Wandering Artist's Journal

In 1992, I met Sherry Miller via "Women's Wire" (a pre-web internet service.) Sherry is an artist and a trickster and she was responsible for steering me back into art. My path had evolved from a promising alternate route into a stumble through the brambles. After watching her, and listening to her bon mots, I found a way to the Land of Oz, where I've been happily working ever since. Sherry, self-described as "the oldest woman on the web," has started a blog , which I added to the sidebar, and she has an Open Studio coming up: Open Studio - Saturday and Sunday, May 12 & 13; 11-6 pm Industrial Center Building Studio 259D 480 Gate Five Road Sausalito CA 94965 From 101 Southbound take Sausalito/Marin City exit. Turn left. Go underhighway. Turn right at light onto Bridgeway. From 101 Northbound take Sausalito/Marin City exit. Go straight on Bridgeway. At third light turn left on Harbor Drive. Third gray building on the left.

I was out this weekend, visiting friends' studios and, while walking near the Mollosk (surf shop & art gallery) I saw this street sculpture (?): A few blocks away, John Paul Turnage was working on his latest obsessively planned landscape - a multipanel view of San Francisco, from Alcatraz. The view stretches from Emeryville to the Marin Headlands. He's spent time on the Parade Grounds at Alcatraz, doing sketches, then working them up in the studio. Here's a shot of one version of the ink studies, tacked around the ceiling of his studio: Here's another small study, on canvas: Eventually, it'll be a big oil on canvas painting, but he hasn't decided yet how many panels or what to leave out/in. He wants to visit the viewing spot a few more times before he commits. Here's the most recent painting he completed: I also visited Dale Erickson 's studio recently. Luckily for me, he agreed to trade paintings and I was over there to pick out the one I wan...

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In response to Tyler Green's Rhyming Painting challenge, this is my favorite pair of rhyming paintings. Besides the obvious color & composition echoes, they both present images of confinement & restriction, with the possibility of escape. For Hopper, it was always a window. For Bechtle, it's the car. Edward Hopper , "Sun in An Empty Room", 1963, oil on canvas, 28 x 39 inches Robert Bechtle , "Oakland Ghia", 1974, watercolor on paper, 10 x 15 inches

In response to Tyler Green's Rhyming Painting challenge: Vincent van Gogh , "Starry Night over the Rhone", 1888, 72.5 x 92 cm Eugène Jansson , "Riddarfjärden, Stockholm", 1898, Oil on canvas, 115 x 135 cm Vincent van Gogh ,, "Starry Night", 1889, oil on canvas, 28 x 36 inches Edvard Munch , "Starry Night", 1893, Oil on canvas, 135 x 140 cm

In response to Tyler Green's Rhyming Painting challenge: Paul Cadmus , "Family Group", 1964, egg tempera on board, 14 x 19 inches Martha Alf , "Kleenex Boutique", 1971, oil on canvas, 16 x 28 inches

In response to Tyler Green's Rhyming Painting challenge: Albert Pinkham Ryder , "The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse)", 1896, Oil on canvas, 27 x 35 inches Alice Neel , "Requiem", 1928, Watercolor on paper, 9 x 12 inches

In response to Tyler Green's Rhyming Painting challenge: Pieter Brueghel the elder , "The Hunters in the Snow", 1565 William Gropper , "The Hunt", 1937, Oil on board, 18 x 35 inches

This is the last weekend for "Princes, Palaces and Passion: The Art of India's Mewar Kingdom" at the Asian Art Museum. The exhibit is a single room with about 70 paintings and a few other works, and it took me about two hours to make my way around the room. I realize now, what a laughably short time that is - less than 2 minutes per painting. And these paintings require intensive looking. The museum hands out magnifying glasses, to help see the mind-blowing detail in the brightly colored little watercolor and gouache pieces. They're filled with decorative patterns, symbolic imagery, animals & insects, mythological creatures, architectural elements, natural wonders, portraits of royalty & gods, and nameless servants - all at once, and on shifting planes of perspective. The artists (who must have been seriously nearsighted) show distinctive styles and original solutions to common challenges in composition and perspective. If I had to pick one word to describ...

