I came to Culver City all of a sudden a couple of months ago after nearly 30 years in San Diego. I was fairly well known there as an artwriter and critic. I also opened and ran contemporary art gallery for a couple of years. For a while, I hobnobbed with the greats and near greats of the local art scene.

 All of that is quite a ways back now. More recently, except for an occasional feature story written for a high-end lifestyle magazine and a couple of not quite art publications, I’ve pretty much faded from the art scene – much as the San Diego art scene faded from itself.

 Then, most recently, with all kinds of fading going on everywhere due to the recession, my few writing gigs dried up and disappeared. This was followed by my day job at a national design center. It started fitfully fading, then vanished altogether when the entire company went belly up.

 No writing gigs. No day job. I was at the end of a rope. Or the rope was at the end of me.

 In the meantime, my 91 year old mom was increasingly showing signs of her age and needing help to carry on. She lives in a small condo near Culver City which has a small and rarely used second bedroom/office. Figuring that we would be helping each other out, we agreed that I would move in. So that’s what I did a couple of months ago to find myself in L.A.

 I figured that L.A. would offer a far bigger art scene than San Diego in which to find art and galleries to write about. So I started to look around. Although nobody in San Diego had uttered much more than word about Culver City, it wasn’t long at all before I realized that I’d arrived at a spot adjacent to a gold mine of galleries within a five minute drive of where I was living – something like 20 serious galleries within a mile of each other on South La Cienega and Washington Boulevards.

Writing about all this art could keep me busy forever. Maybe get some spending money, although there was no publication clammoring for my work.

“Do a blog,” my friends said.

Okay, so I’ll do a blog.

But where to begin?

Cardwell/Jimmerson Contemporary Art, Washington Blvd.

For reasons having to do with impulse and parking, Cardwell/Jimmerson Contemporary Art, on Washington Blvd was one of the first galleries I visited when I started checking out my new neighborhood.  Tom Jimmerson had just finished installing a show of L.A. and southern California artists of the 1960s, mostly the earlier years. These were not the big name artists readily associated with that era such as the Three Eds; Ed Moses, Ed Ruscha, and Ed Keinholtz –but the artists who were well enough known at the time but have since radically changed style or been mostly forgotten.  That happens.

Tom Eatherton, "Point Set 12" acrylic and laquer on board, 43"x43" 1966

In putting the show together, Tom relied on conversation with old-timers, early issues of ArtForum (it was new and Southern California based then) and catalogs of exhibitions at small regional museums.  He’d then contact the artists (those still living) and/or their galleries (if still living) and/or their collectors (if still living) to identify and assemble the paintings and sculptures that comprise the exhibition.

Barry Le Va "Power Plant" 72"x67.5" acrylic on canvas 1966

This is a rare and admirable approach to being a gallery – requiring thoughtfulness, scholarship, and patience.  It also reflects a curiosity about artists whose work may have been inappropriately ignored or misperceived; a chance to rediscover a body of work all but hidden from current awareness.

Cardwell/Jimmerson doesn’t do this kind of show every time.  They’ll chase the hottest and the newest thing along with the other galleries, but the historical perspective such exhibitions bring serves as a reminder of art’s uncertainties, its fickleness from one moment to the next.  In the process, they enrich and challenge the entire contemporary art scene and tell some truths about it.

Toward the end of my conversation with Tom, I asked if there was someplace nearby where I could get a cup of coffee and a sandwich or something; somewhere where the people who go to the galleries and buy the art, the people who work in the galleries, and the people who make the art that’s shown in the galleries go to get a drink or a sandwich or something, and maybe hang out and talk. That would be a good place to find, I said.
Tom said there was a bar like that on La Cienega, a barely noticeable place around the corner about half way up the block on the east side.  He didn’t know the name of the place and he didn’t know if it would be open.  “But you should check it out,” he said.

So I checked it out.

I walked around the corner and half way up the block and found a modest little building that said “bar” on the outside.

“This must be the place,” I thought

It was around two in the afternoon and the place was closed.

There was no sign that said what it’s called.

Mandrake's La Cienega facade

There’s a barely noticeable bar in the middle of a one block stretch of La Cienega between Washington and Venice Boulevards where the two are almost close enough to hold hands.  The block is full of contemporary art galleries – ten of them in all – and not one of them schlocky or touristy.  That’s a lot of serious galleries for one block in any city.  The bar presents itself to the street with one of those seemingly characterless facades behind which anything could be happening.

