Masako Ando

"The Fire"
Masako Ando
2004
Pencil on Paper
62.0x62.0cm

Available through Tomio Koyoma Gallery

Escape

"Escape"
Hiroshi Sugito
1996
acrylic and pencil on canvas
36.5x51.5cm

Available through Tomio Koyama Gallery in Japan

Jose Parla

Wish I could hop a private jet over to Hong Kong tomorrow to see Parla's exhibit, Reading Through Seeing, at Ooibus Gallery for its last month of showing. In London I got the chance to see one his 5 x 6' paintings for the first time in person and it was more powerful than expected. I'd love to continue my international viewing of his works by stepping foot in Hong Kong before July 11th.


"The Night of Saint-Germain des Pres"
4 x 6'
Mixed Media, Oil, Collage, Ink and Acrylic paint on Wood.






"Memory Arrangement of Word Symmetry "
30 x 44"
Watercolor, oil paint, acrylic and powdered pigment on printmaking paper






"A Story of Your Own Interlaced Text"
3 x 4'
Mixed Media, Oil, Collage, Ink and Acrylic paint on Wood.






"Fragmented Article of The Tenderloin, San Francisco"
4 x 5'
Mixed Media, Oil, Collage, Ink and Acrylic paint on Wood.


All of the above paintings are available through Ooibus Gallery.

Empress of India II

A work by the French artist Bertrand Lavier, brings to mind Hong Kong's neon-lit buildings.

Ionesco

Platitudes

"Didacticism is above all an attitude of mind and an expression of the will to dominate.
A work of art really is above all an adventure of the mind.
Some have said that Boris Vian's The Empire Builders was inspired by my own Amedee. Actually, no one is inspired by anyone except by his own self and his own anguish.
I detect a crisis of thought, which is manifested by a crisis of language; words no longer meaning anything.
No society has even been able to abolish human sadness; no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute.

I can affirm that neither the public nor the critics have influenced me.
Perhaps I am socially minded in spite of myself.
With me every play springs from a kind of self-analysis.
I am not an ideologue, for I am straightforward and objective.
The world ought not to interest me so much. In reality, I am obsessed with it."

quoted from Sontag's Against Interpretation

Gabriel Klasmer

Do you not want to keep looking at these graphite drawings on paper. The black - white - gray. Geometric circles.

Klasmer currently is gracing our presence with his latest series of paintings at Stephen Wirtz Gallery. They are equally engaging.


Here's a bit of a bio for you art nerds.

"On winning the Clore scholarship, Gabriel came to London to study MA and later completed a PhD research degree both at the Royal College of Art in London. His research focused on the examination of the history and status of the monochrome painting, and his ongoing creation of a series of mechanical apparatuses that replace the human hand as a means of making work. This concern with formal questions has extended into a number of exhibitions: for example his show at the Givon Gallery in 2001 featured a monochromatic painting that anticipated the arrival of a viewer in the space by tipping itself 90 degrees from the vertical to the horizontal, acting as a reminder that reading of abstract painting often rely on the angle of view.

In his latest works, from 2007, Klasmer extends his engagement in abstraction to figuration by painting what maybe the most intriguing form of representation: the human face. Similar to his abstract ‘sequence’ work, these paintings rely on very similar processes, procedures and “machines”, however, unlike the abstract painting, these painting represent and introduce the emotional complexity of recognition. "

From The Street to the Gallery

Lee Godie’s "My Fair Lady." (aka SA Women (A Woman with Orange Leaves)
Paint and pen on canvas
18 x 18 ¼ inches



"Godie was a well-known Chicago homeless woman who, from the late 1960s into the ’90s, sold her vigorous childlike paintings and drawings of elegant women and other subjects on the street. She was delusional but so aggressively shrewd as a saleswoman that she became known as Chicago’s most collected artist and was the subject of articles in Art in America, The Wall Street Journal and People magazine. (Examples of her works are at Carl Hammer.)"

from a 2008 NYTimes article on Outsider Art


I've been going through my Outsider Art book recently and came across Lee's work. I like this second one too but wish the image quality was better. The repetition is what gets me here.

