Boozin' it up

tiny panels.

a series i'm working on, there are four more that have images of dance steps.

the title of all eight panels together is 'night on the town'

i'll post the other four when they are done.

still working on new pieces, slow going as things take a while to dry with all this rain. am i ever looking forward to hot summer days and nights. i've big plans for some new editions, road trips, and dinner parties...all of it percolating around in my brain.

also! in two weeks i'll be taking part in a sweet new hand made show!
The "I Made ! Market", downtown at Billy's Coffee Shop.
I'll have the usual prints, tote bags, calenders and buttons.
I'm thinking of offering a few things on sale to clear out some things so it should be great!
come check it out on Feb. 9th!!!
see flier below

hmm, is it me or does the rain make anyone else just want to curl up with a good book and a cup of tea?
mmm, warm tea!
mmm, good book!


i'm having such a hard time feeling motivated!
I started a new series of mini-drawings that I keep working on a bit at time and I've been endlessly gessoing and laying down a ground for some other paintings.

maybe this rain will let up so i can streak into the house from our home office and make some tea, read a magazine and then maybe, just maybe get back to work on a few projects. It's slow going-but any progress is better than no progress!

when the rain turns to snow that's my que to run into the house.
yep, it snows where i live. we took a walk to it this morning and it was so beautiful!
i took a picture with my phone but haven't quite worked out how to get it off the phone. so if you see me and you wanna see the snow i'll show ya' :)

clean studio!

weekends!
what a great weekend!

Saturday I went for my first bike ride of 2008, a great ride around Glendale.
My bike is going live at our shop in Glendale so I can ride down where it's a tab bit flatter. I tried to ride where I live when I first moved here but it would take more than a single speed and me being in way better shape than I am. But the ride around Glendale was great, hopefully I'll be able to go for a ride at least once a week. Take pictures, be out in the sunshine, learn more about this area.

After that we had lunch in Atwater and then went and checked out the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown. I've been meaning to go since it was finished...but I like that everything has settled in rather than seeing it brand shiny new. It sooo beautiful! We wandered all around it, the gardens, the upper levels, the inside. It was great! I really dug just 'being' there... seeing how it goes together, how it looks in the neighborhood. I highly recommend going to check it out, take a picnic and chill out on one of the patios.

Then Sunday I cleaded out the Garage Studio! It's where I do all of my screen printing and other random projects that are messy or requite tools. Somewheres between Thanksgiving and now it had become a total sty! But now it's all tidy! Yay! I can work on the new panels I'm going to build and get back into printing.

Other random things that happened this weekend.
-started a new knitting project.
-helped style a few outfits for a photo shoot for the boy's band.
'Hobo is the new tribal', well it was more steampunk...
-found out there is a hat store in pasadena, new hat soon!
-cleaned up the outside yard from all the stuff that keeps blowing around.
-worked on a plan for some small paintings
-went grocery shopping for our new improved low-carb plan.
-sold a print and a calender to a friend who came over to get them and then hung out for a bit.

here's the clean and tidy studio, yes my worktable is built on top of a pool table :)

the work of beth cavener stichter

painting

The art form has long been given up for dead, but just because New York no longer dominates the scene doesn't mean it's failing. Young artists in L.A. help it thrive.

By Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Astudent at one of Los Angeles' premier art schools recently asked a question that had been troubling her for some time. It surprised me.

Her problem was the dismissive, sometimes patronizing attitude toward painting her faculty and fellow students -- not all of them, but enough to notice -- regularly tossed her way. Painting is what she wanted to do, not video, installation, digital photography, performance or any of the other myriad art forms that have proliferated since the 1970s. But constantly defending her desire to be a painter was beating her down.

Part of my surprise came from a simple clash with daily experience: I see lots of new paintings in gallery and museum shows -- more than ever before. Doesn't she?

"When they sneer and say I'm foolish because painting is obsolete, I don't know what to say to them," she said, sighing.

Oh, I thought, that old chestnut. Art, like science and technology, used to be discussed in terms of progress. That meant an ancient practice like painting could become obsolete, like absolute monarchy or 8-track tapes. We don't think that way anymore.

