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November 30, 2004 (Tuesday addendum, because this couldn't wait until tomorrow)
Thanks to Tyler Green at MAN for this link to the "Top Ten Questions Asked of Artists at Art Shows." Oh, how true , how true....
10. Ya got any covered bridges (in the Midwest)? [Substitute dolphins on the West Coast, ships in the Northeast, cowboys in the Southwest, seashells in the Southeast.]
(Ans.: Nope, sold the last one to Wal-Mart, just yesterday.)
9.Do you do portraits from photos?
(Ans.: Only if you don't have about 30 hours to pose.)
8.How long have you painted?
(Ans.: I once did one 8 feet long.)
7.Which one is your favourite?
(Ans.: My next one.)
6.What's the smallest size (read cheapest) painting you do?
(Ans.: I once painted the entire Sistine Chapel Ceiling on the head of a pin.)
5.How long does it take you to do a painting?
(Ans.: Depends on what's on TV at the time.)
4.You draw all these yourself?
(Ans.: Yep, can't get no one else to do them for me.)
3.Do you have a card?
(Ans.: Yes, how about you? MasterCard would be fine.)
2.Do you have this in a size larger, maybe in brown instead of blue?
(Ans.: I could special-order you one but it'd cost $100 more and take 60 days.)
1.Could you tell me, which way is to the rest rooms?
(Ans.: I could, but I like watching you prance around waiting for an answer.)
Contributed by Jim Lane
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November 30, 2004 (Tuesday)
 "Real Symbols for Virtual People"
paintings by Mark Grim
at Soularch Gallery
4033-A Judah @ 46th Ave.
Mon - Fri: 10am-5pm
Sat: 12-5pm
This little gallery is in my neighborhood, in fact I walk by it on my way to the beach. It's one of those narrow, old-fashioned, little store front places with a window in the front and back. This one is between a Thai restaurant and a dog-washing outfit. It's actually an architect's office, but the office space only takes up the back third of the space, so the architect has kindly converted the front to a gallery.
 I first met Mark Grim a few months ago when he came to one of my shows. He said he painted in acrylics and he had studied with Robert Bechtle, although he wasn't doing representational work any more. This show at Soularch was the first time I'd seen his work. Mark's a fun painter to talk with, so I asked him if I could do an interview with him sometime, and I think we're going to do that next month. Here's a review of his previous show in this space.
Mark's work is painterly, and very appealing (to my realist eyes.) It's absolutlely abstract, but I keep getting the sensation that I'm seeing something representational out of the corner of my eye... but then, when I focus on that area, whatever it was vanishes. I took a lot of photos, which I'll post with the interview - soon, I hope.
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November 29, 2004 (Monday)
I saw this sticker on a lamp post this morning, came home and looked it up... and surprise - it's a guy I know, Steve Dehlinger. It looks like an aggressive sell-those-paintings campaign. Wonder if it works? I'm trying to find out...
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November 26, 2004 (Friday)
 "Both the scientist and the sage speak of an immense reservoir of pure creative potentiality transcending all conceptualization. Though this field is the sole constituent of the universe, it gives rise to distinctions and material bodies, which are just fluctuations of it. Both Scientist and sage realize that language, with its concepts and distinctions, keeps us from being aware of undifferentiated wholeness. Only the sage, however, is able to overcome language, gain immediate experience of this field, and put it to use for the good of all creatures."
James N. Powell, in "The Tao of Symbols," published 1982 by William Morrow and Company ("Great Chain of Being, Wheel of Fortune," gouache on paper, ©1996, Anna L. Conti) Permanent Link to this entry.
November 25, 2004 (Thursday)
I just discovered a new (to me) art magazine: "Direct Art." It's a nice, big, glossy, color affair, and... it's only $3.95 !?! Flipping through it at the bookstore, I was convinced to buy it because not only did it have a lot of cool images by artists I hadn't heard of, but two articles caught my eye ("The Great American Nude" by Trevor Price, and "Art and Coffee" by Michael A. Stusser.) It wasn't until I got home that I realized there weren't any ads. As best I can tell, from the info in the magazine and on their web site, this is the product of an artist's cooperative. It's an effort to get more work in front of more people.
They say on their web site:
"As much of the great art being produced in the world today is in the studios of less established and undiscovered artists, it is not represented in the major art magazines such ArtNews, Art Forum and Art In America. These media outlets cater to the large established galleries and museums and have no policy to seek out artists not represented by these established venues."
