Art: Carolyn Castaño: Art after the post-Chicano movement

Ms. Castaño spoke to WPW, my women painters' group, last week at luncheon.  She has an impressive art education, SFAI and UCLA. 

Her materials are mixed - gouache, acrylics, 
watercolor, painted on large pieces of watercolor paper, usually affixed to the wall without frames. There are also light boxes, which make use of the appearance of images on media screens - the high contrast, over-saturated, crisply-defined lines, the flattened perspective.

Her seemingly bright and simple palette displays well on these, but I suspect,also commands the viewing space. Large drawings in the Southwest Airlines terminal at LAX are bold, absolutely distracting from the chaos of baggage claim.  They announce so vividly:  you are here, in Los Angeles, a very singular world.   

She's rooted in a Latina-feminist perspective, though her imagery appears very contemporary.  It's narrative, historical, and figurative, driven by a kind of funereal iconography, deaths-head molds and portraits made of ancestors and cherished, images of lost souls, their faces whitened, impurities of skin and bone disappeared in their now-eternal slumber. 

The Narco-femmes series is insightful and saddening - the objectification and obliteration of the female, of the possibility of real human development based on family, nurture, and slow deep growth sacrificed for the ultimate commodity experience - the drug high. I think of Millais' "Ophelia".

I see confident, bold line shaping forms with faux-primitive colors, thinking of Fauvism, composition drawn from the Pattern and Decoration Movement, Central American textiles, and outsider folk artists (le Douanier Rousseau's Garden of Eden work).  I also think of late Hockney's drawings on the iPad of California palm trees, and Hockney's early fine portrait drawings. Matisse's late collages from "Jazz" seem another reference.

There's a smoothly-integrated synthesis that's referential to art history, and yields a body of purposeful, thoughtful work offering a perspective to those attendant at the shifting plates of cultural diversity, at the "babe struggling to be born", second generation.    

   

The Golden Age Myth: Psychoanalytic Read

Things were better back then...all these changes are decadent and we're all corrupted and Dystopia is us...

I came across an interpretation that suggested that discontent about the present and nostalgia, devaluing the current state and way of things, is part of aging - of letting go of life, "it's not so good anyway, so might as well resign myself to death"...

It's a doomsday device, faulty reasoning that feeds into a loss of a positive attitude in old age - which causes faster cognitive decline.

Wayne Thiebaud: An Artist to Enjoy and Study

A retrospective in London:


"He [Thiebaud] remains prolific, if self-critical, and recalls an anecdote about the great Japanese artist Hokusai, who proclaimed at the age of 90 that he might really learn to draw if given another 10 years. Does Thiebaud likewise feel that as an artist he continues to learn with age? “I often feel that I’m always starting over, in a way,” he says, on reflection." - NYT, 8-27-17

Office Still Life, 1975

And still, Mark Rothko:

 "Rothko...  told a group of art students that he included in his paintings a measure of hope: ‘‘10 percent to make the tragic concept more endurable.’ ...  he chafed at the label ‘‘abstractionist.’’ The subjects of his paintings, he said, were ‘‘basic human emotions’ " -

The Rothko Chapel, Houston, TX

New Cats for me - Neku Atsume

I got this cat today - I had no picture of her, and I'm never satisfied with play unless I get one - I consider I haven't really seen the cat, though it may have visited.


I also got Sassy Fran - finally!
I've been waiting so long. She came to the cafe.

Grandfather Orlando Pieracci - some memories

My sister-in-law Jane and brother Lanny found this artifact from Iowa history on the Iowa state history bus exhibit - it's my grandfather's mining hat. When he immigrated, he moved to Iowa because he was a coal miner - who knew that there was coal in Iowa, too? Notice that the top of the hat is worn through. The little lamp on the front was filled with kerosene.  

He mined coal in Scotland after he left Italy, and so it was lucky that when joining family already in Iowa, he had a trade.  He died when I was a few months old, in 1946.

small coal mine near Ottumwa, Iowa

Keystone Coal Mine

Time for Museums to play a role

LET THERE BE MUSEUMS and compassionate memorialization

History is vital to human decision-making, though we all know we cannot walk in the same river twice.  

Let’s fund new museums and venues of the Civil War that preserve the reality with compelling, honest displays, artifacts, and interactive video. A group of  museums that hold these pain-provoking statues will help neutralize the immediate civic issue by permitting viewing choice, removing the obligation to see an object that is thought offensive and intrudes upon citizens' freedom of movement. The narrative of America’s struggle with human liberty would be safer from appropriations and re-definitions of history. 

Museums have authenticity, possessing  “the real things” -  its holdings have an originality which defy commodification.  Museums have the power to prevent anonymity.  They preserve, heal and teach.  Museums grow imagination and connection.  They are seedbeds for wisdom.  Museums are a unique synergy of journalism, biography and history.  They possess a kind of neutrality, set apart as they are.

The Reagan Library is a fine example, as is the Holocaust Museum.  The sacrifices, tragedies, and achievements of the past are summoned for us in museums - just step aboard the U.S.S. Iowa in San Pedro Harbor and smell the gritty innards, gaze at the massive power of its long guns, and see for yourself.  

Free speech is an American right, but violent protest defiles and destroys the history of our ancestors who died on slave ships or fought in the Civil War - south and north. Their lives need not, and should not be degraded.We do not have the right to remake our heritage.  We have the obligation to understand it, as humans and citizens. 

Protestors who deny or distort the past are corrupting and destroying their own rights and freedoms.  We need to save them from themselves as well as ourselves.  For terrorists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members, I pray that economic and educational opportunities come to them, and offer them an exit from the hellish place in which they live and breathe.

Let the rest of us gather around  informed memorialization.

Hawk Sighting - Which one is it, Cooper's or Sharp-Shinned?

Up on the wires over our pool, not as rufous colored as the illustrations in my bird books. Breast was streaked with gray on a white ground.
  I’m leaning to the sharp-shinned because of the small head and bill, thinner legs, but it wasn't the size of a jay, it was slightly larger.

        








Range Maps from Cornell show the likelihood of it being a sharp-shinned is not great - they are supposedly only winter migrants (check my books TBD).

Cooper's hawk

Sharp-shinned hawk

  

 

I guess I will have to wait for my next sighting to be sure - sometimes the second time I find a bird, I get it right - having learned some new detail to spot.