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Art

The De Young Museum (2)

So much for good intentions. I really mean to keep my prejudices in check, but when I learned many months ago that two of the major art institutions in this country, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) of which the de Young is a part, simply swapped their White, male, European-anchored directors, I rolled my eyes. It is even weirder, given that Thomas Campbell left New York for San Francisco with his reputation under attack, his new Board of Directors undergoing major upheaval with fundraising threatened, for an institution that had worn down four directors in less than a decade, the last one lasting only 22 months, and that had no exhibitions planned beyond 6 months – a process usually stretched over years to be successful.

As so often, I should have been more open minded. Looks like Campbell is rising to these challenges and then some. Despite Covid-19 closing the museum for months on end (they just re-opened,) starving the limited endowment institution of ticket sales on which it heavily relies, he managed so far to prevent major staff lay-offs.

Having to delay major traveling exhibitions for now – a full-dress Judy Chicago retrospective that was supposed to open in May has been postponed for a year – he turned his efforts to support of the local artist community.

“In celebration of the de Young museum’s 125th anniversary, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are hosting The de Young Open, a juried community art exhibition of submissions by artists who live in the nine Bay Area counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma.

Works of art in The de Young Open are hung “salon-style,” installed edge to edge and floor to ceiling, which enables a maximum number of works to be displayed. The de Young filled the 12,000-square-foot Herbst Exhibition Galleries with 877 artworks by 762 Bay Area artists in The de Young Open.”

The work can also be sold directly without the usual commission for the museum, a major boost for the hard-hit community of artists.

Community outreach occurred not on that front alone. In June, protesters against racism had pulled down multiple statues in the park’s Music Concourse, which is flanked by the museum on one side, and the Academy of Sciences on the other. Francis Scott Key, national anthem lyric author and slave owner, came down, as did Saint Junípero Serra, founder of California missions and enslaver of Native Americans, and Ulysses S. Grant.

The statue of Key sat right under the flag bearing figure; the ferris wheel has been empty and motionless since its installment this spring.

The day after the protest, Campbell posted and later wrote to the SF major that the newly empty spaces should be filled with art derived from an annual competition and commission a work by a Bay Area artist that might respond to the challenge of, Who should we memorialize?” A conversation about what to do with sculptures of people who have blood on their hands, had already happened within the museum before the June protests took place. The civic spirit displayed by these efforts is a hopeful sign.

Robert Emmet survived the purge. An Irish nationalist and rebel leader, he is famous for his speech from the dock during his trial. I have no clue why he is memorialized in San Francisco.

I am writing about this at length not because I am particularly familiar with the museum, I am not, but because I find examples of constructive leadership important to flag. When I wandered around the Music Concourse, benches and fountains recently restored from the vandalism, I was thinking about how people who understand where the rage is coming from without condoning vandalism, and who are in positions to make choices, can really be agents of change. It is the next steps that count, after the upheaval. San Francisco seems to have gained an effective and welcome voice in the art scene and the civic realm in this regard.

Someone who doesn’t just sit it out.

The other part of FAMSF is the Legion of Honor Fine Art Museum, which is still closed. I walked by the palace yesterday afternoon, with the fog rolling into this unimaginably beautiful setting next to the Pacific,

and communed with the bored lions, Jeanne d’Arc and El Cid by Anna Hyatt Huntington. Don’t ask me how they are related to San Francisco either.

The neo-classicist building itself is impressive, a gift of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels to the city of San Francisco, after she persuaded her sugar magnate husband to build a replica for the French pavilion she had fallen in love with at the 1915 world exposition. Here is the history of the museum’s creation. I left the thinker to himself, maybe he’ll come up with further good plans for the museum world….

Music in honor of the maid of Orleans who is forever exposed to the damp fog of the region.

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Yerba Buena Gardens

In what seems another lifetime, I used to go to San Francisco for psychology conferences, or to attend the opera, or, as you might remember, document some of the climate change-movement protests last year. Whirlwind trips that focussed on the task or pleasure at hand, not leaving much time to explore the city’s history.

I did walk once or twice through Yerba Buena Gardens, to or from a visit to SF Moma or the Contemporary Jewish Museum, mostly engaging in people watching. People who were nowhere to be seen this time around – when I came to photograph the site, I was one of maybe three or four people hanging out there in the middle of a Tuesday morning. We are talking an area comprising a few city blocks! The name means Good Herb in Spanish, referring to Spearmint and other herbs in the mint family. None of those to be seen, either.

