Wandering Artist's Journal

I'm participating in an art exhibition and fundraiser for AIDS Lifecycle Team Clydesdale. (The painting above, "Infirmary" is one of the two that I have in this event.) Friday, April 29 · 6:00pm - 10:00pm Urban Island Home Furnishings 1901 Broadway Alameda, CA A note from the curator, Coy Abellano: "Whether you like it or not, life is made up of layers. Each unique event builds up a collective experience where profundity and complexity coalesce with all things we generally think are normal and benign. This exhibition features a collection of emerging and established local Bay Area artists. Works presented in the exhibition are diverse and possibly bordering on chaotic. A majority of the art works presented in this exhibition are for sale and a handful of premium pieces will be included in a silent auction. A portion of the sale will go towards the fundraising for AIDS Lifecycle Team Clydesdale. Some of the participating artists in the show are also members of Team ...

Yesterday the SF Artists' Roundtable group took a road trip. The impetus was the Gottfried Helnwein exhibit at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento but we saw much more than that. None of us had been to the Crocker in many years and they have expanded into a big, user friendly space with a excellent collection of regional art. Imagine the Oakland Museum with the di Rosa collection, in the Norton Simon's space. It's huge - we couldn't see it all in one day. Midnight Mickey Gottfried Helnwein 2001 , mixed media (oil and acrylic on canvas) When we arrived, we went straight to "Inferno of the Innocents," the Helnwein exhibit. It was a large exhibit, a selective retrospective, filling multiple galleries with mostly very large paintings. Some of his older, well known Nazi imagery was there, as well as very recent paintings (his surprisingly quiet "Disasters of War" series) and a landscape of Death Valley. After an intense hour or so in the Helnwein exh...

Regardless of how you feel about Rosenquist's painting, his stories of growing up on the Northern Plains and his stories about his life as an artist are wonderful: visually descriptive and often funny. His childhood seems like a typically American story, which I guess is why it seems so familiar to me, even though he was older, and a boy. His parents were into flying, they moved often, he spent long stretches on his grandparents' farm, they lived in fairly rustic situations, he liked to play war and make most of his own toys. He grew up without television but his mother was an amateur painter and took him to art museums when she could. He spent a lot of time in and around Minneapolis, and briefly Chicago, before heading to New York to paint billboards for awhile before getting his own studio. He said painting billboards was like training for the Olympics and after that he never had a problem getting work ready for a show. The book is written like Rosenquist talks: direct, t...

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...

I was in LA recently for four days last week and I tried to make the best of it but there is just too, too much art to see. Tuesday night I walked walked around Chinatown with my three companions (Dave, Sandy and Nancy) and dropped into Ooga Booga to see their selection of chapbooks, which rivals the one at Citylights - worth a side trip if you're nearby. A nighttime walk around Chinatown and a great Vietnamese dinner at Via Cafe wrapped up the evening. There were several large original paintings, portraits mostly , leaning against the walls around the restaurant. I asked the cashier about them and she enthusiastically told me about the artist, Jasmine Little , who had just brought the paintings over earlier in the day - they were loose, expressive portraits, larger than life-sized. A nice start to the week. Incidentally the "art" in our hotel room is worse than bad. I mean, I wasn't expecting anything but really - this is just egregiously bad. Blank walls would ha...