February 28, 2005 (Monday) - Watercolorists Mark Adams and Hideo Date
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Still raining here... and speaking of water, water everywhere, I just got back from the city's best place to get used (cheap!) art books, Green Apple, where I picked up some water color inspiration:
"Mark Adams", a monograph by local publisher, Chronicle Books, ISBN 0-87701-365-9. This San Francisco artist is married to the artist Beth van Hoesen and his watercolors resemble her work. They both tend to focus on single objects in very simple settings. Mark Adams is also (perhaps mainly) known locally for his stained glass and tapestry work. Image at left is Mark Adams' "Rainbow Water Jar", ©1979, watercolor on paper, 12 x 12 inches.
"Living in Color" by Karen Higa, a book about the life of reclusive artist Hideo Date, by local publisher, Heyday books, ISBN 1-890771-45-7
Hideo Date lived in Los Angeles and studied at Otis in the late 1920's. Later, at the Los Angeles Art Student's League, his mentor was Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Date's art career (and life) was seriously derailed in 1942 when he was incarcerated, along with 19,000 other Japanese Americans at the Santa Anita racetrack (and later sent to Heart Mountain, Wyoming.) Image at left is Hideo Date's "In Search of His Dream," ©1936, watercolor and gouache on paper, 19 x 15 inches.
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February 26, 2005 (Saturday) - Hunter S. Thompson's suicide
I can understand the attraction of death when life looks bleak. But leaving your body splattered around a room that you share with other people reveals a level of hostile selfishness that you may not have intended as the defining act in your legacy. What it says to me is - here was a guy who never had to clean up his own messes.
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February 25, 2005 (Friday) - Artists on film and video
Yesterday Charles T. Downey at ionarts wrote about The Artists on Film Trust - a collection of film footage of artists "in their studios or talking about their work." It got me to thinking about recent documentary art films I'd seen.
 Louise Bourgeois:
"When an artist is working, she stops being afraid of anything. By the same token, the reverse is also true. If I do not work, I become a very frightened person. So, actually, work is necessary. Work is necessary to go through the day.
Art allows you to get rid of your fears. So, it is the definition of an exorcism.
Look around and you see that nothing has been discarded. Why? Because I procrastinate and I put on for tomorrow what I do not have the time to do this minute. So, this has two consequences. It is the cluttering of the whole habitat, and the pressure that I feel under. The pressure that I will never have enough time to do what I want to do."
 Louise Bourgeois said these things while she was being filmed in 1996, in her studio, for the art movie, "Art City - Making It In Manhattan." I picked up the DVD version of this movie from the sale table at the SFMOMA bookstore. It's directed by Chris Maybach and distributed by Twelve Films (couldn't find web links for either one of them.) The images of Louise Bourgeois are from the "Bonus Features" section of the DVD. I was especially cheered to see her in her backyard, pointing out saplings that she had tied in knots. The film also interviews Richmond Burton, Brice Marden, Chuck Close, David Deutsch, Neil Jenney, Elizabeth Murray, Ashley Bickerton, Gary Simmons, and Robert Longo.
There's a hilarious moment when they're filming Brice Marden while he's working, and someone asks him what he's working with. He stops, says, "This is, ummm... (long pause) ... a stick." (I am so familiar with that state. I'm happily painting away when someone enters my space and asks some kind of question. At which point I experience an almost painfully rapid return to planet earth. )
Plus there's a terrific little short with critic Jerry Saltz talking about the art world and describing the major players as being "in an abusive relationship." There are a couple of other films in this series, called "Simplicity" and "A Ruling Passion." I'm hoping to find copies of them, one of these days.
The San Francisco PBS station KQED has started a similar thing called "SPARK." It's a weekly TV show that interviews three local artists, in their workspaces. This week, the show is titled "Elevating the Everyday," and it features public art mosaicist Laurel True, furniture maker Garry Knox Bennett , and ceramicist Richard Shaw. The KQED website has artist bios, photos and video clips.
RomanBlog is an ongoing project by Vincent Romaniello. He shoots video interviews with artists in their workspaces, and then posts them on his vlog. This week he's featuring Douglas Witmer, talking about some of the problems inherent in his painting process.
And this just came in: Chris from Zeke's Gallery writes to tell me that there is a film festival for movies about art, and it's opening in Montreal next month - FIFA!
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 February 24, 2005 (Thursday) -
Interview with Stevan Shapona
I first met Stevan Shapona (photo at right) in October 2004, during San Francisco's annual Open Studios event. His work intrigued me but it took me months to set up an interview with him. Finally I met Shapona and another local figurative painter, Dale Erickson, at Shapona's home studio, on Feb. 2, 2005. We talked for three hours - it's taken me three weeks to get the tapes transcribed and edited.
