ART: The Oakland Museum, California Landscapes

Entrance, Oakland Museum:
Ruth Asawa Wall Sculpture, "Untitled"
It's tied wire, associative to the sacred circle and rational square, but like tree limbs, brooms, fans.  How can wire look so soft?  The references come so easy, so confirming, so grounding, inspiring. 

Ruth Asawa was interned in Arkansas during World War II, and went on the become, in her own quiet and elegant work, a model of a liberated zen woman to me.  I have always loved craft as art form, freed of the necessity to be functional. She died last year, with much more art world notice than I would have thought.  She was an artist's artist.

Beth Van Hoesen - Point Richmond? TBD

I love this perceptual landscape treating fog and sun, so iconic of the bay area. 

I've seen this before - the real thing on an island in Indonesia, a beach littered with debris that had swirled there from China, unimaginable trash.  I walked with a marine biologist whose life work was small crustaceans.  How deep and quiet she was as she showed me how the hermit crabs could not surmount the debris to search for a larger shell when theirs had become to small.  She gently cleared a path for one.

Edward Biberman - a WPA muralist and instrumentalist painter from California made this chillingly clinical image of Sepulveda Dam, near our house.  I've often walked around it, photographing.  It's such an elegant Art Deco style, yet so compromised as a purposeful structure - its beauty cloaking the ruination of Western water supplies.

Rex Brandt- Coast at La Purisima Mission

A 30's watercolorist in the deeply energized and muscular, linear style of Disney animators who also painted, Charles Burchfield, and Grant Wood.  What a churning landscape here.  His watercolors sparkle with white paper and splashing waves, crisp, superficial, somehow too styled, too intent on glamour, lovely nonetheless.

Wayne Thiebaud, Urban Square

I can write a long time about the way I love Thiebaud.  His "secret" may be his smooth and sufficiently original synthesis of Pop, realism, and modern color. Most of all I love his riff on traditional perspective.  How oddly and subtly disturbing the skews make for a compressive and truthful, and enjoyment filled experience.

Julius Tavernier, Full Moon over Kilawea, Hawai'i

This is probably not the painting I saw at the museum that day, but I did discover this lesser known but spectacle-seeking landscape artist.  Because of my deep love for Hawai'i, I chose this painting to include.  It is apocalyptic narrative, while the moon hides to see what finality will look like.

I found several paintings of volcanic eruptions, sunsets.  He must have been a born too soon cinematographer, crazy for visual effects, and nature's cataclysms.