text:
"My friends are very used to me being like, 'Hold on. We have to double back. ...I'm just going to jump out and take a few pictures with my iPhone,'" she said with a laugh.
An assistant professor of studio art at Cal Poly, Frantz showcases some of her finds in the exhibition "East of Middle," running Nov. 6 through Dec. 4 at the Harold J. Miossi Art Gallery at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo. (The title refers to her travels throughout the United States and around the globe.) Earlier this year, her work was showcased in the solo shows "The Pleasure Seekers" at David Shelton Gallery in Houston and "Between Borderlands" at Women & Their Work in Austin, Texas.
"I love interesting buildings, interesting architecture," Frantz said, especially "worn-down, dilapidated, abandoned" structures that exemplify a mid-century Americana aesthetic -- the kind commonly spotted alongside highways and interstates.
"I love her graphic sense," Cuesta College fine arts instructor David Prochaska said, calling Frantz "a perfect fit for Cal Poly, with its architecture department."
Frantz, 34, grew up in the western suburbs of Chicago, that familiar Midwestern landscape documented in the classic coming-of-age movies of 1980s auteur John Hughes. "There was a lot of uniformity and a lot of new build," she recalled.
Seeking a change of scenery, Frantz earned a bachelor's degree in studio art in 2003 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before exchanging the frozen north for the sizzling south. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007 with a master of fine arts degree in painting, then spent a few years teaching at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
It was in 2008, during a Nes Artist Residency in Skagastrond, Iceland, that Frantz encountered the inspiration for her current series. "This was a landscape that was so other to me," she said, a stark yet stunning terrain dotted with tiny houses. "I was like, 'Where are my markers? Where are my indicators of what space is?'"
Her focus "became more than just the space and the nature," said Frantz, who recently wrapped up her first year at Cal Poly. "It also became the people who moved here and put their homes down [here], how they changed that space and how that space changed them."
]]> She started out by visually removing the manmade structures from their natural environments -- as seen in the pieces "Covered Wagon" and "Terlingua Store," both featured in "East of Middle." While their surroundings are illustrated in detail, the buildings themselves are represented by blank spaces.
"I was using the void as a way to pull away [from]... or isolate this constructed environment," she explained.
Further exploring the idea of a void, Frantz filled in the absent shapes with white paint. "I took a step back and went, 'That is the wimpiest, lamest next step,'" she said with a laugh.
So Frantz, influenced by the work of German-American artist Josef Albers, decided to take a bolder approach and replace the pure white forms with planes of bright, boisterous color.
"It really shifted the work," Frantz said. "Since then, I've continued to push that [aesthetic] and think about the building itself," she added, asking herself, "'What is emphasized? What's negated? When does it come together? And when does it fall apart?'"
Frantz's pieces now pair colorful, semi-abstract buildings with meticulously rendered black-and-white backgrounds.
While the presence of humans is felt, they're not actually seen, she said, noting that "If I start to put people [in my work], that inevitably, is going to be what people are going to want to know about and investigate."
"I don't have a specific social commentary that I'm making" about humans' impact on their environment, Frantz explained. "With the colors and with the shapes, there's almost more of a connection to art history and to pop culture and to advertising then there is to an environmental statement."
"It's always about 'What is this tension between these spaces -- in a contextual level and a formal level and a historical level?'" she said. "It's about trying to create these new, different relationships."
Unlike the Hudson River School landscape painters, whose works reflected a romantic, sublimely spiritual connection with nature, Frantz is drawn not to majestic mountains or tranquil glades -- but to the everyday vistas familiar to any city dweller or suburbanite.
"You can go to Yellowstone and it's going to be gorgeous. It's going to be beautiful. We can all agree on that," she said. "But that's not my connection to nature. My connection to nature is sitting there with headphones on" gazing at an abandoned gas station as her dog sniffs the overgrown shrubbery.
"This is my landscape. When I'm walking my dog around the block, this is what I see." she said.
In "East of Middle," she showcases such seemingly ordinary structures as billboards and carports. "I tend to work more with spaces I live around," the artist explained, although she's also found inspiration abroad.
Her piece "Rooftop Garden 2" depicts a building in bustling Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, which Frantz explored while traveling in Southeast Asia this summer with two of her three brothers. The trees in the title garden are represented by stylized, stick-like shapes, Frantz's own personal code for foliage.
Although the buildings to the left and right of the towering structure are nowhere to be seen, Frantz acknowledges its surroundings by showing the muted reflection of the opposite side of the street in a bank of windows. "I'm selecting [how I'm] nodding to the environment," she explained.
"Sun Valley Blvd" and "Waco Memorial" offer alternate views of the same geodesic funeral home situated off I-35 near Waco, Texas. While the former captures "that feeling of being on the highway and looking at a building over a median," Frantz said, the latter lets the viewer explore the actual grounds.
Her six-piece series "Not Too Distant Future," in contrast, enters the realm of the abstract with bare representations of billboards and drive-in movie screens -- some seemingly suspended in midair. (Frantz said she was inspired by Los Angeles-born installation artist James Turrell and his work in the Southern California Light and Space movement.)
Frantz said it's difficult to explain what attracts her to a subject. Finding that connection could be as simple as glancing up to see the sun silhouette a particular form.
"Sometimes it's just a moment. It is just seeing this building and having this instant clarity in my mind of 'I know the colors. I know what this composition's going to look like,'" she said. "Sometimes it's dumb luck."
For instance, she remembers being struck by the zigzag roof of a shuttered San Luis Obispo waffle house. "I drove past it so many times and was like, 'What is it?'" said Frantz, who captured the structure in her piece "The Golden Waffle."
The angular lines of a former dermatologist's office elsewhere in the city also caught her eye. "When I came and interviewed for my job at Cal Poly, I was in my rental car driving past the [building] and I was like, 'Regardless of if I get this job or not, that is definitely going to be a drawing,'" she recalled with a chuckle. That experience inspired "84."
Whereas Frantz's earlier drawings depicted specific spaces "where people lived and worked and existed," her most recent work shows landscapes that exist only in her imagination. Two pieces featured in "East of Middle" -- "Yes," which depicts an A-frame rest stop, and "Rearview," which shows a colorful cantilever house -- reveal her continuing evolution as an artist.
"As [I] continue to... discover new things about these spaces and discover new things about the way I want these spaces to interact with each other, I'm feeling less attached to that specific place -- which was so, so important to me [earlier]," Frantz explained. "I don't feel like I have [to] draw everything, like I used to. I can edit things out and I can push space to make it weird. ...There's less planning and more play."
With "East of Middle," Frantz hopes to foster the same sense of play -- encouraging viewers to interact with their environments in a fresh new way.
"One of my favorite things is when people recognize [buildings] even if they're completely fractured," the artist said. "They're like, 'Oh my God, that's a bar in Tuscon that I've been to. That really is a weird building.' Then they start to talk about their experiences and what that building used to be."
Each structure, she added, "houses this richer, bigger history."
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Top image: "Rooftop Garden 2" by Sara J. Frantz, which depicts a building in downtown Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, is featured in the art exhibition "East of Middle" at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo.]]>
Watching Lundgren in his element, it's easy to get swept up in his enthusiasm for his craft. A commercial sea urchin diver by trade, and fine craft artist and photographer by choice, he transforms simple blocks of wood -- black acacia, olive, oak, walnut and more -- into salad bowls, vases, burial urns and other elegant vessels.
Lundgren, 57, will open his workspace to the public during the Open Studios Art Tour, running Oct. 10, 11, 17 and 18 at artists' studios around San Luis Obispo County. The annual two-weekend event, organized by Arts Obispo, the San Luis Obispo Arts Council, will showcase the work of 219 professionals plus four students -- a significant increase from 2014, when 187 artists participated.
Born in Detroit, Lundgren moved to California with his family just two weeks before his second birthday and grew up in Woodland Hills.
From an early age, the artist pursued two passions: photography and the Pacific Ocean. He first entered the water at age 6, started surfing at 13 and began diving at 16.
After high school, Lundgren spent the summer attending the Academy of Art University in San Francisco before enrolling at the Brooks Institute in Ventura with plans of studying underwater photography. But the call of the sea proved too strong, and he started working on a friend's fishing boat in Morro Bay after just a semester.
"It changed my life," said Lundgren, who started out fishing for rock cod and albacore in 1979. He switched to sea urchin diving in 1980 because, he said, "I really love being underwater... going down there and picking riches."
When the weather permits, Lundgren harvests the fertile kelp forests along the Channel Islands off the coasts of Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties.
Despite encounters with elephant seals, orcas and other creatures, "I've been really lucky," he said. I've always said that I love my job. It's just a blast." (His underwater exploits -- and those of fishing boat captain Mark Brubaker -- were chronicled in the short film "Harvester," which won best student film at the 2008 Santa Barbara Ocean Film Festival.)
As comfortable as Lundgren is in the water, he's equally at home on land on the Central Coast. He's lived in San Luis Obispo County since 1979, settling first in Morro Bay and Los Osos before moving to Atascasdero in 1990.
The artist's introduction to woodworking came when he decided to make his own wooden frames for his photographs."I didn't like the generic metal frames that you put around a picture, so I thought wood would be cooler," he explained.
Lundgren began making, and later selling, furniture ranging from pine magazine racks to maple Morris chairs in the Arts and Crafts style. While at a woodworking conference in 1994 in San Jose, he watched a demonstration of natural edge bowl making, which showcases the original lines of the tree, by master Tennessee woodturner John Jordan.
"The light bulb went off," Lundgren recalled. He was immediately struck by the ease and speed at which Jordan worked -- especially when compared to the often lengthy and laborious process of making furniture.
"I was like, 'Uh oh, that looks like fun,'" Lundgren said. "It became what I call a really bad addiction," he added with a chuckle.
Decades later, Lundgren still relishes the relatively rapid pace of woodturning, which allows him to create artworks in as little as a single day. "I just get a chunk of wood, throw it on a lathe and go to town," he said.
More specifically, the artist starts with a rough, raw log, ages it for six months to a year, then gradually shapes it using a chainsaw, bandsaw, lathe and sharp tools. "Every piece is different in texture, hardness and smell. Every piece has a different personality," said Lundgren, who said he looks for a harmonious blend of form and function.
"When you get a pleasing shape, you know. When you're a little off, you know," he explained. "To me there are only a few shapes that are really pleasing to the eye. If you don't get that subtle curve, if it's just a straight line, it doesn't work for me."
Lundgren, who has studied with woodturners David Ellsworth of Buck's County, Penn., and Mike Mahoney of Mount Aukum, crafts his creations in his 20-by-25-foot workshop, a converted two-car garage attached to his custom-built home. It sits on two and a half hilly acres dappled with live, red and white oak trees.
In addition to wood he's salvaged from his property and his neighbors' land, Lundgren gets much of his materials from local woodcutters and suppliers such as Pacific Coast Lumber in San Luis Obispo as well as friends and fellow artists. For instance, he received "a lot of locust" from Realtor Jim Irving, who sits on the San Luis Obispo County Planning Commission, and his wife Anne Laddon, painter, printmaker and founder of Studios on the Park in Paso Robles.
"I've turned some spectacular bowls out of that one," Lundgren said. "He (Irving) was going to cut it up for firewood. Some of this stuff isn't great firewood but it sure makes pretty bowls."
]]> Lundgren's "best score" came courtesy of a city maintenance crew assigned to clear a large, diseased elm tree from a San Luis Obispo neighborhood. The artist had just a half hour to haul away the wood, including a round burl that weighed at least 800 pounds, in his pickup truck.
"That was some of the most beautiful wood (I've seen)... And they were going to take it to the yard and chip it. I just couldn't believe it," said the artist, who estimates he's made thousands of dollars worth of artwork using that elm wood. "I had a big grin on my face, climbing up over the (Cuesta) Grade that day."
Another prized possession is a piece of olive stump salvaged from Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa. "Olive is one of my favorite woods," Lundgren said. "It has this marbling to it. It has this great smell. It's just real pretty stuff."
In general, Lundgren prefers fragrant, richly colored woods that are relatively easy to work with. "It's got to be fun and kind of peaceful. Some of the pieces you fight because it's the nature of the piece," he said. "I would rather turn a piece of wood that turns nice than try to fight it."
That easygoing attitude seems appropriate coming from the genial Lundgren. "Once you really start making a connection, he's someone you want to hang around with more because he's such a nice individual," said his friend and collaborator, San Luis Obispo silversmith and sculptor Crissa Hewitt.
According to Hewitt, Lundgren approached her four years ago with the idea of teaming up to showcase his expert woodturning and her skillful work with metal and stone.
"His work is so exquisite. I just knew that I would be inspired by his response to his material and his level of talent and craftsmanship and ideas and everything else," said Hewitt, who interviews artists, curators and gallery owners as the co-host of the KCBX public radio show "Ears on Art." "The fact that he was approaching me said that he had full trust (in me), there's something very gratifying... I was honored that he would seek me out and say, 'Let's try it.'"
"I've always been a big fan of Crissa's work," Lundgren said. "When I said, 'Crissa, let's do a piece,' her eyes lit up and we just took off from there."
So far, the pair have created three vessels featuring ebony wood and silver lids or handles. They're currently working on a natural edge piece made from honey acacia that will feature a hammered copper lid with a finial, and possibly a gemstone secreted inside. "Crissa just wanted to go way outside the box" in making the container, Lundgren explained.
Asked where he finds his inspiration, Lundgren said he often finds himself thinking about woodturning while under the ocean surface. "That's the one thing that's pretty cool about diving. You can let your mind go and... wonder about anything because it's so automatic," he said. "Once you're comfortable there, then it is really peaceful and really relaxing."
Lundgren experiences a similar sense of calm in the studio.
"I've been really fortunate to have two things I really enjoy doing," Lundgren said. "It's always nice to do the same thing over and over again, (but) it gets really old." Splitting his time between the shore and the sea, the wood and the waves, breaks up the boredom and helps keep his mind and body active, he said.
"It's a whole different skill set. When I'm diving, I'm just a glorified apple picker," relying primarily on physical strength and luck, he explained. While on land, he's focused on transforming a silica-laden chunk of slightly brittle black acacia into an urn or a rich redwood burl into a natural edge bowl.
"It's a good yin and yang," he said.
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Top image: Atascadero woodturner Barry Lundgren designed this boxelder maple and pink ivory urn. | Photo: Courtesy Barry Lundgren.]]>
Herrera, 66, officially takes over his duties as the nation's first Mexican-American poet laureate this month. "I'm very honored and humbled," said Herrera, who will present a reading of his work Sept. 15 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., kicking off Hispanic Heritage Month.