The effort is somewhat like the "New American Paintings", but it's a regular sized magazine format, and it includes painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, graphics, digital and installation art. The entry fees to artists are about the same: a $30 entry fee for DA, a $25 fee for NAP. But, I'm guessing the circulation numbers for NAP are greater. Another difference is that you can see who the jurors are at NAP, but it's unclear who selects the art at DA.
 At $30 each (an average entry fee for these kinds of things) I can only afford to enter just so many of these things each year. So I wonder, what are my chances of being chosen? And what are the benefits of being chosen? It's usually a matter of comparing apples and oranges, but still, the fact remains that I can only enter one or two of these, so somehow I have to choose. Some years, I decide that maybe I'd be better off spending the $60 on promotion for local shows.
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November 24, 2004 (Wednesday)
I spent all day today (yesterday, by the time you read this) at the easel. It's been too long since I've done that. I turned off the phone, and aside from a quick email check at noon, and a brief check-in with a client, I didn't talk to anyone for about 12 hours. Whenever I come back out of a period like that, it feels like most of my vocabulary is locked up in a jewelry box, and I've misplaced the key. When I look around me, at people, at the room, at my dinner plate, I see the push-pull of different pigments, with and without glazes, sharp edges and fuzzy edges... then I realize someone is talking to me, and "Huh?" is about all I can say. I'm just stalling for time, hoping for a chance to find that key before they finish their question.
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November 23, 2004 (Tuesday)
 On Saturday, November 20, 2004, a few hundred members of the San Francisco Bay Area artist community gathered to celebrate the life of Sachiko Nakamura: avant-garde dancer, choreographer, theater group founder, teacher and student of the performing arts. At her memorial celebration, everyone entering Project Artaud Theater was handed a piece of bubble wrap. At various times during the films, the snapping, crackling sound of audience participation drowned out the sound track. ...rest of the story HERE...
Addendum to Nov. 22nd: It just occured to me this morning that I never wrote anything about my opinion of Paul Madonna's work (in yesterday's post.) Not that it's a bad idea to just let the artist speak for himself. But hey - it's my blog, and for once I actually have an opinion. Before attending Madonna's talk at the Newmark gallery, I wasn't particularly fond of the strip, "All Over Coffee." I thought the drawings were OK, but the text made no sense. I realize now that the drawings are actually exceptional, but their subtleties don't translate into newsprint. (The digital images on the web don't come close to doing them justice, either.) And the reason I wasn't getting the text is because I only read it now and then but it's an unfolding story with regular characters. Maybe it'll make more sense when I read the book.
The drawings are beautiful - very, very detailed ink work, done with extra fine Rapidograph pens - some loaded with black ink and some loaded with shades of gray. Then the layered washes (more grays) add depth and sparkle. They're perfect - it's obvious that this guy puts in a lot of hours with these tools and materials.
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November 22, 2004 (Monday)
 Paul Madonna is a San Francisco artist, former "Mad Magazine" intern, and San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist ("All Over Coffee".) He is currently exhibiting some of his ink and wash drawings of San Francisco at the Newmark Gallery, 251 Post St., where he recently gave a talk.
Due to the vagarities of public transportation, I got there too early - it was just me and retired architect, Ed Hoiland from Chico, who was so inspired by Madonna's strips that he was motivated to draw the view from his mother's 2nd floor window. He said said he was happy with the line drawing but was having trouble with the shadows. When the Paul Madonna arrived, Hoiland asked the artist for advice, and the response could be summed up in one word: "practice."
Later in the evening someone else asked Madonna if he was an architect and he said, "I am not an architect, but architects seem to enjoy the work, although I haven't quite figured out why yet."
 The gallery filled up fast and Madonna was soon cornered in the back by gushing fans. He's a friendly, engaging guy, and started right in answering questions from all sides. He had to be dragged out by gallery owner Mark Wladika when it was time to start the presentation. He started out giving a short talk and then took questions from the crowd. Here's what he had to say on a few of the topics that came up:
About the text:
"The first thing I always get asked about is the text. I write all of the text myself. The characters don't exist, they're not real, and the conversations are not overheard. But often I'll hear something out in public that inspires me, so... it doesn't come out of a void."
