Summer Reading Part II: Magazines

Magazines to covet and store away for early morning lounging with a big cup of coffee and the records playing that you never get to listen to.

Now that I have told you about all the ridiculous behemoth books I am trudging through in the post below, I want to tell you what I'm actually excited to read on my bookshelf.

I live in a part of Oakland with at least four good used book stores and one amazing magazine store all on the same street.  Print is not dead here, and the paper love is certainly not lost at Issues Magazine Shop, where I got all of these magazines.  A place stacked with used books and hoards of magazines, no one inside is using a Kindle, I'm pretty sure.  Personally, I need the heavy paper thing, in my hand, and ready to go anywhere with me.  I want to get sand in it at the beach and stain it with coffee rings and rip out the pages I like.  How are you going to keep up with that, Kindle?  Oh, I digress, as usual.

I found a big row of old Parketts at Issues one day, with a pretty great sale sign on them- I think it was $30 for 3 or $12 each.  Whatever it is (there are still some left), Joe, the owner, was smart enough to bring them in from some garage sale and sell them for a fraction of their original $45 price tag.  Who buys $45 art magazines?  Fancy art people who appreciate the bi-lingual German and English text and the readable interviews, (so much more so than Artforum), and good color images, that's who.  And me, when they are old and smell like yard sales.  So I paid my $30 and picked out these 3:  One with the fashion-obsessed Sylvie Fleury, the belated, porn and neon sign rat's nest-maker Jason Rhoades, and the Pop icon James Rosenquist, one with the supremely slick and superficial Richard Phillips and some other people, and one with neo-Mannerist/contortionist John Currin and the strangely undefinable Laura Owens.  Good, now I can read about art that is not a performance freakshow or a site-specific minimalist yawn-fest.  

Issues 58, 71, and 65

I did look it up, and while it seems that Parkett is out of print, it's not- it's just that they only publish two magazines a year ("books", they call them) and a subscription is $90.  Also, the entire back stock is available as set, but they don't even publish the price, so whatever.


Oh, hurray for the Spring fashion back-breaking fetish objects like Pop, AnOther Magazine, Love, Purple, and The Hunger.  Around July or August, I get soooo restless, knowing the Fall one is just around the corner, ripe with all the imagery I NEED.  How do I explain the obsession with the September Issues?  It goes so far beyond the infamous Vogue issue that lists its page numbers like a trophy on the cover.  They are ripe with promise, full of newness and coziness and culture just when summer feels like it's getting too fucking hot and dry and the whole world is just waiting to burst into flames.  The Fall fashion spectaculars promise that right around the corner is a return to art, beauty, literacy, and decency when all you've been able to do for the past couple months is suck back light-colored beer and waste away in crappy jean cut-offs.

So, with that meandering introduction to these magazines, these are the sisters of the Fall issues, the Spring editions.  Available only twice a year as well, the Spring issues come at a time where you might be saying, "It's about goddamn time!"  However, spring is busy in my world of art school freak-outs, and I never get a chance to actually read the magazines I buy until the doldrums of summer.   This way, I have a win-win, with the time to peruse the fat, bible-sized Spring compilations right before I get the Fall issues and all the world is well.

Fatties!: Purple Issue 17, Love Issue 7, and a new one, The Hunger Issue 2

These are not big idiot books, either, I must tell you in case you aren't a fashion freak like me.  I mean, there is a lot of writing about fashion and designers, and that's for the industry people.  Reading about clothes when you aren't a designer, a stylist, or a woman who lunches is boring.  However, there is always a ton of contemporary art and music, sometimes literature, and lots of dark and weird images for my work.

Here we have a super awesome interview with painter, Lisa Yuskavage in Purple, and man on fire (rad) in Love, and a super dead goth dude in The Hunger for the art archive, as well.