The space is organized on several levels, with a pedestrian bridge, meandering pathways, large swaths of lawn, cafés, iceskating rink and bowling alleys, kids’ playgrounds, conference centers and art exhibits. The public art ranges from middling to beautiful, with no real cohesive curation detectable. Or maybe that’s just me, too hot on a mid-October day going on 90 degrees having fought yet another battle for parking, drowning my judgement in sweat.

Playground closed due to Covid-19

There is a kinetic sculpture, Urge by Chico MacMurtrie, a half man half woman who moves when you do, sitting down or standing up on top of the world.

There is a sculpture that reminds too much of a certain Californian actor elected president, The Shaking Man by Terry Allen. Judging by the shininess of his hand(s) people are eager to shake indeed.

Covid-19 related landscape art the has seen better days in the but three weeks or so since installation by artist Tosha Stimage. The social distancing devices are supposed to fade and make room for the next artwork to arrive mid-November, but it is a pity that their original beauty can only be guessed at.

Photograph above from the garden web site

And then there are the walls and reflecting streams by Danish artist Lin Utzon, a compelling area of stillness, movement, pattern and integration of the surrounding cityscape through reflection. The fluted granite walls, perforated with large-scale silver fissures, seem to belong to the sky, the air, the light in all its San Franciscan brightness. Or the light belongs to them – depending on your shift in perspective. A photographer’s pleasure.

By chance I came across a fabulous illustrated history of the area once I started reading up on the site. The historic photographic footage alone is worth checking this document out, compiled as The Memory of Traces by artist Jenny Odell during a residency at the Yerba Buena Art Center 5 years ago. Anybody interested in or from SF should check it out – it is revelatory!

www.jennyodell.com/ybc.pdf

I learned that the area was originally home to Filipino immigrants and hotels for elderly veterans, pawnshops, and small businesses. When developers swooped in, the people formed a citizen group to prevent displacement, with limited success (public housing was erected in other places for the people who had to leave.) After court battles and infighting among developers for the best use of the area, a proposition passed in 1976 that allowed an underground convention center, with a park and cultural facilities above it.

The gardens were finished in the mid 90s. During construction, a lot of burial sites and Native American artifacts ranging back to 6000 (!) years were discovered. A memorial to the indigenous tribe of the Muwekma Ohlone is now part of the gardens.

A huge entertainment center, the Metreon, was erected after the gardens. It did not do well, and has re-emerged, now as a High tech experience, in 2012. Suffice it to say, that Rebeccah Solnit mused “a more obsequious monument to capitalism would be hard to find.” 

I leave it at that. The gardens certainly enrich people who need to stop for a moment in a green oasis when the surrounding intensity of the city starts to grate. If I say so myself.

Music today is by a trio from the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, playing Beethoven and friends in their backyard two weeks ago.

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Antidote

I, for one, find the kind of hedging, waffling, side-stepping, equivocating, prevaricating, stalling and evading we have witnessed in the last few days of the Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings plainly poisonous. And may I remind all of us, that psychologists consider omissions, restructuring, denial, minimization or exaggeration a form of lying.They do speak to the character of those engaging in these actions, or shall we say the absence thereof, but they bring about malaise nonetheless, given what is at stake and given that the absence of character will not matter one bit when it comes to the votes.

Let me post an antidote – words that are unequivocal, honest, no holds barred, emphatic and firm. Words that were true then and are now.

Photographs are of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Yerba Buena Gardens, right in the center of San Francisco. The selection of his words is printed on glass plaques and placed behind a gorgeous waterfall.

I will report more on the gardens tomorrow, not wanting to dilute the power of the words displayed above today. But here is the blurb about the memorial from the website:

The vision of peace and international unity is enshrined in this memorial featuring a majestic waterfall and shimmering glass panels inscribed with Dr. King’s inspiring words, poems and images from the civil rights movement. Artist and sculptor, Houston Conwill, created this memorial in collaboration with poet Estella Conwill Majoza and architect Joseph De Pace.

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MaestraPeace

The Women’s Building in the Mission district features one of the most frequently visited murals in all of San Francisco.

Panoramic photo fron their website

I walked by there on my way to the pharmacy yesterday, another errand within the two mile radius that I am determined to walk in this city, given that I am on war footing with the parking situation. War footing? Outright war more likely…. although the mural tells me to seek peace.