About the structure:
"The dailies and the Sundays are different pieces. The dailies tend to go together - they have Sarah, Liz and Maurice as the main characters. Often you can read many of the dailies together in a row and they'll make up one story. But the Sundays always stand alone and the Sundays tend not to have characters. They're more boiled down scenes and one-offs. That's the difference between having a larger amount of space in the Sundays and it only being once a week. I can't really start a story and pick it up a week later, but when I have three days in a row there's the opportunity to really be able to start something and continue on."
About the process:
"All of the drawings are done on watercolor paper and then I scan them into Photoshop. I handwrite the text and scan that in as well. And then I lay it all out... so I don't really get to see what the strip looks like in print form until it's in the paper, or I do an ink jet print, like you see here (points to some large prints of strips.)
 About the drawing:
"The drawings are all done on site. I have a little fold-up stool that I put in my backpack. In the beginning I did all the line work and the ink washes on site, but I only do the line work on site now, because I want to get more tones... I've become much more picky about the lighting that I want. So, I actually return to the site many times to take photos of the light because the shadows are what really make the drawing good. I take a digital photo of the light and work on that back in my studio. It makes the drawings much more vibrant and it gives them more life. It also takes much more time. You can tell which are the later drawings because they have more tones, richer blacks and lighter greys."
 "It usually takes from one to four hours to do the line work. And then the washes... are taking increasingly longer, and it's hard to say how long it would take. There are many layers built up and you need to let each layer dry... anywhere from 15 minutes to a half hour (each layer.) With repetition it gets easier, but I find that instead of finishing the work faster, I take the same amount of time, and just do more and more complex drawings. My stamina from drawing is getting greater... I can draw from 2 to 4 hours at a sitting.
"I don't pencil anything first - it's all straight to ink. I get asked a lot, 'What do you do if you screw up?' There's a lot of screw ups, in all of the drawings. None of my lines are really straight. None of my perspectives are really perfect, but they all have the illusion of it. It's the nature of the city, too - telephone poles do bend - some of them are actually being held up just by the wires anchored to the other poles. Maybe it's because of our earthquakes, but buildings are not true. The nature of that wiggly line gives the drawing more presence, more life. If I used a pencil and ruler and got more meticulous, it would feel cold."
 About drawing in public:
"It's a trial. Certain neighborhoods are harder to draw in than others. People stop and talk to me a lot. It's OK with me, if they stop, talk a minute and move on. It's when they want to just keep talking... and they don't get the cues, when I jokingly say, "You know, this is my office and I have to get back to work now." Nowadays people often recognize me and know what I'm doing - that's always flattering. I can usually tell them what date the strip will run. Cafe owners like it when they see me there.
About choosing scenes:
"I take out all the people and all the cars. I don't like drawing cars, but... think of a film you've seen where they film 24 hours and speed it up and all of the cars and all of the people are whipping by and you can't even see them. What you're looking at is the environment. That's what I'm looking for - I'm just giving you the environment. This comes back to how the images work with the text. By taking all of those things out of the environment, I'm leaving room for you to go into it. I've taken the elements of a comic strip (which are dialog, characters and setting) and I've removed all those people and those cars, and given you the setting and the conversation. You put the characters in there."
 "My perspective is usually from the street, but sometimes it's from a higher window. This one is from a friend's apartment. She was out of town and I was minding her apartment, so I took advantage of it to sit in her window. I didn't tell her and she came home and the newspaper strip came out that day..."
"Some of the strips are panoramas. Look at the bottom of the prints. On some of them you'll see that there are numbers and letters. The first numbers are the date that it runs. Then there will be a number with either a 'D' or an 'S', which means either daily or sunday. And then often it will say either '1 of 3' or '1 of 5'... and there will be a little row of boxes and one of them will be grayed out. This means that it's part of a larger picture. If the center box is grayed out, that means it's the center drawing (in the panorama.)"
"In some cases, there's only one drawing and I will zoom in on it. So that first day you would see a close up of part the drawing; the second day it will be pulled back and you see a little more; the third day it will be pulled back even more. The point of that is when you read them in a row, since the story goes together, they would seem very cinematic. these are the things that I think about when I think of the book collection. I don't expect many people to get it in the daily paper, where they can be read as single strips. When the story is read all together in a book, something entirely different happens."
 About use of color:
"I use color very sparingly. For instance there's one drawing, near USF, and there's a building in front which has been renovated and painted six or seven crazy, vibrant colors. what I liked about it was not just the architecture, but those colors. If I were to put the colors of all the houses in there, that would be subduing the contrast... Another piece where I've used color is the windmill and I did that to bring out the contrast, to highlight the flowers."
