Dolby Chadwick
210 Post Street, Suite 205, San Francisco
Kim Frohsin
Two Minutes and Counting, Feb. 1-24
Opening Reception: Thursday, Feb 1, 5:30-8:00 PM
You have to move in to look closely because Kim Frohsin’s tasty women on their small sized
canvases are whispering messages you don’t want to miss. I have no idea why, but it’s not frustrating when you realize their messages are incomprehensible. Unexpectedly, that’s reassuring. Like Rita, the waitress in a Ray Carver short story, Froshin’s women seem to be thinking "My life is going to change. I feel it” and as you look, it’s satisfying to pick up on that feeling.Carrying on the commitment to the figure started by David Park, Elmore Bischoff, and others in the Bay Area Figurative Art movement, Froshin has developed her own challenges for this show :(1) Impose a two minute time limit on herself to capture a woman in one particular moment through a quick life drawing. (2) Then, without losing the immediacy of the drawing, add color and background to set a mood and call to mind the big idea— that what is most personal is most universal. Each painting alludes to an entire lifetime in a single pose giving just enough information to get your imagination working. Reminds me of a quote from somewhere…”there are no answers, seek one lovingly”. Labled as a third generation fig (Bay Area Figurative Artist) Frohsin’s smoky atmosphere’s and faceless women are vulnerable, lusty, mischievious, irreverent and don’t care what you think of them, therefore you’re seduced into thinking about them.
One of my personal favorites is Blue Stage, worked in gouache, ink, watercolor crayons and dry pigments. The woman sits pensively, one hip jutting out provocatively, chin resting on hands, looking where? Up? Down? Straight at you? No doubt, deep in thought. I enjoy the sense that she’s in transition, that anything is possible. Pass the word.
Is Frohsin a revoluntionary painter or derivative? Derivative sounds snarky but who can argue with her process of honoring, reshaping and moving the figurative tradition forward? More names that pop up as influences are Diebenkorn, Olivera, Joyce Carol Oates, Ray Carver and Frank Lobdell but like Olivera, Froshin does not seem on a mission to create works that are uniquely new. I think the woman in Blue Stage illustrates Olivera’s idea that arts function is to, “simply reaffirms our presence and the depth of our existence on this earth.” Froshin’s work is strong in part because it is linked to the chain of interest in women’s experiences and like Carver or Oates manages to capture a moment in short and palatable bites.
Catharine Clark Gallery
49 Geary, 2nd floor, San Francisco
Chester Arnold
A Heroes Welcome
Chester Arnold’s current work is like a hurricane in slow motion. When it hits you, you get it. Unique in today’s market, his appeal is to viewers who are able to appreciate his weirdly interesting combination of lush classical painting techniques with biting social criticism. Irony mixes with moans and affection, always in a space dense with movement. Think of Jack LeVine and Max Beckmann, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegal and you will notice his attention to the miniscule and understanding of space and darkness. His pictures easily contain us, often along with casts of thousands.
In A Heros Welcome, what at first glance seems simply an intriguing composition of abstract shapes and colors, evolves as you look into a powerful if dark statement about how we greet our so called national heros--- Dis-missed.
Like Beckman, Arnold seems to fill his work with hidden ideas, seeking a bridge from the visible to the invisible. The magic is in his presentation of content in a formally beautiful way. He says he trys to "build a structure around the message that has some type of intrinsic beauty to it so that as you take it in, it's going to affect you aesthetically as well as politically or philosophically." Combining with elegant comments on social issues is his mind boggling love and respect for the physical materials and methods of painting. "This is really a competitive world,’” he says, “ to do what you do in any less than the most superlative way that you can is a waste of time." That explains why he pushes to increase his amazing skills and works with only the best materials he can get his hands on. As a student in his class on materials and methods, I was lucky enough to see him demo how he creates the shapes which become the beings in paintings like A Heros Welcome: First an underpainting of multi colored dots creating areas of light and dark which in the next layer are developed into oblongs and egg shapes, highlighted and arranged for serial viewing. Next he gives arms and gestures to the dots…uncanny how well it all works for someone who knows exactly what he’s doing.