Now a weird find, 'A' Magazine was edited and curated by my two fashion heroes, the Rodarte sisters, Kate and Laura Mulleavy.  I really don't know whether to believe the romantic story circulated in every interview of their lucky break as two wanna-be designers from Pasadena who studied art history and literature at UC Berkeley and broke the wall down into the New York fashion industry with a portfolio of paper dolls during fashion week.  Whether that part is correct or fairy tale, I am totally in awe of their approach to their fashion collections, which have the weirdest, most unique influences and inspirations each season.  They cite horror movies, the light at dawn and dusk, the California wilderness, and other totally obscure and wonderful visions in creating their almost unwearable designs.  If ever there were fashion designers who were more artists than designers, it would be these two.  I found this magazine which is made by them, cover to cover, and features their clothing but also their favorite things and references.

The like Grizzly Bears

And films by Terence Malick like "Days of Heaven"

And they interview the artist, John Baldessari

And horror movies, of course

Also in the Rodarte curation is Lake Tahoe, Garbage Pail Kids, The Wizard of Oz, etc, etc.

Looking up 'A' Magazine, I just learned they have other issues curated by other fashion people like my very favorite, Ricardo Tisci of Givency, with every page to scroll through.  Check out the link above!

Finally, this last small book, Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the art assignment, I didn't get at Issues but found at my friend's house while I was housesitting.  Made by a small publisher, Paper Monument, it covers the subject of the art assignment, something I've never seen in a good-read book before.  It was filled with assignment ideas, rantings of instructors who don't believe in such a thing, anecdotes of what not to do as a teacher... it was totally engrossing as someone who is learning how to teach art.  I highly recommend it if you are into that sort of thing.  You can order it online here for $15.

Draw it with your eyes closed image from their website.

Summer Reading Part I

It's that time again, for a big pile of books that I may or may not really read by September.  What kind of weirdo would even try to read more than one fat classic?  However, stop into any Barnes and Noble or Borders and they will have you feeling like it's really pretty essential to your summer experience.  Somehow even though I don't go to those stores much anymore, it's become engrained in me to get really ambitious with a stack of really tried and true classics as well as some more readable memoirs, along with the requisite massive fashion magazines that come out in the Spring and some reference books I buy whenever I find a good one for the home art library.  (See last year and the year before for more reading lists I was only partially successful with).
The pure tradition of having a summer reading list feels a lot like one of the other traditions I have been born and raised on: shopping for a new school wardrobe, which I will still fulfill every year until I die even though I'm not technically going to school anymore.  Does it count for school staff?  That's Fall anyway and we're in Summer right now, so let's get smart in the sun before we spend all the money we don't have.  (That's me talking to myself).

The Daunting Reading List

I swear to you, I am not trying to be pretentious by putting books in here that are supposed to make me look fancy but that I am never planning on reading, like how most people put hardbound copies of Shakespeare's entire collection on their bookshelves.  Come on, who can get through the downright impossible Elizabethan language and understand what the fuck they are saying?  Unfortunately, I have to have my Shakespeare handed to me in cleaned up, modern language movie form, like that Romeo and Juliet movie with Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio.  I know, I know.  Anyway, YES, I really am reading, have started, or plan to read all of these books.  Some might take me a year, but a few I have already finished!

Moby Dick by Herman Melville  The classics seem like not only a good idea, (hey, they have stuck around through decades and even centuries and people still read them so they must be good, right?), but I am constantly worried that I might not get a cultural reference that is assumed most smart people would.  No one wants to be the dumb one at the party,  (even though I really don't go to parties), but I also want to know if a movie I would have otherwise thought original is a blatant ripoff of a classic masterpiece.  So, yes, I am reading Moby Dick, and it is pretty boring.

