Bowling With Color
Sir Richard Sheridan Patrick Michael Aloysius Franklin Bowling OBE RA, known as Frank Bowling,(b. 1934), ca 1969 New York, British artist, born in Guyana, working in New York and London So, knowing almost nothing about artist Frank Bowling, I went to the large current SFMOMA exhibition of his 1966-1975 New York paintings*. These were the famous ‘Ab Ex” years in New York, and it appeared at first glance that expressive, exuberant style suited Bowling just fine. His particular spin seemed to be his extravagant use of spray paints...
read moreBuddha Contemplates
Maybe because I still type on her iphone with one finger, I’m not a fan of video art. But I am a fan of poetry, humor, brilliant insight, stillness, quiet and such so I Loved TV Buddha by the “Father of Video Art” Nam June Paik. To stay au current for herself and art tour clients, I went reluctantly to SFMOMA’s huge retrospective of the Korean born, musically trained, internationally active artist’s works. My assumption was that the entire show would be alien and incomprehensible to me. But...
read moreOmmmm
Maybe because I still need to type onto my iphone carefully with one finger, I’m not a particular fan of video art. But I am a fan of poetry, humor, brilliant insight, stillness, quiet and such so I Loved TV Buddha by the “Father of Video Art,” Nam June Paik (1932-2006). To stay au current for myself and art tour clients, I went reluctantly to SFMOMA’s huge retrospective* of the Korean born, musically trained, internationally active artist’s works. My assumption was the entire show would be alien and...
read moreOnly God Can Make … A Safety Pin*
Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen, Corridor Pin Blue, 1999, stainless steel, aluminum and glazed acrylic enamel (de Young Museum, San Francisco) So, I was reading about outdoor sculpture gardens and some of their lovely, harmonious artistic offerings to nature. Then I thought of our local de Young Museum’s sculpture garden which is just off its cafeteria. You buy your food, take it on its tray to a table along the greenery, hear the birds chirp and look out to view … a huge safety pin. Not harmonious. But...
read moreHow’d You Do That?
Here it is a little closer: It’s at the highest point of the Church of Sant’Ignazio in Rome, near the Pantheon. And….it isn’t a dome at all. Ie, the ceiling up there is flat. Backtracking a bit, I was thinking about those high church ceilings and wondering how artists got up there to decorate them. Many of us, particularly those who read Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstacy or saw the movie, know Michaelangelo worked from scaffolding to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He actually designed a unique...
read moreFirst Lady’s Choice
Robert Seldon Duncanson (1821-1872), Landscape with Rainbow, 1859, 30 x 52.25″, oil on canvas I didn’t catch this pastoral landscape on WSJ Live on Inauguration Day, but perhaps some of you watching on television did. It had been selected by Jill Biden from the Smithsonian Collection to be on prominent display in the U.S. Capital during the inauguration. The artist, Robert Seldon Duncanson, was one of very few established African-American artists active during the pre-and post-Civil War era. ‘Established’...
read moreString!
So, the other day I thought I’d take a quick look at the history of fabric and clothes, then report. That turned out like taking a quick glance at the entire worldwide history of art. In other words, it includes virtually everything. First off, everyone was naked for who knows how many tens of thousands of years or whether they had become humans yet. Along the long, long way, discoveries were made or invented at different times in different parts of the world depending on myriad circumstances. The more I...
read moreI Ride a Bus and Go To a Museum
As we all know these days, everyday happenings are now major events, so it felt very adventurous to get onto the 1 California bus and ride part way (I walked the rest) to the de Young Museum’s Frida Kahlo show. It was hung in early March and had already been sold out so anticipation was high for huge attendance and rave critical reviews. And then…. the doors were closed for six months and nobody got a single glance at it except the security guards and a few museum personnel. Until yesterday when the doors...
read moreNothin But Grey Skies
Jackson Pollack (1912-1926), Number 19, 1954, 30 7/8″ x 22 5/8″, Paint dripped on canvas Our smoky San Francisco skies these days put me in mind of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. The one above is actually a bit unusual because he signed it upper left as a vertical and it is more ‘conveniently’ sized than his enormous, wall sized canvases. But, in May 2013, those things didn’t stop someone from buying Number 19 for $58,363,750 at a Christie’s auction. Pollock was famous in his...
read moreA Masterpiece and A Man
Cathedrale Nortre-Dame de Chartres So, appropriately because it was Sunday, I took a quick trip to Chartres. (via Zoom and an artist guide who is leads tours to the site). It was my first time ‘there’ and really one of the few times I’ve been so attentive to the details of church architecture and history.As architecturally significant and beloved as Notre-Dame de Paris is, turns out Chartres’ Notre-Dame is even more so. The Roman Catholic cathedral is designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO which...
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