 About the "wobbly, wiggly" houses:
"That's just me being bored with doing things normally. Although, the building itself has that quality. I see that in it and I'm just pulling it out. With those drawings it's important for me to keep all the detail in. It's the detail that makes it look real."
 About Location:
"I've done a handful of drawings outside of San Francisco... two from Paris, two from Amsterdam, and one from Thailand that I had done years ago from my sketchbook. (Gallery owner Mark Wladika, at left, showed the Thailand drawing to the room.) It was a much different style, much looser, and it didn't have the wash, just sketching. When I use drawings from different places (other than SF) I make sure that it ties in with the text more. The newspaper told me that the strip didn't have to stay in San Francisco, and I've always kept that in the back of my mind. But I don't want to jump out and do it randomly. It has to make sense within the story."
About his personal life:
"It affects the work a great deal. It's been hard to separate. I'm very expressive that way - whatever I'm going through today, I want to put out tomorrow. So I do that with the Sunday strips. The dailies, I think about more as a big story. right now the dailies are written for the next month and a half. The Sundays I write every week. Not every thought or feeling should be put in the paper the next day, but I think about 'what is the tone for this week?' It's a nice balance - one (Sunday) is more expressive, while the other (dailies) are more disciplined and less emotional."
About his other work:
"I have other work on my web site (he points to the work on the wall behind him.) They're much more sketches and first round drawings... it's become a balancing mechanism since the "All Over Coffee" strips are so finished. It's a way to stay loose, and fun. And to not have to stay in one style."
"Sometimes I do commissions. People ask me to draw their houses, and one of the stipulations is that I be able to run the drawing in the strip. In the beginning I thought that might be a problem, but of course everybody wants to see their house in the paper, so it works out really well.
"I'll be collecting the strips in a book format and it will be out next year. The Chronicle will be publishing it."
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November 19, 2004 (Friday)
 New Book!
"Masters of Deception, Escher, Dali & the Artists of Optical Illusion"
by Al Seckel (of Cal Tech)
320 pages, 11" x 9"
©2004 by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
ISBN: 1-4027-0577-8
An art book written by a scientist. I stumbled across this in Stacy's books last week (they still have several copies.)
 Seckel draws a coherent line from Archimboldo, to Dali, Escher, and others to contemporary artists like Shigeo Fukuda and Vik Muniz. (Archimboldo's "Autumn" at right.)
 He documents how many of these artists experimented with the same optical tricks and parlor games, like double images, ambiguous imagery, and anamorphosis using reflecting cylinders. (Dali's cylinder painting, "Man and Woman" at left.)
 Contemporary artists who continue in this vein have worked with 3-D interpretations of "impossible shapes," textual ambigrams, and shadow scultures. (Shigeo Fukuda's "Lunch with a Helmut On, " at right, is a sculpture of welded forks, knives and spoons, which throws a shadow image of a motorcycle.)
Seckel does a good job of showing how these artists have influenced each other and built on the work of earlier artists. The book is richly illustrated, and includes a recommeded reading list as well as contact info for the artists (including web sites.) The author has a supporting web site for the book, which shows quicktime movies and interactive images of some of the artworks that don't translate well to the printed page.
Some of the artists covered in this book:
 Sandro Del Prete
Sweet and sensuous Italian pencil drawings of impossible perspectives.
M.C. Escher
His work consists of over 400 woodcuts and litho prints (a huge catalog of images on this site)
 Robert Gonsalves
His image (at right) was used on the cover of this book - his site has a large number of his color images
Vik Muniz
Contemporary artist, making images from string, sugar, syrup, dust, dirt, toys, pins, shadows, marinara sauce... his is a high tech, interactive site, with slide shows.
Guido Moretti
"The third way to sculpture." This work is impossible to describe in 2-D. Go to the web site to see movies to see these objects rotating.
Shigeo Fukuda
A masterful artist in both 2D and 3D. This site has mostly his 2D poster designs, but this one has a few of the sculptures - a google search will get you lots of 3D images.
Ken Knowlton
Computer assisted pointillism, using spools of thread, shells, old keyboards, etc. - you gotta see this to believe it!
 Octavio Ocampo
Funky images of Marilyn Monroe, Jesus, etc. (his image of Quixote at right)
Istvan Orosz
Contemporary artist, heavily into anamorphosis and etching
 John Pugh
A completely convincing tromp l'oeil artist from Los Gatos, CA.
