Wandering Artist's Journal

Four recent paintings in my "Unreliable Memory" series. Reno has been good to me. It's only been a couple of months since we got here and I'm working at a great pace (six paintings so far - here are four of them.) Finally, a healthy place to live and a nice studio to work in. As I mentioned last year , I'm shifting to a new kind of work. These images are based on archival family photos (8mm film stills and 120 photo film) by my grandparents, possibly the world's worst photographers. Instead of the meticulous gridded transfer of a staged narrative, I'm doing an expressionistic, straight-to-canvas, visual description of childhood emotional memories. It's been fun and its been cathartic. Who knows how long it'll last, but I have a mountain of source material. Simultaneously, I'm working on digital (iPhone) drawings, paintings and hard-to-describe pieces: one or two per day, uploaded to Instagram and/or Facebook with tangible output to met...

"Fat Cat", acrylic on canvas, 18"x 24", ©2014, Anna L. Conti Last night I finished the painting, "Fat Cat" which, along with the previous painting, "Dinner With Friends," marks a new direction for me. I'm done with realism, documentary, and narrative work. I'm still struggling to define what I *am* working toward, but I'm willing to take the rest of this year to figure it out. "Transitions" is probably as close as I can get for now. "Dinner with Friends" was a ten year project that started out as an abstract meditation on SpaceTime and ended up as a more personal record of a time & place: "Dinner With Friends", acrylic on canvas, 24" x 48", ©2011-2015, Anna L. Conti

"Bondage" aka Taped Page 01, ©2014 Anna L. Conti Last night I dreamed that I was painting in a big studio - huge- the size of a house but it was a single room. I had several canvases going at once and the canvases were huge, too - bigger than anything I’ve ever worked on before. I was painting gesturally, with little or no pre-sketching and I was grabbing whatever was available in terms of paint. At some point I realized that some of it was oil (the rest acrylic) and I needed more paint. Waking up, I wondered what that was all about. It was a good-feeling dream, not anxious, not  nightmare. Fun, totally absorbing work. Yesterday I had a good studio day, working on a tape piece and some other projects (printmaking, handmade books.) I did a little more on the sky in the “Fat Cat” canvas. I remember right before I quit and went to bed, I put another blue on the sky and thought I was over-working it and I should just move on. The sky shouldn’t have taken this long. ...

    The first Oddist’s “Art on the iPad” class was a success and there will be more (details will be posted here and there in a few weeks.) The Oddist’s atelier (Richard Perri’s studio in the SF Odd Fellow’s Building) is an inspiring location for almost any kind of art adventure. It’s big and it’s chockablock with paintings, costumes, still life props, funky furniture, easels, lights, music, refreshments and interesting artists & models. I’ve always loved teaching how-to-do-it art classes to adults, at any level. And the iPad has been a favorite medium for me since it was released 4 years ago. David Hockney and the other New Yorker cover artists have sparked an interest this kind of digital paint. It’s significantly more user-friendly than the desktop setups that professional graphic artists use. But most of these apps don’t come with manuals, so a lot of people need a guided tour to get them started. This was a beginner’s class and luckily for me, all of the stu...

I attended the (regular, weekly) figure drawing session at the Mission Cultural Center last week. Wow, was I rusty - no surprise, since it's been a few years since my last one. But it felt good to stretch those muscles, so I think I'll make it a regular habit again.

I recently made a studio visit to Sandra Yagi , in her South Beach studio. Sounds almost tropical, doesn't it? It's an old CalTrans building nestled up against the Bay Bridge on-ramp. The last time I visited this building it was to see Tina Vietmeier . Sandy just moved to this studio from her old place on Belcher Street. ( I interviewed her there five years ago .) The same rolling cart and easels were here in "South Beach" (Rincon Hill), but this studio seemed a lot brighter, with huge windows along one wall. Sandy said it could get a little too bright, and she just got some curtains to cut down the mid-morning glare. If you're not familiar with her work, Sandra paints with classic old-world methods, using familiar symbols and iconography to convey timeless and contemporary concerns. Lots of skeletons, animals, imagined landscapes, and darkly funny situations. Sandra works out her ideas in sketchbooks before going to paint. She often uses 3D models to work out ...

June flew by - I had an art opening at HANG (two pieces in their "Alumni" show) the first week, then Dave had a couple of days of treatment at Kaiser, then we left for Seattle - 22 hours on Amtrak, in coach. We went up there to see our nephew's graduation, and we stayed about a week, visiting with family and seeing some art in the area. Seattle had great weather, water all around, gold-rush history, good food, bookstores, coffee houses, lots of artists. I liked the city - it's basically a smaller version of San Francisco. And I like the emphasis on craft in the Seattle art world. The best gallery I saw on this trip: Greg Kucera . The best art show: Sherry Markovitz at Greg Kucera and the Bellevue Art Museum . Then the 22 hour return trip. It was grueling - not as bad as I'd feared, but bad enough that I don't want to do it again. Maybe if I won the lottery or something and could get a sleeper cabin it might be OK. The other nephew graduates in three ye...

Robert Genn , in his twice weekly letter to artists, writes today that: . . . researchers at the Universities of British Columbia and Minnesota have found a relationship between creativity and the height of ceilings. Rui Zhu and Joan Meyers-Levy tested various volunteer groups in rooms of eight- and ten-foot ceilings. . . . These researchers feel people under high ceilings are "primed" to think broadly because of the sense of freedom associated with the space, while the containment of a lower ceiling encourages people to think small and focused. The paper (a pdf - " The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing People Use ," Joan Meyers-Levy and Rui Zhu, Journal of Consumer Research (forthcoming Aug. 2007).) is on Joan Meyers-Levy's site . Genn wonders: Incidentally, these researchers ought to try to find out if shorter persons are more creative than taller ones because they have more space above their heads. And in case...

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 ...

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...