I’m done.
Come and see the exhibit. The opening reception is on Saturday evening from 6.00 – 9.00 pm. I’ll see you there!
The Brand Library Gallery is in Glendale, California.
From the 5 freeway exit Western, go East until the road T’s, then turn right. Go three blocks to the entrance gates of the Brand, turn left into the grounds, park and go to the mansion.
It’s been a marathon of a day. Yoga and running were a wonderful start, leading directly into preparing the Geomantic Man painting for display, cleaning up the canvas sides and painting them black so they look cleaner.
A quick lunch, then a long traffic ridden freeway drive to Glendale, where I got started on wrapping the tree and installing several of the works that didn’t yet have a home. The exhibit is beginning to look very good. John is all ready to go with the alchemy apparatus, which we’ll install in the afternoon.Â
Getting closer.
Jason and I worked hard today installing the show, with great success. It’s really coming along nicely, with most of the lights on the tree, most of the gravel down and the paintings in place and half way hung. I’ve used the boxes for displaying artefacts as if they had been removed on an archaeological dig, while the smaller hanging pieces are dispersed among the paintings, which look fantastic now that they’re hung together all on the same long wall with plenty of distance to step back and see them. The tarot paintings look really bright and strong, and I’m pleased with the way they look in their black frames. The tree is coming together, still needing the Christmas tree lights on two branches, then I can wrap them in the fabric and get John to work on installing the distillation equipment. I’m really looking forward to getting this part of the installation going, because the tree is so central in the gallery and will be such a focal point when the apparatus is bubbling away.
Photos by Jason Nguyen
Here’s the corner of the painting showing where the grey blue areas radiate from the bottom of the solar circle. There’s a little more work to do, particularly cleaning up the feet by doing a little lining to define them and blending a flesh layer over the existing surface.
He’ll be placed at the end of the gallery with a path of gravel coming from his feet reaching toward a circle of grails, then beyond them to the foot of the tree, where an alchemical apparatus is going to be set up that will distill the essence of Glendale from materials gathered in the park around the gallery.
Sometimes it’s the simplest things that make all the difference to a painting. I’ve been scratching my head worrying about what to do with the bottom half of the Geomantic Man painting for a very long time, so arriving at this point with only a few days to go before the show opens, to find a satisfying answer by drawing four lines and filling in three areas of colour seems particularly minimal. However, I think this addition will work very effectively to balance out the painting and pop the leg out from its background, which has been my primary beef about it as it stood blue on blue. I want to keep the focus on the sun, so the radiant areas will draw focus to the center of the piece, being ruled from the sun disk at the man’s heart, and also act as simple solar imagery.
Simplicity has entered my daily routine, permeating the things I do throughout the day. I’m trying to live as minimally as possible, and have begun to appreciate small pleasures as if they were great luxuries. It’s easy to think that pleasure has to cost more, be ever more extravagant, bigger, or brighter, but this is deceptive. For example, I stopped eating chocolate (it was tough) and now simple fruits taste fantastic, far better than they did before.
How does simplicity start to enter the paintings? If I want to find those delicious fruity moments in the pictures, what are the simple gestures that bring them out? Is this about finding more open space, more fields of open area – so that within the emptiness a figurative narrative can take place? This suggests scale, using large canvases with big open areas, minimal landscapes behind figures.
I hope that all of you reading this blog will be able to visit the exhibit in Glendale if you happen to be in California. There are quite a lot of you now. I’d love to see you at the gallery.
I’ve been putting wires on paintings and preparing for the show, booked up a van to bring the canvases to Glendale, and started writing commentary for each piece.
On the other side of my brain I’ve been thinking about what solar imagery might best fill the bottom corners of the big man painting and procrastinating by knocking about on the web reading news stories. In a moment of serendipity I found a story about NASA’s mission to repair the Hubble telescope, which led me to these awesome pictures of the universe. Thought I’d share.
I took time for myself to get all the mundane stuff of life taken care of this morning – laundry especially – so after a Sunday afternoon nap I finally got to work at about four o’clock. I forget to do these ordinary chores, and sometimes to eat a proper meal in the middle of the day, snacking on whatever I have in the fridge while I work, so it was good to have a little time to myself. Tomorrow will be quite different, with the run up to the opening reception beginning in earnest.Â
I cleaned up the bottom of the Geomantic man, who’s getting close to completion in this incarnation. He’ll need a couple of symbols in the bottom corners to fill an overly large area of dark blue, then I’m stopping work on him so he can dry in time to be moved to the gallery.
I shaped the gold on the skeleton into crowns, one five pointed, while the other boasts only three peaks. I’m glad I added these to the painting, for they really add a different dialogue to the piece, taking it beyond being a skeleton study into the arena of allegory.
Most of the works are in the gallery for the Brand exhibit, leaving the alchemical paintings, the tarot paintings and several sculptures still to bring to the space. It’s been an enormous amount of work to get ready and to bring to the space, and nothing is yet in its place in the show except the skeleton of the new tree, so I’ll be working hard this week to finish off the details on one or two painting pieces and then to make everything look good in the space. I am constantly aware that this would be impossible without the help of good friends and my students, to whom I send my gratitude.
Everyone at the Brand has been completely lovely and immensely supportive – its a really nice gallery in beautiful grounds, with easy hiking into the mountains behind the park.
I am completely beat – an early night for me.
Selected Curiosities with Mr. Pearce’s Cabinet of Alchemical Wonders
Selected Curiosities showcases the work of four Los Angeles area artists working in a variety of media to create pieces that promise to pique the viewer’s curiosity. Using clay, mixed media, and digital photographic prints Monica Furmanski and Janet Neuwalder will collaborate on an installation that speaks to both the micro and macro aspects of the natural world. Their collaborative effort is based on the “use of similar imagery that investigates the poetic and complex structures of natural and industrial systems, networks, and matrices.” With nature as her starting point, Jennifer Tenace uses oil, acrylic and mixed media on panel to create lush abstract landscapes in which the mercurial aspects of process are evident. Michael Pearce will show his installation Mr. Pearce’s Cabinet of Alchemical Wonders for the first time. This installation includes many mixed media pieces and large scale paintings and reflects Pearce’s interest in the philosophy of alchemy, the base elements of air, water, fire, and earth, and humankind’s longing to understand the phenomenon of the universe.
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Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 10:00am
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Friday, June 19, 2009 at 5:00pm
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Brand Library Art Galleries
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1601 West Mountain Street
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Glendale, CA
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818 548 2051
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It’s late now, and it’s the first chance I’ve had to sit and write today. The As the Crow Flies piece is installed over at the Hillcrest Centre, looking great in its own area. Each time I look at the piece I think I should paint every single piece of it with a glaze of crimson, wiping most of it off with a rag to contrast those lovely reds against the gold. Food for thought.
(To get to the Hillcrest Center in Thousand Oaks, California exit the 101 Freeway at Lynn Road and turn towards the Oaks Mall (North). Turn right onto Hillcrest Drive. Turn left onto McCloud Avenue and immediately right into the Hillcrest Center for the Arts driveway. The driveway will take you up a steep hill. At the top of the hill turn left into the parking lot. The first building on your left will be the National Parks Service; the Hillcrest Center for the Arts will be the second building in the parking lot.)
On to this evening at the studio where Nate and I have been preparing paintings for their visit to Glendale, where the exhibit will open next Saturday evening at six. We’ve been finishing up frames and painting the edges of the canvases black to clean them up. Tomorrow we load in the biggest material to the gallery, ready to install on Wednesday and Thursday, so we’ll be moving a lot of gravel, the tree and accompanying boxes, the cabinet pieces and all the bottles. I’m suspicious that this will take two trips, because the truck I hoped to have wasn’t available, so we’re doing it all in a full-size pickup, not a stake-bed.