Dick Termes
The spheres guy (example at left.)
Scott Kim
Letter inversions, or ambigrams and word play. (An inversion is a word or name written so it reads in more than one way.)
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November 18, 2004 (Thursday)
 Wednesday at noon I was slogging away in the studio (working on a big commission) when my friend Betty called and said, "Let's go out to lunch." I suggested we see some art while we were out, and we headed to Sausalito. It was sunny and in the 70's so we sat out on the deck at Horizons watching the sailboats and harbor seals, eating a terrific lunch (thanks, Betty) and feeling smug about living here. Eventually we made our way down to the Edith Caldwell Gallery. This is one of my favorite galleries and I visit whenever I can scam a ride over the bridge (about once every month or two.)
 There are three things that I can depend on when visiting this gallery: 1.) Every single piece of work on display is an example of the highest caliber of craftsmanship; 2.) Edith Caldwell (next to blue painting above) will be in the gallery; 3.) She is friendly, approachable, and informative. I took some photos, but (it must have been the Irish coffees) I forgot to write down the identifying info for each image... and they aren't all available on the gallery website. I feel like a dope. But here's what I can remember about these images...
Betty (at right) is looking at paintings by Peter Plamondon. The big one is "White China", acrylic on canvas. These paintings are subtle, low contrast, color studies. Very painterly, very peaceful.
 The large tapestries (at left) were made in Belgium, using a collaborative process involving the (local) artist who painted the original image, a printmaker from Oakland (click on "information", then "about tapestries") and the weaver.
 Small acrylic still life images of toys and other small, colorful objects by Philip Michelson are the most amazing work in acrylic that I have ever seen. These paintings on panel are so luminous and jewel-like that it's almost impossible to believe that they weren't done in oil.
The gallery also reps artists who work on paper, in graphite, watercolor, and pastel - and again, these are amazing examples of technique in each of these mediums. There are three etchings by Peter Milton on display, and monographs of several of the artists. The current group show, "An Overview of Contemporary Realism" is up through December.
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November 17, 2004 (Wednesday)
Washington D.C. has an annual art event (called Art-O-Matic) that is similar to San Francisco's Open Studios. The main similarity is that the the show is non-juried, with work by established artists hanging next to work by art students and Sunday painters.
Naturally, you get a lot more amateurs than professionals participating in these kinds of things. As Victoria McKernan said at DC Art News:
"Overwhelming mediocrity punctuated with occasional genius is our pattern in everything from art to politics. The brilliant thing about art is that it is not a finite universe where bad work pre-empts or excludes good. The human brain is not some shoe rack in danger of being filled up by one giddy splurge at Payless."
You also get a lot of people looking at art, who have never been to a gallery or museum in their life. Chances are good that they're not going to buy your $2400 painting (even though they wouldn't hesitate to spend that on a wide screen TV.) So why bother to show your work to them?
Personally, I keep doing it because it gives me a chance to educate new art enthusiasts. A small percentage of them will take the next step, sooner or later, after coming to multiple shows, and buy some art. I'm going to be doing some more artist interviews in the near future, so I'll have to ask other artists how they feel about showing work in a free-for-all situation.
J.T. Kirkland at DC's Thinking About Art points out a useful distinction:
Is Art-o-Matic a serious art show or is it a festival/flea market for art? If the intent is for this to be a serious art show then how can people get so upset when it is criticized. ... The organizers and proponents of Art-o-Matic can't have it both ways. You can't put on a serious art show and expect critics or some members of the public to hold their tongues. You either step fully into the fire or you stay far, far away from it. Critics know that art festivals are generally off limits for criticism. Festivals are nice community events. But serious art shows are held to higher standards.
I have a lot of sympathy for the position of artists like Jamie Wimberly, who said:
Given that there does not seem to be any definition to art, a vacuum has been created. And as everyone knows, nature abhors vacuums. So, I would argue non-art values have been filling that void - celebrity, propaganda, political correctness, marketing, corporate affiliations, art as commodity, shock/ outrageousness/ spectacle... to name a few.
Then he offers four suggested standards for judging art (click here to read more of his essay.)
Enforced standards give me the heebee jeebies, but if you feel more comfortable with standards you can always stick to juried shows. J.T. Kirkland suggested Art-O-Matic consider having a separate juried show, and that's the way San Francisco handles it. A few months after Open Studios, the jury chooses artists from the Open Studios event, to be exhibited at the annual "Selections" show.