The building is a community center led by women, a safe space to engage in services and advocacy for women and girls, focussing on immigrant issues as well. They offer a weekly food pantry, finger printing for family reunion, and, pre-Covid 19, also tutoring for job seekers and those trying to figure out technology and provide access to computers and internet. Wellness classes and free consultation with immigration attorneys were slated, as were counseling for domestic violence situations, health care, housing information and job training, also before the virus shut everything down.

In short, an amazing program, in a building that has been chosen as one of the sites for this celebration:

This year, as the nation marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, Benjamin Moore, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation are celebrating this historic milestone with a new program focused on the preservation of sites in the U.S. where women from all walks of life have made history. We are so excited to announce The Women’s Building as one of those sites, and we’re very happy our organization is recognized as trailblazers in the role of women and their impact on U.S. history. Our colorful mural façade depicts the power and contributions of women throughout history and the world. This year-long project will enhance the grand staircase that showcases the building’s colorful mural as it makes its way from outside, into the heart of the building. 

The mural on the outside of the building is called MaestraPeace (Woman Teacher of Peace.) Juana Alicia, Miranda Bergman, Edythe Boone, Susan Kelk Cervantes, Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton and Irene Perez painted the 5 stories high mural in 1992; it was restored to full glory in 2012. When I walked by, on an intensely sunny day, it almost felt like walking the streets of Mexico City again, the colors and motifs familiar from that hispanic context. A trip that now feels like a lifetime ago.

The mural brims with life and encouragement, a celebration of women, their skills, their roles, their courage. And no parking in sight – glad I walked!

Music today are some feminist songs from a variety of musicians.

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Closing the Circle

Yesterday we observed Yom Kippur, a day that always strikes a strange balance between finality and renewal. The end and the beginning of a circle. Much to be pondered, between the call for atonement and the tenet that on this day your fate is sealed for the next year. What happened to the promise that if you try harder, things might change? If the outcome is preordained on this day, why try at all? Can your honest remorse move the outcome, just a little bit?

These are, of course, the naive questions of someone not particularly educated in the interpretations of Judaic commands, but they are questions any person should ask themselves in general. What is the relationship between redemption and effort? How do you motivate yourself to be and do good, regardless of reward that might or might not be dangled in front of you? Why do different religions take such different views of predestination – some as fatalistic as Calvinism, where everything is believed to be immutably preordained?

How do you function if there is no hope for forgiveness or change, no acknowledgment of agency? Is there a connection to the attempts of many religions that appease you with promises for a better time in the after life or during the next one? A successful attempt to square the circle?

I can’t provide satisfactory answers. I can, however, show you why circles were on my mind to begin with.

The recently opened basketball arena for the Golden State Warriors, Chase Center, is a singularly unimaginative building (at least from the outside,) in my opinion a squandered opportunity to build something new and exciting in a marvelous location overlooking the bay, for $500 million no less. Many longtime residents also felt that constructing a new arena for the Warriors is a manifestation of the phenomenon of gentrification. Additionally, many who supported the Warriors throughout their years at Oracle Arena feel betrayed by the team’s decision to relocate to San Francisco. There is also the issue of public costs associated with the new arena, both in San Francisco and Oakland. Or so Wikipedia tells me.

In front of the entrance are huge mirrors, art work by olafur eliasson which consists of five fifteen-and-a-half-feet-tall polished hydro-formed steel spheres that stand in a circle around a central space. Seeing Spheres (2019) double and redouble the reflections around them, making the space look larger than it is and drawing the Instagram crowd and other photographers, your’s truly included.

Associations to Paul Klee’s work with circles were one of the things that came to mind when I looked at myself in those circles with their conic sections, looking not a day under 90 when the skies were colored by fire, aging like the person in his 1922 portrait Senecio (BaldGreis.) The title is believed to refer to a medicinal plant Senecio Vulgaris, also known as Old Man in the Spring, and is also a pun in German, literally translated along the lines of soon to be senile.

The painter has not only done wonders with wit, circles, squares and lines, echoes of which I saw all around me when staring into the Eliasson spheres. He has also left us with a map to understanding the strategies, methods and insights leading to his creative output – his notebooks (Bildnerische Form- und Gestaltungslehre) document 10 years of lectures at the Weimar Bauhaus. They are available in their completeness with transcriptions, drawings and references here (not sure if translated into English, though.)

