Paint By Needle

Friday November 2nd, 2007
Rowan Morrison Gallery
"Paint by Needle"
The Textile works of Narangkar Glover and Ako Castuera

Details from the works that will be on exhibit

As I gather the bits and pieces together and work frantically to finish up my last pieces, I'm being reminded of the work of many talented contemporary artists whose work is also in the textile-soft-sculpture-visual-art category. Here are just a few of our picks:

Laura Splan

"Underneath" (installation) 2003, cosmetic facial peel, wood, metal, thread, blood

Frances Trombly is a Miami Artist showing at Steven Wolf this month, and has a write up by Kenneth Baker at SFgate.

"Balloons" 2004, crochet

Anu Tuominen is Swedish, I think.


Maria Porges is an Oakland sculptor perhaps known more for her wax sculptures, but this I'm very familiar with, as it's as the Berkeley Art Museum:

"Bomboozle", 2003, felted wool, dimensions variable, 48” x 48”

Tonya Solley Thornton just moved from Oakland to Ashville, NC

"Merry Go Cake", mixed media, 5'9"

Lacey Jane Roberts knits with a little toy that makes I-chords. At CCA she made a giant, bright pink, chain link fence with I-chords. Here's another of hers:


And here's a preview of my work that will be showing here at Rowan Morrison Gallery and Artist's Bookstore.

"Color Wheel", 18" x 18", Crewel Embroidery on Jute

Three Girls #2, 68" x 98", oil on canvas

Here's my latest work from the Three Girls series. I think I'll put it to bed for a bit, and start a new series, but mostly I'll be getting my show together for November.







and I posted this one a while back, here it is again (now it's an "official" series)

The Handmade vs. The Brainmade (Idea)

I like to build my own stretchers, stretch and size my own canvas, frame my own work. I like my work to be mine from start to finish. There's a real satisfaction in becoming the process of your work. When you get your hands dirty, you become invested in what you're doing. I also really like to get my brain involved, and the result is usually a muddled, twisting, wrenching argument with myself.

On May 20th I went to an open house and day of demonstrations at the Berkeley Art Museum. The open house went in conjunction with Allison Smith's Notion Nanny exhibit, which I stumbled across a few days prior. The primary message of the exhibit was a study in the idea of the "itinerant apprentice": someone who travels from town to town, learning the skills and crafts of the local tradespeople, and offering up his/her creative ideas in turn. In this case, Allison Smith, a Brooklyn artist was the Itinerant Apprentice, who offers an exhibit of a collection of handmade objects, on display at BAM until August 12, 2007.

I found the collaborative nature of the show to be the most thought-provoking, although there were times that I felt a sense of ambivalence. The woven tapestries were exquisite, and on the placard it read "Allison Smith", and below it read the name of the artist who actually wove the piece, thus giving a somewhat secondary credit to the contibuting Artisan. This leads me to the ever-pervasive debate between Idea vs. Craft; Conceptual vs. Modernist. When the two are polarized as they are in Contemporary Art, it's usually the Idea or Concept that wins favor in the eyes of the critics. But then, I do tire of the "Wow - all those dots and lines must have taken days" - OCD-style works that are "so hot right now". Again, this is an argument I'm having with myself, and this show was a great catalyst for further exploration, polarization, and perhaps the discovery that I have multiple personalities. And we are IN Gemini, and I AM a Gemini after all.. whoa!

Meanwhile, the vast range of exhibitors at the open house were kind, open and earnest in their love for their Craft. I think that was the most inspiring aspect of the show, and I'm really glad I went. Here are some photos I took:


Ehren Tool, an ex-Marine and MFA from Berkeley, makes ceramic cups with grim images of war.


Jeremey (last name?) works with a Letterpress


Travis J. Meinolf works on a loom. He's in the MFA program at CCA in textiles, and his wool blankets are something to see!


If you caught the CCA MFA exhibit, you probably couldn't have missed the giant fence covered in hot-pink knitted I-cords. Here's the artist, Lacey Jane Roberts demonstrating her technique.

One of the most fascinating and beautiful aspects of the open house is that some of these poeple just give their product away for free. Ehren was giving out his ceramic cups, and Travis gives away his wool blankets during his exhibits. Jeremey had GLOBAL WARMING prints to hand out, there were samples of homemade cheese, and free cookies. Amazing.

timelapse video in the studio - then, MEXICO!

...and now I leave you with a video of some painting ...a work in progress as it were



Be back in May... VIVA AKUMAL!

red cross building, Broadway and 40th

Form (capital F) is as important to modern figurative painting as it is to sculpture and architecture. Naturally, I am focused on the form of my surroundings and my landscape. I address my life and express myself by painting not simply WHAT I see, but also that which captivates me and occupies my mind through living here. As painters living and working in an urban environment, we have to filter what's around us in order to gain more closeness to it, and in order to express that much more of the reality in which we live.

The Ashcan School (as mentioned earlier by Alika Cooper, thanks btw!) provided a foundation for all American painters with that sensibility. They painted their surroundings as they were, as industrialization had taken hold nearly all over the Western World - the natural landscape beginning to only be attained with an "exodus". Adopting and painting the cityscape along with all it's interesting industrial objects, thus rejecting the escapist and romantic notion that landscapes must be nature, is one of the very seminal foundations to our current approach to form and composition in modernist painting.

It is interesting to look back to the turn of the century photos that show more than ten times the amount of open space we have today, just one century later. Whoa!

Which brings me to my new series of works: The American Red Cross Building at 40th and Broadway. I have a view of the side and back of the building, lying just behind the abonimable 76 Car Wash. I'm taken in by it's magnitude, it's harsh shadows, high contrast and few windows. Here are some sketches and studies of it:

Easter Sunday and a Web Update

Happy Easter! After our hike in Redwood Regional Park where I picked some forget-me-nots, I worked on getting my website up-to-date.

Here are a few of the works that have just been added:





And here are some photos from our Easter Sunday:

painting-a-days

The steps towards being a skilled artist and draftsman often come from the discipline of a regular practice, but recently I have discovered a rather bustling trend towards "painting-a-day", in which artists do one painting or drawing a day, publish it on his/her blog, post it up for bidding on Ebay, then email and bulletin everyone in his/her myspace about how they just posted their drawing - and then get a Gold Star. Just do a Google search, and you'll start to get the idea...

Don't get me wrong, my beef isn't with painting every day, nor is it with sketching or practicing, or even sharing your work with a community. If anything I am one of the biggest advocates of experimentation with different styles and mediums, sketching and painting, doodling, making three-dimensional works, etc. Whatever gets your juices flowing.

Let's differentiate painting every day from a-painting-a-day right here and now, and especially for the sake of my arguments posed. Aside from my annoyance with all the narcissists out there who make it out to be some kind of amazing feat that the world must be alerted to at once, my argument against painting-a-day isn't as venomous as you readers are starting to think....

When one sets out to a painting a day, they have already acquiesed to the fact that they are neither prolific, nor are they disciplined so in order to overcome their insecurities with their past artistic endeavors they put themselves through some sort of self-imposed artist's boot camp.

But it is flawed in that I've rarely encountered any one individual, who after taking on this boot camp, has followed through for the entire year, and more importantly who has gotten any better with their draftsmanship. It is unrealistic to hope that your are going to come out of this endeavor and be better off than you were before you started, and so, it all just comes down to time wasted. It has diluted your chances for actually producing interesting and ambitious projects. You come home from work, reluctantly work for ten or twenty minutes on your daily painting or drawing, which is probably small, and you veg for the rest of the day. And after a hundred days or so you burn out from the practice all together, taking months to recuperate, only to feel defeated and insecure about your art practice all over again.

So my response and rebellion to the painting-a-day trend is to take an approach much like that of Weight Watchers:

1. Remember that there are no short cuts to success, no magical marathons, no rough and tough boot camps to "shape me up", just genuine effort and interest.

2. Be happy in my own skin. I know my inclinations and I trust that I will follow them.

3. Incorporate artistic practice into my whole life, and realize that without it, I could not be fullfilled as a person.

4. As I realized that I must exercise regularly for the REST OF MY LIFE, I realize that I must make art for the rest of my life if I want to be happy. And when I think about it in that long term way, I let go of any panic or need to accomplish everything in one year.

5. Customize my routine. I personally, do better with a few long days in the studio every week, as opposed to some little time every day, so that's what I do. I will fit figure drawing sessions in when I can, and I won't punish myself for not making it.

and lastly

6. If I paint every day, that's what I do, but I don't have to label it as painting-a-day.

and now I leave you with one of my sketches from my website: