An Old Friend Revisited

How long has it been since I visited Descanso Gardens in La Canada? I don't even remember. My friend KJ was taking her elderly friend (89) on an outing and I decided to go along. (Just FYI, they have wheelchairs available if you get there early enough).

I figured it would be a nice walk in the park looking at the flowers. But not so, it was much more. The gardens are lovely. The camellias are in bloom. The old, craggly trees are magnificent.

I didn't expect to find an art exhibit... in the carriage house... displaying the work of three artists. Some of the paintings by Rut Eneberg and Karen Sill were very good. But I loved the ceramics by Miriam Balcazar. A treat indeed. I believe this exhibit runs through March 5.

The next surprise was being able to enter the Boddy House, built by the publisher of the Los Angeles Daily News in the 1930s. It was refurbished in 2007 as a Pasadena Showcase House. The beautifully remodeled kitchen is about as big as my condo!

The icing on the cake was when we came back to KJ's house there was a yard sale down the street. I acquired a brightly painted metal gecko which now adorns my bathroom wall... oh joy! (Photos copyright roslyn m wilkins)

Robbing the Heart Sunday night BG, MK and I visited the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica to attend the art reception for our mutual friend Lucy Blake-Elahi. She was exhibiting works from three different series:
Come Here…Go Away!, hand-colored Drypoint and monotype prints whose subject matter is “relationships”, The Burden of Unused Wings, small prints lamenting opportunities missed and Robbing the Heart, a few of the smaller pieces from a larger body of work referencing the looting of the Iraq Museum.

When I do attend church (about once a year on the Day of the Dead) this is where I go. And the previous minister, the Reverend Ernie Pipes, presided over my long-ago and long-gone wedding. Ah, memories!

Forbes Hall is a nice little space for an art show. And good advertising for the church, too. I like to support local artists (and my artist friends) as much as possible. Although this show was in Santa Monica there were quite a few people I knew from Culver City in attendance. How great is that when you walk into a space where art is the focus and there are many people you know!

I especially enjoyed Lucy's discussion of her art and the history behind it. You can tell she loves to teach.

And I met an interesting lady who engages Nepalese artists to paint pet portraits on metal.

Another great art day!

(Photo copyright roslyn m wilkins)

What is it About Ceramics?
I love all kinds of art. I even love really bad "contemporary" art that I can't make head or tail of, just because it IS art (well, maybe in some strange, perverse kind of way). Maybe I should say I love all attempts at art! But what really turns on my appreciative juices is anything to do with ceramics (and that can include mosaics, of course). Well, the name of this blog is not Art, Photography and Tapestries (although I have nothing against P or T).
Saturday, BG and I visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), obstensibly to see the BMW art cars painted by Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg on view in the BP Grand Entrance. I've seen "painted" cars before (although not BMWs) and was not impressed then as I am not impressed now. I happen to admire all four artists but seriously folks, if some 15-year-old kid did this to a car on the street they would be doing time in juvie for YEARS! If I was going to make art out of a car I would at least take into consideration the style and design of the vehicle itself. These are beautiful cars on their own, don't mess 'em up!!
(Yes, I'm getting to ceramics.)
Next up we visited the Francis Alÿs: Fabiola exhibit. The original painting of Saint Fabiola is now lost and these are 300 depictions of her by different artists. LACMA describes them as a "collection of nearly identical paintings." All I could see was the differences. Different noses, different chins, different eyes, different painting techniques... there is no way of knowing what she really looked like from this exhibit. To me, it's the differences, not the similarities, that make it interesting...
(Yes, I'm getting to ceramics!)
Sometimes it's just relaxing to meander around the permanent collections. Two of my all-time favorite paintings are on the third floor of the Art of the Americas Building. David Hockney's "Mulholland Drive, the Road to the Studio" and Lee Mullican's "Space", just around the corner from each other.
(Now we're at ceramics...)
On that same third floor the contemporary ceramics are displayed. I love them all but if I HAVE to pick a favorite for the moment I'll go with Ralph Bacerra's "Untitled Cloud Vessel"... so isn't that a title? Love the piece, hate the untitle...
BG then suggested we visit the Japanese Pavilion. I have not been in there in several years. Perhaps because I figured I've been there, done that too many times already. But I was wrong. The building itself is extraordinary. If you've never been in there, promise yourself you will on your next visit to LACMA. Even without the artwork it houses, it is a work of art in itself.
On the top floor (which is where you start your visit) are the ceramics, both modern and ancient... and in between. All the pieces are wonderful. (I was just browsing the online Japanese ceramics collection and it is magnificent... I am drooling over it!)
What can I say? I am in love with ceramics. I am in love with art. I'm in love with loving art!!!!
(Photo copyright roslyn m wilkins)