On June 10, the Library of Congress announced that Herrera, who served as California poet laureate from 2012 to 2014, would receive the nation's highest honor in poetry. (He succeeds Charles Wright in the U.S. poet laureate post.)
The news was greeted with approval by the likes of former National Endowment for the Arts chairman Dana Gioia, who called Herrera "the elder statesman of Mexican American poetry," and Jennifer Benka, executive director of the Academy of American Poets, who predicted the award-winning poet would "bring an enthusiasm and electricity to the role of poet laureate that is sure to spark new and wider interest in the art form among people of all ages."
For his part, Herrera said his new role "means openness to so many new audiences -- (especially) Latinas and Latinos -- and a way to build on the beautiful work of past U.S. laureates... I will be inviting all people to participate."
The only child of migrant farm workers, Herrera spent much of his youth on the move, growing up in a series of Southern California cities that included Escondido, Ramona, San Diego and Vista. Just 29 days after he was born in the San Joaquin Valley town of Fowler, "We hit the road again. That's what you do when you're farm-working," the poet said, living at times in a one-room house his father had built on top of an old U.S. Army truck.
Instilled with a love of songs and storytelling by his mother, Herrera said his creative development was further shaped in the agricultural fields. "I noticed the kindness of hard workers, the joy in small things and the rich colors of dreams, and the stories out in the open under the moon and at dawn," he said.
Herrera credits an elementary school teacher with helping him literally find his voice. But his path was clear from an early age.
"I was always listening to music. I was always doodling and making cartoons and checking out books on (Marc) Chagall or (Henri de) Toulouse-Latrec," he recalled. "I had my guitar, my harmonica. (I was) writing songs, writing poems, putting groups of theater together... And I never veered from that."
While studying social anthropology at UCLA, Herrera became immersed in the Chicano civil rights movement and the experimental street theater scene. Graduating in 1972, he earned a master's degree from Stanford University in 1980 and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1990.
Herrera taught at Fresno State University from 1990 to 2004 before serving as chairman of the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside. He retired from that position in May, and moved back to Fresno to be closer to his family.
The poet, who has published more than a dozen poetry collections as well as books for children and young adults, said he continues to be influenced by his California migrant roots. "Their stories... their courage and pioneering spirit (are) inspiring and move us to bring about change for the better, for them and for all (people)," he said.
Herrera recently shared his thoughts with Artbound about his upbringing, his creative process and his new position as U.S. poet laureate.
How did having a solitary, nomadic childhood shape your development as a writer?
It gets to you, always being by yourself. But then it makes you go out. I used to get out of the apartment -- this was in San Diego -- and I would just walk all the way down to the waterfront and gawk at all the little stores, little jewelry shops and arcades and bus stations.
I just floated around that entire area by myself. I'd take off for an hour or two hours until I'd hit a dead end or I said, "Okay, it's time to turn around." So I'd turn around and come back... until I finally made it back home... I walked almost like a little explorer or an astronaut, venturing out into space.
It's good because you notice a lot of things, and they impress you. I was impressed with streets and cars and people and trees and canyons and... candy and clothes and pawnshops. That's a lot of good material for a writer.
I hauled back all that material in my head. Then I'd scribble something down or draw or doodle.
How did you channel your observations into poetry and the spoken word?
That all started back in third grade. My teacher, Mrs. Sampson, invited me to sing in front of the class, and that was when I started my performance career.
Then I got into choir seriously in middle school. I noticed I was just too frozen. I was like, "Geez, I'm having a hard time saying anything. I want to speak." ...I thought speaking was the greatest thing in the world. People making speeches, I thought they were just magic. [I decided] "I want to be up there like that."
How did you figure out that poetry was the way you were meant to express yourself?
I never really thought about writing. It was kind of like, "Well, that's what I'm doing, but what's a writer? Is that some guy in some office somewhere?" I didn't know what that was. My friends would go, "I want to be a writer," and I'd go, "Oh wow, man, but what is that?"
I never looked at it as something to focus on, to study, because I was just doing it, filling up notebooks with writing. Sometimes I'd read them. Sometimes I'd keep them. Sometimes I'd throw them away. But it didn't matter because I could just grab another notebook and fill it up again.
To this day, sometimes I'll go, "What did I do with that poem? Oh well. I'll just write another one."
Not every writer has that attitude.
You've got to have it because otherwise you'll get stuck. "Oh God, I'll never write again. I threw my best poems away." You threw away some good poems, but you've got a billion more to go.
Does the role of national poet laureate come naturally for you? How does it feel to go from Fresno to the world stage?
It's like you're riding in a fast car, but all the sudden you're riding in a Ferrari... Or it's like you're walking out in the open but all the sudden you're walking through this dense, rich rainforest. All of the sudden, it's a very different place.
You're no longer in your room staring into a computer... You're literally, very literally, standing in the middle of the entire United States and everybody is there for you. You are there for them. You're also standing in the middle of the world, because everyone is always connected to the United States and we're always connected to everyone else.
If you're not aware of that space, you better get aware of it quick. Because everything you say is in that extra big space now. It echoes back and it bounces around. It gets published. It gets mentioned.
You need to think about writing poems that cover a larger space, a larger page... This is a role where addressing the world is at the center of what you're doing.
How did your experiences as California poet laureate help prepare you for this position?
It's very similar. As soon as you get appointed as laureate of the state... immediately you changed right then and there. Right then and there you go, "Okay, I have to think differently. I have to move differently."
Every one of those things stretches your mind and your writing and your way of seeing yourself. That's the role of poetry. The idea is to expand this until you are able to embrace the entire state.
What was the inspiration behind your latest project, "Casa de Colores" ("House of Colors")?
I wanted to have a banner, a symbol... a place where I could put the ingredient for the project or projects I want to initiate for the United States. I thought "Casa de Colores" feels good, sounds good, looks good. It's like a little rainbow.
What will "Casa de Colores" entail?
The spoken word movement is really big so I thought I'd call on young people to put their poetry together in spoken word ensembles, and do it as groups. That's one thought.
Another thought is working with high schools. It's always good to write what you're going through no matter where you're at... Those students are very creative and filled with great energy and extremely intelligent, so the idea is to offer some kind of medium for input.
I think singing poems would be great for elementary school students. That's another idea. I have a whole list of them.
I want people to translate poetry into another language, or translate [poems in] their home language into English. I want to promote the bilingual and multilingual cultures that we are.
I've also got a one-word project which is kind of odd: "Write one word that will end violence." Just one word. You don't have to write a whole complicated sonnet. Then what I could do is collect those words and turn them into poems, into dances, into paintings, into chorales, into songs. But we need those words.
Young people are very easy. All you've got to do is be friendly. That's about it. Let them be who they are. If you can, be you. Be friendly. If you don't feel like being friendly, then wait until you're friendly another day and come back. [If you] bring a project that's new and exciting for you. It's going to be new and exciting for them.
How do you connect with adults?
The same way. You're always coming into a new space. You walk into somebody's space, their world... [If you come in] like the big poet of the world, like you've got everything together, that's not going to work. [If] you come in like a super professor from a super university, that's not going to work.
But if you just come in and be you, good old peanut butter sandwich you... that's a great beginning.
I have a funny bone, so I like to be [funny] with my audiences. But I can also be really serious.
Then I listen to them and I thank them and I acknowledge them. There's a lot of openness, friendliness and acknowledgement, and truthfulness... With those four ingredients, you can't go wrong.
As the first Mexican-American U.S. poet laureate, you're not only an ambassador of poetry. You're also an ambassador of the Latino community. How do you approach that responsibility?
I approach it by saying that I'm here for everyone. I approach it by saying that we need to promote poetry and writing from all groups -- and when I'm talking about Latino writing, I also make that emphasis.
There's a lot of writers [out there]. But we need to see the materials. We need to see the photographs, the writing, the journals... The Latino literary archives need to be seen.They need to be heard, and they need to be displayed.
Everybody needs to be seen and brought out. Times change. They change really fast. In one split second, we need to rethink everything... From one second to the next, we have to rewrite a new definition of poetry.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Top image: U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera is seen at at the California Unity Poem Fiesta on the UC Riverside campus in October 2014, which celebrated the end of his term as California poet laureate. | Photo: Carlos Puma for UC Riverside.]]>
Small, satisfied sighs escape from Scott's mouth as he squints at my face, glancing constantly from me to his canvas to his palette, loaded with colorful oil paints. As he works, muted afternoon light streams in from a series of skylights. "This American Life" drones quietly on the radio in the background.
I start to reposition myself, then apologize. But Scott, 77, doesn't mind the movement.
"That's why I like painting people live," he tells me. "Working from a photograph, you get a likeness but it's kind of dead in many ways. Here, I'm chasing all those little expressions that are happening in your face. Your mouth twitches a little, or you blink. ...It makes (the subject) come alive a lot more."
Scott indulges his love of portrait painting, and his appreciation for female beauty, in the exhibition "Women," running through August at the Steynberg Gallery in San Luis Obispo. His subjects -- some portrayed in the nude, others partially or fully clothed -- are a mix of friends, professional models and historical figures.
"These are all women I've been (in) love with on some level," he explains with a chuckle. "I wanted to get closer to them and know them a little better, because when you're in love with somebody you want to see them... understand them."
Scott, who grew up in Los Angeles, says his fascination with women began with his mother -- a woman he described in an interview with alternative San Luis Obispo newspaper New Times as "beautiful, nurturing and self-sacrificing to a fault." "She was really adoring to not just me, but (also) my brother and sister. We were lucky," he says.
Scott's father also nurtured that sentiment. "My dad would get really angry with me if I showed any kind of anger or abuse toward my little sister, who is two years younger than me. He was like, "She's a girl. You have to protect her,'" the artist recalls. "That's our job (as men) -- to protect and to serve."
Scott has done just that, in fact. At age 16, he dropped out of high school and joined the U.S. Navy -- a move that coincidentally marked the beginning of his artistic endeavors.
"I used to do lots of (self-portraits) in pencil when I was aboard ship," recalls Scott, who's mostly self taught. "I'd sit on my bunk and I'd have a little mirror and I'd draw myself on (paper) no bigger than a writing tablet I'd write letters on."
Back in California, Scott owned a West Hollywood sandal shop, served as a flight instructor and worked as a special effects expert on "Star Wars" and "Caddyshack" before deciding to focus on art full time in 1982.
He moved to the coastal community of Morro Bay in 1985, setting up shop in a barn in the middle of a bean field before building his current studio in the North County hamlet of San Miguel in 1992.
Scott considers the 2,500-square-foot building, with its lofty ceilings and dyed cement floors, a "sacred space" where he can connect with his subjects one-on-one.
It was here, in 2011, that Scott painted 44 small portraits of his male friends. Scott even let his subjects watch movies while he worked; "The Big Lebowski" proved a popular choice.
"I just wanted to have the close and intimate conversations with men friends... in the studio, where we would cop out to what our hopes and fears and desires (were), just talk about our lives," Scott says. "I wanted to see how they felt about their mission in life, and if it was very different from mine."
"Men don't frighten me. I understand their mentality because I am one," he adds. "But women are a mystery."
When he started working on his latest portraits of women in 2013, "I was nervous and scared the whole time," he says with a laugh. "I had to just concentrate on the work, and not think about (the women) and their beauty and the fact that their physical presence is so powerful for me."
He was also concerned that he would infuriate his female subjects by unintentionally depicting them in an unflattering light. "You can be a little rougher with men," he explains. "With women, since I find them so beautiful, I'm always intimidated. I'm always thinking, 'God, I don't know if I'll be able to get that beauty down.'"
While all of Scott's male portraits were painted from life over the course of two or three multi-hour sessions, most of his female models weren't available to sit for such lengths of time. Instead, the artist opted to photograph the women and work from those images -- a method that, he acknowledges, gave him "a kind of freedom."
"Women" is not limited to portraits of living women. Also depicted are two ancient Egyptian royals: Hatshepsut, whose reign as Egypt's first female pharaoh was "profoundly harmonious and prosperous," and Nefertiti, the famously beautiful bride of Pharaoh Akhenaten.
In Scott's hands, Hatshepsut becomes a plaster-and-wax sphinx whose bare breasts signify her fertility. His noseless bust of Nefertiti, meanwhile, is wrapped, mummy-like, in strands of string.
There's also a series of pen-and-ink drawings of female sphinxes, inspired by the five-part documentary series "The Pyramid Code."
While "Women" is limited, naturally, to Scott's paintings and drawings of women, his portraits range from the personal to the political. "I love painting people. They're the most exciting (subjects)," Scott says. "I'm more attracted to that than (to) landscapes or cityscapes or still lifes, because of the human element."
Scott estimates that he's painted about a dozen self portraits in the past 25 years. "I like to do them every once in a while just to check in on myself," the artist says, explaining that each painting mirrors his psychological state at the moment.
"If I'm not feeling good about myself... I could turn out looking like Lucifer, or this downtrodden, beaten-up, homeless alcoholic that you might see on the street. I have to destroy (the portrait) because I don't like seeing myself that way," he explains. "Now I feel better about myself and I don't have that (issue) any more."
On the other end of the introspection spectrum is Scott's emotionally charged series "A Pure Working," which features stylized, sculptural busts depicting Buddhist monks and nuns who set themselves on fire to protest war or injustice. The portraits, which have been displayed at the Fresno Art Museum, the Riverside Art Museum and the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, also pay tribute to the eight American protestors who sacrificed their lives via self-immolation to protest the Vietnam War.
According to Scott, "A Pure Working" specifically draws its inspiration from Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, who set himself on fire on a Saigon street in 1963, bringing attention to the plight of South Vietnam's Buddhist population under the Diem regime.
"I started to learn about their love of humanity, and what they were willing to sacrifice to relieve the suffering of other people," he says.
"Doing art puts me in touch with what's really relevant and what's going on in the world, and I can express it in a manner that is nonthreatening to people," he says. 'It's not like I'm up on the soapbox formulating a diatribe or writing a big, long political treatise, because I don't have the knowledge for that. I translate it into some kind of visual poetry."
With "Women," Scott says, he's again accessing a zeitgeist. "I really believe (that), in the next couple hundred years, things will move into a matriarchy," he says. "We're moving into that direction with women's rights, and Hillary (Clinton) being a serious contender for the presidency..."
Adds the artist, "I think I've found my niche. I'm just going to keep on painting women."