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller  Naughty, naughty Miller.  Damn, dude, try to get a plot in there while you are talking about every dirty whore in Paris in the 1930s!  It's my readable book when I am sick of War and Peace and Moby Dick, (which is often), and I am really quite surprised that it was written at all eighty years ago during what I would assume was a sort of demure time despite the flappers and drinking and all that jazz.  Ba dum bum.  Anyway, he uses 'cunt' more than any author in the English language, and it's really rambling.  However, with this book he really cleared the way for the rights of free speech and the end of morality clauses, and I can see where one of my favorites, Nabokov, takes his cues.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy  What do I even need to say?  This is still on my reading list from to years ago and I am still trudging through it!  The thing is, I read Anna Karenina and loved it.  I was hoping this would be more of the same, but the problem is that the peace part is great and the war part is soooo long.  You really get the feeling Tolstoy was a history nerd, and if there were Napoleonic War reenactments during his time, he probably would have been out there impersonating the Glorious Russian Soldiers.  I would really like to finish it, but honestly, I have to skip the war stuff whenever he starts talking about right and left flanks and each General and you know, war stuff.  Is that sacrilege?

The Best American Essays 1997  Call the year completely random, but I would like to read more essays.  I feel more connected to them, to a style that does not need to have some ridiculous made-up story, or a plot, or an arc.  It's just so much more simple to write down something you know or think.  And I would like to get some reading in because I secretly want to write them myself.  I grabbed this off a church yard sale table for a dollar, and also scored a record box set of Gregorian Chants and a book on the artist, Andrew Wyeth, for a total of $10!

Peregrinations of a Pariah by Flora Tristan and Valencia by Michelle Tea  What an awesome way to experience each memoir by ballsy, independent women two centuries apart from each other by reading them at the same time.  I found the Tristan book at my favorite store, Issues, as it was handed to me by the owner, Joe- looks like a good one?  Written in 1838, Tristan was a French woman who wrote for the London Journal and is described as a "Militante Féministe".  This book chronicles her travels aboard a ship to Peru from France, (which took five months back then!), as she tries to claim her family's inheritance and also gain a divorce from her husband, a big Catholic no-no at the time.  She writes with such passion and frankness that it is completely surprising that it was published almost two hundred years ago!  (Also amazing- a quick search on wikipedia reveals she was the grandmother of the artist, Paul Gaugin- whoa!)
Now enter the late 1990s in San Francisco as dykes and misfits from all over the country flock to the grungy riot grrl gay mecca of the Bay Area.  Michelle Tea, a celebrated feminist thrift-store-T-shirt-punk poet became a local legend with this and other works.  In the very '90s Valencia she chronicles the quick ruination of her naive girlish self, and introduces the reader to "sex positive" leather-bound S&M dykes, the life of a prostitute, and fisting.  Whoa!
It's amazing how self-absorbed both novels are as Tristan chronicles her every fainting spell and bouts of boredom and Tea drags one through every crush and mini relationship and post-breakup obsession.  Both have a social consciousness and message, as well as a critical eye towards the hypocrisy of the times they live in.  I definitely recommend reading them in tandem.

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust  Recently my friend scoffed at me for answering, "He's Ok", to a question on whether I liked this Proust book or not.  What I meant was, it's not like I think I could do better, but I'm giving a Twenty-First century response to something published in 1913.  Like my experience with Shakespearean language, its hard to take in his slowww scenes about very internal experiences by the protagonist as a contemporary reader in our current time of very short, abrupt, fast-paced daily life.  I mean, the beginning where he waits for his mother to kiss him goodnight as a boy takes him like fifteen pages!  I'm not giving up on Proust, (or on any author who gets their own reference as in "it was Proustian"), but I don't know if I could handle all seven volumes which ultimately make up the whole work Remembrances of Things Past- this is just volume one!  However, I already felt I scored a victory as I read Steven Wolf's blog which referred the madeline scene in Proust and I got it!

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky  Am I trying to punish myself? Yes.  I gave up on this after about thirty pages but recently my bookaholic friend, Mandy, told me to try it again because it's one of her favorite books.  Ok, but only after War and Peace.

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh  Well, I grew up on this movie and I had the soundtrack, too.  It made heroin withdrawals look like the worst thing in the world and I think it was single-handedly responsible for keeping me off drugs.  One pass through it's written phonetic slang of marble-mouthed British kids, though, and I'm not sure I will be able to slag through it.  I'll give it a shot.