I was getting bored hearing myself ask the same old questions in these interviews, so I decided to start bringing another artist into the mix. Dale's an old friend of mine, so he agreed to come along as my first co-interviewer. As I mentioned in October, Shapona's studio is in the basement/garage of his house, but really the whole house is an artist's gallery and workspace. We started in the back room upstairs:
(A:Anna, S:Stevan, D:Dale)
A: Can you talk about your subject matter and style?
S: I'm a representational oil painter and the female figure is my preference. My general aim is to take a concern for formal values (abstract values) in one hand and a humanistic representational concern in the other. My hope is to harmoniously combine these two intentions.
A: Do you consider Poussin to be an influence on your work?
S: Yes, he's actually a real favorite of mine.
A: Who else would you think of that may have influenced your work?
S: Whistler, Arthur Matthews, Ingres, Sargent, Hammershoi... when I say influence, I mean I admire them, I'm fascinated by them, it's not to say that I can do that.
D: I never thought much of Whistler, but then when I went to the Musee d'Orsay, I was knocked over by his work. The scale, and the subtlety of the paintings never came through in reproductions. You know, you can reproduce Matisse, but...
... REST of the INTERVIEW HERE
February 23, 2005 (Wednesday) - Excess and Out of Balance
 I heard actress Annette Bening on NPR's "Fresh Air" yesterday... when asked about how she manages to balance creative projects with her busy family life, she said:
"Balance is overrated. Creativity comes out of excess."
A google search of that phrase uncovered these artifacts:
from Career Coach Marty Nemko:
"People who work long hours are derided as workaholics and out-of-balance. Is that fair? Is a person who works 60 hours a week truly lesser than someone who works 40 and spends 20 watching TV and on the golf course?"
from Kansas City author Paul Dorrell, who writes that artists don't necessary suffer more than regular folk; although sensitivities, self doubt, and years of rejection may get even the genius down once in a while. But it comes with the territory and Dorrell says the alternative is an unenlightened existence that isn't really an alternative for anyone who writes, paints, draws or is otherwise involved with creative pursuits. His advice to young artists:
"You may have to burn more midnight oil to stay with it, you may lose weight, you may lose sleep, you may lose a bit of your inner balance, but the struggle will bring out even more insight and, if things go well, better work."
(Image is by Lynn Hershman Leeson - "Roberta's Continuing Constructions, Suggested Alterations," 1975, from the book "Art/Women/California" by Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniela Salvioni
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February 22, 2005 (Tuesday)
- Painting and Meditation
The similarities between painting and meditation came into sharper focus yesterday. I always knew there was a connection, because they felt similar. Also in periods when I am doing a lot of one, there is less need for the other. But I couldn't quite define the "how" or "why."
Here's what I just figured out: since painting is more about seeing than making, and since seeing is being in a state of non-judgmental receptivity, long periods of painting get me to the same place as sitting.
The painting-as-object is an almost accidental side effect of painting-as-meditation.
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"Watertower", acrylic on board
© 2005 Anna L. Conti |
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February 21, 2005 (Monday) - Gung Hay Fat Choy - Happy Lunar New Year!
 It's still raining. This weekend was the Lunar New Year celebration in Chinatown. Besides the parade, there was a massive street festival. I went down there before sunrise - partly to help the SF Performing Arts Library (PALM) with their booth (not that I was much help) and mostly to take photos for future paintings. PALM is hosting an exhibit called, "Painted Men: Chinese Opera Backstage." Performed continuously in San Francisco from 1852 to the present, Chinese Opera is the longest surviving civic theatre in California. A great deal of the history of Chinese Opera in China was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, so the artifacts preserved in San Francisco offer a comprehensive picture of the past 150 years of this art form.
The PALM booth was on Washington Street, right across from the entrance to Ross Alley, where I saw this mural, signed: "Aratani 1986" (image below.) The panels looked like they may have been installed somewhere else before being moved to this location. The figures are life size. The alley is narrow and poorly lit, but the paintings are in pretty good shape. I went over to the Chinese Historical Society (CHSA) to see if they could tell me anything about the artist, but they weren't open then (I was probably too early.) So, I've emailed them and if they get back to me I'll update this post. I wrote about CHSA in April of last year - it's a wonderful little museum which features a lot of fine art along with the historical exhibits.
