ART: Lorraine Lubner

Lubner writes, “In this body of work I began by making a few fundamental (and at times, contradictory) decisions; one, to infuse color into a basic form, a horizontal but of differing widths. 

 Two, that the form be de-skilled, not ruled or taped. 

Three, that the color be prompted by my intuited need-desire by an adjacent relationship (not by color theory). 

 Four, that the total variety of singular colors produce for me, an “eidetic” image of differing powers and individual lives. 

 Fifth, that the immediacy of the layered paint surface reflect the constant change of color sensitivity-saturation allowing its neighbor its place in the sun.  Differing perceptions of color are due to lighting, pigment or binder.  My “eidetic” (mental image that is actually visible) image reflects the singularity of the oil pigments I use, my binder and the light in my studio.  Whereas my past work was infused with aspects of landscape forms these paintings have no narrative but are an experience.”

TRAVEL: The Eastern Sierras

A Los Angeles painter who taught public school!  A colorist adstractionist - when he began painting seriously after an early retirement, he went on to become a professor at Claremont and focused on color and its relationships.  I can see myself doing that and using abstract forms to deal with color relations.  For me, the beauty of the paint surface on the canvas is everything:  the application of it, the texture, the glowing quality, the moment of contrast revealed after I apply another coat of paint or place a loved color next to another.  He’s inspiring - I see myself traveling possible roads which other painters have already discovered, but they seem important to do, even though I re-invent the wheel daily.

FiLM & ART: Gerhard Richter, Real Memories This is an insightful, truthful film about making art, the best one I’ve ever seen about the artistic process. There’s a wonderful moment when Richter approaches two wall size white canvasses with a large bucket of bright yellow paint and a large housepainter’s brush. The anxiety of the white room, the blank page. Then he gashes the surface with giant arm-waving slashes of yellow, followed by red, blue. Later, he pushes and pulls giant “squeegees” over the surface. They look like huge scrapers or a cement mason’s hand floats. He applies paint along the edge, or not, and scrapes away and overlays the past with present meaning, sometimes many times. . He waits, hours, days, goes back, reworks: if it isn’t “good”, it will get painted over again. It is finished when nothing is wrong with the painting, he says. He is a deeply focused, compressive, detached, and humane presence: if I were told he were a New Englander, a Vermonter, I’d believe it. His words about painting sound like what I think Robert Frost might say. Richter has a unique historical position from which to paint. A German post-war artist in East Germany, he escaped to West Germany, became a political refugee, and never saw his parents again. The early Social Realism he painted there is buried now, and Richter’s oeuvre is broad. In the 1980’s he returned to East Germany for an exhibition, welcomed as a “favorite” son, no longer a prodigal. It’s fascinating, the spectacle of government repentance. Repressive regimes are sterile, implode and then struggle to recover what they rebuked and scorned. Ai Weiwei, Wu Guanzhong, Shostakovich come to mind. Germany wins the prize for the worst history to live down, but we do have our own atrocities on our national conscience, it’s well to remember. In one scene Richter muses over old photos of his childhood, and considers destroying them. He has few real memories, only photo memories, and their elusive relation to his past. His small son, clad in a bright yellow rainslicker, peeks into the studio inquiringly, then turns and scampers away. This is an insightful, truthful film about making art, the best one I’ve ever seen about the artistic process. There’s a wonderful moment when Richter approaches two wall size white canvasses with a large bucket of bright yellow paint and a large housepainter’s brush. The anxiety of the white room, the blank page. Then he gashes the surface with giant arm-waving slashes of yellow, followed by red, blue. Later, he pushes and pulls giant “squeegees” over the surface. They look like huge scrapers or a cement mason’s hand floats. He applies paint along the edge, or not, and scrapes away and overlays the past with present meaning, sometimes many times. . He waits, hours, days, goes back, reworks: if it isn’t “good”, it will get painted over again. It is finished when nothing is wrong with the painting, he says. He is a deeply focused, compressive, detached, and humane presence: if I were told he were a New Englander, a Vermonter, I’d believe it. His words about painting sound like what I think Robert Frost might say. Richter has a unique historical position from which to paint. A German post-war artist in East Germany, he escaped to West Germany, became a political refugee, and never saw his parents again. The early Social Realism he painted there is buried now, and Richter’s oeuvre is broad. In the 1980’s he returned to East Germany for an exhibition, welcomed as a “favorite” son, no longer a prodigal. It’s fascinating, the spectacle of government repentance. Repressive regimes are sterile, implode and then struggle to recover what they rebuked and scorned. Ai Weiwei, Wu Guanzhong, Shostakovich come to mind. Germany wins the prize for the worst history to live down, but we do have our own atrocities on our national conscience, it’s well to remember. In one scene Richter muses over old photos of his childhood, and considers destroying them. He has few real memories, only photo memories, and their elusive relation to his past. His small son, clad in a bright yellow rainslicker, peeks into the studio inquiringly, then turns and scampers away.

