October SF Gallery Walk

Went to the annual Yerba Buena gallery walk on October 16th, and I was really disappointed, not by the art on view, although I didn’t see as much as I would have liked, but by the fact that the galleries were basically empty. It looked to me like the gallery walk drew a pretty sizable crowd of art lovers in the past, but this year, I was often the only one looking.  Also, a few of the galleries I always look forward to checking out, such as SculptureSite on 3rd Street, have disappeared.  The economy must be really tough on independent galleries.

I started at the Cartoon Art Museum and saw the excellent show Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women co-curated by Michael Kaminer and Sarah Lightman, loosely based on an article about confessional comics written by Kaminer for The Forward (a weekly Jewish newpaper).  The drawing styles & storytelling vary widely from underground comix pages of the 60’s to more contemporary work in watercolor. It was like having a glass of wine with interesting and opinionated friends.  See the impressive list of artists represented on the CAM site here.

A few blocks away at Crown Point Press, I enjoyed the current Significant Others show, but found myself mesmerized, as usual, by the prints by Wayne Thiebaud in the hallway (Dark Cupcakes and Donuts, 2006 on the left).  Even In tones of grey, his compositions vibrate off the paper. He continues to amaze me. I hope I can make it to see his retrospective at the newly re-opened Crocker Museum in Sacramento before it ends. Catherine Clark Gallery had an astonishing show of the recent work of Masami Teraoka, both his politically charged and erotic ukiyo-e style paintings and his The Last Supper/Pope's Mega Squid Thrust, a very graphic commentary on the weird sexual politics of the Catholic church, done in the style of a gothic altarpiece.

24 Hour Comic Challenge 2010

This coming Saturday 10/2, the Comics Outpost (SF) and Comic Relief (Berkeley)  We will be hosting the 24 Hour Comic Challenge! Beginning at 11am artists will have 24 hours to create a 24-page comic.

The Outpost will be open the entire time (11am Saturday to 5pm on Sunday 10/3), with an "Insane After Midnight Sale" thrown in to entice visitors to drop in.  They've hosted this event for a couple years now, and always get an interesting crowd. Last year Gary Buechler shot a 15 minute documentary commemorating the experience.

The Comics Outpost is in the Outer Sunset district at 2381 Ocean Avenue,  San Francisco, CA. 94127. (415) 239-COMX (2669).

Kitchen Mini Retrospective at MoCCA

The Oddly Compelling Mini-Retrospective of Denis Kitchen will open at MoCCA (NYC) October 5th and run through January. It will consist of approximately twenty hand-selected pieces that will attempt to summarize Kitchen's cartooning career. The focus will be on pieces that appear in the recent Dark Horse book The Oddly Compelling Art of Denis Kitchen,such as “Working in Geektown,” the Bizarre Sex #1 cover, Major Arcana album cover, “The Square Publisher,” and “Five Minutes with God.” Opening reception 10/1 at Noon, Details on a Q & A session are still to be announced. Denis has worn lots of hats in his career; publisher, founder of the CBLDF, agent, writer, curator, collector and artist. I hope that this is the end of "artist" lagging behind at the end of this list, and that there will be more substantial "Art of Kitchen" shows yet to come.

Even at times when the demands of business take over, creativity will still find a way to leak out. In the case of Denis Kitchen's Chipboard Sketchbook (to be published by BOOM! Studios in October), it took the form of funny and surreal doodles on the chipboard backing of notepads, drawn in Sharpie and fine-point Uni-Ball pens (example on the left).  As a film industry & dot-com vet, I've sat through my share of brain sucking meetings, and I can't help trying to visualize what was going on when Kitchen drew some of these. Among the many wacky animals, winged and fish-headed humans, and all the other stuff, some things jump out. There's a whole drawing centered around $56.00 (the price of a book? dinner? who knows?).  Numerous drawings with knives and sarcastic comments lead me to think that the meetings weren't always pleasant. Other drawings are just fun and wacky; as Denis explains his "demented" drawings are a "stream-of-consciousness" expression, totally spontaneous and unplanned.  I'm looking forward to seeing an exhibition of these too, although I admit, now that I've seen them, I'm going to wonder what he's drawing every time we're on a long conference call :-)