Proportioned like the end of a shoebox, it’s covered in rough textured white plaster.  To the facade’s right side, there’s a frameless quadrangle of glass block through which nothing of the interior can be discerned.  As far to the left as it can go, a recess about the size of a telephone booth breaks into the otherwise flat plane of the facade to offer access to a sturdy steel door with its own small glass window.  It also reveals nothing of what’s inside.  For outdoor signage, there’s no visible ID anywhere, just the street address near the roof line and, near the door, a small white neon sign that spells out “bar.“

I was confident that I’d found the place I was looking for but it was closed.  All I could do was look at it from the outside, which turned out to be a more interesting experience than I would have thought.  The design of its few elements revealed a subtlety, a minimalist sensibility, that made me wonder whether this was conscious design and not just an accident of a history that was probably fifty or sixty years old.

In large part because I was just standing there on the sidewalk thinking architecturally and designerly, my attention was drawn to a large patch of greenery in front of the bar.  I soon realized that this patch of greenery was just about the only and certainly the biggest and most verdant green patch anywhere on this part of La Cienega, which is otherwise lined by utterly unimaginative ficus trees poking out of the sidewalk at regular intervals with their dense leafy canopies totally obscuring anything and everything behind them.

Mandrake street "garden"

This green patch consisted of roughly 50% beautifully luxuriant and well fed crab grass and 50% lush tall beach grasses waving and blowing in the early afternoon’s light breezes.  The crab grass could have grown there by accident, but not the lush tall grasses.  The same, too with the third element of this green patch: a group of larger and smaller rocks informally piled together amidst the crab grass at the northern end of this landscape.

Clearly this was a well and thoroughly designed place, though it doesn’t look like it until you look at it.  It made me like the place already, even though I hadn’t been inside because it was closed.

Only later did I learn that the design of the place was intentional in every aspect – except for the rocks.  I learned that the first and largest of the rocks had just shown up one morning shortly after the green patch had been planted with its lush tall grasses; and that all the other rocks had just shown up in the same way thereafter, as if they’d followed the big one – one at a time.

Mandrake's rocks

I also learned that the name of the place is Mandrake.  I learned other things, too.  For example, I learned that the story of the rocks that I was first told and that I’ve written about here is incorrect, except for the part about the first and the biggest one.

(More about Mandrake and its rocks to come later.)

In the first gallery, Vasell shows five large paintings whose imagery consists of intestines, bowels, brains and other bodily stuff. In some of the paintings, the parts appear to be massed on a table that isn’t quite level, making the guts puddle up against each other and the edges of the formats. It’s all very ooey-gooey; far from easy for the eyes to dwell upon and far from most notions of ‘pretty’ or ‘beautiful.’ On the other hand, given the very wide range of images seen on canvas these days, it doesn’t seem all that wild, weird or shocking either.

"To The People That Know This Is Nowhere." Installation view.

Vasell’s color consists of oddly vibrant tones of grayed purples, browned reds, burnt greens, and troubled yellows – hues that might look more familiar in a tattoo parlor than in the typical painter’s studio. This paint inhabits its surfaces more than it covers it, again suggesting a tattoo. This suggestion is further enhanced by the lightly suntanned Caucasian flesh tone of the canvasses which makes the paintings resemble even more closely the look of freshly tattooed skin; minus the hair, of course.

If the work in this series represents an attempt to merge the physical and expressive character of painting and tattooing, it doesn’t quite succeed. As painting, its grittiness, both physical and expressive is only illusory, as it must be. Canvas is only canvas while only flesh and bone are flesh and bone.

The relative weakness of these paintings is confirmed by the way that they work best when seen in each other’s company in the specific spaces of the gallery at Blum and Poe in which they’re shown. It actually seems that the dimensions of the paintings, were calculated to play off the dimensions of the walls they hang on; walls Vasell would be familiar with because he’d shown here twice before. Because of this neat fit between between the paintings and their walls, the outcome has more of the feeling of an installation – more impressive as a whole than any of the individual works are by themselves. While such a close knitting between a group of paintings and their surroundings might constitute a worthy accomplishment for an interior designer, but it’s a dubious achievement for a painter.

The paintings are part of a series titled “To The People That Know This Is Nowhere.”  The enigmatic title arouses wonder about what the “This” refers to, and what kind of nowhere. The question comes up only because the paintings; whether seen either as representational imagery or more simply as a group of lumpy lines, shapes and colors; are as much of an enigma as the title under which they’re exhibited.