 This is an insightful, truthful film about making art, the best one I’ve ever seen about the artistic process.  There’s a wonderful moment when Richter approaches two wall size white canvasses with a large bucket of bright yellow paint and a large housepainter’s brush.  The anxiety of the white room, the blank page.

Then he gashes the surface with giant arm-waving slashes of yellow, followed by red, blue. Later, he pushes and pulls giant “squeegees” over the surface.  They look like huge scrapers or a cement mason’s hand floats. He applies paint along the edge, or not, and scrapes away and overlays the past with present meaning, sometimes many times. .  He waits, hours, days, goes back, reworks: if it isn’t “good”, it will get painted over again.  It is finished when nothing is wrong with the painting, he says.

He is a deeply focused, compressive, detached, and humane presence: if I were told he were a New Englander, a Vermonter, I’d believe it.  His words about painting sound like what I think Robert Frost might say.  

Richter has a unique historical position from which to paint.  A German post-war artist in East Germany, he escaped to West Germany, became a political refugee, and never saw his parents again.  The early Social Realism he painted there is buried now, and Richter’s oeuvre is broad.  In the 1980’s he returned to East Germany for an exhibition, welcomed as a “favorite” son, no longer a prodigal.  It’s fascinating, the spectacle of government repentance.  Repressive regimes are sterile, implode and then struggle to recover what they rebuked and scorned. Ai Weiwei, Wu Guanzhong, Shostakovich come to mind.

Germany wins the prize for the worst history to live down, but we do have our own atrocities on our national conscience, it’s well to remember.  In one scene Richter muses over old photos of his childhood, and considers destroying them.  He has few real memories, only photo memories, and their elusive relation to his past. His small son, clad in a bright yellow rainslicker, peeks into the studio inquiringly, then turns and scampers away.  aption

Would that it all could be swept away, but the purging leaves its inevitable tracks, like a glacier scrapes the mountainside.  At one point, the squeegee  is so large and heavy he must lean into it with his shoulder to push it across the large canvas. In another, he seems to have left it to partially dry, and he wrenches it loose to continue to pull the draperies over what was before, now only posited by say-so.  

 Despite his star problem, he moves back and forth between the deeply private studio experience and the hysteria of world-wide fame.  His painting remains rigorous and truthful; at 80 he’s not on auto-pilot, no golden age nostalgia has seduced him - perhaps because he remains cool, somewhat detached, the observer hiding in plain sight behind canvas spectacles.

ART: Brian Sharpe, Acme Gallery

SEEING, LOOKING, REFLECTING - doing this well is the best revenge

   “Looking at pictures is one of the ways in which you increase the pleasure … of living in a visual world.... It’s not a narcotizing pleasure. It’s the pleasure of having more sense made of our experience of the world.” - Robert Hughes, art critic, dies at 74

A good review from David Pagel in LAT on 6-29 prompted me to go- plus curiousity about simple-looking geometric paintings.  

"Brian Sharp’s simple little paintings lack the razzle-dazzle that plays such a big part of so much contemporary art, not to mention the get-it-now drive that defines so much of life in the big city, where people seem to have become addicted to instantaneous communication. 