A few recent items on this topic: Deborah Oropallo has a couple of local shows of her new work - one at the de Young and one (in a side room) at Stephen Wirtz Gallery. The work is pigment prints (meaning inkjet prints) of digital images which the artist downloaded from the web and manipulated on the computer. She's often referred to as a conceptual painter. For now, I'll agree with the "conceptual" part. How about Vic Muniz (at Rena Bransten ) - is he a painter? Does it matter if he uses toys the way Robert Bechtel uses paint? Long-time blogger and artist, Franklin Einspruch , is moving to Laguna Beach to teach art and act as Chief of Technology. A week ago, he said this about digital tools: The problem is not one of technology, but cynicism, even if the former is being made to serve the latter. Cynicism makes it equally possible to subvert a labor standard, insult tradition, sell something that nobody needs, or roll your eyes and say "Whatever!" when ...

The May issue of artLTD (a West coast art magazine) is out now and it has a good story about Hunters' Point , repeating a lot of the rumors I've been hearing about the artists' studios out there. As usual, no real hard info about who has to move, or when: For over 20 years artists have worked out on the old shipyard, which is among other things an old naval base, a toxic waste site, and the largest plot of open land in San Francisco. It happens to be located in one of the city’s most dangerous and blighted neighborhoods. Here in Hunters Point, dislocated from the hub of downtown, among an ongoing radiological remediation project, a sewage treatment plant, 100 Brownfield sites, a recently closed PG&E power plant, over a third of the city’s hazardous waste generators, 325 underground petroleum storage tanks, and a public housing project know ominously as “The Hill,” a couple hundred artists have found an affordable place to work. But why would anyone (or more specificall...

The blockbuster Picasso and American Art show at SFMOMA is worth the extra bucks and worth dealing with the crowds, worth putting up with the weird entrance strategy (elevator to the 4th floor, then walk up a long curving staircase and across a transparent bridge?) . . . it's been written up by Kenneth Baker , Kristin Farr , Lee Foster , Nancy Ewart , and many others. Even if you don't like Picasso, there are sooo many great paintings here from the Whitney, the Chicago museums, and other sources, that you may never have a chance to see again. My favorite quotes from the blogs: “OH! That is my favorite Picasso!” exclaimed the patron of the arts visiting the SFMOMA for the Picasso and American Art Exhibit as he pointed to the painting on the right, a Max Weber. Quietly, I stated outloud, “The Picasso is on the left.” ( via ) - - - It doesn't matter if you are not a fan of Picasso's work; he stopped caring when he dropped dead at a dinner party in 1973, leaving the ...

I just saw the (2005) movie, " World's Fastest Indian " which is a true story about an eccentric, intensely focused guy, Burt Munro, who breaks the world land speed record on a (modified) motorcyle. He spends his entire life on this project. This movie made me think of the artist's pursuit and the joys (and pain) of the artist's life. The movie was directed by Roger Donaldson , who made an earlier (1971) documentary about Munro called, "Offerings to the Gods of Speed." He spent 20 years trying to get the newer movie made. Both the filmmaker and the subject of the film have a lot in common with the better artists that I know: obsession, passion, and a tendency to inspire envy in onlookers. One young man, interviewed in the 1971 documentary, says about Munro, "I envy him, I envy his life, because he does what he wants." Munro is envied, in spite of the fact that he lives alone in a one room shack (essentially a workshop with a cot.) He actually ...

One of the benefits of practicing a craft over a long time is getting to the point where you can do anything you can imagine. At which point, your challenge is in the imagining. You need to cultivate and protect your imagination - plenty of alone time, reduced exposure to idiotic time-wasters, and (for my work) limited contamination from the popular culture. Another thing that happens when you get to this point is that people want to hire you to execute their visions. It's possible to make a full-time career out of other people's visions. I usually say "no thanks" to these requests. Not that I'm against the idea of making money, but I hate taking time away from my own work. Still the requests keep coming . . . And every once in a while the stars align just so: I'm between projects and someone offers a simple, yet interesting, job that pays well. I just finished one of those - painting some little objects that will probably end up in a gallery and/or museu...

