Wandering Artist's Journal

Gottfried Helnwein spoke at the SF Art Institute last night. It was the visual artists' standard (slide show with commentary) even the standard disclaimer, "I hate making speeches." But he had an entertaining collection of stories & anecdotes and he was very open to questions from the audience, sometimes letting the questions dictate the direction of the talk. He started by talking about his childhood in the Soviet zone of Vienna, part of Allied-Occupied post-war Austria . He was born just a few years after the Soviet siege of Vienna and he recalled the bombed out areas and generalized depression that characterized the city, the culture and the people as he grew up. The lack of cultural and visual arts, the "lack of everything" combined with the reticence of his parents and other adults to answer his questions about what had happened, made him sensitive to the hidden, the reserved, the covered up. He finally realized that his family, his neighbors, in fact...

A couple of days ago I went with a few friends to see the Barbizon show at Franklin Bowles Gallery , 765 Beach Street in SF (it's across from Aquatic Park.) This gallery commissions a mural, at the front of the gallery, for the opening of each major show and one of our party, David Steinhardt , paints most of them. The mural for this show was a very loose, brushy piece inspired by Elisabetta Marchioni's "Roses, Tulipes et Oeillets dans une Urne." Which is not technically a Barbizon painting, but it made a great entry mural. The Barbizon school was centered around the little French village of Barbizon, near the Fontainebleau Forest, which isn't too far from Paris. In 1824 the Salon de Paris exhibited works of the British artist, John Constable. His landscapes inspired a new generation of French artists to get out of the studio and paint directly in nature, focusing on natural light and natural forms. They were rejected by the salon painters and the academies, of c...

A dozen artists met last night to consider the interaction, the opposition, the collusion of the word and the image. It was part of the weekly San Francisco Artists' Roundtable gathering. Each of us presented our thoughts on the matter, taking questions from the group, and trying to stick to a 10 minute per person limit (spurred on by the potluck feast awaiting us once the presentations were over.) Not surprisingly, in this group, the artists' responses to the theme varied wildly with some stepping waaay outside their comfort zone. It was our own version of " the Moth ." I noticed the recurrence of certain themes: - Choosing a creative life as an act of resistance. - Patience and persistence in the pursuit of one's (real, art) work. Marianna Whang cited Melville's " Bartleby the Scrivener " as a significant source of inspiration. She said she often felt like a contemporary scrivener and showed us examples of her photographic work that referenced tha...