The New Young Turks

I love film screenings in galleries. Need to get myself over to Catherine Clark's space soon, it's been too long. Until then, this sounds like a lovely beginning for Friday night.

Gallery: Baer Ridgway Gallery
Event: Film Screening
Time: 7pm
Address: 172 Minna Street


The program includes videos by:
Natasha Agrama, Tucker Bennett, Karla Claudio Betancourt, Lena Daly, Maggie Dilley, Aimee Duddridge, Misty Epperson, Taeer Maymon, Rebecca Parks-Ramage, Christopher Ritson, Hannah Ruskin, Zachery Shipko, and Dominic Tiberio.




Baer Ridgway also has two pieces by Clare Rojas, who currently has an exhibit at Kavi Gupta Gallery through July 25th.




Untitled, 2009
Gouache and latex on unstretched canvas
8.5 x 11 inches
$4,000

All in White

I love that this gallery is only a block from my apartment. I feel so lucky.

Greg Gossel In Three Weeks

Greg Gossel

Three Beautiful Skeleton Keys

Sarraute on Writing Beautifully

"The writer, she says, must renounce 'all desire to write "beautifully" for the pleasure of doing so, to give aesthetic enjoyment to himself or to his readers.' Style is 'capable of beauty in the sense that any athlete's gesture is beautiful; the better it is adapted to its purpose, the greater the beauty.' The purpose, remember, is the recording of the writer's unique apprehension of an unknown reality. But there is absolutely no reason to equate "aesthetic enjoyment.' which every work of art is by definition designed to supply, with the notion of a frivolous, decorative, merely "beautiful" style...."

Against Interpretation
by Susan Sontag

Sunday at Home

I wanted to spend the day sewing but my machine, the beautiful old thing is not functioning. While my living quarters are finally fit for creating, reinventing, for new beauty, it is now a day of drawing and reading. Tomorrow is my mother's birthday, the 25th of May. I almost forgot her birthday, since she left it off of the family calendar, she created for us all. After skypping with her and my father about a solution for my sewing machine, I now sit here in my entry room, the most grounding space in my life. It was not easy to come by. It's been an evolution of friendships, energy and love. With those basic ingredients it goes beyond any other living space I've had. Peaceful in the waking morning and soothing in the sleepy dark of night. My new housemate has a huge presence in my home's new found softness. She's like the third skeleton key we've been waiting for. It is now a time of embracing embracing embracing love. Crushing the harshness and exacerbation I once trusted so intently. Letting go of a tight grasp on everything. Now when I see that tight grasp peeking out I have to let it pass. Vanish you tight grasp. pphhhhhhhh! I extend a formal invitation to simplicity, whim, and the soft nature of love. When I view my life through love it is a peaceful jaunt on a sail boat. When I think of people through love, all else disappears. Love is not white out, a glue stick, or an extra coat of paint. No, no, love is none of those things. Love is blissful and bouyant. It transforms the ugly, leaving no trace of its past existence. As love has re-entered and made its presence known in my life again, I find myself unable to keep from gushing about it. I am delighted for this new era of being. I will no longer live as doing but as being. I'll create, love & be.

Drawing from Thursday Night

Beauty Is Simple

Sarah Applebaum at Receiver Gallery

Artist: Sarah Applebaum
Gallery: Receiver Gallery
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 23, 2009 from
Exhibition Dates: May 23 - June 26 , 2009
Address:1415 Valencia St. San Francisco, CA 94110

Sarah had a solo show at Curiosity Shop this past year and will be in Berlin this Fall. You can find her in 2007's December issue of Ready Made as well as among the nominee's for the SECA award.

Erik Foss

Erik Foss
Fuse Gallery

Lunch with Ron Turner

I had my first tour of Last Gasp's warehouse yesterday and it totally rocked my socks. They've been in that location for 18 years, wow. Afterwards Ron took me to lunch at a little cafe around the corner. He sketched out a history of the JT Leroy phenomenon on the table, giving the back story I was completely unaware of. Good stuff for a Monday.

