Out There

detail from M. Chearney's White Out

My tennis buddy, the painter Michael Chearney, participated in the group show OUT THERE at Gallery 825 in West Hollywood last night.

Joanna among the art lovers

Mike with his painting White Out
(click to enlarge)

"Crazy Mike" as we call him on the courts has a fabulous energy and an indomitable Buddhist spirit. You can see it in his fluid and vigorous work, an artful combination of control and abandon. For me his paintings exhibit a similar theme to one I've been exploring in my novel: merging the assertiveness of the willful West with the ego-dissolution of the mystic East. In life this is seen most dramatically in acts of self-sacrificing courage. In art it is embodied in the artist himself, his daily struggle to lose himself in his work.











On a lighter note, Joanna and I liked this mixed media piece by the artist Deborah Baca. Note the perfect detail: a bottle of Evian water.

Arachnid Attempting 5th Position
(click to enlarge)

Art is Revelation

"God is in the details." The quote is commonly attributed to the German architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but it has also been attributed to Gustave Flaubert, to my mind the more likely candidate. Vladimir Nabokov had his own variation: "Caress the detail, the divine detail." And I've always liked the ditty by the obsessive Michelangelo: "Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle."

While God may be in the details, it seems the devil is in there, too. In her entry in the Spectator DIARY, Jenny McCartney is struck by this "appealingly casual" drawing by Watteau (currently on display at the Royal Academy of Art).

"It calls to mind the difference between pornography and eroticism: pornography imposes the uniform of desire upon its faceless subject; eroticism teases out the particular allure of the person already there."

Particulars turn us on. They're keyholes into the mystery, the rousing essence of art.

Art of the Furies

[MANY PICTURES TO THIS AND OTHER PREVIOUS POSTS HAVE MYSTERIOUSLY VANISHED. MY APOLOGIES.]

On Saturday night at the JK Gallery in Culver City, we attended the opening reception for a series of new paintings by the artist Kathleen Waterloo. Kathleen tells me the paintings were inspired by my novel, NIGHT OF THE FURIES.

Kathleen (right) with LA sophistos

The works are colorful abstractions of classical architecture, with each painting borrowing its tantalizing title from a Greek term found in my book (e.g., Naos, Eleusis, Mystai, Kystai, Kykeon, etc.).






I'm always interested in the role chance plays in the production of a work of art. Kathleen's paintings seem a subtle mix of playful happenstance and conscious design.
Surprisingly, this sense of artful spontaneity is captured in a painstaking ancient technique called encaustic.

Encaustic is from the Greek word enkaustikos meaning 'to fuse,' or ‘to burn in.' The ancient Greeks sealed the hulls of their ships by coating them with wax and resin, while heating the coat with fire. Eventually they began to mix in pigments, adding color to create their startling warships.

Though slow and difficult, the layering of the wax heating process gives a rich and life-like optical effect, and is far more durable than tempera.

By the 5th c. B.C., the technique was being used in highlighting features of the marble statues on the Acropolis and the famous Parthenon frieze.

"Phidias and the Elgin Marbles"by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, oil, 1868

Kathleen explains her use of the process:

"Animal or vegetable wax (I use beeswax) is melted with the resin of the Asian fir tree. Oil paint is then added to the hot liquid and applied with brush to a wooden panel. The wax immediately hardens and must be fused with fire, or heat, for its permanency."

Along with gorgeous colors (you really can't appreciate the translucent effect in these flat, digital images) the process leaves an interesting edge to the paintings.

Here's how the catalog sums up her art: "The elegance of the works is tempered by geometric blocks of color, giving a sense of contingency to the otherwise highly controlled world of architecture."

I like that: a sense of contingency. It speaks to the process, the art of the art. As if Chance had been caught while fusing into Fate.