Please join me on Thursday, March 5th at the offices of Lennar Urban in San Francisco for an art reception and artist Q&A. I will be showing some of my smaller mixed media work, and fellow Shipyard Artist Ellen Markoff will also have work on display.
Lennar Urban is located at One Sansome, Suite 3200 (click here for map)
You can invite friends and RSVP to the event on Facebook here.
Thanks and see you on March 5th!
I can't believe I:
1) went to Las Vegas,
2) saw one of the most amazing works of art I have ever seen,
3) and this was not a museum or even a gallery, but at a mall.
Hidden inside the fourth floor of an enormous Louis Vuitton store is an art installation by the contemporary artist James Turrell. Turrell creates installations using variations of natural, artificial, and colored light that alter our perceptions of reality. As Turrell explains, "I am interested in the physicality of light and feeling its physicality in my work. I like the psychological impact and emotional impact of light and color."
James Turrell's work is rooted in the study of psychology and light. His expansive career includes creating "sky spaces" by excavating a crater in the Painted Desert (called Roden Crater), and last year he transformed the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum by immersing the interior with a combination of natural and artificial light.
"I didn't want to use light as we normally use it, that is to illuminate other things - I was interested in the thingness of light itself, so the light became the revelation." - James Turrell
Seeing (or rather experiencing) his artwork is difficult to articulate. We see light, yet we also experience light with our body and mind, and it is this concept that Turrell's work articulates. As the artist explains:
"Light goes into the skin. From that we make Vitamin D, so we are literally light eaters; it's part of our diet."
In Las Vegas at the Louis Vuitton store at the City Center, Turrell has created an indoor installation using a "ganzfeld effect" - a visual sensory encounter altering perception through light and space.
Seeing Turrell's Las Vegas work is free, but an appointment is required. When you go to your appointment at the clothing store, you are taken up an elevator to the fourth floor. The dimly lit chamber you enter from the elevator has black walls in order to adjust your eyes for what you are about to experience.
The incredibly friendly and knowledgeable Louis Vuitton staff then offer you a Perrier, have you sign a three page waiver, and explain the artwork and artist to you. You learn how the name of the work, "Akhob", is derivative from the Egyptian word for "pure water."
Next you are taken to a room and told to take your shoes off and put disposable shoe covers on your bare feet. It's odd, but the reasoning soon becomes evident. You then walk up several steps towards a white dome shaped structure with a large opening.
When you stand at the top of the stairs, you see that the cavernous space leads to another large room. The walls and ceilings of this 1,200 square foot space are pristine and white - there are no smudges or evidence that anyone has set foot in here before you. You are accompanied by two staff, and one of the girls walks you to the end of the second chamber. She walks to what is presumably the end of the second chamber and explains that you are not to walk past her because there is a six foot drop and in addition to falling, you will also trigger an alarm. You cannot see the edge. She also tells you to remember that the back wall where you entered does not change colors. At this moment, the wall looks emerald green.
What happens next is a twenty minute sequence of lights that alters your perception of space and vision. It's hallucinatory and surreal. The sequence starts off as pink, then red and orange and goes through a myriad of colors. My friend Helen and I stood there, quietly observing. It was serene. Talking seemed inappropriate, almost like we were at church. I looked through the first chamber towards the back wall which was once green, and it had turned now brown. The two chambers were designed to mimic the shape of our eyes, and this is evident when standing towards the edge of the second room. Helen's face looked orange. The Louis Vuitton guide who was wearing all white now looked purple, almost ultraviolet. Then blue. Everything around me kept changing. Different waves of colors appear and disappear, bathing the entire space with its intangible presence.
Photo courtesy of Louis Vuitton.
One of the best things about this artwork is its intimacy. Appointments are limited to six people at a time. It is also not a highly publicized exhibition. I learned about it through word of mouth, and the clandestine nature plus the exclusivity of it being in a luxury store adds to the experience.
The second thing I really like about this and all of Turrell's work is its simplicity. This work needs no explanation. You do not necessarily need to know about Turrell's background in order to appreciate this work. Too often, contemporary art needs to be placed in a context and explained to us. Art can be intimidating. Yet with Turrell, we can enjoy this work whether we have our doctorate in art history or no prior knowledge of the artist. My experience is just as validated and as meaningful as my friend's who accompanied me, and she had never heard of the artist.
In addition to excavating volcanos, Turrell has also had major exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Kayne Griffin Corcoran in Los Angeles. You can see more of his work here.
To visit James Turrell's Akhob, call (702) 730-3150.
You can read more about the art collection at the CityCenter Shopping Center in Las Vegas here.