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February 18, 2005 (Friday) - New Art Book: Weirdo Deluxe
 "Weirdo Deluxe, the Wild, World of Pop Surrealism & Lowbrow Art"
by Matt Dukes Jordan,
2005, Chronicle Books,
ISBN 0-8118-4241-X
I'm drawn to this kind of art, whatever they call it, and that's apparently an issue to the practitioners of this genre. "Lowbrow" is the most prevalent term, and some like it, while others find the term inappropriate, limiting, and derogatory. "Pop Surrealism" is the next most common description and I think that's pretty close. Author Matt Dukes Jordan describes work by these artists as expressing, "a jaded joviality amidst the kitsch luxury trash and tortured toy-land of twentieth-century American pop culture." True enough. They aren't all surrealists, though. In fact, you'd even have to stretch the definition of representational to include all the artists in this book. They're all carnivalesque, and maybe that's the best term for them. The old-time carnival has disappeared from real life, but this kind of art keeps the spirit of the carnival alive and keeps it relevant by giving us the shivers using everyday images from our world. (Two pages from Joe coleman's section below: "A Picture from Life's Other Side" on left; "Mommy/Daddy" on right.)
 The book cites Bruegel, Goya, Bosch, Max Beckman, George Groz, Louise Bourgeois, and Robert Crumb as influences. There's a detailed 14-page annotated graphic time-line of the history of Lowbrow art from 1900 to present day (first two pages at left.) Then the book is divided by artist, with 23 artists currently practicing Lowbrow art, each artist getting 6 pages. These are all people who regularly show up on the pages of Juxtapoz Magazine. Some of them show in galleries, some of them are illustrators (not considered the kiss-of-death in Lowbrow world, as it is in Fine Art world.)
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| Josh Agle above, Stacy Lande at right, Glenn Barr below. |
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| Tim Biskup above, Owen Smith at left. |
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A few of the artists highlighted in this book (images above) are Josh Agle, also known as Shag, from O.C. (slick, graphical acrylic on composition board); Glenn Barr from Detroit (dark, musky, acrylic on Masonite); Tim Biskup from Pasadena (flat, symbolic/decorative gouache or acrylic on paper or wood); Joe Coleman from Brooklyn (obsessively detailed oil on board); Stacy Lande from L.A. (fetish/goddess gals in acrylic on wood); Owen Smith from the SF Bay Area (noir figures in oil on board).
Other artists featured in the book include Anthony ausgang, Kalynn Campbell, Camille Rose Garcia, Liz McGrath, Scott Musgrove, SKote Olsen, Gary Panter, The Pizz, Mark Ryden, Isabel Samaras, Todd Schorr, Kathy Staico Schorr, Joe Sorren, Gary Taxali, Eric White, and Robert Williams. Not a complete list of the artists working this vein, but a good place to start.
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February 17, 2005 (Thursday) - Watercolor Retirement
OK, I've got my watercolor table set up and it's perfect! I'm really psyched. Now I can be working on two canvases (on the two easels) and something on paper (at the table) at more-or-less the same time. Plus I'll be able to use the table for those occasions when I need to lay the canvas flat (to prevent dripping, or encourage a bloom.) I've been dreaming of watercolor for the last two months. I haven't done any for over a year, so it's time.
These works on paper are my retirement plan. Not that I'm planning to retire (meaning: stop painting) but sometimes life makes those decisions for you. And what would I do for an income if I couldn't paint anymore? So, I've been laying aside works on paper. They're easy to store, and if I can keep selling my other work for a few more years, the stuff on paper may increase in value. That's the theory, anyway. I have no idea if anyone else has ever done this, or even if it's a good idea. But it's all I've got, so I'm going with it.
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February 16, 2005 (Wednesday) - San Francisco in the rain
Market Street about 7pm. Only the slow-moving folks show up at this shutter speed - everyone else is a ghost... but don't the streets look fantastic? I love the reflections in the rain.... I was out all day yesterday, shooting photos from 8am until 8pm. Who knows when I'll use them, as I already have some other paintings planned for this year. But since the first of the year, I've been thinking about doing some smaller watercolors, and yesterday I finally found a table small enough to fit in my studio but big enough to hold a pad of watercolor paper and some paints. They deliver it today. Maybe some of yesterday's photos would make a good subject to start with.
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February 15, 2005 (Tuesday) -
Around the neighborhood
There was a city-sponsored Valentine's Day celebration at the Sloat Doggie Diner Head yesterday. The mayor and the Sunset Supervisor were supposed to give speeches, but they were both no-shows. Plenty of kids, dogs, artists, and historians showed up. Someone from DPW gave a speech and handed out goodies to kids and dogs, and free lunch for the rest of us. Woody LaBounty (left, brown hat) of the Western Neighborhoods Project juggled while waiting for the city-hall types to show up (more about the event at his WNP site.) |
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Latest photo of the de Young and Fine Arts Garage construction (below, taken yesterday.) The copper skin on the de Young (above, right) is finally starting to oxidize. It's not green yet, but it's showing hints of blue here and there. The pigeon population seems to be increasing dramatically over there.... do they have some special affinity for construction sites, or is something else going on? In any case, I'm not the only one to notice it - the last two times I've been there, I've seen hawks hunting in the bandstand area.
