LA Paint at the Oakland Museum

I just made it to this show a few days before it closed. It's a small show, just a taste, really. Big range, though. (Anthony Hollingsworth convinced me to go see it.)

Don Suggs' startling concentric circles were impressive for their sense of movement and space. I found his "Headhunter's Dilemma" more interesting - full of obscure symbolic elements rendered with machine-like precision on a loose abstract background.

Brian Fahlstrom was the only other abstract artist that intrigued me. His work reminded me of Mark Grim's work: "both visually cognitive as well as abstract."

Loren Holland is a young artist whose content and imagery appealed to me, but I was puzzled by her choice of (unframed) paper for such large paintings. Some of them were showing signs of wear around the edges. And she was using oil the way most artists use acrylic (a flat, graphic style, with raised edges near the boundries that betrayed inexperience in paint handling.) Even so, she has a terrific eye for visual story-telling.

Robert Williams was well-known to me, and I was glad to see some of his better work here, especially "Surrealist Nude Quiche Cadaver Reclining" - a large, in-your-face image of famous surrealist artists surrounding a squishy corpse while Stalin and Trotsky look on from the corner. It's way over top, as usual.

Steve Galloway was my favorite, both for his painting chops and his original imagery. "Cave of 3 Bats and the Ray of Hope" was a painting I could look at for a long time. "Smokehouse Jig" is at the top of this post - image from his site, here.

Good set of photos from the show at John Casey's blog.