I Bought Andy Warhol by Richard Polsky  I originally gave this to my friend, Libby, as a Christmas present, so I am just borrowing it.  Found at Issues, too, I had surprisingly never heard of it despite the fact it was only written ten years ago and features a honest, first-person account of an art dealer's history of making and losing money in the art world.  It is very readable, but a little stumbly.  I found that while he has some interesting anecdotes and it's great to get a view of the time period where pop and contemporary art really started making those collectors millionaires, he lingers on weird details and isn't the world's best writer.  Even still, I think I will finish it.  There's also a sequel, I Sold Andy Warhol.

The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City by Elizabeth Currid One of the only books left over from my thesis research that I still actually want to read, I'm hoping this one sheds a little light on the inner complex workings of cultural production and profit.  I'm also hoping that from the title, she will be a little acerbic about New York as the hipster capital I recently saw first hand.  (I seem to be the only one who objects to Brooklyn as the new 90210)

That leaves the following research books for art references and occasional perusing:  The Art of Andrew Wyeth (from the church sale), Son of Heaven: Imperial Arts of China for headdress ideas and patterns, Pierre et Giles, an awesome pre-David LaChapelle photo duo of visual overload, and a Taschen book about the Still Life, which I originally bought for the Still Life class I was going to teach that was cancelled.

Now I'm tired and I haven't even touched my books.  Haha.

CCA MFA Open Studios 2012

CCA's MFA Open Studios, Documented Here for Year Three, April 2012.  (See 2010 & 2011) It's so late it's actually funny.  Or dumb.

I know I said I would not be your critic anymore on this blog and I wouldn't go around taking pictures of everything.  Just the good stuff.  Just the stuff I am way head over heels for, (and let's face it, most of it won't be local, but from the internet).  Buuuut..... I already did all the work during the last installment of the graduate student song and dance known as Open Studios at the California College of the Arts; I took all the pictures and uploaded them- I just never got around to putting them for reals on the good old internet.

So, here we go, here is what I thought was noteworthy for some reason or another; maybe 30 out of over 100 studios of grads in one of two categories, (all interspersed together):
The second-years with only about a month of school to go, confident and grossly self-assured or wide-eyed and freaking out (those are the ones who know they only have a month before they have to get a job).  

The other group is of course the first-years, wide-eyed for the other reason- they're still shell-shocked from being force-fed Roland Barthes and Guy Debord, and even worse, bell hooks and Relational Aesthetics.  They're sitting in their studios or walking around outside nervously like ducks that have been trying to recuperate after having grass shoved into their throats for months to make foie gras.  Lucky for the ducks, foie gras was recently banned in San Francisco, but grad school is entirely legal and even more awful, actually encouraged for every artist worth their salt.  I can go on: after the feeding, the ducks's liver's are the beaten, wounded organ jammed full of a rich, almost unpalatable foodstuff.  For the grads, it's their hearts that take the beating, and as their brains try to consume the endless archives of rhetoric, taking in everything that has been written by every touted academic that ever lived, their brains are the thing filled with a rich foodstuff of righteous intellectualism that eventually kills the art in the artist, just like the duck.

OH, I was on a roll!

Obviously, I have mixed feelings about grad school.  One year out of the two-year sentence, I am filled with joy at having made it through and with some truly remarkable new friends and even some new ideas.  I also, however, still have this intellectual toilet paper clinging to my shoe when I go to make a new piece.  Frozen with fear from the constant whap! on my knuckles whenever I tried to make something open-ended, or god forbid, intuitive, I still have to look over my shoulder for someone to tell me I can't do something.  It has taken me this year to figure out, YES, I FUCKING CAN.  The fact is, no one is going to tell me now that I have to have it figured out, that it's unresolved, or that it doesn't say what it means.  I really believe that the absolute best thing to happen to me from being in grad school is the end of it, and the self-confidence that comes from breaking from the disciplinarians.  So, when I see these grads unsure, gun-shy, or clearly proud and a little cocky, I know how they all feel, and how much more they have to go through before it's real.  Before they can totally recover from the force-feed machine and really start making the real deal.

