This afternoon while on my lunch break from painting class I checked my google reader and found a new post by LCAD alumni, Jessie Fohrman. I mentioned her in the post I made about the graduates last fall. It seems that she’d had success in getting her work noticed! She recently created a super cool monster  costume for Deerhoof’s new music video. I am a huge Deerhoof fan and couldn’t be more proud to see an LCAD alumni teaming up with such an awesome group to make an outstanding video.

Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSrlpyFVyaQ

And here is a link to Jessie’s blog post with close up photos of the costume:

http://j4manart.blogspot.com/2011/10/monsters-in-california-city.html

First week of school (almost) through and the first days of September. The first four days on campus as a third year student have been interesting. There are SO many new students. I think that’s great, I’ve already met a few really ambitious and excited freshmen and some interesting transfer students. Also, 2 out of 4 days back on campus student services have given the students free meals yet again. Donuts and lattes on Tuesday and bratwurst food truck  yesterday for lunch. Thanks, LCAD, I was really hungry.

I will update again soon but my homeworks have already been assigned and I don’t have a lot of other exciting updates just yet.

In a farewell to summer, here is a picture of all (really, only about 1/2) of my doodles from this summer tacked to the wall upstairs in my apartment. This area I like to call “my laboratory”.

I woke up yesterday morning and decided to make the most of my day by going to my favorite place in LA- The Natural History Museum. I know I’ve posted about the NHM before so I won’t spend too much time talking about it. The NHM has just organized a new Dinosaur Hall which has a really incredible interactive and informative atmosphere. There are lots of digital touch screen games to play on the second floor, looped films being projected onto the walls of paleontologists doing their thing and explaining the latest and greatest in dino-knowledge, and of course fossils and skeletons. I think the best part of the new Dinosaur Hall is the arrangement on the first floor of three T-Rex skeletons of different ages. It’s really amazing, three skeletons that scientists first believed were different dinosaurs completely are really just the same dinosaur as it matured. I did some doodles while I was at the NHM from some of my favorite dioramas. I wish I could have spent a little more time there but I got there only 3 hours before closing and I tried to make the best of those three hours by making the rounds as usual.

My doodles from the NHM.

After the NHM closed I headed west towards the Hammer museum. The featured exhibits at the Hammer right now are really a must-see, in my opinion. Ed Ruscha: On The Road, is a really great exhibit featuring the work of Ed Ruscha using excerpts from Jack Kerouac’s famous beat generation novel. It put a smile on my face to see an artist of such popularity who has been creating work using text for years to make a collection of pieces in homage to a great American writer of the 20th century.

Mañana – Ed Ruscha

Paul Thek’s retrospective at the Hammer made my day. I entered the galleries not really knowing what to expect, not having seen much of Thek’s work. The first thing I saw was Thek’s face projected on a big white wall, something from one of Warhol’s screen tests – a series of black and white looped photos to create a moving picture of Thek looking directly into the camera. Just blinking, just looking, just breathing. In this same room was Thek’s Warrior’s Arm. It was really believable and really beautiful. I looked at it entirely, top to bottom – left to right, I scrutinized it. I liked it. The best part about a retrospective exhibit is that there is a LOT of work from one artist. So the Thek exhibit took me about 45-60 minutes to get around. Paul Thek’s installation work was on display, a lot of props from his performance arts and my favorite – gouache paintings, text paintings, and note(sketch)books. The exhibit showed a look at a lot of Thek’s personal dialogue with himself by displaying his notebooks. I tried to read every page I could. I really love an artist who has a relationship with language in their work.

left: Warrior’s Arm. right: Tower and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

left: 1:1 right: While There Is Time

#1-19 of 96 Sacraments from Paul Thek’s 1975 notebook

Both the Paul Thek retrospective and the Ed Ruscha exhibit at the Hammer catered to my interests in the contemporary art world. I couldn’t have picked a better museum to visit yesterday.

Yesterday I saw some work by Belgian painter, Stef Driesen, online and today I kept thinking about the paintings. Decidedly, I am posting a few here. He has shown in both Los Angeles and New York so I am trying to find out if any of the galleries in LA have pieces of his on view in their permanent collection. I really like the surrealist qualities of some of his paintings but also the barely ambiguous figures and natural formations (mountains?). Reminds me a bit of Michael Borremans and Luc Tuymans. Take a look for yourself.

Untitled, 2007 – Oil on canvas

Untitled, 2007 – Oil on canvas

Untitled, 2006 – Oil on canvas

My absence from the blog has been too long.

There is a lot of things happening at LCAD: Gallery 793 opened it’s first wave of student, faculty, and alumni art at the beginning of this month and will be opening with it’s second wave of art pieces and another reception night on August 4th. The Rodin exhibit has come to LCAD’s gallery with multiple bronze sculptures on display and a really interesting look at the ‘lost wax’ process of creating bronzed casts.

As of now, there isn’t a lot else I have to share. I will post again soon with a few of my sketchbook drawings.

For the past month-ish I’ve been mostly making small gouache studies. They are really just doodles, something I’ve been doing to help teach myself this new medium and also something that allows me to play and exercise. I wanted to make a short post today because I was looking at my little gouache palette and laughing. A few of my instructors always tell me that painters are not messy drunken whirlwinds that commonly thought of but I think my instructors were just telling me that we should be organized…I don’t think I listened.