Gaze, 1922
Gaze, 2020

Now where can we find an equally detailed and instructive map for figuring out how to lead a morally and ethically sound life in the Jewish year 5781 without being inscribed for an immutable outcome? Or any old year?

Music today is an homage to Klee, a concert with pieces that show parallels between his visual art and music. Some educational talk in-between, but worth listening to the pieces!

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Portraits, Doubled

To end this week devoted to portraits I will tell two stories, one of a clever way to create indirect portraits, the other about how to portray someone who portrays you.

The first story is about Matthias Schaller, who has an ongoing project to portray living and deceased artists by photographing their palettes. His website in the link above gives you a good idea of the kinds of palettes he has pursued and portrayed. The work supports his claim that you can often identify the painter by looking at how the palette is arranged, geometrically used, and by the assigned color range. (The website also has one of the strongest warnings about not using any of the materials without permission – so you have to go there yourself, I can’t put up teasers here.)

Alternatively you can peruse the article below,

Photographic Portraits of Famous Artist’s Paint Palettes by Matthias Schaller

or read an interview with images here or enjoy the views on one of his exhibitions two years ago at the Berman Museum of Art. I am always a bit taken aback by excessive proprietary actions when it comes to art on the internet. I probably err in the opposite direction, with art on my ow website being easily snatched – but then again why should people not enjoy what they desire? Nothing you print off a website comes even close to the quality of the real object, with its particular paper and color requirements.

Anyhow, I digress. I like Schaller’s idea, I think he is on to something, and I truly admire when someone pursues a particular passion across many years, hunting down and negotiating with those who hold the palettes of famous artists in their collections, archives, museums, or wherever.

The second story I first told three years ago here. It described the thoughts and feelings of portraying a painter, Henk Pander, at work, while his work was you yourself – a portrait of your scarred body.

The artistic collaboration created some meaningful results, although, as is so often the case, the gorgeous painting got the exposure it deserved in public, while the photography slumbers along in an overly expensive, little book collecting dust on bookshelves. Double portraits, uneven distribution.

In any case, the photographs today are from those sessions, with a focus on Henk’s palette since those tie to story #1, and a few extras to wrap up the theme of portrait.

Music shall be my eternal go-to in hard times, Schuman’s Davidsbündler Tänze. I will resume reporting when I am settled in San Francisco.

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Licentious Lines

One of the definition of licentious is disregarding accepted rules or conventions, especially in grammar or literary style. The artist I am introducing today extends that disregard to the conventions of portraiture with a distinct line-based approach.

Agnes Grochulska, a Polish painter who now lives in Richmond, Virginia, works with oils but also has a very strong background in charcoal and graphite drawing, and what appears to me, calligraphy.

Constructing portraits with lines is, of course, nothing new. Egon Schiele comes to mind, Mike Parr, Robert Marks closer to home; all configured faces in ingenious ways. Grochulska can be placed in that tradition in her depictions of sitters with calligraphic lines.

Her new work, though, adds some excitement with the addition of lines that do not delineate the portrait itself, but instead frame it.

Portrait with a blue outline #2

You might remember that I devoted a week of blogs on face perception and recognition in February 2017, wearing my psychologist hat at the time. I talked about how we perceive faces holistically, not by attending to individual features. It is the relationships between features that count – the spacing of the eyes relative to the length of the nose and so on – which allow us to construct a whole that leads to recognition. I also mentioned that expectation guides your attention and your ability to interpret or parse a scene.  Importantly, for visual inputs you can only see detail that is landing on your foveas; what lands on your foveas depends on where exactly you’re pointing your eyes; and movements of the eyes (pointing them first here and then there) turn out to be relatively slow. As a result, knowledge about where to look has an immense impact on what you’ll be able to see.

Portrait with Sea Glass Blue Outline

What Grochulska is doing is essentially grabbing our attention with added features – the contrasting and illuminating lines that divide rather than define the portrait – leading us to foveate on those and registering them as features, pulling us away from more holistic processing. We might swing back to the face, try to glimpse its emotional valence, or other associations it triggers, but the magnetism of the lines is strong, we will return to them. For me it resulted in a sense of scanning (although some of these paintings are rather small,) an action often associated with a more evaluative type of perception, looking someone over. It sure triggered my curiosity that I was able to be manipulated that way. It also served as a strong reminder that we should be wary of being caught by salient details, when really what is required is a look at the “whole” picture.