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Richard Guy Wilson at the Disney Family Museum

When my friend, author and art historian Hannah Sigur, invited me to a lecture by the architecture and design expert Richard Guy Wilson, sponsored by the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America, I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Part of the attraction was that it was being held at the theatre at the new-ish Walt Disney Family Museum in the Presidio, and I still haven’t made it over there. I’m a big animation fan, and it’s been on my to-do list for a long time, but the bay area is rich in fabulous museums. It’s almost a full-time job to keep up… I digress.

The event started with a reception in the lower lobby (as this was an evening event, the rest of the museum was not open to view).  Aside from the good conversation, the other high point of the reception was that the lower lobby seemed to be a tribute to Disney concept artist Mary Blair. The room was ringed with many posters by her, and the pattern set in the floor is based on one of her concept paintings for It’s a Small World.  In a case near the center of the room, I was pleased to see a large paint stand (sort of a combination storage chest and worktable), with some of her tools and art supplies and a pair of her eyeglasses.  Let’s face it, as an artist myself, I’m a sucker for art supplies. I can stare at tubes of paint and visualize how they could be used for hours. In this case, the tubes that were shown seemed to be a good representation of her bright and whimsical color palette.  The display also included some photos of Blair, and a hard hat decorated with day-glo flowers bestowed on her by her colleagues at Disney Imagineering. I tried to snap a photo, but was denied. However, I found this one on the Disney Family Museum web site with an article about the installation of the exhibit.

The Disney Museum theatre itself was interesting. It’s painted with comets, constellations and other space related graphics. For this event the house lights stayed up, but I imagine that the stars and comets probably glow in the dark.  In this setting, we settled in to listen to Wilson talk about “The American Renaissance” period, roughly from the 1870’s through the 1930’s. Wilson is the Commonwealth Professor’s Chair of Architectural History at the University of Virginia (Thomas Jefferson’s University), in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow and Visiting Fellow at Cambridge, and his specialty is the architecture, design and art of the 18^th – 20^th century.

The American Renaissance, Wilson explained, an era in which the United States, trying to prove its maturity as a country, worked to establish its own identity. It was at this point that Americans made an effort to mythologize the country’s history, accumulated the foundations of many art museum’s collections, and began to incorporate the classical elements of Greek and Roman architecture into city plans and civic architecture. Wilson tied the result of this progression into several examples here in the bay area, notably the San Francisco City Hall (left) and civic center, and the Palace of Fine Arts, which remains from the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exhibition.

Wilson is an excellent speaker with a sense of humor, and he held our attention throughout. I’d read quite a bit about city planning and architecture in this period, but he was able to sum it up and populate the story with the personalities of the architects, designers and moguls that drove this transformation in American history. 

Trends in Floral Design

The slides above are cell snaps from a floral design demo by Kevin Ylvisaker AIFD, PFCI sponsored by the local unit of Teleflora hosted by Brannan Street Floral Wholesale at the SF Flower Mart.

Kevin created all the arrangements in these photos. In the captions, I discuss points that he brought up as he created the arrangements, but overall his main points were:

Martha style arrangements are dead. Many people still like them, but that's not where contemporary design is going. Monotone and grouped designs are popular. Design is more spare and architectural, and not so much about round mounds of mixed flowers.

Turquoise will be the happening color of the year. Bright colors like lime green, orange, hot pink and bright purple are still trendy. Chocolate is out, and has been replaced by a warm gray/black Charcoal.

More flowers, less greenery. Use moss to cover foam if needed. Even garden style arrangements are more structured.

We love glass cubes. We fill them with colored foam, colored foam shapes, dyed beads, colored wire, curly willow and grasses.

Glitter and dyed flowers are popular. Especially flowers dyed blue.

There was lots more information, and I was fascinated with how quickly and deftly Kevin could create design after design, while talking and joking the whole time.  I would think these same trends are probably appearing in most creative endeavors.