At ACME, the L.A. painter’s two-tone abstractions throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of swift message-sending, giving pause to visitors whose seen-it-all attitudes and know-it-all mind sets are visited by just a whiff of doubt when in the presence of Sharp’s hard-edged compositions.At ACME, the L.A. painter’s two-tone abstractions throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of swift message-sending, giving pause to visitors whose seen-it-all attitudes and know-it-all mind sets are visited by just a whiff of doubt when in the presence of Sharp’s hard-edged compositions. 

At ACME, the L.A. painter’s two-tone abstractions throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of swift message-sending, giving pause to visitors whose seen-it-all attitudes and know-it-all mind sets are visited by just a whiff of doubt when in the presence of Sharp’s hard-edged compositions.

That niggling sense of uncertainty is the heart and soul of Sharp’s unassuming art, which sidesteps the industrial-strength seriousness of much geometric abstraction and the pumped-up physicality of installation-scale painting. The cavalier outlook of slacker abstraction is nowhere to be found in Sharp’s carefully crafted works, nor is the autobiographical impulse of narcissistic art.

Gentle and intimate, Sharp’s quietly engaging paintings are especially effective at deflating claims made about them, both positive and negative. To talk big about them is to misunderstand them. Even those that measure 55-by-44 inches avoid the assertiveness that we associate with strength. In a sense, all of Sharp’s works fly under the radar of language, where they make a little space for a kind of attentiveness that is its own reward.

Nearly, but not quite symmetrical, their carefully skewed compositions stimulate the human desire for both order and freedom. Their odd yet spot-on color combinations — forest green and tangerine, banana cream and golden yellow — make life richer by making the little things matter without overdramatizing their import.

Few paintings are more sensible. Or more satisfying."

SO, I’D BE VERY HAPPY TO HAVE SOMEONE WRITE THIS ABOUT MY PAINTINGS.

ART: Vincent and a Cloud

Was there ever a more marvelous cloud?

ESSAY: LADWP & The Owens Valley

WATER WAR RESURGES 

The L.A. DWP, which agreed to fight dust pollution from part of the Owens Lake bed, wants to rework the deal and is balking at taking on more territory

BY LOUIS SAHAGUN

   LONE PINE, Calif. — Los Angeles and the Owens Valley are at war over water again, with the city trying to rework a historic agreement aimed at stopping massive dust storms that have besieged the eastern Sierra Nevada since L.A. opened an aqueduct 99 years ago that drained Owens Lake.

   The L.A. Department of Water and Power has spent $1.2 billion in accordance with a 1997 agreement to combat the powder-fine dust from a 40-square-mile area of the dry Owens Lake bed. By introducing vegetation, gravel and flooding, the DWP has reduced particle air pollution by 90%.

   The efforts have brought a measure of peace in the rural valley where people have long had bitter feelings toward Los Angeles, although a noxious reminder of how much work remains to be done rolled over this tourist town on the afternoon of May 25. Fearsome gusts of desert wind kicked up swirling clouds thousands of feet high and so thick that drivers switched on their headlights and pedestrians scurried about with squinting eyes.

   Despite the DWP’s efforts, the air quality still doesn’t meet federal pollution standards. So the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District has ordered the DWP to expand its reach to an additional 2.9 square miles of lake bed, including areas so remote and geologically challenging that it could cost the utility as much as $400 million to bring them into compliance with federal health standards. 

.....L.A. diverted so much water  via the aqueduct system that it was nearly impossible for local farmers and ranchers to make a living — a scandal dramatized in the classic 1974 film “Chinatown.”...

   The DWP claims that the 1997 agreement contains flaws that set the stage for unforeseen problems and sent costs soaring. For example, the DWP has had to spread more water than anticipated — yearly costs have grown to about $45 million — over portions of the lake bed where dust pollution exceeds federal standards.

