AUTRY MUSEUM OF WESTERN ART: Gardena High School Collection, Permanent Works,

Rick Bartow, "Crow", gouache on paper

The Gardena High School Collection

California Impressionism: The Gardena High School Collection features a selection of nine paintings from the collection, including major works by notable artists such as Maynard Dixon, Jean Mannheim, and Edgar Payne. The paintings on view reflect the state’s scenic diversity as well as the vitality of Gardena High School’s program and the Impressionist movement that once flourished here.  

Franz Bischoff, "A Cool Drifting Fog", 1924

Edgar Payne Rockbound, circa 1918

Jack Wilkinson Smith, "Lingering Snows",  undated

John Frost, "Desert Twilight",  1924

Checking on line on the Gardena High school website, I learned that the collection has about 100 paintings in it, all in storage, none on display because they have no gallery.
Fundraising continues but I'm not optimistic this will amount to much.  I hope LAUSD is helping them with conservation and storage. 

This collection is too important to leave unviewed by district's children and by the public.  I'm thinking about doing something about it - what would that look like?
  

The Permanent Collection

Albert Bierstadt, "Landscape with Indians", 1859





Thomas Moran, "Mountain of the Holy Cross", 1875



Gene Autry Lunchbox, 1950's

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BIRDING & FLOWERS: Franklin Canyon Reservoir, Santa Placerita Canyon Park, Newhall

Plentiful at Franklin Canyon:

orange sticky monkeyflower - Franklin Canyon

oak titmouse

Seen at both places - a charming little energetic gray bird with its crest.  Hopped onto our picnic table to pick up a sunflower seed someone had left there.  

Calochortus clavatus var. gracilis; Slender Mariposa Lily

Seen trailside at Placenta Canyon. A local unusual variety of Mariposa Lily/Tulip. My most scientific field guide, by Niehaus, lists neither of these flowers.

turtles sunning - Franklin Canyon Reservoir

My brother who lives in Iowa came to stay for a week to recover from wrist surgery.  He tends to the acerbic when contemplating LA lifestyles - traffic, home values, big city indifference, all quite valid, yes?

I wanted to take him to see an "urban greenspot", so we started out for Franklin Canyon.  Of course, another LA water main had broken and a detour was necessary. And the popular park was that day a site for a movie shoot. The little pond was going to be filled with kayaks and inflatables. Loud conversations concerning setups, placement, floated over to us as we circled the small lake, as we sat and listened to the peculiar comforting sound of ducks as they strained water through their beaks for food (combination of a  gurgle and suck).  

This he found to be of interest, to my relief, and once away from the large pond, well known as the lake where Andy Griffith went fishing in the TV show's title sequence, we found a picnic spot under the oaks to relax and watch ducks, turtles, and a few birds.  Marvelous sunny weather with a slight breeze and moderate temperature. 

Next day up early to drive to Newhall for another bird walk.  It was Open House at the Nature Center, and after the walk we strolled about chatting with exhibitors, enjoying displays of natural history.

matalija poppy

woolly blue curls-rosemary like leaves

Best bird seen at Placerita - male Western bluebird.  Placenta Canyon has a lovely stream (winter/spring water only).  There's a  cabin actually used by the Walker family.  I want to live in it in summer.  Sorry, display only.  Visitors could try washing clothes on a hand-operated wringer washing machine, with a scrub board, and sawing logs with an ancient two-man saw.  Really comical.

interior, Walker cabin

The docents/volunteer group was impressive, and the community turnout so large shuttle buses ran the crowds.  Glad we got there early.

ART: Lucy Jones, Susanne Rubin, Frederick Gore

 Monstrous iceberg - an unusual photograph which reveals what's beneath the tip.

Frederick Gore, Country House - English watercolorist

Lucy Jones, English artist - what astonishing color and energy.

Colorado botanic illustrator.  I love placing drawings on maps, and referring to mapping in painting.  Suzanne Rubin illustrated the seed packet of sunflowers I bought for Alexa and me to plant.

Robert Clunie - Saginaw, or River Dwellers

PAINTING: The Getty Cezannes, Serusier

Still Life with Apples, 1899

Italian Woman

Its always a pleasure to go up to the Getty.   I am very familiar with the holdings now, after working there during my teaching days, and looking at them when visitors come.  As always the Cezannes, which the Getty paid in the range of $25 million each, never fail to answer every question one could devise. And they they remain, each in lovely imbalance, the color glowing and rich.

Then the Norton Simon offers Paul Serusier's apples, a fine example of what I think of as incorporation - the Freudian defense mechanism of taking in what one admires, is affected by, wants...Serusier seems reductive to me - the colors echo, the perspective tilts, yet it's all so different and similar.    

PAINTING: L.S. Lowry 1887-1986

I do marvel at how much "way leads onto way" (Robert Frost) when I use the internet and follow a topic.  