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These new (to me) stencils were seen yesterday on the sidewalk at the outbound MUNI stop at 9th & Judah:
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February 14, 2005 (Monday) - Robert Bechtle, part 4.
 I went to the Robert Bechtle show at SFMOMA on Friday and again on Saturday. And you know, I just don't think "photorealist" is a particularly accurate description of his work. Maybe at one time (in the 70s) it made some kind of marketing sense, but it doesn't really describe the majority of his work.
He's a realist. Period. Like most realist painters, he focuses on images of the real world, his real world. He paints his family, his house, his neighborhood, his cars. As he moves about in his world, he captures sketches of things that he might want to paint later. He uses his camera as a sketching tool. He sets up many of the scenes he intends to paint, photographs the scene, and then manipulates the photos (cutting and splicing different photos together, or just adding and eliminating elements.) There's a few display cases showing Bechtle's source photographs, and preliminary sketches for some paintings, including, "Potrero Table",1994, show above left.
Between SFMOMA and the other two venues showing Robert Bechtle's work in SF this month, there are about 140 of his paintings, drawings and prints on view. Only about 3 or 4 of those could fairly be described as "copying a photograph." His earlier work is flattened and pared down to a point approaching minimalism. The later work is very painterly, almost impressionistic. In neither case does it look like a photograph, at least when you're standing in front of it. It does reproduce like a photo, however. Both in print, and on the web, almost all of Bechtle's paintings look like photographs.
So, I highly recommend a personal visit to these shows, if you want to understand the buzz about Bechtle:
SFMOMA, through June 5, 2005
Gallery Paule Anglim, through March 5, 2005
Crown Point Press, through April 2, 2005
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February 11, 2005 (Friday) - Robert Bechtle, part 3.
 Amazingly, the SF Chronicle assigned Jesse Hamlin, instead of Kenneth Baker, to review the Robert Bechtel show. Now we won't have to read how realism is dead and painting is on life support. It's a good article (check it out.) He interviews Bechtle in front of some of his early work at SFMOMA. Bechtle talks about being tuned into the "hum of ordinary things," and he describes how he saw California with new eyes after returning from a trip to Europe. Hamlin mentions the surprising painterly quality in Bechtle's work - you really don't notice that in books or on the web - you have to be standing in front of the painting itself.
I'm a fan of Bechtle's work, and it's not only his command of technique that impresses me, but the California aesthetic, also expressed in the work of Chester Arnold, John Register, James Doolin, Robert Arneson, Edward Ruscha, and William T. Wiley. On Monday I'll wrap up this series with a personal report on the SFMOMA show. Until then, here's more info on Robert Bechtle:
Robert Bechtle's Artist's statement from 1999, OK Harris Gallery:
I am interested in how things look; I am also interested in painting that is based upon how things look. I like to see things the way they are rather than thinking how they can be changed. The richness and range of the visual world constantly thrills and amazes me. I am most particularly interested in using the part of our world which we seem to notice least...that is, our everyday surroundings as we live day to day. Thus, I have painted friends and family, familiar houses, streets and neighborhoods. The paintings are on one level, about middle class American life as experienced in California. On another, they are about reconciling that subject matter with concerns about formal painting issues (the use of color and light, design, and the kinds of marks one must make to replicate appearances). They are, in that sense, a part of a long tradition of European and American painting which has sought to find significance in the details of the commonplace.
- - Robert Bechtle, 1990
Web sites that feature Robert Bechtle's work:
Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York (new work)
SFMOMA Bechtle Retrospective Exhibition February 2005 show
FAMSF : de Young Museum, Bechtle prints
Oakland Museum, about Oct. 2000 show
Hunter Museum, Bechtel pages
CrownPoint Press Bechtle pages page
ArtBusiness review of Bechtle openings
Gallery Paule Anglim, Bechtle page
OK Harris Gallery
Traditional Fine Art Online, Review of Bechtle show
Seavest Collection
Hyperealism.net
Bechtle's AskARTpage
Bechtle images from art-in-context
ArtCyclopedia list of Bechtle web sites
Brauer Museum Bechtle page
Books that mention and show Robert Bechtle's work:
Robert Bechtle, A Retrospective
by Janet Bishop, Michael Auping, Jonathan Weinberg, Charles Ray, Joshua Shirkey; 2005 UC Press, ISBN 0520245431
This is the recent SFMOMA show catalog.
Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood
by Kathan Brown, 1996, Chronicle Books, ISBN 0-8118-0469-0
(pages 212 - 215: story of Bechtle's woodcut on silk prints, images of Bechtle's "Potrero Houses - Pennsylvania Avenue" and "Albany Monte Carlo")
Super Realism
by Edward Lucie-Smith, 1979, Phaidon Press, ISBN 0-7148-1971-9
(page 37: Bechtle's painting, "Santa Barbara Motel")
Contemporary American Realism since 1960
by Frank H. Goodyear, 1981, New York Graphic Society, ISBN 0-8212-1126-9
(page 199: Bechtle's painting, "58 Rambler" and a little bit of copy about him)
Made In California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900 - 2000
by Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, Ilene Susan Fort, 2001, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, ISBN 0-520-22764-6
(page 206: Bechtle's painting, "67 Chrysler")
Photorealism at the Millennium
by Louis K. Meisel, 2002, Harry N. Abrams, ISBN 0-8109-3483-3
(pages 39 - 50: images of 59 paintings by Bechtle, most of them from the ten years before the book was published.)
Realism
by Kerstin Stremmel, 2004, Taschen, ISBN 3-8228-2942-0
(page 13: Bechtle's painting, "Marin Avenue - Late Afternoon" and a quote form Bechtle: "When I'm photographing a car in front of a house I try to keep in mind what a real-estate photographer would do if he were taking a picture of the house and try for that quality.")
Realism in 20th Century Painting
by Brendan Prendeville, 2000, Thames & Hudson, ISBN 0-500-20336-9
(pages 152, 169 - 171, image of Bechtle's painting, "20th Street - Early sunday Morning", and a small amount of text about his work)
Robert Bechtle: California classic (Centric 58)
by Marina Freeman, 2000, California State University, Long Beach, University Art Museum, ISBN: 0936270403
(show catalog - out of print)
Why Draw a Landscape?
by Kathan Brown, Bryan Hunt (Illustrator), April Gornik (Illustrator), Joan Nelson (Illustrator), Anne. Appleby (Illustrator), Slyvia P. Mangold, Jane Freilicher (Illustrator), Pat Steir, Ed Ruscha, Robert Bechtle, Tom Marioni
(1999) Crown Point Press, ISBN: 1891300113
Kathan Brown proposes that the best artists reflect issues of their times in their work and suggests that in life and art engagement is replacing coolness.
Magazines and Newspapers that mention Robert Bechtle:
San Franscisco Chronicle, 02-10-05 Review of SFMOMA Retrospective
Tucson Weekly review of July 2002 show, "As Real As It Gets"
Robert Bechtle at O.K. Harris - Art in America, Sept, 2001
Highbeam Research list on Bechtle
Monday, Robert Bechtle, part 4 (review of SFMOMA retrospective)
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February 10, 2005 (Thursday) - Robert Bechtle, part 2.
Robert Bechtel, Sunset Intersection, 1983, color soft ground etching in three panels on one sheet of paper.
Paper size: 32-1/4 x 59-3/4; image size 22 x 49-1/2", printed by Lilah Toland at Crown Point Press.
Yesterday I talked about Bechtle's charcoal drawings at Gallery Paule Anglim. Another Bechtle show opened in San Francisco last week, at Crown Point Press, which is located just south of SFMOMA. Bechtle has been making prints at Crown Point Press since 1967, and they have a great selection in this show, from some 1967 hard ground etchings to his most recent soft ground color etching, finished in October 2004.
Some of these images were familiar to me, as the FAMSF has many of his earlier prints and the Oakland Museum has a few of his paintings. Bechtle tends to recycle favorite images, in different formats, again and again. In 1983 he made a huge color soft ground etching of a Sunset intersection (not far from my house - image of the print above.) I'm sure I've seen an oil painting of this image somewhere, probably in New York, but I can't find a mention of it on the web. The print is in three panels, on one sheet of paper, 32-1/4 x 59-3/4". I can understand the technical reasons for the three panels, but I think it detracts from the image. Nevertheless, it's a great print.
