Wandering Artist's Journal

A good omen: on the street car yesterday morning, as I was heading out to see art, the anonymous girl next to me pulled out a sketch pad and started an ink drawing of our fellow passengers. I went to the Point with two friends and our first stop was the studio of an artist known to all of us, Richard Bolingbroke. This is his 20th Open Studio show. My favorite series of his is the big watercolor arrangements of bones, stones and flowers. This year he's working on a toy series that includes a lot of robots. His flat files are full of wonderful pastel & pencil drawings. He's also serving a great spiced cider - you might still have time to go get some today. Richard Bolingbroke with his pastel drawing "Skull Abstraction." Larry Morace has more of his (new) signature cityscapes, and a few of his older still life studies and sculptures. He showed us the textured surface of his mixed media paintings and talked to us about a brand new, developing project - maybe you...

Bay Area Printmakers were showing at Ft. Mason this past weekend, so I went to see one of my favorites, David Avery , and discovered a new favorite, Jack Jacobson . David Avery 's etchings are detailed, complex, symbolic dream-like images. They're also very small (He provides magnifying glasses for viewers.) I first visited him 2004 when he had just finished a series called "God's Kitchen", inspired by titles from the Grimm brothers' stories. I told him it reminded me of the way Robert Olen Butler wrote a series of short stories based on the headlines from supermarket tabloids. This time, one of his newer series is called "The Opaque Mirror" and the content is both contemporary news headline material and obscure symbolic references. Still dark, funny, excruciatingly detailed, meticulously rendered. He also has published a couple of new editions of 40 etchings each, printed by the artist. His work is impressive on many levels - the technical skill, th...

I've been meaning to write about Laura Campos for some time. She's one of the great mural artists in San Francisco and a few weeks ago I saw her starting a new mural on 24th Street, near Capp. I shot a few seconds of video and then I had to hurry to my appointment. But last weekend I got a chance to stop and talk to her. She's very warm, approachable, and almost too willing to stop and talk (how does she get her work done? I wasn't the only one bugging her.) Amazingly, she paints these big surfaces with a pretty small brush (it looked like a #2 or #3 flat bristle.) No surprise then, to hear her say that it takes her weeks to complete each mural. I told her I'd shot some video of her and was going to blog it. I'd link to a web site but she doesn't have one. She does have many fans, however, and here are some fan photos of her other murals: Clarion Alley http://www.flickr.com/photos/livenature/4056850618/ Horace Street http://www.flickr.com/photos/liv...

Me and my art pals have a regular Friday date. We meet each week to see and talk about art. (Sometimes we make art, too.) This week we did a marathon of art openings, including 2 galleries and 5 artists' studios. We started at the Catherine Clark Gallery to see the Masami Teraoka show. There's been quite a bit of discussion about this show, among our group, with a wide range of opinions. Personally, I've been a fan of his work for some time. I first noticed him when he was doing the "McDonald's Invades Japan" watercolors. The use of traditional Japanese style to depict contemporary American images was startling, funny, and useful - in terms of forcing the viewer into another point of view. Later, his AIDS series, which mixed ghosts from Japanese folklore, geishas with condoms, and darker, black plague images was very effective at conveying the anxiety and deep sense of loss that surrounded the epidemic. This more recent series, which I think has ...

Hugh Buck's iPad drawings (at Developing Environments) It's getting to the point where I can barely keep up with seeing the the studios of my friends & acquaintances, nevermind seeing someone new. But still, we try. Last weekend was for artists in the Mission and I visited studios all day Saturday & Sunday. This week (SOMA & Dogpatch) I'm going to try to limit it to the Friday night receptions. I couldn't possibly write about everything I saw, but I'll give you the highlights. Project Artaud hallway - Dale Erickson's paintings. My overall impression was that the studios were set up beautifully and the art was better than ever. It looked to me like there were plenty of visitors everywhere I went - I even witnessed two sales. But most of the artists I talked to said it was slower than usual and sales were poor. No surprise, I guess, in this economy - still, artists are enthusiastically making plenty of art. Bernie Rauch is working on a new banner for ...