Ok, so all of that being said, I'd like to look at these works through the lens of a specimen in the middle of a transformation.  I have a lot of friends in this group, so I am not knocking them, but I like the idea that their work will get even better when they get out.

Larissa Greer, making free drawings of happy things to say. 

William Emmert's paper sculptures of stretcher bars, complete with paper staples.

William's reconstructed boyhood archive of wrestling fan paraphernalia.  I have to admit, I was not very interested in the work until I knew it was painstakingly made out of something else.  What does that mean?  Haha.

Max Esplin, who's woven wall piece took a major backseat to the insane display of sweets he prepared in his Mormon tradition of sugar as a lifestyle.  He dressed the Mormon part to really seal the deal. 

This rainbow cake was really giving Will Cotton a run for his money.

Melissa Dickenson's plastic-wrapped canvases gave me the same reaction as William's sculptures- it wasn't interesting until I realized they were made out of something else.  It becomes a riff on painting that is interesting but I wonder what she'll want to make when she doesn't have to define a reason for making abstractions.

More stuff made out of something else: Kim Bennett's painted (screen printed?) found street signs.

Katelyn Eichwald's obsessive wall of small drawings based on a cowboy motif.  I like how it looks from far away.

Up close, like a Monet.

Alex Hernandez as glamorous Mexican trannie sweetly embroidering to kill the time.

Johanna Friedman's textile pieces- the piece behind her is a digital print on canvas, then quilted.  The piece to her right says, Who Cares About Freud When You're Pregnant?

Jake Ziemann's airy abstract painting and matchy-matchy video installation.  It was pretty.

Bruna Massadas's sunset portrait people.

More things made out of something else: flowers painted out of the juices of themselves, which slowly fade over time so they become a form of dying twice (that's my interpretation).

Seriously, Social Practice, you are really killing me.  Just because you stick something lovable like a petting zoo with mini ponies in the courtyard does not make the idea of 'non-art as art' any more likable.

A Swedish first year's funny sculpture of a Castle Greyskull kind of landscape.

I liked these printed still-life/collages on shaped masonite by Kate Bonner.

Heather Watson's scribbly drawings/messages.  She's such a likable person that I can't separate myself  from them enough to be objective.  I have no idea whether I really like them or not.

Rebekah Goldstein's colored pencil drawing- like the pink and red.

Rebekah Goldstein, the painted version.

Kate Nichols's lab-come-gallery.  She made mirror and cellulose fiber out of crazy science stuff and hung it on the wall.

Some of Kate's lab equipment.

I don't know.  I really like moss.  I don't know who made this.

This is how people in art school watch girls touching their boobs on video.

Wes Fanelli's bears, Jesuses, and Madonnas.  A natural combination.

Not sure who made this either, but I am liking the painting as non-painting with this string strung in swatches  on the stretcher bar.

Without the chair, this would maybe look like a small collage piece, right?

I will always like drawings.  Even drawings of stuff where I don't quite understand the references.

Janine Scarboro's abstracted figures.

I can't remember this woman's name, but she is adept at painting these surreal portraits.  As a first year, I'm excited to see what she does next.

These are super fun cut foam paintings by Theresa... I can't remember her last name.  We'll see what she comes up with next year, too.

A wall of cigarette cartons.  Ok.  I think I like it.

So, not that anyone asked me, but here's my redundant advice for the first year grads:  Hang in there.  It gets better.   And for the second year newly graduated artists in the world now:  You have to throw up the foie gras in order to live and not be consumed.  
(Wouldn't you agree, Maysha and Courtney?)

I Couldn't Stay Away... Or, I Wish I Could Quit You

In the past two months I have done my best to avoid blogging.  The reason being, well, If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all comes to mind.   I have just been calling 'em like I see 'em on here.  The thing is, at local art openings I would see artists that I said some fairly honest things about on the blog and felt a little guilty.  I mean, it's not like I was talking shit-  I was just being honest with my opinions about their art, as any art critic might.  But looking at them across the room, I felt a little rotten inside.  At first, it didn't seem to matter because I didn't think anyone read this thing, so I didn't think there was a chance they had seen it.  But then I started getting knee-jerk comments from my friends- "Wait, you're not going to put this on your blog, are you?  Don't say I said that".  Or, "Geez, your blog is getting kind of mean..."