"That's easy," I replied. "Say, 'Thank you.' And mean it."

The short explanation for expressing gratitude is that every young artist should take hostile groupthink -- the promiscuous pressure to conform -- as a cue that she's on the right track. Those pressures can be especially acute at school. That's one hazard of the current pervasiveness of academic training for artists.

The long explanation is -- well, longer, although not by much. It begins with another question: What century is this?

Lingering animus toward painting is so end-of-the-20th century. Painting hasn't been the black sheep of the art family for a couple of decades now, except in academic backwaters of provincial thought.

It wasn't always so. But the recent change in fortune of painting's status -- at least outside the academy -- turns out to be revealing.

In 1975, art critic Max Kozloff took note of a widespread indifference to painting among his scribbling colleagues. Writing in Artforum, then the leading intellectual art journal, he noted that "for at least five years . . . a whole mode, painting, has been dropped gradually from avant-garde writing, without so much as a sigh of regret."

Painting seemed to have evaporated.

After the 1970s and even in the face of a sputtering "return to painting" in the 1980s, the actual practice of slapping paint around on canvas took a back seat to academically inspired Conceptual art. "Ideas about painting," which is one strategy the inspiring first generation of Conceptual artists employed to shake-up the status quo, superseded painting itself. But the ideas were getting monotonous by the time the second- and third-generation Conceptualists came around.

Today, by contrast, actual painting is a staple in gallery exhibitions from Santa Monica and Culver City to mid-Wilshire and Chinatown. And paintings made by L.A. artists are everywhere. Lots of them are by younger artists, under 45. When California's deep recession of the early 1990s eased, galleries exploded across L.A. Now they number well into the triple digits. The number of painters, promising and accomplished, has likewise mushroomed. Painting -- of all kinds -- is as prominent as any other art in the city's galleries.

I think of them as "the undead." Do the math: Born in the 1960s and 1970s, these are artists who came of age in a world where painting was widely and sometimes loudly proclaimed to be finished, kaput -- dead.

Or, as Kozloff complained, more likely it was just being ignored to death. Painting was the crazy old uncle rambling around in the attic, and about whom the less said the better.

Why did painting disappear? And why has it reappeared in such abundance?

One reason is rarely voiced: The postwar rise of New York's cultural dominion -- and its more recent fall -- explains a lot of it.

Painting was always said to be "a New York thing." After World War II, when the New York School bumped the School of Paris off the charts, a few sculptors were present at the coronation. But mostly they were painters -- Pollock, De Kooning, Rothko, Kline, Still, Frankenthaler, Guston, Newman, Hartigan and many more.

Back then the bond between Modern painting and New York was intense. Eventually, it swelled to imperial proportions.

The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, initially slow to respond, got on board. The otherwise adroit 1970 history of the New York School by NYU professor Irving Sandler (himself a former painter and gallerist) is titled "The Triumph of American Painting." It was axiomatic: Masterful American art was painting, and masterful painting meant the New York School. A local event was inflated into a national phenomenon, claiming worldwide stature.

But that was then, and this is now.

The triumph of American painting was actually a thrilling neighborhood affair with great public relations. So was the subsequent skirmish over painting's death.

These vicissitudes mattered in Manhattan, where the triumphant painters' watering hole at the Cedar Bar gave way to the anti-painting grim reapers' club at Max's Kansas City. But neither posture prevented Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke in Germany or Ed Ruscha and James Hayward in L.A.from painting up a storm.

What actually was dying was not painting but its complement -- a provincial enslavement to the primacy of the New York School. As the 21st century approached, surging globalism meant the slow, irreversible erosion of New York as contemporary art's preeminent center.

First Los Angeles and Cologne, then London and Berlin, lately Beijing and Mumbai joined the party. It turns out the old argument over the freshness-or-obsolescence of colors smeared on canvas was less about painting's legitimacy -- really, how can an artistic medium be illegitimate? -- than about shifting centers of power.

Overlooking history

UNLIKE New York, Los Angeles never had an established reputation as a painting town. That might help to explain the abundance of painting now: Without history's heavy baggage, the field seems wide open -- ripe for the picking.