Fortunately, things get better in the second gallery.

Three of the four paintings here share the series title,” To The People of Los Angeles.”  They are very similar to each other but very different from the paintings Vasell shows in the first gallery even though they’re part of the same exhibition. To begin with, their construction is very different, working literally on two levels; or more accurately, on two layers .

"To the People of Los Angeles" Installation view

The first layer is a format filling Op Art-ish image of two interlocking concentric rings representing some sort of radiance like the wave pattern produced by a pair of loud speakers partially submerged in a pool of water and blasting forth the fourth note of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Vasell creates the image using a translucent color that might be the sum of the colors in the paintings in the first gallery, but much paler and more varied in its density. The proximity to Op Art is evident here; Op of the type practiced by Brigette Riley, among others, using line that was primarily curvilinear.

The second level/layer of these works consists of precision cut one inch squares of raw canvas precisely aligned in a rectilinear grid across the paintings’ entire surface. The proximity to Op Art is evident here as well; Op of the type practiced irritatingly by Victor Vasarelly in the 1970s and wildly popular in the poster world for several of those years.

Detail. "To the People of Los Angeles"

The fusion of curvilinear Op Art with rectilinear Op Art does not double the Op effects but in fact reduces them by half. This is a thankful result and produces paintings which are visually dynamic and intriguing for the eye.

These paintings don’t play to their architectural surround in the way that the first gallery’s paintings do. It’s a disassociation which serves the paintings well. They don’t need it.

There’s one more painting in the exhibition, the only one from the series, “To The People of Alhambra.”  Here, over an undifferentiated thoroughly black first level/layer, Vasell constructs his second level/layer grid using near white bleached canvas squares whose size is not consistent and whose threads hang out all over the place. This only amplifies the Op Art effect of creating visual jitterbuggery that drives some people crazy and gives most eyes headaches.

"To The People of Alhambra" Installation view

The work makes sense as a practice piece or as a study, for the others constructed similarly, but why was it in the show? Because Vasell doesn’t particularly like the people of Alhambra?.

Whatever the case, it’s the people of Los Angeles who fare the best in this exhibition.

Blum and Poe's recent and first location in Culver City area.

The Chris Vasell exhibition is the last to be offered in the 5,000 square foot building that  Blum and Poe Gallery has occupied since arriving in Culver City (technically L.A.; but who’s counting).

Early in October, 2009, the gallery will present its exhibitions in its new space directly across La Cienega from its old location.  The new gallery provides 21,000 square feet.  This is serious growth.

Blum and Poe's new location - open October 3, 2009

“Against Design:” A Consideration

Andy Goldsworth: Three Cairns

inSITE97

Younger artists dream of a moment like this; a first solo show at a major contemporary art gallery.  It’s a shot at the big time.

 For Adam Belt, this dream comes true on Saturday evening, July 13 when an exhibition of his latest work opens at the Quint Gallery, in La Jolla.  A miscellany of people; some from San Diego’s art crowd and some from beyond, will gather to talk shop, chitchat and, for the first time, take a look at what this 32 year old has to offer.

 The Carlsbad-based artist knows what the situation means. “For someone like me who hasn’t built much of a name ” he says, “it’s obviously exciting to have a show like this.  The Quint Gallery represents a lot of top level artists and deals with serious collectors and museums.  I’ve had several college gallery exhibitions and I’m thankful for it, but this is a whole different ballgame.  There’s a much higher level of scrutiny and critical attention directed toward my work.  There will be a lot of sharp eyes, so it’s a big challenge.  And, yes, I’m a bit nervous.”

 What gallery visitors will see in Belt’s work, at least at first glance, are large nearly all-white paintings with a small black area off towards a corner of the format.  The look is cool and minimalist, evoking a kind of calmness and serenity that’s become quite unfamiliar in the work of most younger artists today whose hotly colored, high emotional, image-packed paintings seem to come screaming out at you.  With Belt’s work, the paintings quietly wait for you to take a look. 

 Even the slightest such look reveals that the paintings which looked abstract a first aren’t abstract at all. 

 This transformation from abstraction into representation occurs as the eye takes a closer look at the small, dark hued areas near the middle of his seemingly undifferentiated white surfaces.  Here, the artist has used black pencil to create a highly realistic drawing of a hydroelectric dam, with the shadow cast on the dam’s face by its enclosing canyon being by far the densest and darkest area anywhere in the painting.  Recognizing this very realistic form, the eye begins to see the contours of the waters collected behind the dam in the curving forms of a white paint that barely separates itself from the surrounding white canvas.

