As I am sure you've realised, I love discovering artists within my midst. Sometimes, I'll be on my Facebook, and a friend will post a drawing or a piece of fabric art and I'll have no idea.
This happened with Kimberly Goff, an amazing artist who I met through my former roommate (and who showed me that PHENOMENAL section of wall with Fab 5 Freddy, Basquiat, Haring and others on it() and who is just phenomenal. She's showing at Ross Contemporary in Chicago, and the pieces she forwarded to me were, well, if I could paint, they'd be what I'd paint! The piece to the left, the one over there <-, is one thing that has just thrown my tiny mind into a tizzy.. From 2000, it's a majestic, spare piece that seems to call up so many different artists, differing moods and tones. THere's an Abstract Expressionist thing going on, I'd argue it's got a touch of Kline in it, but at the same time, there's an almost Turnerian haze about it, as if we are seeing a day at a seaside beach, a Giacometti-esque child cavorting in the still water as three adults loom. There is a more sinister impression, one of that same figure, but in a world going insane, the smoke of fires rising, a sheen of oil just to the left of the figure the same color as the rising smoke. Whatever impression it leaves on me, it is obvious that this is a piece that was well-constructed within itself. The 'figures' are comprised of a chaotic gesturalism that calls back to the work of Kline and perhaps Joan Mitchell, while there is impressive restraint in the rest of the piece, evoking more impressionistic moods. It's a piece that draws an emotional response, and one that I am still fully digesting.
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I was lucky enough to get to visit the DigiBarn, a computer museum in beautiful Boulder Creek, California. I was quite impressed, but was more impressed when I realised that it also held a significant archive of Timothy Leary's materials. Leary was the leading figure in bringing psychadelic drugs to the American masses, and was one of the most fascinating and important figures in the 1960s. Massive numbers of newspaper clippings, along with albums, books, zines, and more, it's an impressive collection of items. There was one piece in particular that fits my interests.
Bruce Damer showed me a piece of folded paper and on it was written a description of Leary's trip on mushrooms. It was apparently pretty good, because pieces were redacted using a gold pen, but when Bruce opened up the paper, it showed the second image: a poster for a Jasper Johns show at the Leo Castelli Gallery at 4 East 77th street in New York. This was a significant show, and it featured the legendary pait of Ballantine's Ale cans, which I would say is his most significant sculpture! My third favorite podcast (after You Must Remember This and Welcome to Nightvale) is the Art History Babes, a podcast about, wait for it, Art History. They do a phenomenal job of presenting topics and exploring the area within it with a tone that is somewhere between academic and fan-squee. Too often, those two tones are incompatible, but they manage to pull it off perfectly.
The recent episode on Frida Kahlo put a bunch of thoughts in my mind about my own connection with the most awesome of Surrealists (if she really was a Surrealist, as I could easily see it going either way on that topic. She claimed to not be on, and that her work did not present dreams, but it appears to fall in with the work of Dali, Magritte, etc.) She was one of the first artists I seriously dug into more than simply plowing through art books. I read a couple of biographies of her in High School, and when the internet was first available to me, found myself AltaVistaing her to find more and more info on her life, her loves, her work. Her's is a tragic story, and too often is told within the confines of her relationship to Diego Rivera. The difference between the two is striking. There is no better muralist than Diego. His work was perfected set for large-scale public interaction. The surviving photos of his work for Rockefeller in New York, a significant portion of the film Cradle Will Rock, shows the depth of his mastery of form. Frida was the superior Artist. Period. She imbued her work with pain, her pain and the world's pain, and with magic. Even a painting as seemingly simple as her self-portrait with the monkey has incredible depth and layers that spread open as you encounter the work again and again. Frida's technique, rough at times, actually focuses her painterly energies into meaning, symbolism, storytelling in static images. No other artist of the 20th century drew out so much from static presentations, and especially self-portraiture. Every painting she delivered encompassed the energy of her life, fiery and often tragic, and gave us a work that forced us into dark corners, searching for light. The piece above, at the SFMoMA, is not my fave, but it shows the layers she managed to create within her works. Diego is much more realistic in her delivery of them than she painted herself. They are holding hands, seemingly gently, and Diego holds a painters palette and brushes, while Frida clutches her scarf. The positioning is so straight forward, but the work seems to scream that there is more to this relationship, more to Frida the person, and certainly a sort of cold calculation to Diego's stare. I could go on, and often have, but this work is not nearly as bare bones as it would appear at first glance.
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Your HostChristopher J Garcia - Curator, Fan Writer, Podcaster, and a guy who just loves art. Archives
February 2019
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