Still, the lack of historical identification of painting with L.A. is somewhat odd, since Southern California's first brilliant postwar artist -- John McLaughlin -- was a painter. Deeply informed by an intimate knowledge of 14th and 15th century Japanese Literati painting and its 19th century revivals, McLaughlin began to consolidate his own contemplative brand of radical abstract geometry as early as 1950-51.

Not until the second half of the '50s did the primary achievements of such marvelous Beat Generation assemblage artists as Wallace Berman and Edward Kienholz appear. Yet the dawn of important L.A. art is regularly misrepresented as emerging in their great sculptures.

"The Cool School," an otherwise impressive documentary film about the Los Angeles art scene of the 1950s and 1960s by director Morgan Neville and journalist Kristine McKenna, just now going into theatrical release, takes this erroneous tack. So did last year's great exhibition at Paris' Pompidou Center, "Los Angeles 1955-1985: Birth of an Artistic Capital." (Note the start-date of the European survey of mature postwar Southern California art -- five years after McLaughlin went into gear.) But "Birth of the Cool," a snazzy exhibition now at the Orange County Museum of Art, definitively confirms that painting, not sculpture, actually occupies pride of original place in L.A.'s stunningly inventive contemporary art history. And expect painting's local longevity to be a subtext of the next LA Weekly Annual Biennial, a mashup titled "Some Paintings" and featuring the work of more than 70 living L.A. painters, opening at Track 16 on Jan. 12.

In fact, I wonder whether the ingrained confusion about painting and assemblage sculpture isn't itself a legacy of capitulation to the power of the New York School. Starting with assemblage represents the assumption -- mistaken, I believe -- that 1950s painting is all locked up in the history books. Pimping the primacy of assemblage sculpture offers L.A. art a veneer of independent, maverick style.

But that's just silly -- and redundant too. Painting is by definition maverick.

Painting, unlike most image-making practices in industrial or post-industrial society, is already pretty much a solitary job. Rarely do production assistants, teams of fabricators and collaborators gather in a painter's studio, as they do for movies at Paramount, TV shows at HBO and at the far-flung art factories established by video artist Bill Viola, sculptor Jeff Koons or installation artist Ann Hamilton. Usually it's just one person in a room, with a flat plane and some colors, trying to juice the corpse and make it dance.

That's the real legerdemain facing anyone determined to be a painter, whether the student who asked the original question gets the support of her teachers and peers or not. Painting isn't dead -- or, more precisely, it always has been and always will be. The perpetual trick is to give a painting life.

christopher.knight@latimes.com

year in review

i suppose i've been putting this off, but a conversation at lunch had me realizing i really should take stock of this last year and lay out a few things for this next year!
yes, this will be a tad shameless but feel free to skip it if you want :)

so as for last year
a quick run down

I moved into a new studio in January.
I unpacked all my stuff for the last time in a bit and spread out into the shop and into the room inside the house. Between setting up the space in the shop to screen print in and setting up the studio I was able to create a few different areas for creativity.
The inside studio has worked out quite well, the tables I built for my last space are compact and allow for me to work against the wall on larger paintings and drawings.
Later in the year I was able to swap out the temp book shelves for larger ones.

The outside space is coming along nicely! This year year saw the acquisition of a few great tools in the screen printing shop.
1.a drying rack for prints
2.an inside 'dirty' sink
3.a professional paper cutter

Art Work:
Holy Cow I think I made a lot of stuff this year!
At least 2o completed print editions including multiple layer prints and completely original works.
A calender
6 super large paintings
and a host of other random projects.

To make this much work in a new environment was a great accomplishment for me!