 Indeed, this is landscape, vast in scale and highly purified, and presented in a way that pulls the viewer in by leaving room for the imagination to fill in what Belt leaves out.

 At the Quint Gallery show, Belt offers this vision in paintings of Glen Canyon Dam, Hoover Dam, Parker Dam, and similar locations in various parts of the world.  In all, eight such paintings comprise the exhibition; all of them created within the last year in the studio/garage of his home south Carlsbad.

 Belt arrived at this work through a life-long fascination with landscape and the forces that shape it.  He grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the various forms and textures of the landscape are readily apparent in the barren terrain.  

 An even more powerful impression of landscape and its formation came to Belt during his adolescent years when he would spend summers around Lake Powell and Glen Canyon Dam.  “It’s an amazing place.  You can barely grasp the scale of things,” he says, recalling those experiences.  “You’d drive over the dam and there’s a long steep drop to the bottom of the canyon on one side, and

a huge lake on the other, nearly at eye level.  Then, looking up at the dam from the canyon bottom, you can feel the strength, the muscle in its massive structure and imagine, with all that water behind it, what would happen if it suddenly failed.  It was equally eerie to be on the lake in a boat and to see that some distance away the lake suddenly stopped, as if in the middle of the air.”

 These kinds of experiences, of physical forms and emotional impressions, have inspired Belt’s artmaking from its beginnings.  His earliest expressions took the form of landscape painting.  He describes these as being “quite conventional,” largely because that was just about the only kind of artistic treatment of landscape that he’d seen in the galleries around Albuquerque and the kind of teaching he encountered in his early experiences as an art student. 

 His studies at Claremont Graduate School changed all this.  There, he encountered a different kind of teaching that emphasized experimentation and the exploration of ideas through artmaking.  There was also a greater appreciation of the possibilities of sculpture, which was expansively defined as any work involving three dimensional form.   

 With this new freedom, he began a series of works that recreate, in a gallery context, the forces and processes that shape the Earth’s surface.   

 In some of these works, he would pour concrete of varying densities into cube shaped forms, then remove the forms sides.  The still unhardened concrete would then slump and ooze from its original confines, leaving eroded shapes within the cube and alluvial-type flows of concrete spreading outward across the floor.  He enacted similar processes, and achieved similar results, using large rectangular blocks of compressed granular salt and water; again transforming regularized rational shapes into the myriad irregular forms that occur in the natural world.

 Work of this type – which links him to the Earth Art pioneered by the likes of Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and Walter de Maria a trio of decades ago – continues to come from Belt’s imagination in parallel with his painting and will be presented at La Jolla’s Athenaeum in the spring of 2008.

 Already, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego has acquired some of his work, as have some important collectors.  The collecting world in general watches this kind of thing, looking for art that’s not only good art but also a promising investment. 

You can see what they’ll be seeing starting with the opening reception on Friday, July 13, from 6 to 8pm.  The exhibition then continues through September 1.  

The Quint Gallery is located at 7739 Fay Avenue, in downtown La Jolla.  Entry to the gallery is from the alley between Kline and Silverado.  For additional information, contact the gallery at 858-454-3409 or on the Internet at www.quintgallery.com.

Sharabi’s are clearly deeply personal and subjective expressions.  They show a state of mind that lives in the imagination, but not the imagination of dreams and fantasies.  Instead, she shows us the imagination that wonders about human life from its day-to-day specifics to the larger questions of what it means to be alive.  Through her art, she shares her own internal dialog in purely visual form and invites us to become part of this wondering.

You can feel this experience in Shaevitch’s 2008 painting, “Flamenco.” Here, bright washes of light blue color merge with the ground of the canvas to provide a backdrop for several dark irregular forms situated almost randomly within the format. Both the wash and the overlying forms erupt with spinning, swirling lines that occasionally become segments of circles dotted with small rectangles of contrasting color. Throughout the painting, and in all of Shaevitch’s work, the calligraphic character of the brushwork is wonderful to behold all by itself.

These paintings reside within the tradition of Surrealist abstraction epitomized in the early decades of the 20th Century by the Swiss artist, Paul Klee. Yet Sergey Shaevitch brings a distinctly 21st Century sensibility to this tradition in the way that it’s energy is more intense, it’s color hotter, and its rhythm more complex. Given his background as a native of Belarus who spent his teen years as an Israeli and who now lives in Canada, his art reflects the new globalized world that art and all of us live in today.