I had the pleasure of recently speaking with the French artist Dominique Caron. Her paintings evoke the gestural force of abstract expressionism, yet her work is incredibly refined. She makes abstract painting look easy. Controlling such chaos is very difficult. Her paintings seem to sing like a Kandinsky work does.
Dominique always painted but her art career started in San Francisco. She was born in France, then spent her 20s living in Africa. Returning to France after being abroad seemed unthinkable, and so she moved to the Bay Area. In California, she started making tribal masks like the ones she had seen in Africa. They were soon being sold in galleries. I was interested in speaking with her not so much about her work, but about her path to becoming a successful artist. I wanted to know what advice she might have for young artists wanting to pursue art as a full time career. Here are some highlights from our conversation and you can seen her work here.
Think of yourself as a businesswoman. You are running a business.
Network network network.
Reinvest 10-15% of your profit back into your business.
Emails are ok, but printed cards are better. People will delete emails but keep cards.
Work big and do not make prints.
Never mark your work down, ie put "sale" next to a price. It cheapens your artwork.
It is better to price your work a little low than have it be overpriced.
The return on showing at cafes and non-gallery venues is very low.
Buy canvases in packs of twenty. Make a lot of work. Two out of ten paintings will sell so make fifty.
If you have an idea or something that you are passionate about, express it. You can work in different themes.
Work on several paintings at once.
Make a budget.
There is a lot of competition, but a lot of people are not really good.
If you have to get a job in the beginning, get a job in the arts.
I did not have high expectations for this past weekend's art fair in San Francisco. There are too many art fairs, and I therefore expected the quality of work presented would be mediocre at best. I was quite pleasantly surprised at what I saw. The emphasis of the work shown was on process, such as Hiroshi Sugimoto's photos made from electricity, Etsuko's Ichikawa's "pyrograph" paintings made by melting glass over paper, and Dustin Yellin's collages of intricately cut images layered in glass which recall a modernized Heironymus Bosch. One of show's highlights was a video by the artist Jim Campbell, who coded LED lights to mimic video of traffic and the result was shown behind a block of frosted glass. It had the same mesmerizing aesthetic beauty of a James Turrell but animated. The fair, however, was not technology heavy and there was a solid balance between photography, painting, and design. There were some unfamiliar works by heavyweight artists Wayne Thiebaud and Julie Mehretu (the latter who was just awarded the U.S. Department of State's Medal of Arts). Here are some of the highlights:
This post explains the method I use for creating the mixed media works.
I take a lot of pictures. I take photos with my phone when I am walking or driving, and I see something that I know intuitively will work well as a painting.
When I start a painting, I go through all of my photos and choose one. I edit and crop the picture on my computer so it will fit on the canvas the way I want it to. I do this process for all of my works, not only for the mixed media works. I like tweaking photos to maximize the effect that I want the painting to have. Here is an example of a painting I did where I spent a lot time finding the "perfect" edit. I wanted the figure to be slightly off center so the folds in her robe would be emphasized. I like having figures slightly cropped so their bodies are pushing off the edge of the canvas, thus not revealing all of the figure. I think this creates a little bit of tension and therefore makes for better composition.
Once I have the perfect photo, I do a line drawing of it on an 11x14" sheet of acetate, which is the same thing as a clear transparency. I use the Sakura Pigma Micron pens in sizes 1 and 3.
Example of drawing done on 11x14" acetate in pen. I use nail polish and a q-tip to clean up, erase, or redo any smudged lines
Next I block in some of the color on the back of the transparency with acrylic paint. I block in color for the main areas on the back of the transparency.
The opposite (front) side of the drawing now looks like this.
Next I paint the mixed media paper (also 11x14"). I block color in and paint the general composition of the painting. After making sure the drawing and painting correspond, I continue alternating between building up the texture and composition on the paper.
I add more paint to the back of the acetate.
I do this process using brushes and often with a palette knife. hen I remove a lot of the paint by scraping it with the palette knife so the composition on the canvas shows through.
I continue working like this: adding and removing pain. I build up the paint, create, and remove layers on the acetate, while simultaneously working on the paper and adding more paint there as well.
Here is the final result. When seen in person, the work looks three dimensional because of the layers created between the acetate and the paper.
When viewed as a photograph on the web, most people ask me if the work is a watercolor. These paintings are difficult to photograph because of the glass like reflection the acetate creates. Here you can see three different photos of the same painting photographed under different light as to minimize the reflection.
