In our dining room is a painting by California painter Caroline Allen. It is a large landscape, of green hills and lush foliage and blue sky with white clouds. But the greens aren't just greens--they're bright and brilliant, and the browns are rich, and the whites are tinged with lavender, and there is this lovely sense of the painter as one who sees the world in this particular way, a way of seeing that encompasses light and energy and movement and color with a vivacious and feminine sensibility. This painting makes my life better every day.
I first knew Caroline Allen as a
writer of fiction (wonderful fiction, with vivid characters described with wit
and thoughtfulness) at the
College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where she continues to teach. What I didn't know at the time was that Ms. Allen had been an art major at Art Center in Pasadena before enrolling in Creative Studies as a lit major. She continued writing and studying literature (and then teaching) and painting, but the painting became almost a compulsion when her mother died, though her writing was temporarily interrupted. Ms. Allen had wanted to write about her mother even before her death, but then when her mother died, she lost the ability to think in words for a time--but she was able to paint. And painting was such a pleasure, and it wasn't really about mourning, it was a joy, and some of the joy seemed to be the understanding that she really was a painter, that painting wasn't just something she did, it was part of who she was.
And so she painted pictures of her mother, who was and still is mysterious to her, painting from old photographs, and then Ms. Allen would alter the images in some way. There was one, a black and white photo that had been taken in daylight, of her mother standing in front of a large bush, holding her as a baby, that Ms. Allen painted as a kind of ghost image or dream, of this mysterious woman wearing a scarf around her hair, and holding a baby in front of a dark bush under a purple sky.
Ms. Allen and her husband (photographer
Bob DeBris) were then living in an artists' community in Santa Barbara, where it seemed natural to paint. For 7 years, she painted every free day. After taking a class with
Michael Drury, it felt natural to do landscape painting; it felt natural to go outside and paint what she saw. Not only natural, but--again--a pleasure. Which takes us back to the paintings--in the immortal words of Aristotle, "Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work." (Or, as Rollo May says, "Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings.")
Here is "Late Summer at Cañada Larga":
When Ms. Allen was painting these landscapes, she would paint with her friend,
Todd Anderson, and she felt that landscape painting was this kind of macho venture, to pack up her painting kit and dress in old, paint-splattered clothes and brave the heat and the wind and the cold, standing up for hours out on country roads. And yet, though there were these seemingly masculine elements to the process, the paintings have a distinct feminine quality.
Caroline Allen's landscapes and urbanscapes are immediately recognizable as pure California in spirit and scene--the gold hills in central California, the bungalows and palm trees of a beach town. There's a naturalness to them, without the strict adherence to a certain view that sometimes flattens some of the life out of realistic painting. In Ms. Allen's paintings, you never think you are looking at a photograph, nor do you wonder where the artist is. The view is clearly and beautifully shaped through the lens of another's mind and imagination, and then crafted to add feeling and movement.
But even though the artist always has an unmistakable presence, that presence shifts its shape and intensity with the focus and subject of the work. Part of what interests me about Ms. Allen's work is that over the years, I've seen her landscapes, traditional still lifes, arranged still lifes, portraits of chihuahuas, portraits of people, more landscapes, and urbanscapes, and so I've seen this personality emerge more in some work and less in other work, or maybe it is more accurate to say that different pieces allow (and emphasize) different facets. The portraits of people are lovely, and have so much feeling, so much emotion, and yet still have all that beautiful color. The newer landscapes are evidence of exploring technique, of working on being "tight but loose"--allowing more looseness in the painting, letting paint drip, not drawing ahead of time, in order to be more aware of the medium, with strokes that are more gestural for a greater sense of movement and for the sensual presence of paint.
I asked Ms. Allen a question I usually do ask artists (because the answer is always interesting to me), about whether she sees the world differently from other people, and she said that she's not aware of it, but maybe her painting mind does. She does think that she finds beauty in things that others don't, and she does like gloomy subjects--even though her attempts at painting or writing about gloomy topics never come off as she intended, her subjects always do manage to find their way to the light.
Here is one of my favorites of the arranged still lifes, "Who Were These People?":
If you find yourself in
that part of the world--if you've been to Ventura County, you know it is worth the trip, and if you haven't, you might put it on your list, and there are lots of wineries on the way, so you can create your own art and wine festival without subjecting yourself to ceramic frogs or clown paintings--you can see Ms. Allen's work in
Ojai Celebrates Art II at the
Ojai Valley Museum's annual juried art exhibit October 17-November 22, 2009.