Red Specs

Add to that a more positive reaction: joy. The use of color, in its expressive, declarative form in those frames suggests abandon, a painter not holding back. No wonder people cite Oscar Wilde in connection with reviews of Grochulska’s work: “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter”.

Here are additional examples of the Outline Series. I very much hope there will be a time when one can see these paintings in their original form, not just on screen.

Montages today of divided fields of perception:

Music today is by another artist from Poland, who also picked apart lines, and whose work was called bizarre but totally arresting – something one might apply to the paintings as well. Penderecki died this March.

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Verso

If there is one positive thing I can think of that helps us through these weeks of anguish, it is the emotional and practical support provided by those close to us, our family, friends and community.

Human goodness, in all shapes and forms. I’ll try, then, to focus this week on humans, on portraits that speak to the strength of the sitter, or their relationship with the artist, the reaction they rouse in those portraying them, the way they provoke the creation of something more than just the semblance of a face.

Portraiture in painting was historically meant to depict those in power, or the rich who could pay the artist, focused primarily on some idealized representation conveying status. Eventually portraiture turned to depict all kinds of sitters, and went beyond likeness, introducing novel ways to convey a psychological truth rather than a more or less photorealist likeness of the face.

Today we have artists who do both, creating the likeness as well as going beyond it. The work that comes to my mind first in this regard is that of Cayce Zavaglia.

Originally trained as a painter she left the studio because of problems with the toxicity of oil paints and solvents involved. Instead she started to photograph her family and friends, and developed a form of (her terminology) renegade embroidery. She stitches the facial topography on pastel colored Belgian linen, creating a low relief resembling the brushstrokes of her former paintings, a tapestry of color blends from which a clear portrait emerges.

The craft is amazing, the portraits appealing. But the truly interesting part of her work comes from the accidentally discovered interest of the backside of the embroidery, the verso, which reveals the messy bits and pieces of the cotton, silk and wool threads employed, dissolving the likeness but putting a more lively substance in its place. There are loose ends, potential for unraveling, but also a sense of mobility, flux, paths that can be chosen or abandoned.

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Recently, she has returned to painting, using the discovery of those backside portraits as a template for larger works in acrylic. (The embroidered portraits are rather small and delicate.)

I am taken by the creativity, the craft, the openness to discovery and the flexibility to switch between media in Zavaglia’s work. What truly impresses me, though, is how the push to depict, the inner drive to make art is not deadened by obstacles. The demands of a body to be protected from toxins, the demands of raising children, curtailing time and space, led to an ingenious switch to portable work and embrace of people close to her as models rather than as a hindrance to her artistic practice. There is real ingenuity here about both the focus and the nature of the process.

Not surprisingly, when I look in the mirror I feel like I see my own verso, the marks of the upheaval of these weeks. It will right itself. I’ll be moving to San Francisco next week for some months to be there when my son comes out of hospital, wheelchair-bound for many weeks. I plan on continuing to blog, but it may be intermittent at the start.

Below is an interview with the artist:

“petrified and totally excited”

All photographs above of work by the artist. Montage below from my own work on altered portraiture, from some years back.

Music today are Beethoven variations on a Mozart theme – Men who feel the call of love – let’s make that into humans who feel the offer of love. Connection. All that matters.

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Overcoming Aloneness

Even for people like me who like being alone, at times even crave aloneness, the recent lonely days smear solitude with fear at times.

What if we all end up alone? Truly alone, not just the state that we currently experience, in our respective living conditions, geographic locations, separated from family and friends? The kind of alone where you lost the one closest to your heart, or take your last breath being surrounded by strangers, if surrounded at all?

I find comfort, when these threatening thoughts crop up, in thinking of a German scientist, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who conquered an immense loss when his wife-to-be suddenly died, by throwing himself into work and art. In fact, he confronted the pain of aloneness with creating a whole worldview of systemic connectedness – ecology – and devoted himself to promote Darwin’s theory of evolution. The fate of the individual, the very fact of individuation, could be subsumed into ideas of connectedness and dominant needs within and for the preservation of the species. He and Darwin became close friends, and cooperated on numerous scientific explorations.