   The utility also argues that geological reports and newly discovered archaeological sites indicate that the lake was smaller in 1913 — when the aqueduct began taking water south — than outlined in the 1997 agreement. The DWP is responsible for dust arising only from the portions of the lake bed exposed since 1913. The utility says the State Lands Commission should be responsible for rest of the area, which amounts to about 10 square miles.

   In addition, the DWP contends that the agreement unreasonably requires it to control all airborne dust over the lake bed, even though some of the particles might be blown in from nearby sand dunes and other sources.

   “We have no intention of walking away from our responsibility for the dust at the dry Owens Lake bed,” Nichols said. “But the reality is that we don’t create all the dust out there, never did.”

   The utility has filed an appeal of the air pollution control district’s order with the California Air Resources Board, which will hear the case Friday. The DWP says that if it prevails, the amount of water used for dust control could be cut in half, saving the average ratepayer about $20 a year.

   Ted Schade, Great Basin air pollution control officer, said he understands the desire to save money in a tough economy. But the federal Clean Air Act does not say that “close to completion” is good enough, he said.

   “The DWP is responsible for controlling the lake bed that is exposed today because of their ongoing water diversions,” he said. In addition, state-approved procedures require Great Basin to identify and order treatment of areas that fail to meet federal particulate standards.

   Schade conceded that some dust does come from other sources, but he said “they are a small fraction of the dust that comes off the Owens Lake bed.”

   Environmentalists have a stake in the outcome. A master plan for the lake bed calls for environmentally sensitive flooding strategies, but the plan is on hold until the current dispute is resolved, DWP officials said. Thousands of migrating waterfowl and shorebirds roost on portions of the flooded lake bed.

MUSIC: Krautrock Concert

Krautrock Concert at the Ford

The Ford Amphitheatre is nestled in the hills of Cahuenga Pass, one of several venerable outdoor performance venues in my city so lavishly appointed with entertainment delights.  I see local groups sponsored by the Cultural Affairs Department of the city with other cultural groups here.  The audience is welcome to bring picnics or buy dinner boxes and dine alfresco on terraces beneath beautiful old canyon trees as the sun sets.

I enjoyed a nice Pino Grigio and a boxed salad next to a fountain falling over mayan-shaped bricks while the twilight made its long slow way over the arching branches above me.

The young hip audience brought a few other less traditional items to enhance their listening pleasure, I noticed. Rather surprised no one seemed worried about getting busted; it’s a very public family-oriented venue. They danced in their seats, rising up like a wave when the last cover band began the Kraftwerk set.

 During last night’s performance, of “cosmic” German alternative music, a large full moon rose over the tall trees, soon disappearing into the waiting sea a few miles away.

“Krautrock” styles began in the late 60’s and early 70’s in Germany, and is a seminal modern popular movement which influenced house, ambient, New Age, and industrial music styles.

The only band I recognized was Kraftwerk, whom I had loved immediately when I first heard them.  I went because it was billed “cosmic”, and I thought it could be an intriguing contrast to the Ring Cycle and its themes which I saw at the Dorothy Chandler in 2010-11.   The cynical clashing energy of 30’s cabaret Expressionism and the smooth evil of  The Threepenny Opera have given way to a numbed alienation, muffled and worn, yet with visions of transcendence gothic romantic emotion. Very intriguing, as is the use of electronic instruments.

Krautrock and ambient music features echoes, crescendos, extreme dynamics, vibrating and reverberating non-musical noises, mechanical or electronic tools or motors, for instance.  I hear little regular rhythmic pattern, and limited vocal or traditional use of the voice; Kraftwerk chants robotically.

Did anyone find that numbing mechanistic quality more so because all the bands were simply “covering”,  another step toward modern zombie-ism?

Independence is a partial recitation of the Declaration of Independence and a mix of the Star Spangled Banner. It was first performed in Germany 30 years ago, which must have been early 1980’s.  A long time ago, when one recalls that the Berlin Wall didn’t come down until November, 1989. I found it quite haunting, realizing that and listening to Lorenz’ stylistically and historically meaningful expression.