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One of my paintings from yesterday, a self portrait.

i know my last update was about going to the huntington library. and maybe i’m coming across as more interested in literature than painting but i find that a vast amount of my inspiration comes from reading and from writing. between the end of my freshman year and the beginning of my sophomore year at LCAD i was exposed to so many writers by means of two classes: critical reasoning and american lit-iconoclasts. Grant Hier instructs both of these courses with great knowledge on the material and incredible diversity of material. i think without this exposure to literature, i wouldn’t be half as interested in making art as i am now. the written and spoken word can be invigorating.

with that being said, i’ve binged on book and magazine buying the past few weeks. i’ve been trying to catch up on some classics i missed out on in high school (i was never really interested in anything in high school) and also trying to cover some field of my favorite writers and philosophers.

this one was on sale for a quarter at the “Friends of El Toro Library Bookstore”. Erich Fromm also wrote my favorite read of the past 5 months, On Disobedience. it speaks towards how to handle separateness and how to love whatever it is you love, fully. the section i just finished reading had this to say about love,

“The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice….But aside from learning the theory and practice there is a third…ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important”

which, i realized that i couldn’t agree with more.

unfortunately, the best bookstore within a 20 mile radius (to my knowledge) is going out of business in september. latitude 33, in laguna, is having a 20% off – closing sale to move all of their books out of the store. i’ve been eyeing this Lars Elling book for a couple months and i finally bought it yesterday. i really like Elling’s contemporary narratives- very relavent but also very dreamlike and unattainable. You could compare the style of Elling’s paintings to that of Gerhard Richter’s but i believe that’s applicable to so many contemporary artists.

also, i’ve acquired other goodwill finds, philosophy books, and new additions to my Bukowski collection…

classics, Hesse, 1984, Steinbeck, Kafka. new Bukowski. the newest issue of The Believer and a perfect condition December 1969 issue of Nat Geo.

i have a lot of reading to do.

Yesterday I convinced a friend to take a trip to the Huntington Library in Pasadena with me, on a whim. I have been wanting to visit the Huntington Library for over a year. Last year I had heard they had some kind of exhibit full of Bukowski’s typed pages, used objects, and other relics that would have blown my mind. Unfortunately (maybe I missed it) these relics were no longer on display yesterday but I did get to see one of Bukowski’s typed pages, a self portrait he drew of himself, and many many other things that I wasn’t expecting.

The Huntington Library is over 75 years old and covers so much land. On their site there are multiple gardens, a greenhouse, and different gallery buildings to explore. I learnt a lot about science through an exhibit they had that showcased different manuscripts and first edition books on space, evolution, anatomy, light and color. There were a lot of paintings. The Huntington Library owns a few John Singer Sargent paintings, some very interesting sculptures, and a room full of Frank Lloyd Write’s furniture. I was stimulated.

The greenhouse was amazing. I had never been in a greenhouse with multiple different climate controlled rooms, before. I don’t even think I’d ever been in a greenhouse before. In the cloud room, fog rolled in and out – sometimes enough fog to cloud your vision. The desert gardens had rows and rows and colonies of succulents, cactus, and other desert indigenous plant life. A lot of it seemed alien, like stepping foot on a different planet.

The geese were friendly and the ducks had just hatched ducklings. I went inside the branches of a magnolia tree and became engulfed by it’s leaves, the light was mostly gone and it felt really magical. I loved the nature.

I highly recommend visiting the Huntington Library when in Pasadena. But only if there’s enough time to really explore every facet of the property.

PLANT LIFE in the desert gardens,

Bukowski, the “elephant-edition” of the national American Audobon index, a 400 hundred year old anatomy book. (crazy)

Puck and Frank LLoyd Wright.

I’ve been distant. Time for some kind of update. I’ve been making a lot of little gouache paintings, trying to work on a few bigger oil paintings and I finally closed my sketchbook from the past 10 months and opened a new one.

I had been hearing a lot of mixed reviews on the Geffen’s “Art in the Streets” exhibition that recently went up in LA. Finally got around to checking it out yesterday…to sum it up I will call the exhibition, extensive.

(yeah, even the bathrooms were painted on)

The place was stuffed with tons of different work from tons of different artists. Photos, graff, installations, paintings, sculpture. I was on sensory overload for the first 10 minutes. Once I allowed myself to sink into the mood of the exhibition, I got kinda crazy and was chuckling and ogling at the walls. The most exciting part of this exhibit was the multiple rooms that were singularly occupied by artists and the false fronts of shops, homes, bathrooms, churches, etc. The exhibit is incredibly fun and takes at least an hour to get through.

a miniature replica of a NY subway by Kiely Jenkins, a painting by Robbie Conal, and a tribute to Dash Snow.

There were, obviously, a few artists who’s work really stuck with me: Swoon and RAMMELLZEE. I had known about Swoon from a film I rented at the LCAD library called The Run Up. To see her work up close, knowing the amount of labor that was put into it and finally witnessing the scale of the work, was really breathtaking. Swoon set up a white tented area that exhibited a centrally, internally lit structure inside. The structure was something like an icy peak of natural and feminine beauty. Cut paper, vellum, and drawn portraits in paper were linked together to cast incredibly delicate shadows on the surrounding walls of the tent.

different shots of the Swoon installation.

RAMMELLZEE is an artist I had never heard of before or seen before yesterday. He is one of the artists that had an entire enclosed four walls to display work. Florescent UV reacting paints and materials were part of the terrifying and interesting masks, armor, and toys (sort of) that he had built. I was actually frightened by these masks, and I think that’s why I like them so much.

a few of the works done by RAMMELLZEE

While in LA, I took a trip to a new(ish) bookstore called Lead Apron on Melrose. This store is a vintage/bibliophile’s dream. If you like midcentury modern design and rare, hard to find books – you’d love this place. I felt like touching anything was going to make it fall apart but the shop clerks were amused by my handling of the books with such delicacy. The store is currently showing photographs by Olivier Zahm that really excited my interests.

fancy rare books and Olivier Zahm.

That kind of sums up my LA Friday. I have at least a dozen more photos I’d love to share but my connection to the internet is weak. Lots of painting today…