I was hoping to see a copy of the color woodcut print, "Potrero Houses - Pennsylvania Avenue", and I wasn't disappointed. I had read about this print in Kathan Brown's 1996 book, "Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood" (ISBN 0-8118-0469-0). Bechtle had painted the scene on silk, using Chinese watercolors. Then he and Brown went to Beijing to have it printed at a Chinese woodcut shop. They were happy with the printing, but not the mounting:
"When we received the edition prints of "Potrero Houses - Pennsylvania Avenue," the printing was consistently good. But in the mounting, lots of brush hairs and bits of dirt and straw had been caught between the print and the heavier sheet on which it was mounted. The dirt showed clearly through the silk, especially in the wide expanse of the street in the print. when we complained about this to Mr. Sun at Rong Bao Zhai, he was surprised at our concern. 'No one sees that,' he said. His tone implied a simple statement of fact, not an excuse, and I realized that in china, people have learned not to see what they consider unimportant. We ended up throwing away the worst of the flawed prints, settling for a smaller edition than we had wanted (and paid for). I decided in the future, we should do the mounting ourselves."
from Kathan Brown's "Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood" (ISBN 0-8118-0469-0)
The edition was only 38, but the one they had framed at the show looks very good - actually, it looks like a watercolor at first glance.
 The most recent print is the one that Crown Point Press is using on the postcard for this show, "Texas and 20th Intersection." It's a soft ground etching with aquatint, Paper size 31 x 39"; image size 22 x 30-3/4", printed by Catherine Brooks. A car slants down the hill to the left with sunlight glaring off the windshield. That glow coming off the windshield is an awesome tour de force. Kathan Brown wrote,
"This is a large print for Bechtle, whose work is labor intensive, his largest except for the famous "Sunset Intersection" of 1983. He spent three weeks in October, 2004, working every day on it, drawing five 22 x 30 copper plates in soft ground and adding a sixth for aquatint. In soft ground etching, the artist draws on paper laid over a plate coated with a soft wax. The pressure of the pencil picks up the wax, and the texture of the paper is etched into the plate. That texture provides the tooth that holds ink and gives a soft ground line it's quality.
quoted from Winter 2005 edition of "Overview," the Crown Point Press newsletter
tomorrow, Robert Bechtle, part 3 (in and out of print and on the web)
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February 9, 2005 (Wednesday) - Robert Bechtle, part 1.
 There are three Robert Bechtle shows opening in San Francisco this month, and since he's had some influence on my work, I thought I'd write a few more words than I usually do. The SFMOMA retrospective, the first full-scale survey of Bechtle's work, covers his career from the 1960s to his most recent work, with 91 paintings and works on paper. It opens to the public this week and I'm planning on attending the member's preview as well as the Saturday lecture.
A couple of San Francisco galleries also opened Bechtle shows, and I saw them last week. Gallery Paule Anglim has a new exhibition of Bechtle's charcoal drawings, and Crown Point Press is showing a large group of etchings, color lithos, wood cuts and gravure/aquatint prints. Both shows are terrific.
It seems like just a year ago that I saw another show of Bechtle's charcoal drawings at Gallery Paule Anglim, but it was in 2002. I think this show is all new work (one of the night scenes looked familiar to me.) The drawings are all on a thin, tinted drawing paper - the kind with the French-style lined texture and deckle edges. This orderly texture (as opposed to, say, rough watercolor paper) adds to the sense of stillness he builds with orderly drawing, mostly empty streets, lots of empty space (even when the view is just across the street or across the room.) Whether it's a drawing, a print or a painting, Bechtle completely nails that blinding California light. He as born in San Francisco in 1932 and has lived in the Bay Area all of his life.
Kathan Brown of Crown Point Press writes that in San Franciso, Bechtle found,
"... a small art community that has long fostered original art ideas. Hans Hofmann taught in Berkeley in the early 1940s before he lived in New York, and abstract expressionists Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko were at the California School of Fine arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in the 1950s. Richard Diebenkorn and other Bay Area figurative painters provided influences toward figuration before those kinds of ideas resurfaced (after abstract expressionism had done away with them) in New York. And funk art, a kind of homegrown humor-filled, surrealist-influenced pop art began in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1960s. In the 1970s, conceptual art and photorealist art were two streams of figuration with influences from the minimal art being developed in New york and Europe. The photorealist artists and conceptual artists working in San Francisco in the 1970s were different in obvious ways, but (in varying degrees) they had in common a desire to make their art workmanlike, without embellishment. Early in his career, Bechtle has said, he 'was consciously trying to see how devoid of inherent interest I could make things, how bland they could be and still make some kind of sense.' "
from the Crown Point Press newsletter, "Overview", winter 2005
His most recent work, some self-portrait drawings at Gallery Paule Anglim and the etching, "Texas and 20th Intersection" at Crown Point Press show a continued devotion to this intention. A series of self portrait drawings all show him in front of a window, at different times of day, no furniture in the room, facing the viewer with an unreadable expression. Many of the city scenes show a car covered with a cloth. (They're so common in Bechtle's work that whenever I pass one of those covered cars on the street, I think of him.) The drawing itself is perfectly smooth and flawless. Large shaded areas are so smooth and flat they almost look sprayed on. Each line, curved or straight, is smooth, sure, unwavering, and unsmudged. And it's clearly charcoal! Amazing.