Join UCLA Extension on March 7 for ArtsDayLA!
Explore your passion for the arts at ArtsDayLA, an informative day-long event held on the UCLA campus, Saturday, March 7. Find out how you can go from novice to professional in these exciting areas:
Creative Writing
Design Communication Arts
Entertainment Studies (Film, Television, Music)
Interior Design
Landscape Architecture
Screenwriting
At ArtsDayLA you can:• Attend any or all of four immersive learning sessions offered in each field throughout the day• Meet program advisors, instructors, and graduates sharing their experience and success stories• Find out more about courses, programs, and career paths• Get a 10% discount on select spring courses when you enroll during ArtsDayLA
Sound like fun? Then make plans to join us Saturday, March 7, from 10am-4pm, at the Young Hall Courtyard on the UCLA campus!
Get more information at www.artsdayla.org, email artsdayla@uclaextension, or call (310) 267-4888.

The Private Life of a Masterpiece
I just finished viewing this DVD, "The Private Life of a Masterpiece, Masterpieces 1851 to 1900," disc four of a series. The three paintings on this DVD are Edouard Manet's "Le Dejeuner sur L'Herbe," James Whistler's "Portrait of the Artist's Mother" and Edvard Munch's "The Scream."
All three of these works of art have become somewhat cliches in our culture but now that I understand their stories I will never encounter these paintings the same way again.
This series reminds me in some ways of Simon Schama's "Power of Art" (a series I really must see again) in that the tale of the artist and the time period is told by the specific painting.
I played this DVD twice to make sure I didn't miss anything... now I can't wait to see the other discs in this series. I will say no more. Rent it!

http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/privatelifemasterpiece.php
The above link seems to give a pretty good in-depth review of the series (including a rebuttal)should you be interested, although I did not read the whole thing!

Three for a Friday

Conservator Jeff Maish restores the painted decoration on a fragmentary mixing vessel. (See below for photo copyright information.)