Haeckel’s scientific methods as a zoologist and professor of comparative anatomy as well as his philosophy where not uncontroversial – to this day creationist websites call him Darwin’s lap dog and the German menace – his Tree of Life was and is incendiary to religious folks clinging to biblical literalness of creation. The Nazis, long after his death, selectively picked some of his writings on the political and religious implications of Darwinism to justify their racial programs, perhaps one of the reasons that he has fallen into obscurity more so than Darwin.

Within the scientific community some of Haeckel’s biological assumptions are no longer accepted. Inferring from his work with radiolarians, tiny plankton that is found in the ocean, he believed that an individual’s biological development mirrors the evolutionary one of the entire species – ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Not so.

He is heralded, though, as a brilliant naturalist and discoverer of multiple new species.

Whatever you think of his science, or his beliefs, there is no controversy around the fact that he was an amazing artist.

In fact, it was his art that introduced him to Darwin in the first place when he sent him portfolios with his drawings of jelly fish and other maritime creatures. The drawings in Kunstformen der Natur – Art Forms in Nature – are breathtaking, you can judge for yourself, of course.

I can vividly imagine how the painstaking creation of these detailed drawings and watercolors of jelly fish and other creatures distracted him from his loss; the embrace of a theory that celebrates interconnectedness in nature must have helped to transmute his grief into a sense of belonging. We should all be so lucky to find appropriate distractions and beliefs ourselves.

Or we could engage in truly downward comparison to make us feel better if we are really desperate: over dinner, the time of day where we try to cheer each other up by reporting useless factoids, I learned that marine biologists discovered, deep, deep at the floor of the ocean, a species of octopus that has to sit on her eggs (all 155 of them) for a gestation period of 4.5 years. Not eating during all this time, not moving once other than fending off ravenous crabs, the emaciated Mama dies when the little ones emerge. Now there is loneliness. To the bitter end.

Below is a 4 minute art film that uses Haeckel’s concepts and drawings to explain some of the things I mentioned. Nothing but wonder.

Music today fits the topic, I think. Anything and everything is captured in this concerto, from lonely distance, listlessness, determination to intense joy (Hindemith wrote it while still in the killing fields of WW I – art transmuting fear here as well.)

Photographs are of jelly fish at diverse aquariums, in Newport, OR, Vancouver BC and Charleston, SC.

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Juxtapositions

I cannot think of another time of the year when the landscape around us is as intensely, profusely patterned as it is now. Billowing patches of wild flowers, carpets of fresh grasses and nettles, whole seas composed of lupines and chamomile, color and form and bees wherever you look. Blooming, buzzing confusion comes to mind, when you blink at it, but that is of course a quote by William James published in his 1890 Principles of Psychology and referring to babies’ perception. (And boy, did he get it wrong, as we now know 130 years later. Infant perception is fit from the get go.)

I know, I know, some will argue that the color carpets of autumn’s fallen leaves match the spring profusion, or that the geometric lines of wintery, stark, leaf-less branches are prime examples of pattern – please don’t. Just leave my May enthusiasm unchallenged! Uncurbed enthusiasm is what I need right now. Lest you want me to resume uncurbed wailing about politics and administrative utterances of human capital stock ready to work... No? Thought so.

I do not know some of the plants I photographed last week, identification welcome. But I thought it would be fun to juxtapose the billowing forms with art that is the opposite – exacting geometric lines, connected to nature as well, in some ways, or just connected to the world as photographed.

I am talking about the embroideries of Dutch-born, California-based Natalie Ciccoricco, who has a wonderful eye, a steady hand and in some of her work a deft sense of humor (as well as on her website where she goes by Mrs. Ciccoricco. At least I assume that is meant as a joke.)

Her most recent series of embroideries on recycled aper used found twigs and branches, encasing them in geometrically refined line patterns with a remarkable sense of balance. Here is a page where you can see the diversity within that body of works (Nesting).

I had first seen her images of circles – a series called color holes – embroidered on old photographs or landscapes, vintage postcards, images of SF houses etc., which struck me as creative in the radial pick-up of the color palettes.

They are also artful in the sense that they shift the spatial relationships while adding an eerie artificial element. Fabric artists are really seeing a renaissance, don’t they.

So, juxtaposing the straight with the diffuse, the carefully selected palette with the organically haphazard one, craft with nature – I think we have busied our eyes enough to allow ourselves to forgo reading the news. (Ha, got the hint at politics in twice!)

And music, what else could it be, will juxtapose the violin with the piano, in Beethoven’s Spring sonata (# 5, Frühlings-Sonate.)

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