But it's not nearly as well attended as the non-juried event.
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November 16, 2004 (Tuesday)
I dropped in to SFMOMA to see what was new - I hadn't been there since Sachi got sick. Of all the new stuff, the only artists that jazzed me were Roy Lichtenstein and William Eggleston. Also, the new lobby redesign is pretty cool. It's much more open now, a more inviting meeting, resting, and hanging out place. They moved the ticket purchases out front, theater-style (members can still waltz in the side door.)
The Lichtenstein retrospective was enjoyable. I always like retrospectives, even when I'm not that crazy about the artist. It's fascinating to see the evolution of a mature artist's work; to see what things they held on to and which things they threw away. In Roy Lichtenstein's case, he hung on to those Benday dots to the end but dropped the comic book subject matter pretty quickly. By 1965 he had perfected his technique and his craftsmanship was high. There's a marked difference between his early paintings and the work from 1965 onward. In the early work, the dots were uneven in areas, lines were hesitant, and the whites were dingy. After 1965 the colors were brilliant, and he really nailed the lines and dots - perfect, crisp edges. There was about 20 years of great work, exploring different subject matter, symbolism, and playing around with the issue of depth. Then near the end, he started doing these weird, pseudo-chinese images. He was still using the Benday dots, but had eliminated the lines, and was messing around with mixing colors on the canvas in isolated areas of the image. These pieces are very weak. The colors don't work, and the composition is stale. Too bad he didn't get a chance to finish working out whatever he was trying to do with this series.
I was curious about the photography of William Eggleston. I've heard a lot about him, but never seen his work except in magazines. I couldn't figure out what all the buzz was about. I was going up in the elevator with a couple of tourists from Germany who were there primarily to see the Eggleston show (on the 3rd floor.) I talked them into riding with me up to the 5th floor, to see the contemporary art first, and then walking down. They were suitably impressed when the doors opened right in front of those giant Louise Bourgeois spiders.
Eventually I made my way back down to the 3rd floor and entered the Eggleston show. I liked this work, but it took me awhile to figure out why. Thank god they seem to be putting more benches around the place these days - I was able to sit a while in the rooms and figure it out. This work is different from a lot of the photography I see, and I think the defining quality is a lack of agenda. The feeling I get from looking through Eggleston's lens is that the most important thing in the world is color, and the second most important thing is composition. Given the times and places that these photos were taken (60's and 70's; Mississippi, Tennessee) you would think that nostalgia, or journalism, or sociology would hold some importance here, but no.... I get the feeling that he was motivated by pure delight in the visual - color and form, with a rare chuckle over the absurdity of the human condition.
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November 15, 2004 (Monday)
Sorry to say, I'm late posting this because I spent all day yesterday laying on the couch, reading the Sunday New York Times and a stack of art magazines. Haven't done that in at least three months. I was due.
Anyway,I've always liked the art and culture magazine "Juxtapoz" - it's usually more interesting than most of the art mags in the racks. But this current issue (#53, Nov/Dec) is exceptional.
There's an article on Yoko Ono because (per George Petros,) "She challenges highly visual individuals to think beyond their medium, outside the picture frame, to remind them that at the very core of every work of art, no matter how complex, lies a simple, definitive idea. Yoko instructs us to imagine an apple, and in our minds an apple appears. She reminds us that sometimes art gets too complicated, outgrowing its own central thesis."
Juxtapoz #53 reviews San Francisco Bay Area shows at Yerba Buena ("Beautiful Losers"), the Asian Art Museum ("Geisha: Beyond the Painted Smile"), San Jose Museum of Art ("Yoshitomo Nara: Nothing Ever Happens"), and the Legion ("Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya".) These are multi-page (big color illustrations) spreads.
The issue also reviews the "100 Artists See Satan", which reads like a much more intelligent and witty show that the insipid "100 Artists See God." (But then, that one sounded good, until I saw it.) And they cover a few other SoCal shows, including an interview with Coop about his show at LA's sixspace.
It's a visually appealing magazine, and the only one besides Modern Painters where I spend more time with the content than looking at ads.
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Speaking of San Francisco art and culture, and the mix of high brow / low brow, check out the line-up of reviews on the SF Opera production of "Le Grand Macabre" in Charles Downey's excellent culture blog, ionarts. I'm still hoping to score to comp tickets for this one...