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Top image: The author poses with her portrait by David Settino Scott, featured in the exhibition "Women" at the Steynberg Gallery in San Luis Obispo. | Photo: Chris Daly.]]>
"I knew I'd get challenged eventually, and I knew I had to come up with some sort of sensitive, respectful response," App, 36, said. So, in August 2014, she launched her Five Gallon Challenge, which challenges participants to live on just five gallons a water a day -- plus three toilet flushes.
"As the drought has gotten worse, I feel that people are waking up to it, and slowly but surely people are changing habits," said App, who has been documenting the effects of the drought for the past two years as part of her photography series, "Where There Once Was Water." "That's a great thing, but I don't think enough of us are taking it as seriously as we should be."
According to App, "Where There Once Was Water" is aimed not only at showcasing scenes of devastation -- cracked earth, dusty lake beds, drained reservoirs -- but also raising questions about responsible water use.
Her goal is to "start a conversation that gets us all thinking about what we can do individually and collectively, and what we can do in communication with the powers that be," she said.
App grew up in Los Osos, a small, scenic coastal community with its own complicated relationship with water. Work on a $183 million sewage treatment project began in 2012 following three decades of debate, divisive politics and legal battles; construction is slated to be completed in 2017. She graduated from Morro Bay High School in 1997.
Even though App had been a shutterbug since childhood -- at age 11, she purchased her grandparents' old VHS camcorder with $150 she raised by doing household chores, breeding mice and catching crayfish and tadpoles -- she didn't see photography as a viable career until she attended Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo.
"It wasn't until after a few years at Cuesta that I realized, 'Oh, people do this for a living,'" said App, who officially launched her photography business in 2001.
"Everyone who chooses an artistic career is on an exciting but dangerous path," she said. "It's really exciting that you get to do what you love and make money doing it. And it's also very dangerous because the burnout factor is very real."
With that in mind, App has made it her mission to supplement her paid work with passion projects "that have absolutely nothing to do with a paycheck," she said.. Over the years, she has visited 31 countries and sailed twice with shipboard study-abroad program Semester at Sea.
App, whose travels have taken her to Africa, Asia, Europe and Central and South America, said her experiences overseas have opened her eyes to the realities of life around the globe. In particular, she's struggled with feelings of guilt over her access to amenities such as safe, clean running water.
"In one part of the world, there are 11-year-old girls walking five miles each way each day just to fetch dirty water, and in another part of the world, I can walk 10 feet and I get to choose if I want [my water] hot or cold," she said. "Why do I deserve that and someone else doesn't? Because I was born here and they weren't. That's not fair."
"The basic building block of life and growth and prosperity is access to clean water. That is the first, most important step in eradicating poverty," the photographer added. "That became my heartbeat, in a way."
In 2010, App and Oregon filmmaker Garrett Russell went on a three-month bicycle ride from San Diego to St. Augustine, Fla., to raise awareness and funds for international nonprofit organization WaterAid. Their journey was chronicled in the 16-part Web series "Water Tension" in 2012.
App continues to rally for water rights overseas. But her attention has turned closer to home in recent years as California's devastating drought has deepened.
"Probably two years ago... I went, 'Huh, it's really starting to get dry in my hometown. Nobody's talking about. Nobody seems to be doing anything about it,'" App recalled. That's when the subject of water "started bubbling up in my mind and my heart again," she said.
In January 2014, App and her now-husband, Steven Anzel, took a day trip to Lake San Antonio, on the border between Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties -- lured by rumors that the scenic site of the Wildflower Triathlon had lost its lushness.
"It was like barren desert, that cracked dry (lakebed)," App recalled. "You could ride your bike out on the nothing and ride your bike down to the dam because there was no lake at all."
She snapped a few panoramic photos with her cell phone and posted them on Facebook under the evocative heading "Where There Once Was Water." "As a photographer, I felt it was my duty, in a sense, to share what I was seeing," she explained.
Empowered by that experience, and the vocal response she received, App began pursuing her project in earnest.
She's headed north to snap photos of Guadalupe Reservoir south of San Jose and San Luis Reservoir west of Los Banos, and journeyed south to photograph Cachuma Lake in northern Santa Barbara County. App even stopped by the nation's largest reservoir in terms of maximum water capacity, Lake Mead, during a business trip to Las Vegas.
She choses her subjects partially for convenience -- "Where There Once Was Water" is an unpaid project, after all -- and partially for notoriety.
"I pay attention online to what lakes are getting the most coverage because (the changes) are so drastic," she said. She's eager, for instance, to visit Folsom Lake northeast of Sacramento, where dropping water levels have revealed the remnants of a 19th-century mining community.
App said her subjects represent the metaphorical tip of the iceberg. "How do you photograph what's really going on with the water situation in California? You can't photograph groundwater, or the lack of groundwater," she explained, adding that the status of the state's lakes and reservoirs can serve to demonstrate what's happening under the surface.
"Unfortunately, I have... an endless supply of subject matter," she said.
Although "Where There Once Was Water" has focused primarily on photography, App has also branched out into video. Her short video "California, where there once was water" was selected as one of 21 finalists in this spring's sH2Orts international film competition organized by WaterAid in partnership with WorldView -- and the only one representing the United States.
Asked what form "Where There Once Was Water" will take in the future, App suggested a gallery exhibition, a Web series and even a full-length documentary as possibilities.
"I don't have an end goal... because I don't know or when there is an end to the project," the photographer said. In fact, she said, it could last a lifetime.
"Part of the reason I'm doing this project is I want us to respect the beauty and the sensitivity of (California)," she said. "If you love it here, like I do, and you want to keep living here, like I do, behave like it."
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Top image: This aerial photograph highlights the effects of the drought on the Laguna Lake area of San Luis Obispo, Calif. | Photo: Brittany App.]]>
Southern California's pools -- turquoise seas of tranquility bordered by grey concrete and emerald lawns -- have served as powerful symbols of a regional obsession with health, leisure and luxury since the 1920s, when architect Julia Morgan oversaw the installation of the sumptuous Neptune Pool at newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon mansion, La Cuesta Encantada. (Hearst was following the lead of silent film stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, who added a massive pool to their Beverly Hills estate, Pickfair, in 1920.)
Over the decades, pools have become as ubiquitous as palm trees and tile roofs -- documented by the likes of painter David Hockney, multimedia pop artist Ed Ruscha and photographer Julius Shulman, immortalized in movies ranging from "Sunset Boulevard" to "The Graduate" to "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." Found on the grounds of suburban homes, apartment complexes, condominiums and hotels across the state, they signify wholesome fun to some, affluence to others.
But Southern California's swimming pools may soon be the latest casualties of a catastrophic drought that has left the state parched for the past four years.
A handful of California communities have banned the building of new pools or put restrictions on the filling of pools and spas. (In response, the California Pool and Spa Association launched the "Let's Pool Together" campaign last August encouraging customers to be more water-efficient.) They're concerned that pools -- which, left uncovered, can lose about 20,000 gallons a year on average due to evaporation, according to the Los Angeles Times -- represent an unnecessary drain on a dwindling resource.
In celebration of summer, here are two Central Coast artists who find inspiration in Southern California's precious pools.
Tracey Sylvester Harris: Diving Into the Past
Old movies taught San Luis Obispo painter Tracey Sylvester Harris about transience.
While watching black-and-white films, "I remember (my mom) telling me, 'That was years ago. They're not young anymore. Maybe they died already,' and my brain could not (process that). I just couldn't believe it," Harris, 49, recalled. "Every time I'd watch a movie I'd do the math to hope the person was still alive.
"In a way, it's been my way of dealing with our transient lives and coming to terms with that."
The artist addresses ideas of love, loss and leisure in the exhibition "Lost Holidays: Paintings by Tracey Sylvester Harris," running May 15 through June 28 at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art. The large-scale oil paintings depict men and women of a bygone era splashing in swimming pools, surfing ocean waves and lounging by the lake.
The daughter of a landscape painter and a graphic designer, Harris had no shortage of art instruction or supplies as a child. She took up oil painting at age 17, just after her family moved from Las Vegas to the North Coast hamlet of Cambria; her parents currently own and operate Cambria's Melanee Sylvester Gallery.
Harris studied art at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo under the mentorship of Morro Bay artist Marian Stevens Loomis.
She started out painting smaller-scale urban scenes. But her work took a dramatic turn in scale and subject when she turned 40 and reassessed her career.
"I finally realized, 'No, I don't want to be doing these small, urban paintings. ...I need to take a risk here and do what I really want to do,'" she said, specifically bigger, brighter works.
Harris stumbled upon the inspiration for "Lost Holidays" around 2008 while searching for images of beach sand on the Internet. "I happened to see this photo from the '40s," she said, describing a black-and-white snapshot of a woman and child reclining on a beach towel. "I was so captivated by that photo. It was just incredible. I just went, 'Oh, that's it. That's what I need to start with.'"
Since then, the artist has sought out other images of pleasure seekers, combing through antique stores, book shops, yard sales and websites for old photos, postcards and advertisements. (On occasion, she's even used family photos.) She prefers candid, high-contrast shots that show the interplay of sun and shadow.
Since the images tend to be in black-and-white, Harris incorporates her own vibrant color palette -- bright blues, greens and purples, eye-popping reds, creamy tans and sunny yellows. She also plays with scale and framing, dramatically cropping scenes by trimming torsos, removing heads and chopping off limbs.
When a figure has been visually pared down, Harris said, "We can identify with (it) as more of an iconic figure. It becomes a little more abstract, more contemporary. ...This is a symbol for enjoying the moment in the sun."
Although some of her paintings depict ordinary people, others show models, actresses and aspiring Hollywood starlets. Sylvester acknowledged that there's an element of sadness in the sight of these beauties in the bloom of youth, a recognition of the fleeting nature of glamor and the artificiality of California's carefully landscaped twist on the American Dream.
"It's not all palm trees and sunshine. There's more to it," she said.
She's not the only one who sees that subtext.While on display at Skidmore Contemporary Art at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, Harris's paintings caught the attention of Dallas-based producer Tom DeNolf, then scouting for art to showcase in the 2014 indie drama "The Face of Love."
The movie follows a widow (Annette Benning) who falls in love with an artist (Ed Harris) who bears a striking resemblance to her late husband. "(DeNolf) was told to look for artwork that is California... big, splashy figures, colorful," Tracey Sylvester Harris said, pieces that Ed Harris's character would have painted. Her work fit the bill.
She contributed several paintings to "The Face of Love" and even taught Ed Harris how to paint in her style. She also has a small cameo in the movie.
Although the "Lost Holiday" paintings possess a certain poignancy, Harris works hard to avoid sentimentality in the series. "I don't want it be sappy or nostalgic." she explained. "That's where the brushwork and the composition can keep it really current."
Neal Breton: Escape to the Deep End
Whenever his mother visits the Central Coast, San Luis Obispo artist Neal Breton goes on vacation. More specifically, he checks into the same hotel and enjoys a miniature "stay-cation" free of work duties and social obligations.
"Those are really nice times when I can get them. I feel like I can escape pretty much everything," the 40-year-old painter said.
Breton's "Pools" paintings, which depict swimming pools at their most serene, offer viewers a similar sense of calm. They go on display June 27 as part of a group show at The Bunker art collective in San Luis Obispo.
A Southern California resident since 1982, Breton moved to the region at age 8 when his parents divorced. He'd spend the school year in Glendale, where his mother lived, and summer and winter vacations visiting his dad in New Hampshire.
"It was always a weird transition," he recalled, because he never felt fully at home in either place. "It was awful not to fit in."
That feeling didn't come until Breton's first year at Pasadena City College, where he studied under representational painter Douglas Bond. He dropped out in 1996.
"A little bit of me wishes I had stayed in school and learned to appreciate things," Breton acknowledged, "(but) I'm not ashamed of where I'm at and I'm not ashamed of how I got there."
The artist spent 25 years living and working in Los Angeles before moving to San Luis Obispo, where he opened an art supply store. After that venture folded, he and artist Jeff Claassen launched Fiasco Gallery in August 2013, originally housed at Studios on the Park in Paso Robles.
They currently share studio space with Bret Brown at The Bunker, which officially opened its doors in December. Breton is also the organizer of the annual "Savages" group show, being held this September at Steynberg Gallery in Luis Obispo.
Breton said the inspiration for his "Pools" paintings came, not surprisingly, in a swimming pool. As he bobbed in the water, "this wave of serenity washed over me," he recalled.
Breton bases his acrylic paintings on actual pools, some surrounded by hedges or wooden fences. But he works without visual references, preferring to channel his memories and emotions directly into art.
]]> "I'm trying to catch my feeling and then compress it and edit it in the most simplistic way possible to paint that particular structure," he said. "If I need to skew a shadow a little longer to make a composition look more balanced or look more beautiful, then I'm going to subvert reality and create my own environment."
"I'm editing the story myself in hopes the viewer will fill it in," he said.
At the bottom of his canvases, Breton often lays out solid blocks of color. (The artist acknowledges that his palette, which typically includes pink, teal and yellow, is uniquely Californian.) "That little space down there... is usually me working something out," he explained. "If it's a math problem, I'm showing my work right there..."
Eschewing detail, his paintings focus on clean lines and simple planes, with "no noise of humanity," he said. That's not to say that the human element is missing; it's indicated by the presence of deck chairs, life preservers or, in the case of "Breakfast by the Pool, half a pink grapefruit perched on a diving board.
In "Poolside 2014," which depicts the aftermath of a wild party, someone has left a beach towel lying next to a red polka-dot bikini top. One wonders if the owner of the swimwear is floating just out of the frame, navigating an inner tube through a minefield of empty plastic cups.
Breton currently experimenting with incorporating people -- nude women, specifically -- in his "Pools" paintings.
"What's really important to me is to get that aspect of luxury. It's a vacation for me, so I'm visiting a place that I could never live in that painting," he said.
On the other end of the spectrum are Breton's "Clouds" series, which use images of clouds, raindrops and thunderbolts to offer a silent prayer to "the Gods of Precipitation." "We're in a place of perpetual summer in California," Breton said. "It's either hot or it's dark -- those are the two kinds of weather we have."
"Clouds" and "Pools" may share an aquatic motif, but any similarity is purely superficial. The former deals with "growth and struggle" whereas the latter represents "me giving myself a break," Breton said.
"The pools are always my vacation from thinking about real life," he said.
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Top Image: "Lakeside Swim" by Tracey Sylvester Harris is among the paintings featured in the exhibition "Lost Holidays" at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art.
In "Imperium," a man clasping a wand and orb holds audience with a horned woman with morning glory vines erupting from her mouth. "The Words (Priestess)" features two women sprawled over a pentacle examining a manuscript, while "The Hanging Man" finds the titular character suspended in mid-air by his foot, reaching for the mossy message he sees on a stone below.