The Creator Has a Master Plan, a cover of a cover!, sounded like the beginning of time as swelling blooming energies coalesced and divided, rather like listening to a lava lamp.

Vitamin C and Computer World take an amusingly ironic tone, celebrating a kind of numbed anxiety that smiles and chuckles quietly and darkly at the post-industrial plight of modern man.  

Annoyingly long set-ups required for the many bands and their electronic instruments cut the last performance short. A gargantuan monster tangle of cable and wires was heaped onstage testified to the complexity of the event. Technicians ministering frantically over it as if to resuscitate dying seaweed. I think I was the oldest person there, and I think everyone knew everyone there but me.  Two young people sitting with me chatted with me, one of them clearly enjoying it that I said I was a Kraftwerk fan.  Where do all these people come from?  They live in LA, sure, and what a view of how grand the artistic rainbow of this place arches.

ESSAY: Environmental Catastrophes

 “...population growth, climate change and environmental destruction are pushing Earth toward calamitous — and irreversible — biological changes.

In a paper published in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature, 22 researchers from a variety of fields liken the human impact to global events eons ago that caused mass extinctions, permanently altering Earth's biosphere.

"Humans are now forcing another such transition, with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience," wrote the authors, who are from the U.S., Europe, Canada and South America...if we just ignore all the warning signs of how we're changing the Earth, the scenario of losses of biodiversity — 75% or more — is not an outlandish scenario at all...The swiftness of climate change is likely to outpace the ability of species to adapt, especially as natural habitat becomes more fragmented...Human influence on the planet has become so pervasive that some scientists have argued in recent years that Earth has entered a new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene...To avert a grim future, or at least make it less grim, the paper calls for significant reductions in world population growth and per-capita resource use, more efficient energy use, less reliance on fossil fuels and stepped-up efforts to protect the parts of Earth that have so far escaped human dominance....We have to say what we see. - excerpts from Los Angeles Times article, 6-8-12

“...everything moves beyond our remedy” - Mao Zedong’s character sings this at the poignant and solemn conclusion of “Nixon in China”.

ESSAY: Firefly Populations in Decline

Oh, is this beautiful: Yayoi Kusama’s installation for her retrospective at the Whitney.  

It makes me grieve, for the rivers of Thailand with their firefly displays are losing them.  Some say locals are spraying pesticides on the grasses and trees where the beetles lay their eggs because they are tired of the swarms of tourists.  The hundreds of small motorboats are destroying the grasses with their sight-seeing trips, and and the tourist housing is encroaching on the areas as well.  Where is a government when it’s needed?

The fireflies of Indonesia - tourists mob the riverbanks where the fireflies roost - building tourist facilities close to the sites is causing a decline - big surprise.

FILM: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

“...The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is actually Ravla Khempur, a charming rural palace hotel in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, about an hour outside the spectacular lakeside city of Udaipur…. with a history dating from the early 17th Century...”  (John Bealby, MailOnLine, March 3, 2012)

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-2110061/Holidays-India-Follow-footsteps-cast-The-Best-Exotic-Marigold-Hotel.html#ixzz1wXvvsMtN

John, my husband, is utterly seduced by India, and so of course, this film was a must-see.  It’s very well done, with a wonderful English cast, so very polished, understated, and  with exquisite acting.  The tourist dream of India plays out most delightfully - what an overwhelming, truly exotic place it must be.  

The aging inhabitants, faced with unexpected financial failures, find newly purposeful lives, closure, love, and geriatric sex, without worries about medical insurance or missing their grandchildrens’ early years.  Of course, Wi-Fi always works, even though the plumbing doesn’t.  Poignant and comedic moments, the story of daily life begun anew, is narrated in a blog voice-over by Judi Dench’s character.  I’ve seen so many films and TV shows with this device that I’m afraid my blog will start sounding like one!

Dev Patel is really comic, an appealing young actor, and the Indian cast is quite wonderful, too. So, do go, if you are a lover of English movies, even if you’re not, it’s a lovely fantasy with its quiet lessons about dignity in aging.