For gallery owner and artist alike, it can be a very risky business; with the rare people who run these businesses being as wedded to the art they show as any of the artists they exhibit. In recognition of this, it has become fashionable to speak of such people as “gallerists,” in the same spirit that painters and sculptors are spoken of as artists.

In San Diego, no one has better exemplified this role than Mark Quint, whose Quint Gallery is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Since its beginning, the gallery has stood as one of San Diego’s most prestigious venues for serious contemporary art; presenting over 200 exhibitions by more than a thousand artists, most of them based in Southern California but also from nations and cultures around the world. The great range and variety of these offerings; in a series of locations stretching from La Jolla to downtown to Mira Mesa and again to La Jolla; is one of the essential elements of the Quint Gallery’s character.

Quint’s current gallery-filling exhibition of video art, which remains on view through the end of the year, demonstrates his ever shifting, predictably unpredictable tastes and enthusiasms. Titled “Heavy Light” and featuring an assemblage of artists from New York, Ireland, California and Chicago, the presentation offers a look at the leading edge of today’s contemporary video art. Among the works are hand drawn digital images, video paintings, a video installation in which viewers become part of the art, and a ‘real time’ visualization of a 1,000 year long day.

What’s especially surprising with this show, beyond the fact that 100% of the gallery’s space is devoted to a form of art that hardly anyone thinks of buying, is that Quint himself will share his views about the work in a public-invited discussion starting at 7 P.M. on Wednesday, December 13.

This kind of public presence is very rare for Quint, who generally presents himself as ‘just one of the crowd’ at his gallery’s openings. Perhaps this dis-interest in the spotlight reflects the ethos of the Southern California surfing culture in which he grew up. The sea and the waves were as much a part of his early life as the drawings and paintings he would create from his childhood years through his graduation from La Jolla High in 1972 and his Bachelor’s degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1976. Then, for the next few years, he taught art classes at a girls’ school in Hawaii – a great destination for a surfer, but not the ideal place to launch a career as a studio artist, as he admits.

As Quint describes that time, “It became increasingly clear to me that I didn’t have what it takes to be the kind of artist I wanted to be. At the same time, I got increasingly excited by the idea of opening a gallery where I could show the work of artists who really did have what it takes. So I came back to La Jolla in 1981 and just jumped into the business of being an art gallery. To be honest, I had little more than no idea of what I was doing. I just did it.”

Quint’s gallery caught a rising tide of art in San Diego. The dynamism of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and the aura of the nationally admired faculty at UCSD’s Visual Arts department added fuel to the fires of the city’s art scene, as did the region’s growing population and sense of civic pride.

These were the energies that fueled the Quint Gallery’s rise to prominence during its early years, and that momentum has never stopped.

As characterized by Hugh Davies, director of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (the former LJMCA), “It is fair to say that no one has done more than Mark Quint to develop the art scene in San Diego over the past twenty-five years. It has been an inspiration to follow him and the exhibition program he has consistently presented in gallery spaces all over the city for so many years. The through-line has been his impeccable eye, uncompromising intelligence and a fierce loyalty to his artists and his friends. Had it been about money, he would have thrown in his hand years ago, but his persistence for the sake of art has vastly improved the cultural climate of our city. We at the museum salute him.”

An artist’s view of the Quint Gallery is expressed by Gary Lang, a highly regarded Los Angeles based painter and video artist whose “Dividing Time ” is part of Quint’s video exhibition: “When I met Mark in 1981, an L.A. colleague asked me how important a gallerist from La Jolla could be. Twenty five years later I can tell you that Mark is the most important member of my professional team. He has always been a beacon of creativity and continuity. He has never let me down and is currently a renewable source of hope, surprise, and inspiration for work yet to come. He is a treasure.”

Quint’s anticipation for the next 25 years? “I’m already seeing a new expansion in the number of people of a younger generation who are interested in collecting contemporary art, and a steadily increasing interest in art as a public and community asset. There’s a special satisfaction that comes with an engagement with art. That is what has propelled my life all along, and the gallery is a way to share it. I see no reason to ever stop.”

The Quint Gallery is located in La Jolla at 7739 Fay Avenue and is accessed via the alley entrance on Drury Lane, between Fay and Girard Avenues. Call 858-454-3409 for gallery hours and other information.