Tomorrow, Robert Bechtle, part 2 (more about the Crown Point Press show)
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February 8, 2005 (Tuesday) - Lisa Dent Gallery.
 The Lisa Dent Gallery is directly across the street from the Cartoon Art Museum and the (still under construction) Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD), just a few doors down from the California Historical Society, and around the corner from SFMOMA & YBCA.
There's no banner or obvious sign, just "660" on an awning over the door, and a little plaque next to the door buzzer. It's a secure building, meaning you need to ring the intercom to get in, but the very loud traffic on Mission Street makes it hard to hear the receptionist - it took me three tries to get buzzed in. |
 Once I was up to the fourth floor, though, I was glad I made the effort. The current show is Robin Ward's "Otherkin," light, fun, inexplicable narrative works on paper. Most of these drawings involve animals and they all have that trendy isolated-images-on-a-plain-paper-background look. The drawing is skilled, but I kept wondering about her source photos.
I was really hoping to see some work by Marcia Kure, and they kindly unwrapped several pieces in the back room for me. These are the small framed pieces in the photo at left. This work is also isolated images (Kolanut pigment, ink, watercolor and pencil on white paper.) Each drawing is a unique spirit portrait, in beautiful, rich, reddish yellow-brown Kolanut with delicate, spidery, lines defining and animating the form. Incredible stuff - very powerful. Keep an eye out for this artist. More of her stuff on the web HERE, HERE, and HERE.
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February 7, 2005 (Monday) - How to Ship a Painting.
  Lots of people will tell you they use cardboard and bubble wrap, and sometimes you get lucky with that method, but after you've spent weeks or months slaving over a one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-repeated work of art, do you really want to protect it with such flimsy materials? I could tell you my horror stories about shipping valuable objects, but I'm sure you've heard plenty of your own. If you're worried about the shipping costing more than the work of art, then you're not charging enough for your art.
Art museums and people who deal in fine art use shipping crates, usually made of wood. Here's an example of a custom shipping crate for a painting that I'm sending from San Francisco to the East Coast (photos above and at at right - click on image for larger view.) It's made of smooth, sanded and varnished, birch-plywood (nothing rough or splintery that might aggravate the delivery people.) The top panel (lid) is held in place with recessed screws. After you (the recipient) have removed the screws, you will notice that the painting is nestled down inside the wooden box, and held securely away from the outer panels by little blocks of wood. The only thing touching the surface of the painting is the four corner pieces, which are padded with felt. The corner pieces are removed by unscrewing from the outside, and then the painting is lifted straight up out of the box.
This is a fairly small, light painting in a simple box. Bigger and heavier paintings may require additional supports, attachments and handles. You may need waterproofing. An experienced and reputable art shipper will know what kind of packing your painting needs.
My shipping crates are made by Mark Grim (415-665-6352). If you're in some other part of the world, try asking the nearest art museum or large gallery (one that has artists and clients from out of the area) who they use.
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February 6, 2005 (Weekend) - Faces in Marin & Doggie Diner Head moved.
 Local artist Chester Arnold (represented in SF by Catherine Clark Gallery) teaches at College of Marin. After seeing the NYT photo-spread of the war's first 1,000 dead troops, he had an idea for his figure drawing class:
"Contemporary artists are dealing with a lot of narcissistic stuff -- people trying to distinguish themselves by doing something unique, something bizarre," he said. "It struck me that making memorial portraiture, one of the oldest uses of artistic skills, is a way out of that. The students were working on self-portraits, and all of a sudden I thought, why am I having them do that when I could be offering this project up? Here I had an assignment that had to do with the absolute realities of life and death."
Two weeks later, he drove to a copy shop and enlarged the photos from the New York Times -- 16 photographs to a sheet. He went to an art-supply store and bought 1,000 small canvasses; there was no time to wait for purchase orders. Worried that his students might think the idea was a "downer," he nonetheless introduced his idea at his Friday life-painting class.
"He said, 'What do you think of the idea of at least attempting to recognize some of these faces?' " recalled Tracy Eastman, 22, one of Arnold's students. "He said the more each person did, the closer we'd get to doing the whole 1,000. He told us it was not meant to be a political statement, and there was no pressure; you could do it or not do it."
from SF Chronicle story by Janet Somers, full story HERE
The project took on a life of its own and the exhibition, "To Never Forget: Faces of the Fallen," more than 1,100 paintings, drawings and prints of U.S. soldiers killed in the Iraq war, by College of Marin art students, faculty and staff, is up through Feb. 22nd. Exhibition website here.