Bay Area, you are too sensitive.

So why am I posturing myself as another art critic?  The fact is, we do need more real art critics here in San Francisco, besides the overly-too-man-art friendly Kenneth Baker of the Chronicle, who has been around long enough in this small pond to establish himself as THE critic.  We also have the fabulous Glen Helfand of Art Forum, but he can't cover more than one or two 'picks' at a time.  That leaves self-appointed critics like those at decent art blogs like Art Practical, but it also leaves people like Alan Bamburger of Art Business, a nice guy I'm sure, but no one needs his two cents- just take the pictures, please.  Here I go again, see?  I can't help it.  But anyway, maybe I was trying to fill the critic void myself, until I realized nothing, other than an MFA that half the SF population also seem to have, qualifies me as an art expert.  And my opinion might be as valid as anyone else's, but I probably don't need to be the one filling the position.  I know no one asked me.  Jerry Saltz, the job is all yours.

I am no longer your corespondent in the trenches, calling 'em like I see 'em.  I will however, be posting things that I care to discuss or share, like a safari explorer of art.  Why make an art blog at all?  Well, I missed it.  I missed wasting my time filling the infinite void with my thoughts.  I also missed having a way to keep it all in one place, like an ever-expanding sketchbook.  A lot of the content will be a way for me to save things I thought were great, note-worthy, or at least beautiful.  I made new links on the side that I actually use more for my own bookmark purposes.  And if you like anything on here, awesome.  If not, don't worry, I'm not going to tell anyone what you said last time we had some wine in 49 Geary.

I am ready.   Let's go.

(PS Obviously I stole these images from the internet.)

Art Shows That Are Already Over

Eleanor Harwood, Steven Wolf, and Ratio 3

Hello, it's me, your hopelessly late, half-assed blogger and nit-picker of art culture.  Here are some images of shows that aren't up anymore so you won't be able to see them.  Most opened a good two months ago. Helpful?  I thought so.

What is it about San Francisco art that gives itself away as so 'Bay Area'?  I am not sure I can answer that, and I certainly can't tell whether the following shows at three quintessential SF galleries do a good job of avoiding or following our Bay Area trends.  Just the same way you can't hear your own accent, or because it doesn't exist without a comparison, I can't possibly see whether I like my friends' work because it's original or because it falls within my Bay Area idea of good.  

I'm not able to tell whether or not I am biased towards my own community.  Maybe my taste is charmingly provincial, but I make the effort on this blog to not only show you what I think is note-worthy, but whatever else exists in this city around me.  

What I do know about the taste-making of San Francisco is that there are two main currents running through our gallery culture: The '90s Mission School left a slime trail of graffiti-inspired, graphic and color-soaked drawings, paintings, and murals, (though I do have to admit I enjoyed the movie, Beautiful Losers, and I think Mike Mills in particular is a genius).  Also, the 'everything is art' hippy free-for-all known as Social Practice shows no signs of stopping the incessant condescension towards impoverished communities by giving them free blankets, nor leaving the rest of us alone anytime soon.  Occassionally, there are gems from both cults that surface and give me hope for our city's future and our reputation at large.  However, it's the other art I post here on this blog that I hope reaches beyond our local cul de sac of "hella cool" and lands somewhere around good art, if only so that I can believe our stock as San Francisco artists is going up in the art world.  

"Snow Dream" Group Show curated by Gaelan McKeown-Hickel, Eleanor Harwood Gallery, San Francisco 

February 25- March 25, 2012

Eleanor Harwood's unassuming exterior in the deep Mission District

I went to see this group show with my buddy Libby on a quiet, sunny afternoon, which is the best way to see an art show.