Due to their scale and their subject matter, Pearce's paintings "require you to pay attention," said the English figurative painter, who has lived and worked in Southern California since 1990. "I want to the viewers to be more contemplative. I really would like for them to go away from the paintings and think about them ... maybe come to some conclusion about their lives."
Pearce, who's based in Ventura County, draws inspiration from the rich traditions of the late medieval period and the Pre-Raphaelites. But his artistic journey began with his interest in a revolutionary of the Italian baroque movement -- that tempestuous master of chiaroscuro, Michelangelo Mersisi da Caravaggio.
"I longed to paint like Caravaggio ... and no one could teach me," Pearce recalled. "I just couldn't find anyone who was interested or excited about the idea of painting like the old masters painted." So he taught himself with the help of the book "Traditional Oil Painting: Advanced Techniques and Concepts" by Virgil Elliott.
"I went to art school for one year and there was clearly no future in it for me," Pearce said. "They wanted us to make piles of shoes and use string to draw with. It was just not at all what I was interested in." Instead, he studied scenic design at the now-closed Dartington College of Arts in Devon, England, later earning his master's degree at the University of Southern California and his doctorate at England's Plymouth University.
Today, Pearce is an associate professor of art at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks and curator of the university's Kwan Fong Gallery of Art and Culture.
He's also the co-founder and chair of The Representational Art Conference in Ventura, an annual event aimed at exploring the possibilities of contemporary representational art.
Keynote speakers at this year's conference, being held Nov. 1 through 4, include Monterey sculptor Richard MacDonald; Elliot Bostwick Davis, author and curator of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts; and Fred Ross, founder and chairman of the Art Renewal Center in New York City. Also featured is Semir Zeki, professor of neuroaesthetics at University College London.
"It's heartwarming to be surrounded by so many people who are enthusiastic about the conference and excited what we're doing," Pearce said.
The painter has also been forging connections with the Central Coast art scene. His work was featured along with that of his students, Hüicho Lé and Harold Muliadi, in the exhibition "In a New World" in April at Studios on the Park in Paso Robles.
Pearce will return to Paso Robles on May 22 to deliver the keynote address at this year's Paso Artsfest, held Memorial Day weekend. The subject of his talk, "Art in the Age of Emergence," is also the title of his book, published in January by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
The painter recently took a break from working on his current series "Veil" -- which explores ideas of concealment and control with images of nude models draped in sheer fabrics and plastics -- to speak about the subject.
Let's begin by talking about "Art in the Age of Emergence." What is emergence in this context?
Let's start with a very commonly used metaphor. ... If you look at water and you want to understand wetness, probably the worst thing you can do is break it down into oxygen and hydrogen. You're not going to understand wetness by looking inward and downward.
Emergent qualities are those things that are greater than the sum of their parts.
Another great example that I particularly like is the murmuration of starlings. It's when the starlings all flock and swirl around the sky in those elegant, graceful (formations) that are so fluid and wonderful. If you break down the flock of starlings and look at one bird, you're not going to get any idea about that movement, that fluidity of the flock. ...
Our culture is the result of a collective consciousness -- the ideas we share and the ideas we express collectively. That too is a emergent quality.
What makes this the age of emergence?
Emergence has become more prevalent in the sciences in the last 30 or 40 years. It hasn't yet really taken root in the arts. That's why I'm so interested in trying to build aesthetics out of emergence. So I'm only using the term 'art in the age of emergence' as an expression that the postmodern age is coming to an end. We're really run out of meaningful aesthetics in post-modernity.
What do you see as that next step?
I suspect that what we're going to see is an interest in art that belongs to the people more democratically. The aesthetics that are implied by emergence are more based on the roots, on kitsch art.
I think that we're going to see more and more art that is a little sentimental, perhaps, more and more art that appeals to emotion rather than appealing to high-end high art.
We're getting away from (Immanuel) Kant and the idea of disinterested interest, which is the idea that you're looking at art without any emotional tug of the work upon you. You're to step back from that emotional appeal and go for the intellectual engagement with art.
Emergent art is very much based on modern human experience. The art appeals to the people. And then you flip the aesthetics ... so you're looking from the bottom up rather than from the top down ...
How does your work fit into the idea of the new emergent aesthetics?
I'm interested in the way of looking at the world through the kitsch lens, the more emotional response ... (So) you're getting something greater than the sum of the parts.
I think emergent art is going to be the kind of work that is skillfully made, that has emotional appeal and yet has intellectual content too -- so that you're able to engage at the higher level and at the emotional level.
And it's sincere art, too. This emergent art is the real thing. When you look at it, you know the artist meant it -- unlike some of the more postmodern work that we've seen for 20 or 30 years which is pretty cynical and skeptical and ironic. This emergent art is more open, more honest, more sincere, more sentimental, more emotionally appealing.
You're a big proponent of skill-based art. Why do you feel we've moved away from that?
You have to go back 100 years for that (answer) -- all the way to the Dadaists in World War I. They're so repulsed by modernity and the dehumanization that comes with modernity that they reject that violently and become quite nihilistic, in fact. They don't want anything to do with it, and then you see a reinvention of the world.
You know, we're not going to reinvent the world. Our experiences haven't changed the world really, fundamentally. Our DNA is exactly the same as the DNA of neolithic people. I don't think we've evolved in any way like that.
Are you trying to harken back to an earlier tradition of creating art -- learning from a master before branching off on your own?
I think that's a pretty good way of doing it. ... Skill is something that we always appreciate. When you look at something that's really well made, the quality, that's important to us. We care about quality. And we care about authenticity too. I think skillfulness is part of that.
When we look at an artist who does something really, really well, they come out of the crowd. They've done something more than what normal people can do. They've done something extraordinary.
It's just like an athlete. When you see an athlete who's really on top of their form, you appreciate how much work they've done to get to that point of being excellent.
Excellence, I think, is all part of emergence. ... If you think about what makes up excellence, it's not just skill. You can be very, very skillful but make very boring paintings or boring furniture or boring houses.
It's fascinating that you've formulated these ideas while based in Southern California, which is a culture associated with disposability and transience.
Even here we see our desire for quality. ... Southern California is still young, and that's what makes it so exciting. What are the emergent qualities of this place going to be? What is it that we collectively create and express in our culture?
That's tremendously exciting, actually. I think taking the long view is probably a good way to go.
Do you see those qualities in your students?
Yes. They're growing up in a time when they can get training and find a place to use their skills and (discover) the ways that people have done painting for years and years -- which is quite different than the way it was in the 1970s, '80s and '90s, when it was very, very hard to find traditional studio training.
Many people who come to TRAC have told us the same story -- that in the late part of the 20th century, they just couldn't find any training, and they had to do it themselves. They told us many sad stories of how they were left out of art school or rejected because they wanted to make representational art.
It's really wonderful to see these young people who are finding the training they need and flourishing. There's an extraordinary amount of really great, quality art being produced right now that doesn't get any of the attention it really deserves, frankly. ...
The ideas are very much about our time. They're not painting paintings that look like 19th century (artworks). They're painting paintings that you would never mistake for anything but work that's being made right now. I think that's cause for celebration.
Let's talk about TRAC, which you started with Cal Lutheran lecturer and Los Angeles artist Michael Lynn Adams in 2012. What was your original vision for the conference?
Both of us are figurative representational painters. Mike had gone down to visit with Alexey Steele in Carson. He met up with seven or eight really good painters -- Richard Schmid was there, for example, and Jeremy Lipking -- and he came back seeming really energy and refreshed. ... I started thinking, "Gosh, I wish there was something like that available in the academic world."
Until we did TRAC, there were literally no conferences at all about representational art -- which is a strange absence, because there was then and is now a huge amount of representational art, and a very large community of people who are interested in representational art. It seemed like a big gap that needed filling.
So we went to see Chris Kimball, who is the president of Cal Lutheran, and explained what we wanted to do and that we believed it would be successful. And he had the courage to let us do it.
What was the reaction?
Extraordinary. The people who came to it were just so thrilled. We heard over and over again these stories from people who said they'd been alone and they'd felt so isolated and now they didn't feel alone anymore. There's a very strong sense of community and a sense of hopefulness that simply wasn't there before.
Who is your target audience for TRAC?
Academics, artists, critics, all the thought leaders. We want anyone who's got an interest in representational art.
People misunderstand a little bit what we're about sometimes. We're not really there in order to provide a plan. We're there to provide a platform and to give people a place to talk about representational art -- but not necessarily to provide concrete ideas and polemic and dogma about what representational art is or what it should be doing. We want to provide the space for people to come up with that ...
The official mission of TRAC is "exploring representational art's place in the new millennium." What do you see as its place at this time?
I don't think that representational art is going to supplant or destroy or take the place of any of the art that's being made right now. But I think that representational art deserves and will have a place at the table ... that it hasn't had for probably the last 100 years.
Have we ever in the history of man just completely stop doing things which we find part of a bigger valuable experience? We don't stop because something else comes along. We don't stop weaving by hand because a loom comes along. We continue these traditions and we appreciate them and we appreciate human skill in those things.
There's plenty of room for the human experience to be expressed in representational art -- in any art.
So there will always be a place for art created by human hands?
Yes, absolutely. ... You want the real thing. When you buy a print, you know it's a print and you're not going to pay top dollar for a print. But you will play top dollar for a Rubens or a Rembrandt or a Van Gogh. We're hungry for authenticity.
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Top Image: "Magician" by Michael Pearce.]]>
But her beauty lives on in the image captured by San Luis Obispo photographer Richard "R.J." Arnold in the 1880s.
"When I first saw (Arnold's) glass plate (negatives), the number one thing that struck me was the quality of the portraiture -- the openness of the subjects, the ease in which they seemed to be in front of the photographer," Los Angeles photographer Anthony Lepore said. "These people were opening their worlds up to the photographer."
Fifty of Arnold's images -- mostly portraits, plus four landscapes - will be featured in the exhibition "California Unedited! The Archives of R.J. Arnold" at this year's Paris Photo Los Angeles, an international fine art photography fair held May 1 through 3 at Paramount Picture Studios in Hollywood.
Little is known about Arnold, who was born in England on June 28, 1856, and died at age 73 in Monterey on May 19, 1929, according to historians. He emigrated to New York at age 16 and eventually made his way to California's Central Coast.
A log book donated to the History Center of San Luis Obispo County indicates that Arnold operated a studio on Higuera Street in downtown San Luis Obispo between 1883 and 1887. According to those ledger entries, the History Center said, his clientele included prominent area clans as the Dallidet, Dana, Jack and Price families, whose names still grace local streets and historic homes.
The same ledger reveals that Arnold also photographed Latino and Native American subjects.
"He was very interested in documenting communities of color," said Eva Ulz, History Center curator. "There are people represented in these negatives that are African American, that are Chinese, that are Latino. He was actually photographing a much larger representation of who California was in the 1880s."
According to Ulz. Arnold was the community's "only portrait photographer of record" before the arrival of Frank C. Aston, who was active in San Luis Obispo from 1905 until 1947. Arnold headed north at the turn of the century, and he served as the official photographer of the Hotel del Monte in Monterey from 1902 to 1924.
Arnold's Monterey photos were featured in the 2005 book "Monterey's Hotel Del Monte, California" by Julie Cain, part of the Images of America series. But his work in San Luis Obispo County remained largely unknown until the El Paso de Robles Area Historical Society (PRAHS) received a massive donation -- more than 2,000 glass-plate negatives coated with a light-sensitive emulsion -- in 2011.
Those negatives were discovered decades earlier at a Atascadero yard sale by San Miguel resident Randal Gene Young, who gave them to his close friend, Morro Bay resident and personal property appraiser Jacqueline D. Marie. She, in turn, loaned them to PRAHS on the condition that they wouldn't leave the county or be used for economic purposes.
Grace Pucci, PRAHS president, described the Arnold collection, which numbered about 1,400 negatives, as a priceless treasure trove -- albeit one in "awful" condition.
Part of the problem was the way the negatives were stored, she said, slipped into paper envelopes and stacked in cardboard boxes and plastic bins. (For a time, Young kept them in a 19th-century hotel in San Miguel.) In some cases, the paper had adhered to the glass; in others, the emulsion had come off.
About 10 percent of the negatives couldn't be salvaged, Pucci said.
The rest have been slowly cleaned, catalogued and properly stored by a small army of PRAHS volunteers under the instruction of Brother Lawrence Scrivani, then an archivist for the Cooper Molera Adobe in Monterey. (He now lives in Cupertino and works with the Archdiocese of San Francisco archives.)
Removing decades of damage by water, dirt and exposure is a "delicate task," Scrivani said, requiring the application of soap and water on one side of the glass pane and a solvent on the other. "I find remarkable the job done by the volunteers in saving what is left," he said. "They truly made a silk purse from a sow's ear."
Lepore's introduction to Arnold's photography came during a Thanksgiving 2012 visit to Paso Robles. Pucci, his aunt, invited him to take a look at the PRAHS collection, housed at its headquarters in the Carnegie Library in downtown Paso Robles.
"My first response was ... 'They're going to be these dusty old prints,'" he recalled, poorly shot and devoid of serious interest. But when he started shifting through the containers of negatives, his attention was soon piqued.
First, he pulled out a portrait of a Latina girl, then an image of a Chinese immigrant in traditional garb. "I pulled out a couple more and said, 'Aunt Grace, this is stunning,'" Lepore recalled. "Just by holding (them) up to the light, I could see they were something amazing."
Lepore said he was struck not only by Arnold's artistic ability and technical skills, but also the emotional quality of the images he was able to capture. "His ability to make a connection with the (subject) is reflected back in the camera," he said.
He compared Arnold's work to that of another once-forgotten photographer, E.J. Bellocq, who shot intimate portraits of the prostitutes of Storyville, New Orleans' red light district, in the early 20th century. "It's rare to see someone with such clarity," said Lepore, who holds a master of fine arts degree from Yale University.
Arnold's portraits showcase the diversity of San Luis Obispo County in the late 19th century, as well as its sophistication and economic prosperity. "It was the normal thing for just wealthy people to have their photo taken," Pucci said. "(But) we have pictures of ranch hands and bread sellers and butchers."
One group portrait, shot in a butcher shop, shows several works standing in front of a swaying backdrop of pig and cattle carcasses. Another depicts churchgoers seated on the grass under a sycamore tree, enjoying an outdoor picnic. "It's a stunning picture," Lepore said of the latter shot, which he considers one of his favorites.