To make an appointment to see Caroline Allen's paintings, please contact the artist at mscallen@west.net.
This past Saturday I took a three hour Print Gocco class at SCRAP--Scroungers Center for Reusable Art Parts--in San Francisco. Print Gocco is a Japanese printing system that uses paints/inks, flashbulbs, and a stamping machine or hand stamp. The manufacturer stopped making the machines over a year ago; it is surprising because there are a lot of accessories to order, so it is a perfect way to keep getting revenue. What is also surprising is the clarity and quality of the printing. You can make dozens and dozens of copies from one paint load.
The class was taught by local artist Marc Ellen Hamel, a certified fourth degree Goccologist. Her painting to the left is by hand, not by Print Gocco. In the class, I was surrounded by women artists, one of whom complained she was way behind everyone else, then turned out a card so incredibly detailed I thought she must spend her weekdays engraving currency plates for the U.S. Mint. 
The amazing part is you can make dozens and dozens of copies from the original inking. When you get tired of making cards, you can remove the “stencil” and put it in a hand held stamp. With the hand stamp you can wallpaper your room with the designs, or make wrapping paper, wanted posters, personalized lunch bags, giant business cards, it just goes on and on. When you have printed everything in sight, there is still ink left, although fading a little like a monotype would. 
When I got to the Berkeley Art Museum, one of the first things I saw was more ceramic work - "New Pathways to Ancient Traditions," a small exhibit of Chinese scrolls, seals, and ceramics. It was the ceramics that really interested me. From the Song Dynasty (960-1279) these elegant works used a decorative technique I'd never seen before, at least not with this skill level. It involved raised patterns in the clay, covered with translucent glazes that settled into depressions, leaving a thinner layer on the raised areas and creating subtle color gradations and combinations (the color of the clay, versus the color of the glaze.) It got me to thinking about how that technique might be possible in paint, and I think I'm going to experiment with it. (photo from Christies.)
Fernando Botero's "Abu Ghraib Series" was my main reason for visiting the museum, so I headed up, up, up the ramps toward the 6th floor. On the way, I passed through "Material Witness," which was a very collegial neighbor to Botero's work. "Material Witness" is drawn from the museum's permanent collection and includes Goya's "Disasters of War" as well as contemporary works that address politics and cultural memory. I think it's easy to approach these works as "reportage to activist response" (Lucinda Barnes, curator of the show) but I'm not so sure that's true, at least not in terms of the artist's process. I just finished reading James Lord's biography of Giacometti, which spends a good chunk of its 570 pages describing the artist's process as a search for truth and a means of understanding the world. It rang very true to me, as that has been my own experience in making representational work with narrative content. It's frequently interpreted as reportage or propaganda and while many works of art can be used for both purposes, I think most often that neither are "true." That is, if you consider the artist's intent to be the truth (another arguable point, admittedly.)
The Flaming Lotus Girls (FLG) are a group of artists that create large scale sculptures made of steel, stainless steel, copper, bronze, glass, wood, resin, LED lights, variable speed motors, and propane fed fire. The flames shooting out from the sculptures can be from 2 inches to over 150 feet in length. 
FLG has built installations for events around the world, including Burning Man, the Fire Arts Festival at the Crucible in Oakland, Festival of Lights in Sausalito, Robodock in Amsterdam, and the Big Day Out in Australia.
The sculptures utilize computer-controlled flame and sequenced LEDS to create colorful moving patterns of light. Some of the effects are interactive, created and controlled by observers. 
He's also been making his own frames, and he's come up with a beautiful design (in the upper the left of image above and image at right.) It's clean, simple, and really lets his paintings shine.
I recently made a studio visit to Sandra Yagi, in her South Beach studio. Sounds almost tropical, doesn't it? It's an old CalTrans building nestled up against the Bay Bridge on-ramp. The last time I visited this building it was to see Tina Vietmeier.
Sandy just moved to this studio from her old place on Belcher Street. (I interviewed her there five years ago.) The same rolling cart and easels were here in "South Beach" (Rincon Hill), but this studio seemed a lot brighter, with huge windows along one wall. Sandy said it could get a little too bright, and she just got some curtains to cut down the mid-morning glare.
These classic methods seem commonplace and hardly worth mentioning to most painters, but I think many art visitors/ viewers are completely unaware of the long road to the canvas. Another good reason to visit Open Studios (and ask questions) this month.
Posts
