Cedars-Sinai: The Second Day

The hublet is in a lot of pain. The staff has kindly drugged him up again. It's so bad he said he would rather not have had the surgery. I remember pain like that from my hysterectomy surgery to this day.  The first two days were a nightmare.  Thank god for the passage of time.

Tom Lieber 

Yellow Abstraction (the alligator series?)

Abstraction: The Alligator Series, 1980

Lieber studied in the Midwest, worked in Berkeley, now lives in Maui. He's more lyric and beautiful than Cy Twombly, the gestural quality exploratory and final, floating on the ground like fog, while the figuration bites down through it, anchoring the image.

Lee Mullican

Grounded in the belief that modern painting should merge abstraction and representation to best reveal the underlying order of the universe, Lee Mullican made drawings and paintings that synthesized European Surrealism, American abstraction, and Native American heritage geometries. Mullican’s experience as a topographer during World War II instilled in him an admiration for the abstract patterns inherent in natural forms and refined his drawing abilities. Favoring contradictory visual elements, he opted for clashing yet complementary colors, building images simultaneously serene and stimulating. Mullican painted in a style influenced by printmaking, forming ridges of paint and using the edge of a palette knife to achieve a line raised and puckered; the resulting surfaces caught light and cast shadows, ultimately assuming a tapestry-like quality. - from Artsy website


Ken Price

Known for his extravagantly beautiful, groundbreaking ceramics-as-sculpture, here he does serigraphs of his cups, with humor and a fine sense of space and form.

detail, Interior Series, Green Turtle Cup,1971

An amusing erotic cup, a reference to the famous Surrealist fur cup by Meret Oppenheim

Luncheon in Fur

Claes Oldenberg

Icebag

Byoung Ok Min

Untitled

I can find a brief biography of this artist, but I didn't find this work. The artist seems to be very experimental, moving through various phases of abstraction. I loved this work, 6 horizontal rows of "tongues", each sampling colors, brushwork, and negative/positive space, repeating the form yet each different.  It's like a semaphore flag poster, or cut up string candy. It's whole in itself, finished, balanced, yet filled with tension because of the relation between the cut-off of each bar and line.

Richard Bosman

Beacon, 1987

detail, Beacon

Bosman is an East Coast figurative artist who studied at the Skowhegan School, where Neil Welliver worked and taught.  I find some similarities between his work and David Bates. Very strong bold, almost crude forms created by thick impastoed brushstrokes, with little sentimentality for the places, people, and things they each depict. (Bates will give us humor sometimes.) Much of Bosman's early work I find lacking in enough draftsmanship to be compelling. In this painting I think his technique works very well, and the edge of control is a tightrope balance that works.