The show featured work by ladies interested in magic, or other sort of mystical, dark ideas.  Considering the title even quotes Stevie Nicks, this could easily be translated into a terrible or just OK show. My verdict was surprisingly positive after seeing the art hung together.  Each work fit tightly within the concept, as well as in harmony with the other pieces.  Behind Libby is work by our friend, Kara Joslyn.  I was especially impressed with Anne Regan's artwork, which made references to witchy or morbid things but each piece still held its own as a strong formal and conceptual work.

Anne Regan, exorcism spell, wax encaustic, safflower, St. John’s Wort, wormwood, horehound, and orris root

Anne Regan, top:  beeswax, grass, rocks, and earth from the grave site of Johnny and June Carter Cash in Hendersonville, TN, bottom: Conjure Bells

"Jonathan Runcio:  Blue Turns to Grey", Ratio 3 
San Francisco,
February 24- April 7, 2012

Ratio 3's garden-covered sidewalk down a tiny side street in the Mission

Libby and I also checked out fellow CCA MFA Alum, Jonathan Runcio's, new show at Ratio 3.  I have posted his work before, and have been admiring it since starting school at CCA.  I've always found his graphic work to have a bend towards beauty, which he never seems to mention when discussing what it's about.  (However, for me, that is priority number one).  

Jonathan installed a few walls within the show which were intended, I'm sure, to complement and bounce off the geometric work.

 Ratio 3 is an odd place to see artwork.  While Libby and I felt pretty at ease in Eleanor Harwood, at Ratio 3 the vibe comes off as very unfriendly.  It wasn't the quiet receptionist, a guy I know from my undergrad days, but more so from the very fibers of the space.  It seems to whisper, "Don't come in here...you don't have any money and you could't possibly understand what we are trying to show here".  That's just the feeling I get, anyway.

The work was referencing elements of the man-made everywhere

Sculpture, too

Beautiful, complicated screenprints

Compared to the show (linked above) that I saw the year before of Runcio's work at The Popular Workshop, I felt there was a lot of color missing.  In the past, one of my favorite things about his work was his way of mixing jewel tones together to create luxurious, feminine combinations within the masculinity of architecture and geometry.  Still, it was a nice show.  Too bad there's not a little more of that friendly, hippy San Francisco feeling of the Mission within gallerist, Chris Perez's, stuffy space.

"More Paintings", Club Paint (Keith Boadwee, Erin Allen, and Isaac Gray), Steven Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco, February 24- April 7, 2012

I recently remarked on Facebook that art was starting to appear to be of only two categories, "Too Smart to Look Good", and "Bad on Purpose".  Afterwards my friends called me out on my increasingly snarky attitude and ensuing social alienation.  While I was directly referencing this show of the art trio, Club Paint, in the latter group, I really don't think they would mind hearing me saying that.  Keith Boadwee, the older, dapper CCA professor and his art ingenues, CCA alumni Allen and Gray, seem to be doing just that- painting badly on purpose.  Is it really a secret?  Given the bad-boy subject matter of sexual positions, stick figures giving birth, and dinosaurs in their recent show of paintings at Steven Wolf, I am pretty sure that the theme of 'bad' fits all around.  

If the cake fits... Club Paint bad boys on a special cake for the reception.  Allen is the punk, Gray is the Mormon, and Boadwee is old enough to be the dad.

There's the ringleader himself, Boadwee, flanked by CCA students Max Esplin and Leora Lutz.

Steven Wolf was packed with CCA and SFAI brethren.  PS I love Stevn Wolf, himself.  He is the funniest, most sarcastic gallerist I have ever met.  Also, the space itself is huge and stunning.

Each painting is a collaboration between all three painters.

What I found surprising about the show was actually the level of quality within the 'bad' work.  Being a painter, I could recognize complex moments in each piece of texture, color combinations, and lovely resting points.  I'm sure it's what they are going for within their messy, seemingly naive paintings.  They are poking the eye of a kind of art which demands to be taken seriously.  The paintings and the painters are not sophisticated, and yet somehow they are.  

Look at my buddy Mark Benson, taking it all so seriously.

Well, yet another survey of what's out here in the Bay Area, or was until last month.  Take it or leave it for the abstract expressionism of NY or the whatever LA is these days.