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While I was taking a recent hiatus from blogging, I noticed that Tyler Green reorganized the side bar at Modern Art Notes - and this blog is listed under San Francisco - thanks!
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November 12, 2004 (Friday)
More on the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (yesterday the Legion, today the de Young.)
I've written about the progress of the new de Young before (here , here, here, and here.)
Last week John King wrote in the SF Chron about the controversy over the new structure. Bitching about the latest construction projects is a major San Francisco pastime. It makes no difference who's paying for it, if the building is public or private, if the architecture is stand-out original or blend-in boring, if the construction is eco-sensitive or brutally rapacious, there's one thing you can count on - somebody is going to protest it. This doesn't just mean letters to the editor. It means years of heated public meetings, marches in the streets, city propositions to the voters, and sometimes shadowy back-room deals. I guess the good news is that San Franciscans care about the city, and get involved.
In this case, the new deYoung and the underground parking garage are well underway, and it's no longer a question of "if" or "how" but "when." The latest date I've heard is October 2005 for the opening. The new California Academy of Sciences (across the concourse from de Young) will take a bit longer - 2008 is the most recent date I've heard. They're just now demolishing the old building:
Regardless of how it looks from the outside, it will fabulous to have our museums back again. With both the Legion and the de Young open they can get back to focusing on their respective specialties. The Legion holds European decorative arts and paintings, Ancient art, and one of the largest collections of prints and drawings in the country. The de Young holds American paintings, decorative arts and crafts, and arts from Africa, Oceania and the Americas, as well as western and non-western textiles.
The new galleries in the de Young have been designed with the specific collections in mind. Take a look at the cool slide show at the Thinker.org and you'll see what I mean.
In the most recent issue of "Fine Arts", the FAMSF members publication, Museum Director Harry S. Parker III writes:
Gerhard Richter will create a large-scale mural for Wilsey court, the central public hall in the new building. He is using digitally manipulated micro-photographs of the atomic structure of strontium titanate, a synthetic element used to create artificial diamonds. Richter will use his signature blurring of images, but his use of a high-tech database is a new direction for this artist.
James Turrell is creating a "skyspace" for the Osher Sculpture Garden. This "skyspace," entitled "Three Gems," is a subterranean installation with an oculus open to the sky. a viewer will respond to the changing atmospheric effects above him, his perceptions subtly altered by the L.E. D. lighting system inside the viewing chamber.
A couple of years ago, the Fine arts museums asked Andy Goldsworthy to develop a site-specific work that could be incorporated into the new museum. He has responded to the tectonic angularity of the building's architecture and to the geological realities of the Bay Area with an installation called "Faultline." A continuous crack will run up to the main entrance from the edge of the Music Concourse roadway, cleaving boulders a long its way, subtly subverting our ideas of permanence.
In terms of how the de Young looks on the outside, we won't know for awhile. Not only do they have to finish the construction and landscaping, but the copper building skin needs time to turn green, as intended.
Here's a recent shot of the de Young, taken from the Tea Garden:
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November 11, 2004 (Thursday)
I was at the Legion of Honor yesterday and noticed that the reorganization of the permanent collection continues at a slow pace. Most of the changes are in the north galleries (11 through 15.) The most noticeable change is in gallery 11, the first big room to the right as you enter from the lobby.
For the last year or so, this room has hosted a series of modern and contemporary shows (plus the Deco show.) Now it's been returned to "Baroque Art in Holland & Flanders." The van Dycks are back, plus Rembrandt's "Joris de Caulerii" and Ruben's "The Tribute Money." Things have been moved around a bit in the next few galleries...
The massive, and popular, "Russian Bride's Attire" by Konstantin Makovsky is still in its usual place in Gallery 17, but the rest of the room has changed. The opposite wall appropriately held two Bouguereaus - "Pieta" and "Broken Pitcher" (and an empty display case.)
I missed one of my favorites, JosÈ Jimenez Y Aranda's , "Holy Week in Seville." It had been replaced by a couple of insignificant paintings by Degas and Manet.
Gallery 18 was mostly piles of junk, empty display cases and signs about "installation in progress." It did house the hideous "Assuaging the Waters" by John Martin. This painting is so bad, it's fascinating. It's hard not to look.
 The Bruyas Collection (Bonjour, Monsier Courbet!) is coming soon - the book is in the gift shop already. Which might explain the grouping of a couple of lovely Corot paintings (left upper:"Banks of the Somme at Picguigny", and left lower: "View of Rome: The Bridge and Castel Sant'Angelo") and one of Courbet's versions of "The Wave".