Today's catch I found on ArtNews - an auction report about a British artist seldom found outside the country, and evidently little known.

The Monument

I'm thinking of the empty streets of Giorgio del Chirico, the  particularly of placement of Giorgio Morandi, the limitations of palette of Bernard Buffet, the naïf, outsider  quality of Rousseau,the American industrial scene painters,and surrealism's haunted quality.  His life story, with its repressed lonely interiority, reminded me of Joseph Cornell.  

He is a very reductive, stylized artist, easy to respond to. I admire the selectivity and excisions he makes from the scenes he chooses to paint or draw.

The Footbridge

   

after reading Wuthering Heights

Now thinking of Charles Burchfield, Japanese block prints and their use of perspective

Sexual symbols of male and female, staircases ascending.  I wish I'd had this artist to base a student project upon. 

ART: Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens : All the King's Horsemen, Postmaster's Gallery Group Exhibit

BEARING LOADS: Small Sculptures attempt alchemy 

All the King's Horsemen, 2015 - title of group of artworks by Ibghy and Lemons exhibited at Postmaster's Gallery, NYC, group exhibit
  
NOTES:• defy commodification 
• visual symbols of economic theories and statistics    
• how to attain economic equilibrium for     society
• fragility of materials metaphor for flimsy inaccuracy, unverifiable quality of economic theory 
• non-specific visual representations of each theory and its graphed or visualized possibilities - instead of an identifying label, form and shape should inherently display more specific meaning of each concept
    
gallery statement

By barely being there, these sculptures get at the inherent immateriality of mathematical and statistical calculations. In our current economic and social climate, however, they also speak of the fragile grasp on reality that economics seem to have, spewing will o' the wisp ideas and ideals that never seem to pan out in practice. Bębecka said that these pieces are what got her launched into theme of her show, and that means that her whole project has a political dimension: We need smallness, right now, as a moral counterweight to the oversized forces we are all up against. - quote from ArtNews website 2-11-16


Each of these small objects may be a 3-d graph, showing direction, levels, revealing data.  They also look like sails, methods of transport across difficult seas.  Each has a small handwritten tag, I think, labeling the sculpture with an economic concept.

"Marginal Cost to Society"

Supply and Demand for Immortality, 2011

Sharjah Bienniel, 2011, application to front of museum façade




I love the wry, arch puncturing tone of each of these descriptions of a someone I seem to know (me?) and his/her hypocritical, annoying, dishonest, foolish, self-carved niche of personal delusion lovingly cultivated and maintained. 

MOVIE REVIEW: The Big Short

Yes! A chance to understand the mortgage derivatives debacle!  Visual Cliffs Notes - and droll, too.

The film critic Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian questions the film's ambiguous tone, finding the  campy irony created distance from sensitivity and sympathy for the victims. In fact, that was exactly so, and it makes the reality seem even more disheartening. I did not take this from the film myself, because I didn't forget, and it's mentioned several times by at least one of the characters, Mark Baum, played with intensity and range by Steve Carrell.

Perhaps we're used to motivational implants in our entertainment,and when a film doesn't send us striding out of the theater angry  some conclude it's flawed.(Isn't that why we have Bernie, folks?)  So Bradshaw deplores the "...exhausted acquiescence" we're left with at the conclusion.

But that's the point. Co-scripters Adam McKay and Charles Randolph write an indictment of consumerism and the alchemic greed it engenders, the Horatio Alger and level playing field myths we buy.

The disappearance of cost-value-profit relation that was supposed to be the core of traditional capitalist systems is our greatest loss - we should have known, right?  They even called the products "derivatives", but really they should have been called diminutives.

The film and the catastrophe it examines become another A-Exhibit in the depraved and conflicted philosophy advanced indy-tech capitalism has become.

Of course, the problem is that democratic capitalism doesn't  really want citizen integrity - it wants sheep to shear. Think of House of Cards and President Underwood's chilling campaign speech in which he proclaims "...You're not entitled."(Season 3) and the audience repeats it, chanting, "We're not entitled". Now there's a sardonic and cynical take on modern financial bureaucracy.  

I liked all the accomplished performances - ensemble-smooth quartet-style harmonies with distinctive individual personalities and a story for each of the "winners".

So who paid the smart and risk-taking short-sellers? (Remember, the corporation is to be viewed for legal purposes as a person.) I couldn't figure out how the Wall Street carriers of their short positions had any money left to pay out after their failures.  

Oh, silly me, it was us, the American people, who provided a bailout to the banks who knew we would.  

Back to the film - I liked the synthesis of docu-drama, shopping channel exposition, and reality TV. Expert editing and cross-cuts  take the film to a finely tuned farcical, artful place. It's a fine, intelligent, engaging work, as was the film Moneyball, based on a book by the same author as The Big Short, Michael Lewis.