Arnold's solo subjects -- most of them unidentified -- range from children to wizened women to middle-aged men sporting bushy beards and carefully groomed mustaches. Some pose against delicately painted backdrops, while others stand in front of a simple grey background.
There are even a few post-mortem portraits commemorating deceased loved ones, a common practice during the Victorian era.
According to Lepore, Arnold would typically shoot a full-length portrait, then crop it to show only his subject's upper torso and head. Lepore prefers to present the images uncropped and unedited, with cracks, scratches and other imperfections left intact.
"We get to see the scrappy frayed rug ... that was worn at the edges. We get to see the dirty edge of the rock that was never intended to be in the pictures," Lepore said. "There's something awesome about getting to look back through that window."
Over the past few years, Lepore has scanned a number of Arnold's negatives in high resolution, digitally enlarged them and printed them. (Most of the original negatives measured 8 inches by 10 inches; they've been reproduced as prints as large as 20 by 30 inches.)
Enlarging those images adds to their immediacy, Pucci said. "It's like you're looking at a picture of someone that could have been taken yesterday, but the picutre was taken 100 years ago," she said.
Added Ulz, "You really get an amazing connection between those people and people today."
Part of the Arnold collection was first featured in the 2013 exhibition "Shared Histories: R.J. Arnold's Photographs of the Central Coast" at the Carnegie Library in downtown Paso Robles. The History Center then put the images on display at its San Luis Obispo headquarters from the spring of 2014 to this March in the exhibition "Windows for the Past: Photographs by Richard Arnold, 1883 to 1887."
Arnold's portraits and landscapes are again in the spotlight this spring in two shows: "Shared Histories II: More of R.J. Arnold's Portraits of the Central Coast" in Paso Robles, and the "California Unedited!" exhibition at Paris Photo Los Angeles. Lepore put together the Los Angeles exhibition with the help of French curator and former fair director Julien Fryedman, who culled photos from the Los Angeles Police Department archives for last year's "Unedited" show.
Pucci expressed her delight that Arnold, "this man who was almost forgotten," is now being celebrated throughout California. "All the sudden, so many people from all the world can see his talent," she said.
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Top Image: San Luis Obispo photographer R.J. Arnold captured this portrait of an unnamed woman, featured in the exhibition "California Unedited! The Archives of R.J. Arnold," featured in Paris Photo Los Angeles. | El Paso de Robles Area Historical Society]]>
"A lot of it is my response to pressure from the outside," said Rushing, who originally hails from Huntington Beach. "It's all a cathartic process."
Rushing, 40, offers a glimpse into her artistic process in the solo exhibition "Methods of Madness," which runs through April at the Steynberg Gallery in San Luis Obispo. Acrylic paintings and paper shadow-box constructions are paired with small booklets depicting different steps in the progress of each piece.
"The process is totally as interesting to me as a finished piece," explained Rushing, and just as revealing. That's why she's content to leave visible "the bones" -- an errant drip of paint, the shadow of a preliminary sketch, the flash of a colorful first coat.
Slyly subversive and rife with personal symbolism, Rushing's special brand of surrealism has earned acolytes around California.
San Luis Obispo artist Neal Breton readily lists Rushing among the top three painters in San Luis Obispo County, along with Mark Bryan and Daniel Dove. "Everything time I see a (Rushing) show, I'm like, 'This is it. ... These paintings are amazing. There's no way that she could make these better,'" he said. "Then you go to the next show she does, and she tops herself."
Painter and printmaker Anne Laddon, founder of Studios on the Park in Paso Robles, said she was struck from the start by Rushing's "deep, deep commitment to art making."
"There are only a handful of artists (in San Luis Obispo County) who are as serious about the process as she is," Laddon said, describing Rushing as "very creative and experimental." "She's saying more about her interior life than most artists, and she does it beautifully. She is authentically herself."
Identity and duplicity play powerful roles in Rushing's work, where a prowling panther can stand in for a sexual predator or a plummeting bird can serve as a symbol for despair.
That dichotomy is mirrored by a public persona split into two distinct facets. There's Lena the warm, well-dressed wife and mother who politely lowers her voice when she cusses, and Lena the rebel, the runaway, the outlaw.
Rushing was 4 when her parents divorced. She lived with her mother under age 12, then moved in with her dad -- but neither parent, it seemed, had much success controlling her.
"I was always good in that I didn't want my parents to be disappointed in me, but I still did whatever I wanted," the artist recalled, whether that meant dying her hair with Manic Panic dye, smoking cigarettes at school or sneaking out of the house at night to dance at the now-closed Studio K at Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park.
Rushing ran away from home so many times that she received luggage as a high school graduation gift. ("So I didn't have to grab a plastic bag," she explained.")
"I wouldn't have described myself as depressed up to that point," Rushing recalled, "but I was really dark." When she moved to the Central Coast from Riverside in her early 20s to finish her fine arts degree at Cuesta College, "I would purposely park my car in my condo's garage so, on my day off from work, none of my friends knew I was home. ... I didn't want to go out. I didn't want to do anything."
That attitude shifted when Rushing became a mother at age 26. "It changed me completely. I had never been so happy in my entire life," said Rushing, now mom to a 13-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter. "I just felt this explosion of joy and love and things I (had) always made fun of."
Rushing's dark side didn't go away entirely, of course.
"I still have the same feelings. It's just that I have a different place to put them," she explained. "Most of the time, I'm the mom at school who's crazy. I really am that person. ... But this other (persona) is really me too. It just fits better into art than into my life."
Rushing said her work helps her cope with emotions that would otherwise be overwhelming. "Reading the news will break my heart," she said, adding that, without art, "I would just be devastated all day long and I wouldn't be able to raise a family or get out of bed. It's all real, and it's f-cking crushing."
One motif that crops up repeatedly in Rushing's work are predators -- dangerous animals that her seemingly fearless female protagonists keep under control.
In "Peppermint Bay," a lingerie-clad dancer with a frank, self-aware stare poses on a platform surrounded by candy-striped shark fins.
A moray eel stalks a determined-looking woman and her ghostly twin in "Perseverance." And in "The Giver," two albino alligators loom behind a nonchalant nude woman whose attention is distracted by a pink fruit bat nibbling on the strawberry she holds.
Rushing said those deadly predators signify men, particularly their potential for physical and sexual violence. "My husband likes to joke that I'm a man hater, but I'm not," she said. "There's something so different about men that I just can't understand."
By intentionally putting themselves in harm's way, Rushing said, her heroines -- whose heads often sport playful red-and-white striped swirls in the place of hair -- are proving their power. "You are powerful, just because you're a woman. ... You can't deny it," she said.
In May 2014, Rushing organized and curated the exhibition "Powerful Woman" at Linnaea's Cafe in San Luis Obispo. Fifty female artists paid tribute to feminist icons ranging from sharpshooter Annie Oakley to singer Mavis Staples to writer, philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft.
Rushing said the inspiration for the show arose out of a run-in with a male volunteer referee at her daughter's soccer game. She noticed that her daughter, then 8, seemed intimidated by an aggressive player on the opposing team.
"So I said, 'Don't be scared, honey. It's okay,'" Rushing said. "That's what I was yelling. Not 'Get her.' Not fight back.'" Even so, the artist got a nasty reaction from the referee.
"He turned to my coach for some reason ... and said, 'She needs to to shut it, or you're going to have to get it off the field,'" Rushing said. "My immediate reaction was to stand up in front of all these eight-year-old girls and be like 'F-ck you' and really rip him a new asshole ... (But) I was so afraid of humiliating (my daughter) that I did the wrong thing. I stayed quiet."
The "Powerful Women" show, she said, "was my way of redeeming myself."
"Everything I've done as an artist," Rushing added, has been moving toward that goal of celebrating "sassy women who say 'I'll do what I want.'" But as defiant as her heroines are, they're also haunted -- by external pressures and inner struggles.
A dozen dive-bombing birds surround the saintly central figure in "Provocateur," while a wounded cardinal, representing Jesus Christ, hovers near her haloed head. (Rushing's daughter served as a model for the piece as well as one of her favorite paintings, "Imaginary Fiend.")
Rushing noted that the chalice the girl holds has no base. "I wanted it to be more like a burden, like she can never set (it) down," the artist explained. "When she has a daughter, she has to pass that on to her child."
Asked why the plummeting birds have diaphanous capes fluttering from their shoulders, Rushing said, "I felt like I needed to give them hope. (So) I put their parachutes on."
But that's only one explanation. According to the artist, her work is always open to interpretation.
"I absolutely want other people to look at it as a narrative piece ... and recognize there are symbols, but I don't want to tell people what all the symbols are," she said, partially because she wants to free viewers to draw their own conclusions. "If I asked 20 different people, (I would find) they're all having a totally different experience from the same piece. I love that."
Rushing's work has been receiving plenty of scrutiny as of late. In February, she participated in the group show "Eat Your Heart Out" at Studios on the Park. In March, she was featured in the exhibition "Laluzapalooza" at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles.
2014 brought shows at venues including The Artery in Atascadero, Vale Fine Art Gallery in Paso Robles and Johnson Art Gallery and The Bunker, both in San Luis Obispo. Rushing also took part in the "Savages" group show at Studios on the Park; the annual show, which features younger artists, comes to the Steynberg Gallery in September.
"As a fan of art, I'm drawn to her content," said "Savages" organizer Neal Breton, a member of the local art collectives The Bunker and Fiasco Gallery. "And as a paint nerd, as a person who wants to unravel the mystery of a process, I'm always satisfied by looking deeply into her work aesthetically- - the way she's layered paint, the colors she's chosen, her brushstrokes. When you see them, you see them for a reason."
She gleans daily inspiration from the artists she follows on Instagram, as well as local luminaries such as Josephine Crawford, Peg Grady and David Settino Scott. "There are times when you look at something and you're inspired (to say) 'Wow, this makes me want to work hard and try and do better.' And there are some that make me go, 'I am never painting again.'"
"I'm not in a hurry. I'm not driven to be famous and make a lot of money," she added. "I just want to do whatever the f-ck I want, as far as art goes, and put it out there."
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Top Image: "Perseverance" by Lena Rushing is one of the paintings figured in the exhibition "Methods of Madness" at the Steynberg Gallery in San Luis Obispo.]]>
This month, the power plant is the focus of the art exhibit "Redacted: Transparency, Democracy and Nuclear Power." Organized by the local nonprofit Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, the exhibit pairs editorial cartoons dealing with Diablo Canyon with heavily redacted communications between Pacific Gas & Electric Co., which owns and operates the plant, and two government bodies that regulate it, the California Public Utilities Commission and the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The exhibit, which runs March 3 through 28 at the Steynberg Gallery in San Luis Obispo, coincides with the fourth anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan.
"It's an art exhibit unlike any other that I've seen in my entire life," said Jane Swanson, spokeswoman for anti-nuclear nonprofit organization San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace, and one guaranteed to elicit a response. "This art exhibit definitely does raise consciousness and start a political discussion in helping people see the big picture."
Her group is planning its own event in memory of Fukushima on March 11. "Fukushima Is Everywhere" will feature music by Inga Swearingen, poetry by Blake Williams and a prayer by Japanese Buddhist monk Sawada Shonin, who plans to walk from Santa Barbara to Diablo Canyon to the San Luis Obispo County courthouse in support of a nuclear-free future.
According to David Weisman, outreach coordinator for the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, the inspiration for "Redacted" came as he prepared for a legal briefing by spreading out documents on the floor. As he gazed at the pages, broken visually into bold blocks of black and white, he was suddenly struck by their aesthetic power.
"I said, 'There's quite a metaphorical abstract pattern here,'" recalled the Morro Bay resident, who was reminded of the abstract, geometric works of Russian avant-garde artists El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich. "It is sobering to take a look and realize what remains hidden, what remains seen. We've got black and white. We have darkness and light. We have truth and obfuscation."
The effect wasn't lost on Weisman, who graduated from New York University with a bachelor's degree in film and television in 1983. Before moving to the Central Coast 14 years ago, he worked as a documentary filmmaker specializing in social and environmental issues -- examining such topics as squatters in the Philippines ("On Borrowed Land"), green building techniques ("At Home with Mother Earth") and environmental regulation (the 28-part PBS series "Preserving the Legacy").
"When you request a document and you get back entirely blacked-out pages, at first it's laughable. It's absolutely absurd," Weisman said, but strangely telling. In December 2013, he created a similar but smaller art exhibit featuring redacted documents at Ocean Beach People's Organic Food Co-op in Pacific Beach.
Visitors to "Redacted" enlarged versions of documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, flip through a notebook of other altered documents and see censored and uncensored versions of communiques dealing with a NRC-commissioned report by Robert Sewell assessing the risks tsunamis could pose to Diablo Canyon.
"Redacted" pairs those documents with 20 editorial cartoons by San Luis Obispo artist and architect Russell Hodin, who moved from Southern California to the Central Coast 35 years ago to attend Cal Poly. His satirical cartoons have been appearing in the pages of local alternative weekly New Times for 23 years.
Although Hodin has covered a multitude of local issues in his work -- his Diablo Canyon cartoons only constitute four percent of the hundreds he's inked over the years -- the cartoonist finds the nuclear power plant a routinely fascinating subject.
"If something's getting a lot of ink, that attracts me.... "That's the stuff that really captures my interest," said Hodin, who counts Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Paul Conrad among his influences. "It's part of my burden as an opinion person in the county to not let things go by unchallenged that are important."
Diablo Canyon Power Plant has been a source of controversy and commentary since the 1960s, when PG&E first announced plans to bring nuclear power to the Central Coast.
In 1981, two years after a partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, thousands of protesters -- including singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, who had been organizing "Stop Diablo" concerts since the late '70s -- flocked to the entrance of Diablo Canyon in what the Los Angeles Times called "the Normandy Invasion of civil protests."
After decades of demonstrations, hearings and court cases, the NRC granted PG&E operating licenses for the plant's two Westinghouse Pressurized Water Reactor units. The first unit began commercial operation in 1985, followed by the second in 1987.
Today, Diablo Canyon produces a total of 18,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity a year, enough to meet the needs of more than 3 million Californians. In 2011, the plant employed more than 1,400 workers with a payroll of $202 million, PG&E said, making the utility one of the largest employers and taxpayers in the area.
Plus, with the closure of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in 2013, Diablo Canyon is the last nuclear power plant operating n California. (PG&E has applied for 20-year extensions of its Diablo Canyon operating licenses, set to expire in 2024 and 2025.)
Although state and federal regulators maintain that Diablo Canyon is safe, public concerns about the safety and necessity of the plant persist in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima meltdown.
Chief among those fears is the presence of five fault lines surrounding Diablo Canyon -- some running just offshore of the plant -- that could trigger catastrophic temblors.
PG&E completed a four-year assessment of the earthquake danger facing Diablo Canyon in September 2014 and concluded that the power plant is seismically safe and capable of withstanding a quake from any of the faults. But critics including U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, U.S. Rep. Lois Capps and former state Sen. Sam Blakeslee argue an independent review of all seismic data is needed.
Another concern is the plant's cooling system, which circulates 2.5 billion gallons of seawater each day. That water is discharged back into the ocean 20 degrees warmer, damaging the ocean ecosystem by killing fish larvae and harming kelp and other forms of algae.
"We don't need Diablo Canyon right now and we certainly don't need the risks," Swanson said. "Even if you love nuclear power and you do not think that Mother Nature will throw you any gutterballs, even if you think mechanical failure will never happen to you ... there's just no excuse for having Diablo Canyon where it is."
Founded in 1973, San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace deals primarily with safety and legal issues on the federal level, Swanson said. The all-volunteer group has 45 core members and a mailing list of more than 1,000 people; contrary to its name, participants do not have to be parents, women or even Central Coast residents to join.
The Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, in contrast, focuses on anti-nuclear activism at the state level.
"We don't really discuss the technology of nuclear power. We don't discuss health effects," explained Weisman, who joined the group when it was formed in 2005. "We take a look at economics. Our stance on nuclear power ... is it doesn't pencil out. It's no longer profitable or economic to run (these plants)."
Although not directly involved in "Redacted," Swanson said Mothers for Peace welcomes the Alliance exhibit. "It's a different way to educate a different audience," she said, particularly those who are not aware of Diablo Canyon or the potential dangers it poses.
According to San Luis Obispo artist Mark Bryan, art can be a surprisingly effective tool in getting a message across.
"An artist doesn't have a lot of power or money but they can express feelings that a lot of people have," said Bryan, whose satirical oil paintings often deal with social issues such as war, politics and poverty. "It's somewhat satisfying to get to laugh at something you're scared of, or people you're scared of. It's a way to get back at them."
In fact, he added, sly humor can be just successful as graphic imagery in engaging the viewer. "If a person gets a laugh or a humorous take .. it somewhat seduces the viewer into looking at (the piece) and thinking about it," the artist said.
Bryan didn't contribute any pieces to the "Redacted" exhibit, but he's been exploring Diablo Canyon in his work since the 1970s. "I've always been into that topic because it's right here in our backyard," he explained.
In fact, Bryan featured a few Diablo Canyon-themed pieces in his exhibit "More Things to Worry About" last fall at the Steynberg Gallery -- including "Devil's Due, Meltdown at Diablo Canyon," which depicts people running in terror from a twisting, tornado-like radioactive plume.]]> "I like to think that all of my paintings are well-crafted and pretty at some level ... but the story they're telling might not be so pretty," Bryan explained.
Whether gallery goers find the pieces in "Redacted" amusing, alarming or both, Weisman hopes the exhibit will serve as a powerful call to action.
"This is an attempt to broaden the public engagement" and move beyond the public meeting rooms and legislative offices where his group normally operates, he explained.
"People who see the exhibit should be able to walk away and realize that we as engaged citizens cannot take for granted blank assertions that government regulators and appointed watchdogs have the truth at their disposal, or are able to act on it," he said. "If you are an engaged citizen of democracy, you have to force the truth."
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Top Image: Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant near Avila Beach, as seen from Port San Luis. | Photo by Mike Baird. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.]]>
"To get to this point where I could do this installation and open the dialogue about Taiwan, I felt was my responsibility," Hite, 63, said. "And I've waited a lifetime to do it."
Her exhibition "From My Father's Eye to Mine: Sculpture and Documentary by C. Hite," running through February at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, serves as a career retrospective, showcasing themes and concepts that the artist has been exploring since the early 1970s. The show, which encompasses ceramics, sculpture, photography, performance art and other disciplines, is being presented in conjunction with the Central Coast Sculptors Group.
"We just like to feature the range of what our members do and (Hite) was a good example of that. She has quite a body of work and quite a history," explained Michael Reddell, former president of the Central Coast Sculptors Group, noting how the artist's past pervades every element of the exhibition. "Most people just hang up art, and that's it. She took it to a deeper level."
Tales of her late father's wartime experiences -- vine-covered temples, snake charmers, whirling dervishes and the like -- fueled Hite's childhood imagination. A U.S. Air Force mechanic and pilot who began his military career in a National Guard cavalry division, he hiked across India to reach Nepal during World War II and participated in the Berlin Airlift in the early days of the Cold War.
"I was really close to my father and I think that's why he talked to me," Hite said, noting that their bond was cemented with her birth. Her mother went into labor during the funeral of Hite's paternal grandfather, and the artist was born after midnight on her father's birthday in December 1950. (Born Carol Beth Hite, the artist later legally changed her first name to "C.")
When Hite was 6, she, her mother and her two older siblings joined her father overseas for the first time. He was stationed as an American military advisor in the Republic of China, as Taiwan is officially known, during a time of immense tension between the island nation and the People's Republic of China.
After the end of World War II, the island nation -- still reeling from a half-century of Japanese rule -- found itself in the cross-hairs of a civil war between the Chinese Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-Shek, and the Chinese Communist Party, led by Mao Zedong, as Cold War tensions raged around the globe.
In 1947, the shooting of a civilian triggered an island-wide uprising that was violently suppressed by the Chinese Nationalist Party-led government, resulting in the slaughter of as many as 30,000 people. The so-called 228 Incident ushered in the period referred to as the White Terror.
Between 1949, when martial law was declared on Taiwan, and 1987, when democratic rule was restored, 140,000 Taiwanese political dissidents were imprisoned and in some cases tortured; 3,000 to 4,000 were executed.
"My experience in Taiwan is that we were isolated," Hite recalled, living in a fortress-like complex in the country flanked by rice paddies, away from other American military families. "I understood that there was something about where we lived that made people afraid, that we caused people stress by being there." But she couldn't quite grasp why at the time.
There were glimmers of Taiwan's trauma, of course: the mutilated orphans she encountered at a missionary hospital, the "friendly spies" who accosted her and her siblings in the village. She now believes that an undulating grassy knoll next to the Hite home's garbage pit was actually a mass murder site and that the hashmarks that she saw in a workshop weren't decorations, but sword slashes.
Hite lived in Taiwan for two years before her family returned to the States, spending the rest of her adolescence in Southern California. In 1973, she moved to Humboldt to study ceramics and experimental filmmaking, spending time in Chico and Sacramento before moving with her son, C. Hite-Trejo, to the Central Coast in 1997.
"I was 50-something when my hidden memories started coming back," Hite recalled. "I (gradually) pieced it together: Why did these grown men come and stand out front? Why did no one ever go to the back of the house? And why was there fear in everyone's eyes?"
Hite pieced together her recollections of Taiwan with the help of her father's photographed slides -- the inspiration behind her show's title, "From My Father's Eye to Mine."
The exhibition spans the gamut from Asian-influenced animation to wearable art, each piece representing a different aspect of Hite's creative journey. Photographs show glimpses of past art installations -- such as 1981's "Rag Kabuki Live!," a colorful commentary on poverty, and 1981's "13 Conceptual Days," which found Hite on a solo exploration of Death Valley. "Every day I was relaxed. I took my time. I would just travel around and see where my next site was," she said.
The founder of ART Zero, a collaboration of artists and individuals from the art and business communities, Hite ascribes to what she calls the "zero mind" approach, which emphasizes unstudied creativity. "You need to take the step of thinking out of it," she explained. "When I started doing things really spontaneously ... I really started liking my work."
Hite's ceramic pieces, especially her rough raku creations, reflect that approach.
Take 1975's "Madonna" and 2012's "Hostage," both entries of the same sculptural series. Inside the feminine, womb-like forms can be seen ball shapes bursting with vitality. "I wanted to depict something that really showed incredible energy, and that's what came to me," Hite explained.
Other pieces appear more purposeful.
"Conical Forms" features five straw hats -- the conical type commonly worn by field workers in Asia -- decorated with paint, feathers, faux flowers, tassels and beads. Hite said the piece was inspired by the farmhands she saw in Taiwan and her own experiences working during the Easter lily harvest in Del Norte County, which disproved her mother's belief that a good education would ward off poverty.
"This is my way of saying, 'I got down on my hands and knees and crawled through a field with two degrees in art,'" said Hite, who holds three degrees in ceramic sculpture studio arts, graduating from Riverside City College in 1973 with an associate degree, Humboldt State University in 1975 with a bachelor's degree and Sacramento State University in 1984 with a master's degree. (She also has a doctorate of divinity; friends call the artist "Rev" -- short for "Reverend.")
At the center of "From My Father's Eye to Mine" is the 2008 sculpture installation "Formosa." (The piece takes its name from Ilha Formosa ("Beautiful Island"), the Portuguese name for Taiwan.)
Situated next to 2015's "Shrine," a stand of withered bamboo stalks resembling a rice paddy, the large raku pot recalls a female field worker carrying scorched bamboo and ceramic canes.
Above the entrance of the vessel hover a clay mask, a reference to the handkerchiefs worn by raku potters and farmhands, and a singed straw hat; the entire assemblage is perched on a wooden platform over sand studded with Y-shaped ceramic forms-- "landscape graffiti," Hite said.
"There's always kind of a mystery about (Hite's) work, so you have to get close to it and look at it and think about it," Santa Margarita artist Melinda Forbes said. "That makes it even more intriguing."]]>
Forbes and her frequent collaborator, San Luis Obispo artist Julie Frankel, have worked with Hite several times over the years on The Peace Library, a community-based, collaborative art project centered on subjects of war and peace.
Describing Hite as a "complete nonconformist" whose work is designed to challenge and engage, Frankel said many of the artist's pieces draw on personal experience, often referencing unspecified atrocities or violence.
"Whatever the seminal experiences that she had in her life (were), that seems to be a very deep well that she goes back to again and again," Frankel said. "(Her work) evokes sensations, responses. It alludes to (events) but without being really knowable. That's part of what makes it art as opposed to a history lesson."
Hite acknowledged that she's still trying to find peace with her past.
"My life, my art and my mission have taken courage. People don't have to understand it," she wrote in an email. "It was my place to figure it all out. I think this is what my show as all about: fitting one more piece to the puzzle."
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Top Image: In the installation piece "The Gift," featured in the exhibition "From My Father's Eye to Mine: Sculpture and Documentary by C. Hite," the artist and her son, C. Hite-Trejo, carry brocade fabrics displayed on a bamboo pole -- a traditional Taiwanese wedding gift.]]>
Moments later, smiling, scarf-wearing women spit on the girl's fallen form. Children point and laugh.
That startling sequence is the opening scene of "pool '63," a politically and emotionally charged play about race, prejudice and perseverance. Created in collaboration with bree valle, who heads the drama department at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo; her husband, playwright and Cal Poly adjunct theater professor Philip Valle; and current and former Cuesta students, the production revisits a pivotal chapter in American civil rights history while drawing clear parallels between the nation's past and current conflicts in Ferguson, Mo., New York City and elsewhere.
"A play like this has perfect timing. It's a way we can utilize the stories of the past to comment on who we are in the present," said Josh Machamer, chair of Cal Poly's Theatre & Dance Department. "The play is about 1963, but it is still about us right now."
Cuesta presented "pool '63" at the regional Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival at Los Angeles last February, earning five national awards -- a huge accomplishment for San Luis Obispo County's only community college. This month, the play will represent the Kennedy Center at the International University Theatre Festival in Mexico City, sponsored by the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
bree valle predicted that "pool '63" will resonate with Mexican audiences as much as it's touched theatergoers in California. "Somebody said to me, 'Why do this show?' she said, and her answer was obvious. "If we don't talk about the past, we're going to recreate it in the future, and it will be the end of our civilization. We need to remember what fights brought us to where we are (today) ..."
Although "pool '63" takes place roughly a half-century ago, the play has its roots in something more recent -- the fatal shooting of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin by white Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in Sanford, Fla, in February 2012. Outraged by Zimmerman's acquittal that July, valle, who is Canadian, decided to research the history of race relations in the United States -- and was "absolutely flabbergasted" by what she found.
That summer, valle and her husband began work on a play that would tackle the nation's history head-on, bringing her students on board in the fall. "We showed up on the first day (of class) and she was like, 'You guys, what did this country do? ... What is wrong with you Americans?'" recalled Cuesta College student Rainey Forzetting, who stars in "pool '63."
After poring over historical accounts of the civil rights movement and consulting with African American congregation members at the Second Baptist Church in Paso Robles, valle and her team started swapping ideas -- building the production from the ground up using a method known as "devised theater." They eventually settled on a simple story about two girls and a swimming pool, said valle, who drew inspiration from children's books such as "Glory Be" by Augusta Scattergood.
Set during the summer of 1963 in Birmingham, Ala. -- once described by Martin Luther King, Jr., as "the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States" -- "pool '63" examines how the families of two nine-year-old girls are affected by the civil rights movement.
Segregation laws prevent best friends Rosa Jackson (Rainey Forzetting), who is black, and Caroline Woods (Olga Siebrass), who is white, from attending the same school, checking out books at the same library, playing in the same park and splashing in the same swimming pool.
The same prejudices shape the lives of Rosa's mother, Grace (Jayde Forzetting), and her progressive-minded employer, Peggy (Mary Kerrigan), who happens to be Caroline's mother. Even so, Rosa dreams of donning her goggles and diving in.
When the city announces it is reopening public pools to African Americans -- Birmingham Mayor Art Hanes famously closed scores of public spaces rather than comply with a federal court order to integrate them -- the news inspires hope in Rosa's dad, Donald (Meshack Burton), and cautious concern in Caroline's father, John (Daniel Lewis). Both men know that Birmingham is on the brink of immense change.
Jayde Forzetting compared the process of creating "pool '63," which premiered in December 2013, to a roller coaster ride -- describing it as "incredibly frustrating" yet immensely rewarding.
"Devising is one of the most irritating but creative situations I've ever been put into in my entire life," her twin sister, Rainey Forzetting added. "All of us have these ideas that we think are the best ideas of the entire world. We play with those ideas and we maybe keep one. ... Then we realize that that one idea was a piece of shit as well and we throw it away ... and have to start all over again."
While some of their classmates struggled with "pool '63's" difficult subject matter -- racial epithets are uttered, and scenes of brutality abound -- the Forzetting sisters wrestled with understanding their characters' experiences. "We were expected to feel the struggle. We were expected to automatically feel the hardships when, growing up in Atascadero ... we haven't encountered a lot of racism in our lives," Rainey Forzetting explained. "With this show, our biggest objective is to make it real."
Thanks to the students' hands-on approach to the material, "They have an ownership of the property -- unlike most shows, where they just memorize their part and they're done with it," Philip Valle said. "In this case, they actually have a personal stamp on their individual parts. They've helped shape them and bring them to life."
Rainey Forzetting echoed the playwright's words. "It isn't just a character we're taking over. It's someone who's literally a branch off ourselves," she said.
For that reason, bree valle said, she's seen the students grow. "They feel empowered, and they walk differently and they speak differently. And they feel that they have value -- more value, perhaps, than they did before," she said. "That's so thrilling."
That sense of empowerment and investment was evident to Machamer, who serves as a Kennedy Center American Theater Festival respondent. After he saw "pool '63," he insisted that the play be seen by a wider audience at the Kennedy Center's Region 8 festival, which featured college and university productions from Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Utah and Guam.
"Bree and Philip getting together in a room with students -- many of whom had never been on the stage before -- and creating that production is an extraordinary accomplishment," said Gregg Henry, artistic director of the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. "It was the most dynamic, progressive staging that we saw all last year."
"I'm proud of 'pool '63,'" Henry said, and he's proud that the "essentially timely" Cuesta production will represent the Kennedy Center in its first visit to the International University Theatre Festival. "This is the opening of what I hope to be a very productive and creative relationship" with arts leaders across the border, he said.
One of the aspects that attracted the Kennedy Center's attention was the minimal nature of the staging, sets and props. In "pool '63," plain wood blocks serve alternately as briefcases, school desks, daises and diving boards.
"The reason we stripped it down to nothing is because we had no money," valle explained. "We don't have money for a set. We don't have money for royalties."
"Our aesthetic is more toward things that are stripped down, actor-generated, movement-based," her husband added. "All the other, extraneous things that are often part of theater are things that we have been trying to omit more and more"
"Everyone's looking to have new methods of creating work, and we have our own specific method that is attractive to them," Philip Valle said. In fact, the Valles will lead a two-day devising workshop during the International University Theatre Festival, working with Mexican students to create an original theater piece based on their own nation's history.
Ultimately, the cast and crew of "pool '63" -- which includes technical director Richard Jackson, a Cuesta faculty member -- hope the production inspires audiences everywhere to take a hard look at the current state of the civil rights landscape.
"We tend to turn our heads and shy away from ... how people are being treated, because as long as we don't hear about it, as long as we don't see it, it's not happening," Rainey Forzetting said, which is why the culture is so slow to change.. "With theater, we're forcing you to confront it right in that moment. If you still choose not to do anything, it's going to eat at you."
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Top Image: Abraham Slezak, Brandon Harris, Greg Threlkeld, Ferris Franzen and Jayde Forzetting appear in a scene from "pool '63." Photo by Chris Kamas.]]>
"Mother Earth has been in dreamland. She's been asleep," Santa Margarita artist Jennifer Blue explained, describing her piece "Reawakening." "She wakes up from her dream and looks around and goes, 'What's going on? I'm pissed off and I need to take some action here.' "
"Earth Gowns: Narrative Dresses, Stitched Storytelling" examines humankind's relationship with the environment through the medium of handcrafted clothing. The exhibition, which runs through Jan. 31 at the Steynberg Gallery in San Luis Obispo and Aug. 19 through Sept. 24 at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, is the latest collaboration between Central Coast artists Julie Frankel and Melinda Forbes.
Although based in different disciplines -- Frankel, a San Luis Obispo resident, is primarily a mixed-media painter, while Forbes is a fabric artist, dressmaker and organic gardener based in Santa Margarita -- the two share an interest in sustainability and the environment.
As a self-described "real recycler," "I have a commitment to reusing and re-appreciating some of the things that have been thrown away," Forbes said, adding that the concept of "value" has changed as the clothing industry has mostly shifted from creating high-quality garments to inexpensive, easily disposable clothing. "Now 'value' is finding something cheap -- 'Oh, I got it at Forever 21 for $3!'"
At the same time that college students snap up tissue-thin T-shirts sewn in South Asian sweatshops, Frankel added, the upper echelons of society eagerly purchase designer handbags at outrageous prices. "For some of us, it's downright offensive to look at an ad in The New York Times fashion magazine for a purse that costs $4,500," she said. "It's not even 'Oh, I would never buy that.' It's 'That is wrong.' "
She and Forbes prefer fashion statements that double as political ones. (Although "Earth Gowns" deals primarily with the environment, a future exhibition may explore social justice issues in fashion. "Cheap clothing can only be produced if you're paying subsistence wages to women in underdeveloped countries," Frankel said.)
In 2011, Forbes organized the exhibit "The White Gowns" at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art. She and her fellow artists -- Blue, Peg Eckert and Nancy Martin -- created elegant, ethereal white dresses using recycled materials such as vintage wedding dresses, table cloths and plastic shopping bags.
Forbes said that exhibition was aimed at awakening art lovers to the precious nature of materials that would otherwise be thrown away. "Creating beauty does not have to be going out and buying things to enrich our lives," she told the Mustang News, Cal Poly's student-run newspaper, in 2011. "It can be achieved using what we already have."
To create a total of 20 "Earth Gowns" pieces, each of them paired with a poem or statement, 10 San Luis Obispo County women combed through thrift stores, rummaged through rag bags and even foraged for seed pods, leaves, lichen, bark and woodpecker feathers at a local park. "Each artist had the opportunity to develop a gown that represented, to them, an aspect of nature," Forbes explained.
She created a pair of garments for "Earth Gowns" inspired by Demeter, the ancient Greek goddess of grain and the harvest, and her daughter Persephone, who was abducted by the god Hades and taken to his home in the underworld. While "Demeter's Gown" reflects her life-giver status with a spangled seed bag and subtle floral motif, "Persephone's Gown" features an elaborate patchwork that includes bits of embroidery, Victorian-era quilt remnants and tattered scraps of lace, linen and silk.
"All these pieces represents those gowns that she's worn over the generations," Forbes explained. "This (dress) protects her modesty when she's down there with her husband and it also connects her to her mother and the earth."
Frankel's pieces use paper -- painted, printed, pleated into origami-style folds -- as their primary medium. "A dawn chorus of her friends" is decorated with images of the birds she spots in her backyard, including quails, grosbeaks, cedar waxwings and hooded orioles, while "The Butterfly Effect" salutes a different kind of winged visitor.
"She wanders the forest," which features Asian-influenced flower and leaf motifs, take its inspiration from Japanese street fashion's Mori girls, young women who crave a closer connection with nature and a simpler, less cluttered lifestyle. "It's a little bit of the fantasy of living in the woods," Frankel explained, adding that nearly all Mori girls live in urban settings.
Many of the "Earth Gowns" participants are members of the local Ragtime Collective, which specializes in "wearable art and functional craft." Backroom Bazaar, running concurrently with "Earth Gowns," features items created by the group, which started at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo and now meets monthly at Forbes' home.
"This is all new to me, to sew," said Arroyo Grande ceramics artist Meg Johnson. "I joined Ragtime because I thought it was time for a change. I'm thinking I want to say to say 'yes' to everything now."]]> Johnson's piece "Her Voice" is built around a simple cotton shift dyed with terra-cotta clay as a nod to her pottery past. A bustle fashioned from her 44-year-old tulle wedding veil reflects her personal history, and a "medicine apron" made of copper dish-scrubbing pads evokes her Cherokee and Celtic heritage.
"Copper has medical properties. It's a healing substance," so it's a suitable material to adorn Mother Earth, explained Johnson, a self-described "medicine woman" who goes by the "Earth walk name" Buffalo Heart Woman. "Basically I'm saying we need to heal her."
"Her Voice" is paired with "Connection with Star Nation," a dramatic headdress fashioned from a palm tree blossom; "Walk softly on Mother Earth," shoes made with persimmon tops, eucalyptus bark and moss; and "Life, Death, Rebirth," a delicate necklace featuring a snake skin discovered in Ojai and tilapia bones and shells salvaged from the Salton Sea.
San Luis Obispo native Stacy Williams, who's primarily a painter, also branched into new territory in "Earth Gowns." "When I heard what they were doing with 'Earth Gowns,' it just struck a chord with me," she said. "That's a theme that's been part of my work for a long time -- our relationship with the natural world."
Her gown "She Wraps Herself in Indra's Web," which started life as a lacy black peignoir, takes its title from Vedic mythology and the infinite, jewel-spangled web, or net, hanging over the god Indra's palace. "It's a metaphor for the interconnectedness of life," she explained.
"She Dances in the Briny Sea of Creation" examines "the idea of the sea as the source, as the origin of life," Williams said, with a mermaid-skirted gown featuring seaweed, shells and hand-painted fabrics ruched to resemble ocean waves. And the whimsical "Aunt Leaf" uses lichen, leaves, seed pods and the remains of a once-living Christmas tree to recall a childlike love of nature.
"All these pieces really have their roots in my childhood experiences of mystical communication in nature, feeling that sense of awe," she said. "I feel this real connection to the landscape here."
While the majority of the garments in "Earth Gowns" veer toward the delicate and feminine, Blue's "Reawakening" takes a more aggressive tone with belted olive-green coveralls embellished with found metal objects, camouflage netting and rust-colored tulle and paired with a mosquito-netting hat and a bridal shrug.
"It's not time for a gossamer gown. It's time for combat," the Santa Margarita dressmaker said, adding that the dress represented a different direction for her. "This gown was a little more masculine, not quite bridal fluffy."
Local dancers will don "Reawakening" and other "Earth Gowns" creations on Jan. 17 for "Gaia in Motion." Directed by Anet Carlin, founder of Atascadero's Brickyard Theatre, the performance piece will feature choreography by Central Coast choreographers Joy Becker and Jude Warnisher and live music by San Luis Obispo musician/mixed-media artist Timo Beckwith.
According to Forbes and Frankel, "Gaia in Motion" speaks to the collaborative aspect that is at the heart of "Earth Gowns" and the other art exhibitions they've orchestrated. Since creating The Peace Library, a community-based, collaborative art project, in 2002, they've organized several exhibitions of artists' books dealing with the subjects of war and peace, as well as the 2013 exhibition "Up in Arms: A Creative Response to Gun Violence," featuring 100 protest posters.
"To make traditional hand-stitched garments ... requires a big investment of time," Frankel explained. "That's one of the reasons it was crucial to put together a group of artists to allow the show to come together in under a year."
The "Earth Gowns" artists provided each other with a source of support and practical problem solving throughout the entire process. "There's just many levels of collaboration going on between people who don't necessarily know each other, and a really, easy, lovely flow to the whole project," Forbes said.
Said Blue, "Just being in the same room with all these women is amazing. The energy just explodes around us."
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Top Image: "Her Voice" by Meg Johnson and "The Great Mother's Autumn Sojourn" by Susan Lara are two of the nature-inspired art gowns that appear in the exhibition "Earth Gowns: Narrative Gowns, Stitched Storytelling," running through January in San Luis Obispo.]]>
"The fact that it's handmade gives it meaning," said Carol Sauvion, owner of Freehand Gallery in Los Angeles, creator of the Peabody Award-winning television series "Craft in America" and executive director of the nonprofit organization of the same name. "Living with these things is life-changing, and it always has been."
Sauvion is the juror for "Dimensions: An Exhibition of Fine Craft from California," which runs Sept. 5 through Oct. 12 at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art. Sponsored by Central Coast Craftmakers, the biennial show explores the full breadth of contemporary craftmaking in the Golden State, encompassing clay, fiber, glass, metal, wood, paper and other media.
In addition to showcasing nearly 80 works by about 70 artists, this year's exhibition also honors four local artists who died in the past year: Barbara Flynn and Ken Ray of Los Osos, Ina Mae Overman of Arroyo Grande and Janine Kirkpatrick of Templeton.
According to San Luis Obispo silversmith and sculptor Crissa Hewitt, craft has been an essential aspect of human civilization since the start. "All of us, from the beginning of time, have found ways to adorn ourselves, decorate our homes (and) our habitats, create objects that we hope we can barter and trade with," she said.
Hewitt traces the roots of the studio craft movement to the years following World War II, when universities -- responding to the needs of veterans entering the higher education system on the G.I. Bill, as well as an influx of skilled European artists, craftspeople and designers -- began offering advanced courses on metalworking, glassblowing and other disciplines.
"There was a real hunger for people creating things," she said, buoyed by a growing dissatisfaction with industrial society and mass-produced goods.
As the craft movement continued to flourish through the 1950s and 1960s, "(Artists) were teaching the techniques but they were also encouraging an awful lot of exploration," Hewitt said. "There were people who were going out on a limb and saying, 'This is what I'm going to do with a lump of clay.'"
Over the decades, those craftspeople have only grown more fearlessly inventive, their originality expanding the definition of what is considered "craft." "In a society where everything is regimented, it's nice there's a place where there's freedom," Sauvion said.
"You will often hear the argument that fine art has real meaning behind it and purpose, whereas craft is about function. That's often how the separation has been made," Hewitt explained. However, she and her peers contend that contemporary fine crafts manifest the same spirit of artistic expression, creativity and intellectual curiosity as anything traditionally appreciated as "fine art."
In the 15 years she's spent interviewing artists, curators and gallery owners on the KCBX public radio show "Ears on Art," It's absolutely been borne out to (co-host) Steven deLuque and to me that people are very immersed in process," Hewitt said, adding that artists are interested not only in "the technical process of 'How do I make this?' but (also) the emotional process of 'What am I making? And why?'"
Kathleen DePalma: Sacred Scenes
It all starts with craftsmanship for mixed-media artist Kathleen De Palma.
"I have a great appreciation of the materials I work with, and I try to manipulate them carefully and with as much skill as I can," said the San Luis Obispo native, who has lived in Morro Bay for the past 15 years.
Painting came first for De Palma, who has a bachelor of fine arts degree from California College of the Arts in Oakland. But while running a craft gallery in Cambria with mixed-media artist Ruth Fash in the mid-1990s, she realized she was missing out.
"I was like, 'She's having so much more fun than I am,'" joked De Palma, who decided to try out three-dimensional art.
"For me it was just a fun way to explore things I couldn't paint," she recalled. "There were no limits to what my subjects could be, what my materials to be. It was just up to me to construct (the pieces)."
Housed in wooden cigar boxes, De Palma's meticulously crafted miniature tableaux feature wire armatures covered in papier-mâché, posed and covered in acrylic paint. (She also creates mixed-media paintings, layering canvas, lace and string.)