Shows/Sales:
The Brewery Art Walk - The Brewery Studios, Los Angeles CA, October 2007
Felt Club XL Summer 2007 - Ukrainian Cultural Center, Los Angeles CA, July 2007
The Brewery Art Walk - The Brewery Studios, Los Angeles CA April 2007
Handmade for the Holidays, Los Angeles CA, November 2007
Stores:
Black Maria, Atwater CA
Reform School, Silverlake CA
Teaching:
Screen printing Tutorial at Tujunga studio

I sold a slew of prints this year at ArtWalk and the two independent show I participated in
Prolly in the neghborhood of 200+ prints and a few paintings and drawings, including one of the larger 4 foot panels which was particularly exciting! I also sold out of a number of print editions that had been lingering for a number of years, those that have a 'Grandmother's Gun'... man are folks bummed they are gone!
And randomly over 500 buttons, all individually made of painting's and drawings of mine.
(I'm prolly phasing out the 'hella heart oakland' buttons so get 'em while you can!)
So much work to be out in the world!!! So awesome that folks are digging what I'm making.

Half way though the year I got to upgrade to a way faster, happier computer and bigger 'office' work area! I didn't think it would make a difference but it helped me to accomplish a few things.
1. change my negative process for screen printing from paper to transparencies
2.forced me to finally make the change from sorta using photoshop and a few other programs to only using photo shop
3.my 24 inch monitor allows me to work on multiple projects at once
4. continue using and develop my blog and web presence through etsy and other online stores

Later in the year as the weather got cold I started and completed a complete re-work of my web site. I learned how to clunkyly get around in Dream weaver due to my awesome boy friend. I'm super excited as to how this turned out, I did a lot of research looking at other sites and it turned out just the way I wanted.

Started to connect with folks at shows and random gatherings, got out of my shell a bit!
This one is pretty hard for me as it's tough to realize that even though I know some of the strongest creatively awesome folks, they happen to live in the Bay Area. Which is great for ambush creative support or long distance phone consultations but getting to know folks here and developing a space here where I can talk with others is vital.

Goals For This Year:

Simple Stuff
-Shins for bookshelves so they don't fall over.
-New Screens, I would like to purchase some smaller screens to be used on a project by project basis.
-maybe move the tv into the inside studio? I know, not what some creative folks would have but I think I'm one of those that needs a low level background noise. And sometimes I use watching TV as a way to avoid being in the studio...so maybe If I'm in there more often, than more creative genius?
More complicated
-Better way to wash out Screens,
Still figuring this out, right now I wash them outside but this is unpredictable as I need 'fair' weather, better hoses, light?...hmm...
-a better measuring grid for paper cutter, because damn it, it's metric!
-paint the wall of the shop, get rid of the butter yellow

Art work Goals:
-Better place to draw, I need to be doing this more often on a regular basis but it seems hard to get into the studio to take the time. i might set up some drawing stuff at my computer desk so I can do that here also
-Work more at Dreamweaver, get better at making sites in a quick manner. Continue to update site as work progresses
-Load more things and maintain Etsy store on a more regular basis
-Build functionality of store into my own site
-Build a new series of canvas's to work on, phasing out the slim panels in favor of a more structured look. achieving a look between the smaller panels of 2004/2005 and the bigger panels of 2007.
-Continue to paint and draw, building those skills
-Figure out why the gesso I bought more recently is smoother and annoying...
-Continue to work on landscape painting's when traveling
-New prints! not sure what these are going to be yet! More found imagery and quirky drawings i'm sure.
-Apply GTD method's to Artwork tasks
-Letting the work develop more, acknowledging that this might mean I end up with less work but that it will hopefully result in deeper, richer work.


Bigger Things not Quite related to Art...but Really Everything is:
-Side projects, let's stay focused shall we. none of these endless sewing projects or things in the desert (yes, it's fun but sort of gets us off track)
-Continue going to the gym, time is not on my side my friends but eventually I'll figure this one out.
-Continue to work on community building, connecting with other artists. perhaps start an artist group...I've been tinkering with this idea for a bit. maybe it's time to get something together.
the only thing stopping me is primarily where i live but maybe thats not as much of an issue
-Travel, well, one of last years goals that developed was to get a passport without a destination in mind. and now i just need to figure out how to go about going somewheres...and where that somewheres is going to be...
-Teeth, as in keep them happy
-Car, as in keep it happy.

Things Going Awesomely:
Boy
Work
New Friends
Old Friends (though I miss them terribly still)

ok, that's enough for now, I think it's time to go and draw.