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  Some folks have been calling me about the Sunset Doggie Diner Head. Here's the scoop: according to Frank Felice at the SF Department of Public Works, DD was moved to 45th & Sloat, as part of the five-year-old agreement with Sloat Garden Center (owner of the old Doggie Diner property.) There will be a ceremony for the Doggie next Monday, Feb 14th at 11am, at the new location (just up the street from the old spot) at 45th and Sloat Bloulevard. Be there or be square!
I shot the photos above and left last Friday around 11am. Click on photo at left for a VERY LARGE image of the Doggie. Image at right is an old painting of mine, "CAR", ©2001, 48"x36". I haven't painted the Doggie in a few years, but hardly a month goes by that someone doesn't ask me about it. Here's a link to some of my old DD paintings, and to the official Doggie Diner Head pages.
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February 4, 2005 (Friday) - Upcoming content (shows and interviews)
This is Dale Erickson and Stevan Shapona in Shapona's studio. I talked with these two San Francisco figurative painters Wednesday evening, and taped three hours of a conversational interview. It's going to take me several days to transcribe the tapes and edit it down, but I'll be posting it next week. Also I'll be seeing some new shows this weekend, and I'll have something to say about those shows before I post the interview.
And I hope I finish my taxes early this weekend, as the weather is stunningly beautiful here - gotta get to the beach or take a bike ride. Seeya Monday.
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February 3, 2005 (Thursday) - Barbara Kruger
 Thanks to my friend Tipler, who scored the tickets, I attended the Barbara Kruger lecture Tuesday night at the SF Art Institute. It wasn't really a lecture, more like an annotated slide show. (Real slides! In a carousel projector. Sometimes upside down and backwards.) My first thought was, hey - if someone asked me to give a lecture about my work, god only knows what I'd come up with. A slide show is not a bad solution. My second thought was, it was actually the perfect presentation of her work: a pithy comment or two, followed by silence, then another seemingly random comment. Life imitating art. So, in that spirit, here's a sampling of Kruger comments from the lecture:
"I'm interested in how language zig-zags between tenderness and violence."
Referring to to her current work in video:
"One thing about being in L.A. - lots of actors need work."
"For years, I only used black and white images because I couldn't afford color."
"I'm interested in doubt, which pretty soon, in this country, you're going to get arrested for."
Talking about the difficulties of doing installation work that is difficult to sell:
"The fact that I even have a pot to piss in, is an amazement to me."
"The art world is a sub-culture that, compared to the movie or music business, is benevolent. It's a pile of disavowal, with power circulating throughout."
About New York Times chief art critic Michael Kimmelman:
"I guarantee I will get a negative obituary from him."
"I have no complaints except for the world."
All quotes noted above were spoken by Barbara Kruger at SFAI lecture Feb. 1, 2005
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February 2, 2005 (Wednesday) - photo vs painting
I pass this scene often on my way to SFMOMA. It's Annie Alley, between Stevenson and Jessie. I'm quite fond of the image and considered making a painting of it. That's almost always my first reaction when I see something that visually attracts me. Drawing is a way of knowing. But some things make better photos than paintings, and this is one of them.
Now, I have to get back to TurboTax.
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February 1, 2005 (Tuesday) - the business hours of art making
Tax time again... won't get too much painting done this week. The process of looking over the records for the last year is always an interesting, sometimes educational, process. This time I didn't need a calculator to tell me that 2004 was a tough year. For some reason, the number I always look to first and tend to fixate on is, how many paintings did I finish? Answer: 22 paintings in 2004, which is well below my usual numbers (35 to 55.) There were good reasons for that - I got diverted from painting by a series of personal crises that were outside my control and ate up a lot of time and energy. On a positive note, they're all good paintings that I feel good about submitting to juried shows, galleries, etc. Sending out submissions is the other big project this month. Hence the stack of slides and labels on my desk. I just updated my mailing list and image database yesterday, but I still need to do my promotional materials for this year. So this week, I'll be sitting here with my back to the easels, grinding my teeth, while I get all this loathsome stuff over and done with.
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Previous week's entries:
January 31, 2005 (Monday) - "Dutch Masters Now" at Newmark
January 29, 2005 (Saturday) - Insider's Tour of the New de Young
January 28, 2005 (Friday) - Artist hostilities in old San Francisco
January 27, 2005 (Thursday) - 2004 SECA show at SFMOMA
January 26, 2005 (Wednesday) - Art: What you do with your life.
January 25, 2005 (Tuesday) - Art machines and Vlogs
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