Monday, March 31, 2008

Campaigning politicians talk solutions; artists talk problems. Politics deals in goals and initiatives; art, or at least interesting art, in a language of doubt and nuance.

--Holland Cotter

Sunday, March 30, 2008

Perseus Slays Medusa

Saturday, March 29, 2008

The attraction of any art fair is that many kinds of art all talk at once, randomly, democratically, in a relatively direct way, unedited by museum curators, magazine editors, international exhibition commissioners or even art critics. Still, it is possible to string together different conversations. One concerns the persistence of painting or paintinglike surfaces, something that few museums seem willing to broach these days. If you want to call this market-driven, fine. Paintings are portable and salable. But, like the novel or the love song, the medium is also wonderfully mutable and susceptible to physical, emotional and symbolic variation.

--My favorite paragraph from Roberta Smith's review of the Armory Fair, where I sure wish I was right now...


Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Another possible design for the student show card:

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

An announcement image idea for our forthcoming student show:

(Image courtesy of the Bob Ross website.)

Sunday, March 23, 2008

My spring break:

Tidy Duplex, 2008, oil on panel

Friday, March 21, 2008

Those two new cymbals sound really good:

(I'll need to replace the rest of his battered kid-sized drum set at some point.)

Thursday, March 20, 2008

"How soon will artists have their own TV channels?"
--Nam June Paik, 1973

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

You are most welcome to attend the local Premier of Bay Dredge!

Monday March 24 @ 7:00pm, as part of the Humboldt Film Festival, Van Duzen Theater, Humboldt State University, Arcata, CA.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

"One can articulate their position very clearly and very directly without a lot of excess nonsense around the image."

--Kerry James Marshall

Monday, March 17, 2008

"Interesting artists are always trying to figure out how not to devolve into endless technical reiterations of the same old shit."

--Amy Sillman

Sunday, March 16, 2008

"You're maudlin and full of self-pity. You're magnificent."

Addison DeWitte to Margo Channing in All About Eve
"To produce paintings means to rework the truths of personal experience, converting them into gratuitous curiosities—something the world has no real need for..."

Julian Bell on Lucian Freud

Friday, March 14, 2008

California Video at the Getty (click here)

Still from Jeff Cain's Radar Balloon, 2005:

You can watch clips from the show on-line! So helpful 'cause I'm so trapped in Humboldt right now...

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

"Hard-line believers in art as visual pleasure will have, poor things, a bitter slog. But if the show is heedless of traditional beauty, it is also firm in its faith in artists as thinkers and makers rather than production-line workers meeting market demands."

(My favorite line from Holland Cotter's review of the Whitney Biennial.)
Value scales by my colleague Julie McNeil's students (click on the artworks to see the details of these lovely little collages):



Friday, March 07, 2008

Our faculty show:



Here's the press release:

The 2008 Art Faculty Exhibition features a diverse selection of recent work by 16 Eureka campus art professors. Sculpture professor Shannon Sullivan’s wall-mounted installation features rhythmically fluid ceramic forms imbedded in a ribbon-like matrix of resin. Imagine translucently luminous cellular structures—enormously magnified—spread across the wall and sparkling like stained glass. Cynthia Hooper’s paintings are inspired by the make-shift housing strategies of the fluidly and precariously expanding working class communities of Tijuana, Mexico. The paintings from this particular series explore the phenomenon of using recycled garage doors from tear-downs in San Diego to make sturdy, four-walled Mexican homes for Maquiladora workers.

Painting professor Emily Silver has created a suite of watercolors that map the terrain of Mojave Desert walks she has taken. They are elegant and diagrammatic—observing the desert from an aerial (and highly abstracted) point of view. Emily also affixes the richly-hued Mojave soil she’s collected right onto the surface of her paintings.

Digital art professor Michael Jenner’s photograph of an amusement park’s Tilt-a-Whirl is a thrilling swirl of elliptical motion—luminous, abstracted motion captured by her camera’s delayed exposure. Ceramic professor Mary Mallahan’s Mesolithic Intrusion is—upon initial inspection—a ceramic vase inspired by her interest in geology and the surface textures of rocks. With closer scrutiny, however, the form subtly references the fertility idols of our Paleolithic past. That little sculpture reflexively compels its viewers—with all its mysterious power—to reverently worship it. Don’t get to close, though—you might get pregnant!

Thursday, March 06, 2008






















I took this picture years ago at Pompeii, in a room our guide described as La Sala de Amore. I rediscovered the slide tonight.

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Beware of the Dog (entry way mosaic from ancient Pompeii)

(I am indebted to my dear colleague Michael Jenner for loaning me her slide scanner when mine finally burned out from overuse. My art historians will have their digital lectures once again!)

Sunday, March 02, 2008

My son's drawings: