I've been immersed in the world of wine lately. On Friday evening, I attended a Champagne seminar at The Wine Country, a shop in Signal Hill, about a mile from my house. This involves sitting at a table with other aficionados, and tasting 10 different wines. It's great fun. The seminar lasts about 2 hours, and then groups of us buy bottles to take ( Read more... )

The rhythm of the holidays and non-holidays in interesting to me. The reason I think about it as much as I do, is that I work in the school system, where everyone looks forward to this time off, which comes one month before the end of the first semester of the year. Our schedule is very fragmented, a relic of old ways of educating kids. We start in ( Read more... )

I've been working for the past year or so, mostly on sculptures and installations instead of painting. Frankly, the reason I've changed media is  because I'm working with a teacher who is a sculptor, and to work with her, that's what you do. That's the reason, 25 years ago, I got my BFA in sculpture. I had this affinity with the professor of the ( Read more... )

I finally saw this over the weekend. Julian Schnabel was one of the most ham-fisted painters in a field full of ham fists in the '80's, back when I was a little art student. It's remarkable what a fine director he is. Where his paintings are ludicrous, this film in particular, is ethereal and captivating. After watching it once, I woke up this ( Read more... )

So, Christmas is over, and now that that's out of the way, I've been working on my own stuff. My studio is cleaner than it's ever been. I think I threw away at least half of what was in there, and actually found several articles of clothing that I've been complaining about not finding for some time now. Papers have been filed, palettes cleaned, and ( Read more... )

I've recently been quite taken with this artist:

www.caiguoqiang.com/

I grew up surrounded by fireworks, and they were formative in my early visual/aesthetic awareness. This weekend, I started experimenting:

Click to view

The voice at the end is Raul, my son in law. He's always up for experimentation. We were both a little shocked by how easy it was to ( Read more... )

I'm submitting it to a little local show.

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It's been a long time since I've posted. Health issues, Jackson going off to college, babies in the house, school year ending, etc. But, I've got some new work that I shot this morning:


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I didn't submit anything today down at the I-5.
I'm happy for my friends, artworkslive and edcartoon, for success in this one.
I'm also a little rueful that it didn't work out for me.
I'm having one of those periods when I'm my own worst critic,
and not happy enough with my work to put it up on the block.

This too, shall pass?

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