On Gertrude Stein's style

"The circular repetitive style of Gertrude Stein's Melanctha expresses her interest in the dilution of immediate awareness by memory and anticipation, what she calls 'association,' which is obscured in language by the system of the tenses. Stein's insistence on the presentness of experience is identical with her decision to keep the present tense, to choose commonplace short words and repeat groups of them incessantly, to use an extremely loose syntax and abjure most punctuation. Every style is a means of insisting on something."

from Against Interpretation p.35

Andy Kehoe at Jonathan LeVine Gallery

Humanity Returns
Acrylic and oil on panel
16" x 20"








"Wandering of the Wicked"
Acrylic and oil on panel
30" x 30 "



Andy Kehoe
Jonathan LeVine Gallery
Andy's Personal Website

The Future is So Bright

Artists: Mark Warren Jacques, Timothy Karpinski, Nas Chompas, Kyle Lee and Alexandra Steele
Gallery: Gallery 666
Opening Reception: Friday, May 15, 2009
Exhibition Dates: May 15 - June 15, 2009
Address: 66 Sixth Street, San Francisco, CA

Official Gallery Page
Happenstand Listing
Juxtapoz Listing
Art Nouveau Magazine

I AM KURIOUS ORANGE

Where: David Cunningham Projects

When: Saturday May 16th 2-6pm
What: ORANGES - REHEARSAL
Who: Marc Arthur, Anne Colvin, Alex Hetherington, Karla Milosevich
Where exactly: 1928 Folsom Street, San Francisco, CA 94103

David Dode Shillinglaw

David Dode Shillinglaw

The Clayton Brothers

two brother s

"When we collaborate, we do so with the utmost respect for our friendship. We would never have come as far as we have if we weren't best friends. As brothers, we share our lives, and this is important to who we are as collaborators. Neither of us claims to know the way.

At times, one of us looks for the other's vision and lets him lead. Other times, one of us creates a vision and invites the other along. As brothers, we have an innate understanding of how we think and create individually. As collaborators, we find ourselves resorting to pure instinct and trust, giving and taking visual elements like two authors of the same book, each writing every other word.

Responding to each other's marks on a painting and redirecting a story intrigues us. We check our egos, and the outcome of each painting remains a mystery until the end. Each of us spends time at the canvas, drawing energy from what the other has painted before, and we begin to speak the same language.

Although our hands and minds are always intertwined in the same creation, we encourage each other to think independently. As little kids, we shared a lot of the same interests. When one of us found something interesting, the other would add his two cents. This philosophy has carried forward into what we do today. We expand on and explore the messages left for each other, and the painting seem to finish themselves during the course of our non-verbal dialogues. "
The Clayton Brothers
Rob & Christian


Print that goes along with the book's title.

published through Last Gasp Books

Dustin Olson

Artist: Dustin Olson
Gallery: Gallery Three
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 9, 2009 from 7-11pm
Exhibition Dates: May 9, 2009 - June 4, 2009
Address:835 Larkin St, San Francisco, CA

Damon Soule Opening Tonight

Artist: Damon Soule
Gallery: Fecal Face Dot Gallery
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 7, 2009 from 6-9pm
Address: 66 Gough St (@Market)

Bright colors but not too many to make it overwhelming. Pronounced geometric shapes holding together the loose fluidity. That's what I like about Damon's work.

"As a child Damon Soule (b. 1974) became so engrossed in his drawing that it became a distraction; at age 16 he dropped out of school opting for the immediacy of GED. At 19, with $300, a packed bag of clothes, and small box of art supplies, Damon moved to San Francisco, CA and enrolled in the Interdisciplinary Program at the San Francisco Art Institute. "

Drawing by Isabel Samaras

"Study for Wize"





"Study for Mocking"


These are my two favorites from this show!

Isabel Samaras

Artist: Isabel Samras
Gallery: The Shooting Gallery
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 9, 2009 from 7-11PM
Exibition Dates: May 9, 2009 - June 7, 2009
Address: 839 Larkin Street, San Francisco, CA

I love this new collection of paintings by Isabel. Mixing urban accessories and nature...makes me want to have a gala in the redwoods.