Thursday, August 31, 2006

"Surface Tension" (cool new publication):
















(my painting is on the cover)

(my son's ready-made)
"What, after all, is adventure but inconvenience properly regarded?"
~GK Chesterton

Monday, August 28, 2006

Sean Hemmerle

Tijuana:

Nogales:

Sunday, August 27, 2006

Nikko Mueller (for my painting students):

















(Ariel view of the US/Mexico border crossing at Tijuana, oil on canvas.)

Nicolaides (for my drawing students):

On Gesture: "It is only the action, the gesture, that you are trying to respond to here, not the details of the structure. You must discover--and feel--that the gesture is dynamic, moving, not static. Gesture has no precise edges, no exact shape, no jelled form. The forms are in the act of changing. Gesture is movement in space."





















On Contour: "Exactly coordinate the pencil with the eye. Your eye may be tempted at first to move faster than your pencil, but do not let it get ahead. Consider only the point that you are working on at the moment with no regard for any other part of the figure."

Friday, August 25, 2006

From the permanent collection of the de Young Museum, San Francisco:

James Elkins (for my life drawing students):














"Men's Life Drawing class, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This is 1905, the year when so much of modernism got started in Paris. Meanwhile, in America (as in much of the world) art instruction kept to the ideas of the French Academy. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts had only recently allowed women into life drawing classes, and the issue of equality of the sexes--not to mention the problems of sexism--was not yet on the horizon. These students would all have been happy to produce "academies"--academic-style nude studies--which were preparatory exercises for large oil paintings. They wouldn't have even noticed the oddity of posing a female model surrounded by male students. Notice the pompously posed instructor with his thick moustache, and the very earnest young student at the lower left."

Thursday, August 24, 2006

After the Dying Gaul Series (3rd C. B.C. Hellenistic):


"They knew how to die, Barbarians though they were."

Tuesday, August 22, 2006



(Picasso)

Monday, August 21, 2006

Jesse Wiedel

From "Power/Exchange" by Deborah Stratman:


He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
~Sir William Drummond

Sunday, August 20, 2006

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Colonia Esperanza (Tijuana):

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

"To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable."
--Rebecca Solnit
Lazaro Cardenas (Tijuana):

Friday, August 04, 2006

Anthony James at Blum and Poe (Los Angeles):




"Mama! You just spent half an hour looking at trees in a box!"