It is a long process because of the many steps involved. It usually takes around 3 hours for me to do the drawing, sometimes longer, and then about 10-20 additional hours for the painting; this in addition to taking the photo and spending anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours editing the photo. Sometimes I obsess over a tiny area and spend a lot of time trying to get the color and movement of the paint perfect on both the acetate and the paper. My goal is for the work to look effortless, but this is created by intense scrutiny and constantly reworking the paint. I recently did a painting of Chicago only to find that the painting on paper did not look right. It looked okay, but the "feeling" that I wanted the painting to have was not there. I could not figure out how to make it look better, so I redid the entire painting on paper.
What Is It Like To Be An Artist?
This is a question people ask me ALL the time. Actually, no. Not really. Not ever. But just in case you were going to ask me, here is a list of ten great things about being an artist, followed by ten no-so-great things.
10 Great Things About Being An Artist:
1. You make your own hours. You can go to a mall at 10AM on a Tuesday, eat lunch at 3PM, or stay up all night and finish work at 6AM.
2. You are all caught up on the Serial Podcast. As well as every other podcast. Also all of your friend’s Spotify playlists.
3. No office dress code. You can wear whatever you want to your studio. Including your pajamas/yoga clothes/fleece lined super baggy comfortable-as-hell track pants to work.
4. You don’t stare at a computer all day.
5. You don’t have to sit all day. You get to stand while you work. You can even take a break whenever you want.
6. No gossipy coworkers or office politics.
7. No bad managers. If fact, no managers. You are the boss.
8. Showering every day is optional.
9. You sometimes get big paychecks.
10. You can be grumpy all day long.
10 Not-So-Great Things About Being An Artist:
1. The money. You don’t have steady income when you first start out or maybe even five years down the line. Maybe ten years. You might get a big fat paycheck but it might only come once every three months. It takes a long time to build up your career.
2. You secretly hate telling strangers what you do. You fear everyone thinks you drink all day à la Bukowski and rarely work. We do no have a reputation for working 16 hour days. I have had to build up the confidence to genuinely not be embarrassed or scared but PROUD to tell strangers that I am an artist. (Also, I think most people have anxiety about their job titles because we are so competitive and hard on ourselves. Truth is, nobody really gives a flying f**k about your title except you and your ego.)
3. You feel old. Like physically old. You find yourself asking your mother where she bought her knee high compression socks because your legs get really, really tired from standing all day. You also find yourself googling “homeopathic arthritis treatment” because the fingers in your right hand ache from drawing and painting all the time.
4. Mastering painting takes a long time. Malcolm Gladwell says 10,000 hours to master any craft. I think it’s more like 20,000.
5. Painting is the easy part. Learning how to speak and write about your work, market your product (your artwork), sell your product (your paintings), retain existing clients, and get future clients is the not so easy part. These things are commonly called “running a business.” Yes, you are an artist, but you are also a small business owner. I am learning all of this now. I don't like it. I would rather paint all day.
6. Everyone says WOW that’s great - you get to do what you love. Yes, it is. (Although I think anyone can figure out what they love to do and make a career out of it. Seriously. Read this guy if you don’t believe me.) At the end of the day, however, it is still a job and I am still running a business. I don’t always feel like working. I was sick last week. I wanted to stay in bed and watch Homeland. I could have, and I definitely did work less. But just like everyone else, if I don’t work, I don’t have money. I also realized this week that painting is something that is really hard to do if your brain feels like mush because of a lousy cold / sore throat / cough.
7. Being an artist is isolating. You better like being alone because are alone A LOT. You don’t talk to anyone while you are at your studio painting for ten hours. But you can't be too much of an introverted weirdo, otherwise you will never be able to talk about and sell any artwork.
8. Price of artwork = direct correlation to number of hours it took to paint it. Strangers have no qualms asking how much the painting is immediately followed by how long did that take you. Never mind the fact that you spent six figures on art school, have 20 years experience building up your skills, and a lot of bad artwork to prove it. People want to pay an hourly rate for your work. My work would probably sell for a lot more if I did put an hourly rate on it, but only because I am a slow painter, obsess over every detail, and think about my work all the time.
9. You feel guilty when you are not painting. The painter Francis Bacon once said that the only thing he regretted in life was spending so much time drinking at bars. He did drink a lot, but he also produced a ton of work. I am convinced that no matter how famous and successful you are (or aren’t yet), all artists have this internal turmoil that they need to be painting ALL THE TIME. I have a really hard time watching T.V. and seeing movies because I always feel guilty like I am wasting time and I should be painting instead of sitting.
10. People think you have unlimited free time. Well, no you don't because you are running a business, designing the product, and also marketing it. I always wonder if strangers tell people who run startups that they should take etching classes or learn new methods like encaustic because they have so much free time.
