Category: Visual Art
Stories, thoughts, and observations about art.
Intaglio a Go-Go: Etching Moves Forward
Libraries are one of my favorite places to hang out. I love being around books and people who love being around books. The library is a place of words. However, it is easy to forget that it is also a place of images. Printed images and picture are close kin to printed words. For this reason, libraries have extraordinary potential as places to exhibit art, in particular art related to words.
P.S. for more information visit www.friendsofpix.org
The City of Angels:
Another exhibit which stood out was Joan Snyder‘s exhibit at Solway Jones Gallery. Online images and reproductions do not do her work justice. Her work is among the best painterly abstractions I have seen lately. Ms. Snyder’s vocabulary of mark and form is diverse. She often builds up paint in a sculptural way. Included in the paint are bits of different materials such as fabrics and dried debris from plants. These artifacts are barely noticeable in reproduction. The small bits that I found in her paintings were like little surprises and reminded me of the insects and little details, found only through close inspection, in dutch still life painting from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For more images visit: www.solwayjonesgallery.com
Above is one of Dawson’s paintings. To learn more about Dawson’s work visit his site:
www.riverofglass.com
There never has to be a dull moment in L.A., but if one needs to slow down one can relax by the pool and there are a lot of pools in L.A. I was sad to leave the warm weather and return to a snow storm in Philadelphia. However, the snow does have its own charm.
Overwhelmington
Exhibit at H&F Fine Art
Opening: March 7th 5-8 pm
Running time: March 5th-29th
“Alasktic” portrays the pleasure and the strain of travel on the mind and body. The series is comprised of fifteen prints produced between 2006 and 2008. The prints fit together to form a narrative about travel beginning in Mexico and ending in Alaska.
This project was initially inspired by Utagawa Hiroshige’s 1834 print series, “53 Stations on the Tokaido,” which depict scenes along the famous eastern sea road in Japan. For the contemporary viewer, Hiroshige’s prints function as a virtual trip allowing one to imagine what once was. Secondarily, the expeditions of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark inspired “Alasktic,” along with John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie and lyrics by Woody Guthrie.
The goal of this project was to create a pictorial and verbal overview of an imagined journey. The first and last prints in the series represent literal and figurative edges of the American territory.