Art Thursday

Last night, we went to the gallery opening receptions in downtown San Francisco. Every first Thursday, many galleries are open late to show their art and often serve wine and maybe a snack. We made it to 2 buildings, but one of them had so many galleries that we could have stayed there nearly forever (or died first).

The first gallery, Paule Anglim, had huge blow-ups of historic photographs from the National Archive. I don’t know what the criteria for selecting the photos was, but it appeared to me to be the most boring images the artist (Roloff) could find. Maybe it isn’t my field of interest, but I just didn’t find anything to look at. They also had a collection of contour drawings by Ala Ebtekar of male standing figures in various stances overlapping each other. They all seemed to be the same guy, with the same body, in different clothes and slightly different positions. He never had a face, but sometime he had a hat. The piles of figures were positioned at odd places on the page, sometimes small in a corner of a big page, but never centered or taking up much of the blank white.

Earlier yesterday, my figure drawing teacher, Diane Olivier, spent some time talking about the importance of line weight in contour drawings – how much you can communicate just by changing the thickness or darkness or presence of the figure’s outline. Ebtekar’s drawings were clearly not really about sensitivity to the human form, but I couldn’t help but feel disappointed that he didn’t vary his line weight to express himself. I never figured out what his point was anyway.

We saw A LOT of art, and while, amazingly, I remember much of it. I am not going to try to describe it all. Instead, I want to talk about the things I saw that struck me. I don’t necessarily remember the name of the gallery or the artist. Someone had collected gauzy dresses and then encased them into a kind of clear mould the size of a Frisbee but thicker, like soap. The gallery displayed these by placing the pucks on the floor with the skirt flowing outward in every direction. It looked neat because the dresses were pretty and complicated, but I have no idea how buyers would display this art in their homes.

Another artist had persuaded various people to take off their clothes (to varying degrees) in fields/woods/nature and then had taken photographs of them and printed them in large squares. The best ones had wet naked women, I thought, but there was something cool about those portraits sharing the wall with similar ones of fat old men. I mean, one thing I have learned from my figure drawing class (where I see a different naked body every TTh) is that every body is beautiful and that there is no one perfect body – even the “best” are all different from each other. The viewer learned something about the person shown from each portrait although I was never exactly sure what.

I nearly didn’t make it thru printmaking earlier today. My plate wasn’t looking how I wanted, and I had left some of my other prints at home to watercolor on (an assignment and a good idea). So, I didn’t really want to do anything I had there to do, but I stayed the struggled thru anyway. Drawing, yesterday morning, went well, and maybe I will post a link to view my new drawings if I can manage to upload them. I’m getting pretty good.

It’s February, and I need to get my act together. Once Harry Potter 6 is finished, that will clear up a lot of time. Here are some goals for the month:
· Apply for grants for CG project
· Put together portfolio (and begin to circulate?)
· Make art
· ALC training and fundraising (donate here, it’s tax deductible: https://www.aidslifecycle.org/donate/form.cfm?n=2012)
· Yoga 1x/week
· Fun stuff with friends (see art, hike, sketch, etc.)
That should keep me pretty busy, but when you next talk to me, feel free to ask how I’m doing on those. I need all the encouragement I can get.