De Palma compares her creations to reliquaries dedicated to housing sacred objects. In place of a dusty knucklebone or saintly shroud, however, viewers might find a sultry snake charmer, a mischievous monkey or legendary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo enjoying a smoke.
Because De Palma's pieces evolve as she constructs them - she has the ability to swap out accessories or body parts at will -- "I have this incredible freedom to go back and redesign things," she said. "The process in the main part of it. I'm as involved from the moment I begin to when it's finished."
De Palma's current series, The Circus, was inspired in part by "Calder's Circus," Alexander Calder's toy theater piece.
It celebrates the golden age of traveling circuses, when acrobats, clowns and freak show performers held the nation in thrall. "This was the big show. There was no limit to the amount of imagination and money that went into it," she said.
De Palma acknowledged that her work can be fragile, like the Latin American folk art she admires. "Part of what I love about it is the ephemeral quality," said the artist, who spent a year living and studying in Michoacán, Mexico. "It's just this joy of creation in the moment."
Doug Lawrie: Truth Through Heat
For Atascadero ceramics artist Doug Lawrie, few forms can match the appeal of the simple sake cup.
"Anyone can make a big pot that impresses people. To make a little cup that has soul or feeling is really a challenge," he said.
Lawrie, who grew up in Claremont, originally studied architecture. After spending two years stationed in Hawaii with the U.S. Army, he enrolled in the architecture program at Claremont Graduate University.
"I look a night course in ceramics, which kind screwed my whole life up," he said. "I decided it was a lot more fun making clay objects than trying to fight the system to make an interesting structure. ... That finished it off. I was a dyed-in-the-wool potter."
"(Japan) was mecca for potters in those days. ...It (was) an artform there, where in America it was just beginning to gain steam," recalled Lawrie, so he moved there. "I went for a month's trip and ended up staying for 26 years."
During that time, he established a folk craft shop, restored a 300-year-old farmhouse in the mountains outside Kyoto and studied with potter Kawai Kanjiro, one of the founders of Japan's folk art movement. It was in Japan that Lawrie developed his affinity for functional, high-fired stoneware with rich, earthy glazes produced in wood-burning kilns.
"As a human, you can do everything possible to make (a piece) come out as you desire," he said. "(But) when it goes into high-temperature firing, you totally lose control. The gods take over." "That's what keeps potters going ... No matter how many years you've done it, it's still exciting to open the door of the kiln and see what happened," the ceramics artist added.
The same element of unpredictability motivates his preference for slab-built forms as opposed to wheel-thrown pieces. "If I knew what it was going to do, I wouldn't do it," he said. "It's the discovery along the way ... (that) is fun."
Upon his return to the United States, Lawrie taught ceramics at UC Santa Barbara for a couple years, then spent two decades running the state Arts-in-Corrections program at Avenal State Prison before retiring. He's lived in Atascadero for about a quarter-century.
"I get as much joy from making pottery as doing anything. It's immensely satisfying. It's totally open-ended in scope," Lawrie said. "There's all kinds of clay one can explore. There's all kinds of glazes one can explore. There's thousands of shapes and approaches."
Andi Perejda: Fabric of Her Imagination
"Wood and stone speak to the sculptor or the woodworker," said Arroyo Grande artist, teacher and quilt judge Andi Perejda, "and the fabric speaks to me."
But the Kalamazoo, Mich., native didn't start out as a fiber artist. Perejda, who holds a doctorate in cell biology from Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., spent 10 years as a medical researcher specializing in connective tissue.
But after moving to the Central Coast with her neurosurgeon husband in 1990, she gave up her career to raise her two sons. "In between babies," Perejda, who had sewed all her own clothes in high school, discovered quilting.
"It was a way of being creative and having something to show for it," Perejda said. Put another way, she added, "It was a sanity plea."
After learning traditional techniques such as hand applique, hand piecing and hand quilting, Perejda began branching out into other, more inventive avenues - using surface design techniques such as bleaching, dyeing, painting, stamping and screen-printing to transform textiles from boring to brilliant.
Once altered, "The fabric itself isn't telling you what it needs to be," she explained. "You can use your own creativity or imagination."
What feeds Perejda's imagination most is traveling. "Some things are so spectacular that you come home and know you want to create that (sight)" in fabric form, said the quilter, who uses photographs from her trips as reference points. "My husband takes gorgeous pictures, so I'm always chasing him around saying 'Take a picture of this. Take a picture of that.'"
Perejda's quilt "Hamakua Coast" recreates the dramatic vista from a favorite trail on the island of Hawaii, while "Golden State: Los Alamos" captures the live oak trees dappling the golden hills of northern Santa Barbara County.
Other quilts venture into more esoteric territory, exploring climate change, civil rights and space travel. "Occasionally a pattern or design might catch my eye because it reminds me of my scientific background," said Perejda, whose work has incorporated imagery from electromicrographs of blood vessels and CT brain scans.
According to Perejda, attitudes toward fiber art have shifted over the past few years. "I think we've proven over the years that there're just some absolutely incredible pieces being made," she said. "(Art) has progressed to the point where many people are using fabric as their medium instead of paint or wood. It's just a different way of expressing it."
Randy Stromsoe: A Study in Silver
By modern metalworking standards, silversmith Randy Stromsoe is a bit old-fashioned.
A Templeton resident since 1979, "I do things like they were done in 1920," he said, relying on antique tools and a hands-on approach that's increasingly rare in an era when most metalsmiths are being taught by universities. "I don't bring in too many of the new techniques. There's no CAD program, no shortcuts."
Stromsoe's introduction to silversmithing came while taking art classes at L.A. Valley College, when he accidentally enrolled in a jewelry class with instructor Zella Margraff. "As soon as we started working in sterling silver, I fell in love," he said, drawn by the elastic yet durable nature of the metal.
In 1970, he became the final apprentice of master Arts and Crafts silversmith Porter Blanchard. "I had to learn at break-neck speed, as his days were numbered," recalled Stromsoe, who later trained with Blanchard's son-in-law, Lewis Wise.]]> In the course of his four-decade-long career, Stromsoe has crafted pieces for the White House, the U.S. State Department and even the Vatican. (The Archdiocese of Los Angeles commissioned him to create the ciborium, or communion wafer container, used by Pope John Paul II to administer mass to at Dodgers Stadium in 1987.)
So what drives Stromsoe's artistic vision? Awe and appreciation for the modernist masters who came before him, as well an affinity for sleek, sculptural designs.
"I'm always playing around with shapes," the silversmith said. "I always feel a little guilty ... over obsessing and indulging myself," he joked. "It's like, 'Here's Randy again, playing with another form.'"
His speckled "Penguin" teapot combines smooth, sophisticated curves and sharp angles, while his "Macaroni and Teas" tea set features containers bowed in a graceful backbend, their wooden handles resting level with their bases.
"I don't feel the need to sacrifice form and good design in order to make something functional. I don't apologize for making functional pieces," said Stromsoe, who prides himself not only on the quality of his pieces but their durability as well. "There are no construction flaws and no weak links. These pieces could last 500 years."
Rather than lock away his flatware, plates, cups, chalices and bowls, Stromsoe prefers that his customers keep them in daily rotation, explaining that regular use actually helps preserve the metal.
"I want to make it so when people use a teapot, even if they only use it every couple months, it's a fun thing to use," he said.
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Top Image: "Artist Inspired Cups" by Ani Garrick will be featured in "Dimensions: An Exhibition of Fine Craft from California" at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art.]]>
"You can never tell what you're going to see out here," explained Abel, who moved to the Central Coast from Carlsbad in January 2013. It's here, surrounded by the bucolic beauty of northern San Luis Obispo County, that the former journalist has found space to expand his artistic vision: rock-inflected classical music with a strikingly contemporary edge.
According to Delos Productions Inc. Director Carol Rosenberger, Abel's compositions demonstrate authenticity, emotional depth and a serious dedication to craft.
"I'm really excited to see something of that quality come out of California. He's really made quite a contribution already," said Rosenberger, whose Sonoma-based record label has released two of Abel's albums so far. "The Dream Gallery: Seven California Portraits" came out in 2012, and "Terrain of the Heart: Song Cycles of Mark Abel" was released in February.
Rosenberger isn't the only artistic heavyweight who thinks highly of Abel, who was honored in July by the Los Angeles chapter of the American Composers Forum. He recently collaborated with Los Angeles author, publisher and librettist Kate Gale on a song cycle based on her upcoming book.
The son of Pulitzer Prize and Peabody Award-winning journalist and author Elie Abel, Mark Abel spent his early years immersed in classical music and jazz before discovering rock 'n' roll.
"I was fortunate to start listening in the early 1960s," Abel said. "If it had been some other decade where my ears were really fresh and taking in everything, I probably wouldn't have received so much quality stimuli."
Still, he added, "It wasn't until I was about 17 or 18 (that) I started saying, 'Hmmm, I love this stuff. Why don't I get a guitar and start learning how to play this?'"
After two years at Stanford University - he dropped out without declaring a major - Abel moved to New York City, where he worked as a guitarist, bassist and songwriter in the 1970s and early 1980s. In addition to serving as a live sound engineer for Television and Talking Heads and producer for The Bongos and The Feelies, he led the bands City Lights and Architecture.
Abel left his rock career behind when he returned to the Bay Area in 1983, taking a job at a Palo Alto newspaper. He joined the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle two and a half years later.
"The whole time I had been in journalism, I had been continuing to work on my music very doggedly at home," recalled Abel, who stepped down as the Chronicle's foreign editor in 2004 to focus on music full time.
He credits advances in MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) technology with giving him the tools needed to expand his skills as a composer. "I realized, 'Here's the key that's going to unlock the opening chapters of my being (able) to write more complex music,'" he said, despite his lack of formal training.
Abel released two self-produced albums - 2006's "Songs of Life, Love and Death" and 2008's "Journey Long, Journey Far" - before signing with Delos.
Rosenberger described popping the demo for "The Dream Gallery" into her CD player for the first time. "Seventy-some minutes later, I emerged. I could not stop (listening)," the classical pianist recalled. "I just had not ever experienced anything like it."
According to Abel, the overarching narrative of "The Dream Gallery" echoes that "hoary cliché about California being a place that people come to realize their dreams."
"It's a cliché but it's also true," the composer said. "Therefore I felt it was fair game to talk about what these people were hoping to achieve (and) how they may have gotten off track."
Over the course of "The Dream Gallery," which features seven vocalists and the La Brea Sinfonietta conducted by Sharon Lavery, listeners meet characters including "Helen" the desperate Los Angeles divorcee, "Luz" the "proud yet determined" Soledad farmworker and "Adam" the aimless Arcata college grad.
Abel showcases the Bay Area as well, offering a sardonic portrait of a smug, elitist Berkeley in "Naomi" and a sympathetic view of crime-ridden, poverty-stricken Richmond in "Lonnie." "It's just people trying to tell their truths, ungarnished, whether we like them or not," he explained.
While "The Dream Gallery" charts the psychological landscape of the Golden State, Abel's most recent album delves deeper to explore the "Terrain of the Heart."
The emotionally charged album features Los Angeles pianist Victoria Kirsch and sopranos Jamie Chamberlin and Ariel Pisturino. Chamberlin and Kirsch will perform selections from "Terrain of the Heart" on Aug. 17 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Glendale as part of the Unsung: Songs Uncommon and New concert series.
Opening the album is the song cycle "The Dark-Eyed Chameleon," a profound and powerful narrative of love and loss inspired by Abel's own agonizing breakup. "I could have not dealt with it. I could have sublimated it and never turned it into a piece or art," the composer said. "But it needed to come out."
Romance and redemption return as themes in the reflective "Rainbow Songs," while "Five Songs of Rainier Marie Rilke" explores the enigmatic masterpieces of the German poet.
Comparing his songs to short stories, Abel said his goal as a composer is "to get the listener to latch onto the journey that's going on" by placing them "in some kind of spot where they think they're encountering a real person, even if it's somebody that I've just made up."
"La Sonnambula," part of the "Rainbow Songs" cycle, was selected as one of the winners of the American Composers Forum's 2014 Composition Competition showcasing pieces written for voice and piano. Winning works were performed July 15 at Boston Court Performing Arts Center in Pasadena.
"What the judges were looking at were scores that are going to end up being performed over and over in concert halls around the country," explained Gale, president of the American Composers Forum of Los Angeles since 2006. "In other words, the composers are working at a high level of mastery and excellence."
Abel approached Gale last fall about writing a libretto for his upcoming opera, "Home Is a Harbor." He ended up penning his own. Then the composer decided to set to music "five wonderful, very visceral poems" from Gale's book "Echo Light," which will be published by Red Mountain Press of Santa Fe, N.M., this fall.
"They come from a deep place, but they almost break the surface in terms of your being able to feel the power that's behind them," Abel said of the poems, praising Gale's fearless approach to her subject matter. "She has the gift for saying things that (other) people would like to say but often squelch."
Gale said Abel's music shares a sensibility with her own work. "I get the feeling of being on the West Coast and being on the edge of the world. And the edge of your life," she said.
"You come to L.A. to reinvent yourself," explained Gale, managing editor of Pasadena's Red Hen Press and editor of the Los Angeles Review. "At that point, that raw, edgy feeling you have is that anything is possible and that you can create anything. That's the feeling that ... flows through my poetry most consistently."
"Home Is a Harbor," which Abel plans to record with the Gale song cycle as a double album, seeks to capture a different facet of California culture.
Set in the near past, the opera follows twin sisters Lisa and Laurie as they leave their hometown of Morro Bay; one sibling moves to New York City and becomes a successful yet creatively stifled artist, while the other attends Cal Poly before being recruited by an unscrupulous reverse-mortgage company in Orange County.
Asked why he set the opera on the Central Coast, Abel said he views the area as "one of the last unspoiled places in terms of cultural pollution." "I don't get the idea that (people here) are as enthralled by mass consumerist culture," he said. "They don't feel obliged to jump every time these powers say 'jump.'"
Abel also wanted a narrative that would be accessible to modern audiences. "It wouldn't be natural for me to write some high-falutin' story about knights in shining armor," he said. "I'm just not interested in the 18th and 19th century subject matter that a lot of operas (use)."
Abel acknowledged that his stance, like his unique musical background, sets him apart from much of the classical crowd. "I'm just trying to do something that has (a) contemporary feel, that people can relate to," he said.
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Top Image: San Simeon composer Mark Abel finds inspiration in his scenic surroundings. Photo by Chris Daly.