Hang Gallery
556 Sutter Street, San Francisco
David Fullarton
The Extent of My Consternation
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 1st, 6-8pm
David Fullarton is another artists whose brain is on fire
All is not lost, but much has been mislaid
but in his case, his funny bone is boss. Everything from the price of salt to the next imminent catastrophe seems gist for his laugh out loud paintings in upbeat colors. Odd words, numbers and images fall into broken grids on bright grounds. His humor is off beat, the kind of quirky stuff where you have an image of a dog and the dog is named “cat” or a cat in a general's costume is issuing instructions for making salami. Not really his topic, I made that one up, but it’s the sort of thing he does...taking things out of their usual context and putting them into new surroundings that change their meaning in delightfully odd ways. He is some deal - you could wake up smiling looking at paintings like his.
Andrea Schwartz Gallery
525-2nd Street, San Francisco, CA 94107
Howard Hersh
Howard Hersh is a big name among encaustic painters. With umpteen solo shows and over 100 group shows to his credit, he’s become a superstar at pouring the smoothest of smooth surfaces and for his trademark way of joining multiple panels into evocative shapes, unique among painters who work with beeswax. I’ll tell you what does me in -
the level of precision and detail he’s perfected. Taking full advantage of the translucent qualities inherent to wax, building flawless layer over layer, his blend of architectural grids and organic marks combine and appear to grow outwards, beyond the panel’s borders. It’s easy to imagine that the finished pieces could just keep growing, like any living creatures, soon taking over the walls of the gallery, stopping traffic on 2nd street, growing upward like Jack’s beanstalk, or continuing in a morphic flow, perhaps to the Pacific. You’ve got to see it.Tina Vietmeier
I’m nuts about Tina Vietmeier’s new encaustic paintings.The last time I saw Tina’s work she was dunking rolls of toilet paper in molten wax and adding marks to the hardened surface. They were good, interesting plays on the stuff of everyday life,
in fact I bought a couple, but the work she’s doing now is way more. Spare, playful shapes in not sweet pastel colors float up and out on big panels. Glistening pools, like poured lakes of wax are inset into larger, rougher areas. You look deep into them, layers deep, and catch reflections of the hidden layers shining up from the bottom. There are also scraped away bits, scratchy, like paper pulled off a billboard making you think about impermanence. She says she has “been paying attention to space: light, weight, matter, fullness, presence, geometry, and quiet.” It shows.SOMA Artists Studios
689 Bryant Street at 5th, San Francisco, Studio 5
Louis Bording
Remember that uproarious film about an artist who jumped on and otherwise attacked his canvases with brushes and his paint covered body all the while chanting "DeKooning, DeKooning, DeKooning" as he made each mark? Louis Bording, at SOMA Art Studios, made me think
of that guy. Though Bording is hardly crazy and limits his mark making to charcoal and brushes he does name DeKooning and Roberto Matta as his major influences. An action painter, he says “the work is in the doing. (DeKooning, DeKooning, DeKooning) “Everything after is an afterthought, if you’re lucky.” Starting with gestured lines in charcoal on canvas, he adds color, take it away, and than the hardest thing…adds gestural lines back in. Fluid and good humored like the man himself, the shapes curve through space like a disjointed roller coaster, with colliding cars weaving in and out in a surrealistic rhythmic dance. “My intention in making these paintings is to create something where nothing existed before,” he says. “There is something unstuck in a process using a mark, line or color where images appear having no basis in reality.” His paintings are in private collections in the United States as well as collections in Geneva, Frankfurt, Prague, Seville, and Rio de Janeiro. When I asked him how he chooses his palette he said color is a big issue with him. He won’t plan, it has to come intuitively as in, which tube on his table catches his eye. “Ahh- so, buy yourself a new quinacridone majenta on me, “I should have said. Big up, everyone.
0 comments:
Post a Comment