As an artist, I'm often approached by friends, family, and strangers . . . with the news that I'm so talented, I'm so creative, and they are not. "I can't even draw a straight line," they'll say. (Neither did Mondrian - have you ever seen one of his paintings up close?) But there's more to creativity than art and more to art than painting. I like the way Art scholar Ellen Dissanayake defines art as a behavior, and she says that all humans are born with a capacity for and need to practice art. "Living Artfully" by Sandra Magsamen is the perfect book for those friends. If I could, I'd carry a box of them around with me, and hand them out every time I heard someone complain, "I don't have a creative bone in my body." Throughout the book, Sandra writes encouraging insights in her big loopy handwriting, spread across colored pages . . . inspiring quotes are inserted liberally . . . but it's not a "how to" book...

I finally picked up the Chester Arnold painting that I put on layaway at Catherine Clark Gallery last year. Right now it's sitting on the top of my computer desk. I'm going to make a frame for it and hang it in the living room . . . sooner or later. "It Was Very Late or Very Early" ©2005, Chester Arnold oil on linen on panel, 5" x 4"

From today's Sri Lanka Daily News : Asian art could be said to be ‘modern’ centuries before the existence of what now is called modern art in Europe. Perhaps the first considerable painter in Europe to be attracted by the Indian art of his time was Rembrandt - a long period after the great art of Hindu India had perished under Muslim vandalism, and which has never been surpassed. Rembrandt even made rough pen and ink sketches of Indo-Mogul and other miniatures from India, and certain figures in some of his paintings depicting oriental subjects show the influence of Indian miniatures.

I'd love to know who made the giant Ganesh sculpture that's sitting over the main entrance to Macy's (Union Square) these days. And have you seen that humongous banner on the side of the building? It's the biggest one I've seen in the downtown area:

I first saw Anne Subercaseaux 's work at the SOMA artists' studios (which, incidentally is having a Spring Open studios event later this month.) Excellent painting - she pares down to the essence in terms of shape & line, then goes all out with the color. In reproduction, the colors look muted and restrained, but in the presence of the paintings, the colors are deeply alive. Her show is up this month at the Newmark Gallery - I made a little video of the opening, including some comments by the artist and a couple of randomly selected viewers:

Burning Man artists have built a roaming political art piece, commissioned by Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry's.) from the SFGate : The Topsy-Turvy Bus, a "shortie" yellow school bus with its twin welded upside down to the roof, was commissioned by Ben & Jerry's ice cream co-founder Ben Cohen to protest U.S. military spending. A crew of 10 artists who build sculpture for the annual Burning Man art festival in the Nevada desert is putting the finishing touches on the bus, including stenciling the sides to say, "The U.S. Budget Is Topsy-Turvy." They are putting large pie charts on the flip-out stop signs that show half of federal discretionary spending is reserved for the Pentagon, and diet-size slivers set aside for other concerns such as education, health care and the environment. Tuesday, lead builder Tom Kennedy and artist Flash Hopkins were using a ceiling crane to lower the wheels onto the upside down bus. "Our military arsenal is big ...

Trillium Press is now Electric Works and they're in their new location at 8th & Mission. It's a cool old building, which Electric Works is still renovating. They have a big gallery on the first floor - photos at their Flickr site. (Image above is William Wiley signing prints for Yale Art Gallery, Electric Works founding partner Richard Lang turning prints.) Also moving into the South of Market Area is Catherine Clark Gallery . They'd been at 49 Geary for 12 years. Their new space (like Electric Works, it's street level) is located at 150 Minna Street, between 3rd and New Montgomery Streets, and adjacent to the Saint Regis Hotel and the SFMOMA. They open at the new location in May. There's an entrance from Mission street, between the Cartoon Art Museum and MoAD . Catherine Clark has also started a blog and a Flickr site. (Image below is the Last First Thursday Event at 49Geary - Work by Masami Teraoka. Photo by Rhiannon MacFadyen .)

Sorry for the absence - I've been trying to wrestle a senile seventy-something cowboy into giving up his guns and trucks, and getting him to accept daily assistance in his home. It's been a wild ride. I feel like I've been living in a Molly Ivins column. If this were one of those ultra-personal blogs, I'd go into details, but it's not, so I won't. Now I can finally get back to all those art book reviews, San Francisco art shows, and artist interviews that have been on the back burner for far too long. (Photo is from 1943, Llano, Texas - my Dad is the little guy on the right.)