Griscom in Fraction Magazine

Beale Street, Tom Griscom

 Tom Griscom's Bay Area Labor Project photos are featured in this month's issue of Fraction Magazine. Even though we worked on this project together in 2008, I'm still surprised by the depth and beauty of these photos everytime I see them. Please check it out.

Are all the “Action Chicks” in the music business?

Since getting home from San Diego, I’ve been ruminating on an interesting but ultimately unsatisfying Comic Arts Conference panel I attended called “Where are all the Action Chicks”? Meaning, “Where are all the strong female lead characters in TV, Film and Comics”?

Kramer, Stuller & Misiroglu

The panel seemed promising (and had a huge line for a CAC panel). The moderator Katrina Hill (ActionFlickChick.com, see summary here) was joined writer/scholars Jen Stuller (Ink Stained Amazons) and Gina Misiroglu (Encyclopedia of Women in Popular Culture) who both did a heroic job of summing up the history of female heroes in Film, TV & Comics in ten minutes each. Comics writer Marjorie Liu (Black Widow) and the always insightful J. Michael Stracznski (Thor, Wonder Woman, etc…) were there and had interesting things to say but left early. Rounding out the panel was a bevy of media chicks & actresses including Jill Pantozzi (MTV Splash Page), Adrianne Curry (America’s Top Model, who was dressed in a Princess Leia Slave costume), Cindy Morgan (TRON), and Clare Kramer (Buffy).  Morgan told an interesting story about an on-line campaign to pressure the producers at Disney to include her in the new Tron: Legacy film, but otherwise, this panel seemed to kept circling around the usual litany of complaints with no real substance or suggested solutions.  I didn't disagree with most of what was said, but with all the brains in the room, I hoped for more. The fact that Angelina Jolie, arguably the chief female butt kicker in film these days, was just there the day before promoting Salt went without comment.  I think the public actually enjoys seeing a strong female heroine, but it has to be the right female heroine.  We need to figure out how to keep building on our successes. It will be interesting to see how Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow is handled in the upcoming Avengers film.

2010 The New York Times Co.

One of the panel participants asked “where are the women who could really kick some ass?”  I’ll tell you… have you seen Christina Aguilera lately? An article in Sunday’s New York Times (Pure Gaga: Spectacle Rules by John Caramanica) got me thinking about this.  Here are all these ladies in pop music: they are rich, famous, have athletic bods, wear crazy revealing costumes, and they can dominate an audience (Photo: Lady Gaga, foreground left, and Beyoncé, right, in the "Telephone" video). The point of the article was a compare/contrast between the sincere, singer-songwriter Lilith Fair style performers (not doing well) and the outrageous spectacle of the Lady Gaga generation bad girls.  Maybe the general public wants distraction from their problems instead of introspective confessions?  I don’t know, but if you are looking for women in spandex that look like they could kick some ass, here they are.

JMS & "WW 601 Players"

One comic heroine that is still kicking ass is Wonder Woman, who just got a controversial reboot by DC and J. Michael Stracznski. Although I understand some people’s concerns about the change to her iconic outfit, personally I’m glad to see her wearing clothes that she can actually fight in without her breasts or butt falling out.  It’s funny in a way that Wonder Woman is finally getting to cover up and Lady Gaga and Beyoncé in the photo above are obviously referencing her and not wearing much, but I digress…. I bring this up because I witnessed what must have been a ComiCon first at the JMS spotlight session, a staged reading of a comic book.  Bummed out that Wonder Woman #601 wouldn’t be out in time for SDCC, he brought in 4 voice actors (the "Wonder Woman 601 Players") and had them do a dramatic reading of the characters, while he narrated and the drawn pages were shown on the big screen.  Overall, I like this change. JMS is strong in character development, and I loved his reboot of Thor and his mythological world. I’m not sure how this version of the character will fit within the DC Universe (or if DC will completely screw it up when the next big crossover event comes along), but I’m willing to give WW & JMS a chance (here's another review I agree with).