This past Friday was one of those days that I could repeat over and over again and never get tired of it. In the morning I did my volunteer gig at the Fowler Museum lab in Westwood, bought some groceries at Whole Foods (skinless sausages made from humanely raised chickens and rainforest coffee), then drove along Sunset Blvd. as it winds its way through upscale neighborhoods and past Will Rogers State Park to Pacific Coast Highway and the Getty Villa.
I visited three exhibitions at the Villa: Reconstructing Identity: A Statue of a God from Dresden, The Getty Commodus: Roman Portraits and Modern Copies, Fragment to Vase: Approaches to Ceramic Restoration. One of my interests in art and archaeology is conservation and preservation. Over the centuries the term "conservation" has had various interpretations. In earlier times, statues that had lost arms or legs, or even heads, were given body parts from unrelated statues in order to make them whole. Today, museums are more likely to display statues with the missing parts, or at least indicate where the original statue leaves off and the restoration begins. Personally, if there is a drawing or photograph of how a statue looked in its original state, I don't mind seeing it restored as it was originally intended to be seen, as long as the restoration parts are clearly identified in documentation displayed nearby.
A Statue of a God from Dresden is a wonderful lesson in conservation history all by itself. You could say it has survived the restoration wars! Everything imaginable happened to the statue since its discovery in the 1600s, and the Getty has done a splendid job in telling its story.
The Getty Commodus is another story, literally. The exhibition explains the difficulties in determining the date of origin of a sculpture. This piece was at first thought to be the work of an Italian sculptor from the late 16th century as it was fashionable at that time (and through the next few centuries) to make copies of ancient works of art. However, after weighing all the clues, it is now thought to be an original ancient sculpture from an archaeological dig.
As interesting as the first two exhibits are, my favorite is Fragment to Vase. In the past, the approach to restoring a fragmented vase was to do everything possible to make it look like an unbroken piece by gluing, painting, cementing... some of this was for purely practical purposes, but it was also done to make it saleable to unsuspecting collectors. In the 20th century it was usually the policy to show plainly the difference between the restored part and the original, sometimes resulting in a not very intelligible piece. The Getty's approach today is to balance aesthetics with preservation, making the patching less obtrusive but distinguishable. I like that idea.
My policy, if possible, is to time my visit to an exhibit so I can go through at my own pace, then if there is a guided tour to participate in that either before or after (after is my preference as then I am already familiar with the subject) which is what I did on Friday.
The drive home along Pacific Coast Highway in the late afternoon was splendid. Usually I am enamored of the sun sparkling on the calm blue of the Pacific. But this drive was in a storm and the ocean was heaving up murky, dangerous-looking waves as my windshield wipers were having a hard time keeping up with the deluge of wet stuff falling from the sky. Fortunately, the traffic was relatively light for that time of day on a Friday, maybe because everybody left work early for the safety of their homes.
As usual, I am glad I made the effort to see the exhibit. I have wasted countless hours of my life watching detective shows on TV and putting together jigsaw puzzles... which is perhaps why the art of conservation and preservation is so fascinating to me!

(Photo copyright The J. Paul Getty Trust
© J. Paul Getty Trust
For useage information see http://www.getty.edu/legal/copyright.html)

The Puppy Bowl (and other ceramics)
My friend KJ tells me that, yes, there is a Puppy Bowl (on Animal Planet, of course) on Super Bowl Sunday with cat cheerleaders at halftime. How could I make this stuff up?
I was at her house on SB Sunday to admire her tile and mosaic work at the entrance to her house. A really super job.
But our mission on this day was to visit the 65th Scripps Ceramic Annual exhibit at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery in Claremont.
It was a splendid sunny southern California day for the first day of February, and with four brand new tires on my car gripping the road, a great day for the hour or so drive out there from her house to the little town at the foot of Mt. Baldy. We could see just a dusting of snow still at the cap. I was reminded of my trek up to the top 25 years ago in heavy snow and ice with pretty much white-out conditions when we reached the summit and could not imagine attempting such a hike today, or even wanting to!
The Williamson is a nice little gallery. The exhibit was small. I knew it was going to be contemporary ceramic art, and we all know the problems I have with anything labeled "contemporary" and I was not disappointed. So I won't go into all of that again. Let's just say it wasn't my cup of tea. We looked at some of the catalogs from previous years and personally, I would have preferred to see one of those exhibits. Maybe I'll take another shot next year.
But one of the works did fascinate me, if not in the way the artist probably intended. A series of shovels made with "human bone china." My aunt and uncle who recently passed away donated their bodies to science. So I wondered, did the people who ended up on this wall know they were going to be part of an art exhibit when they died? And how do you go about donating your body to art? And can you specify the work of art you want to be?
I thought about the pickled sheep at BCAM at LACMA. I would not want to end up in a tank of formaldehide for the whole world to see. But I wouldn't mind being turned into a beautiful bone china teapot used for elegant tea parties at some rich lady's mansion. Or maybe as part of a sculpture in a park where families come to sit at my feet with their picnics. As I like functional art more than anything, it would be nice to know I would be useful as well as decorative when I am gone.
But in the meantime, before I give up this body for some higher purpose, I am in need of it to take me to more art exhibits and galleries!