Last Sketch of 2011

What a beautiful day today in San Francisco. Both sunrise and sunset were melting layers of an orange sherbet push-up popsicle and a Cherry Garcia ice cream wedge. In between each display people spilled outdoors to embrace the day; a crisp and vibrant year-end gift. The above scribble-fest is this year's last. I titled it there's no here without there.

Art Show In Santa Barbara!

Hey! When in Santa Barbara please visit Sullivan Goss/An American Art Gallery. This month is the 100 Grand Art Exhibit featuring a vast array of artworks, all for prices specifically designed as a holiday gift to patrons. I'm grateful to participate with the above two 12" x 12" paintings in the show from my Beach Wall series.

SGTV Presents 100 GRAND (100 works of art for $1,000 or less)

Labor Art

This study titled Our Daily Bread is from the current exhibit at 555 California Street. Here the workers populate the field like a repeat pattern on a chunk of fabric. Generally overlooked and dismissed, these laborers are the backbone of American agriculture.

Quick Rough Sketches

One of my favorite spots for sketching is about forty miles south on the coast near Pescadero. Rows of strawberries stretch out toward the Pacific Ocean. There's something about this spot that feels right. I go there expecting to find the answer and return with questions. The sketches exist in between.

555 California Concourse Exhibit

The paintings in this exhibit are each 12" X 24" acrylic on wood panels. This one is titled Fruit of Thy Womb.

New Exhibit @ 555 California Street!

This is a series of acrylic studies for a larger, more extensive body of work. Agricultural labor was the career of both my grandfathers. Each owned a farm: one in Nebraska and the other in Puerto Rico. I was raised in California and these paintings represent my extension of that legacy. Actually, everyone is related to agriculture since we all eat, but as small farms continue to disappear, we are becoming increasingly oblivious to the process by which food gets to our tables.

A drive in any direction from San Francisco ultimately features a landscape dotted with laborers in fields of one crop or another. What I find underneath the ruffling blanket of its politics is a beauty and clarity defined by the act of working the land. Stooped for hours in the sun, field labor is connected to the earth in an arduous and robust way that very few Americans experience. It's real and tangible. It's a ceaseless effort of gritty physicality. It's familiar and timeless, like the soil itself. It's everywhere and always. Right now, there are hands reaching, pulling and fully extending themselves for a necessary purpose. Bodies of all ages perform a backbreaking dance that can only be done by hand. We are all of the earth and dependent upon it, just as we are dependent upon those human hands that work it.

Box Painting: Pear Tajitu

I've been painting objects in boxes for a bunch of years. And I've enjoyed the box as a visual constraint within which I've had fun solving a compositional puzzle. The organic shapes I find for my subjects have been the perfect puzzle pieces because of their elegant and figurative lines. I'd use anything as my model as long as it served my need for finding a pleasing solution. It's a game I invented for myself called playing with still-life. This year I've changed the rules. This year I've simplified the proceedings. Or have I?

This year I set out to discover the beautiful possibilities that exist within the regular quadrilateral known as the square. It's not my first foray into being a square painter. Actually I hope that by embracing the square I'll become less of a square painter and ultimately find new freedom within my constraint.  It will still take awhile to transcend the obvious before I begin to make the unknown known. That's why I've committed myself to creating ten 12" X 12" paintings per month. By the end of the year I will have made 120. It's not the only art I'll be making but I find it necessary to square off with the square this year. I fully expect to further my relationship with the unexpected. And who knows what else. And maybe I'll have a better understanding of what Lao Tzu meant by "the great square has no corners."