As usual, the place was packed - this was at 10am on a rainy weekday, and this time I didn't go near the Maya show or the Helnwein exhibit. Lots of kids, from grade school to college, were sketching in the sculpture courts, and plenty of other folks were in every gallery. I don't know what the attendance figures are, but personal observation has convinced me that a whole lotta people are looking at art around here.
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November 10, 2004 (Wednesday)
 Max Beckmann in a letter dated June 8, 1915:
"This morning I was at the dusty, white-gray front and saw remarkable, enchanted, and fiery things. A searing black, like golden gray-violet crossing over to lime-yellow, and a pale, dusty sky, and half- and totally naked men with weapons and bandages. Everything in disorder. Staggering shadows. Oh, I wish I could paint again. Color's after all, and instrument that one can't do without for long. All I have to do is just think of gray, green and white or of black-yellow, sulfur yellow, and violet, and a shudder of pleasure runs through me. Then I wish the war were over and I could paint."
image: "The Morgue", (after a drypoint of 1915) woodcut 37.2 x 47.4 cm
 Max Beckmann, in an artist's statement for an exhibition in 1933:
"I believe that essentially I love painting so much because it forces me to be objective. The stronger my determination grows to grasp the unutterable things of this world, the deeper and more powerful the emotion burning inside me about our existence, the tighter I keep my mouth shut and the harder I try to capture the terrible, thrilling monster of life's vitality and to confine it, to beat it down and to strangle it with crystal-clear, razor-sharp lines and planes."
Quotes from:
"Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait in Words, Collected Writings and Statements, 1903-1950" Edited and annotated by Barbara Copeland Buenger, University of Chicago Press 1997, ISBN 0-226-04136-0
Images from:
"Max Beckmann 1884 - 1950, The Path to Myth", by Reinhard Spieler, Benedikt Taschen Verlag 1995, ISBN 3-8228-9058-8
image: "Departure" (left panel of triptych) 1933 oil on canvas 215 x 99 cm
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 November 9, 2002 (Tuesday)
Last Thursday I attended the opening reception for Bill McElhiney's new show at Alliance Francaise. Titled "Souvenirs de Montpellier", McElhineys' oil paintings, drawings, and watercolor/gouache on paper are recent works inspired by a stay in Montpellier this past June. Matisse and Bonnard also worked in this area - everyone seems to mention the quality of light when they talk about painting in the south of France.
 I attempted to interview the artist - I wanted to ask him how the light in the Mediterranean city of Montpellier compares with the light in here San Francisco. But this reception was packed, especially around the food, and I never got close enough to the artist (in blue turtleneck) long enough to ask him anything. I was also wondering how much of the work was done in France and how much was completed when he got back here.
 Most of the work was small enough to easily transport. The only large piece (approximately 42" x 42") was the painting of his wife looking toward an ancient aqueduct.
The pencil drawings were especially well rendered, fresh, and evocative, although I wasn't able to get close enough to most of them for a photo. The oil paintings and the water/gouache works on paper each had the same bright, saturated colors. There were several views from a window that looked as if they were different angles from same window at different times of day - a good study of a place.
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 November 7, 2004
Sachiko Nakamura
My good friend Sachi died recently, here in my home. She was a creative, life-generating force in this community, and a good friend to (literally) hundreds of people. I was lucky she agreed to spend her last ten days with me. Eight of those days were an almost continuous party, with live music, poetry readings, laughter and and unbelievable amount of food.
Sachiko's art form was performance, but she was a boundary-crosser in the finest tradition of the trickster. She had her fingers in so many pies, that I don't think there's a single one of us who knows about them all. I know she was involved in the civil rights movement in the 60's and met Malcolm X. She was an inspirational feminist at San Jose State in the early 70's, and was active in the Peace movement. She combined elements of Japanese Noh, Butoh, and American solo performance theater to come up with her own art form - Asian American Dance Theater. She founded theater groups, taught dance classes, danced the hula, played the ukulele, practiced Chinese brush painting, taught grade school music classes and college level drama classes, and was a proud, active member of San Francisco's first (and longest running) artist live-work collective, Project Artaud. There will be more Sachi stories at her memorial celebration, 1pm - 4pm on Saturday, November 20th, at Theater Artaud.
More about Sachiko Nakamura here.
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