Dangerous Chunky notebook

If I was one of those hair-trigger posters, I would have a lot to say recently.
Thankfully life intervenes, and you wonder how omni-important it all is.
I jokingly googled the term Slow Blogging Movement and of course like everything else on the web it exists. We are obviously embracing it.

Last week I saw the Cornish BFA show with fellow comrade Sharon (who fed me insight into the institution being an alumni). I love seeing all the young enthusiasm at these openings, it was actually refreshing. I longed for more intellectual engagement from this crew, but there were a few gems. I wish young people felt the necessity of adding to their knowledge of art history as well, I think it would help them out immensely ( at a very base and local level: please people, quit copying Samantha Scherer). I was pretty stunned at how many new grads are part of this stream of artists entering the landscape of Seattle and outlying regions.

At any rate, I wanted to see what they were up to. Cornish frequently gets over looked due to the attention lavished on the University of Washington grads that make up a large pipeline directed into the Seattle gallery system. I intend to see the UW MFA exhibit and UW BFA shows next week for comparison’s sake.

Here are the photos I took at the –>Cornish opening.

Some of the standouts that stayed in my head for a week:
Katie Miller- for executing a well thought out aesthetically consistent body of work:

Claude Andrew- the most mature piece in the show, and he gets anxiety credits for executing a kinetic piece that continued to run through the night.

and although I have a very thin (in possibly non absorbent) tolerance for performance art, the piece that Tilla Kuenzli was responsible for was pretty over the top and more ambitious in scale than most of her colleagues. Although my gut reaction to much of it mostly hilarity and more amusement at all the folks taking photos of it, knowing that exhibitionists don’t usually go into painting, this was worth noting.

Seattle- note to self. An internet blog legend is amongst you this month- Joy Garnett.
A great painter to boot. NYC painter Joy Garnett is one of three artists featured in Platform Gallery’s Eden’s On Fire! show, that opened tonight.

Find more videos like this on artreview.com

Michael Schall and Saul Becker round out this excellent collection of work that signifies once again, Platform is “worth leaving your house for.” - Quoted by one who ventured forth into Mariners traffic et all!

I’ve been a fan of Joy’s Newsgrist for a long time, and have followed her ambitious rise amongst art bloggers. I honestly fear she might not sleep due to her vast output via both studio and on-line. For those of us who some times feel long in the tooth over this internet stuff, all I can say is “We’re not worthy”.

Case in point- newsworthy to C-Monster today, Joy and Platform get a mention. It was great to see her work in the flesh- a curious project she has been sheparding along- proving to the web world on a case by case basis that painting continues to be relevant in this sped up world.

Also touché to those who claim artists have been head in the sand over the current world events- how about Joy’s Hijacker series….Death Penalty in Black & White and Strange Weather series.

I like this public art sculpture by Brian Tolle, which I finally took a walk to see recently. The piece is located on the south end of the University of Washington campus. In contrast to many public art pieces that seem to lose themselves in translation, Tolle’s Stronghold works as a visual object and also a nice viewing platform on the expanse of lawn it has been situated on. The construction of the form, made up of many slats of wood reminded me somewhat of some of Phoebe Washburn’s work. The only disappointment is the landscaping surrounding the base is rather lackadaisical and uninspiring, but indeed it will look better after the plants grow a bit.

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This looks great….at Western Bridge….opening on Friday.

flaky pastry
noun: pastry consisting of thin light layers when baked.

It was never my intention with this site to be flaky like pie crust here.
But alas my superpowers or what ever it is that allows others to keep up with the world have gone missing. A wave of sickness has been sweeping the museum I work at that snagged me a few weeks ago I’ve been narrowly hanging on by the tips of my fingernails in riding out. Still haven’t quite mustered the part of working 50+ hours a week and figuring out how to manage a life…and it goes on. Plus people have been complaining about all the rain here, and the fact it is 10 degrees cooler than normal, can you believe it? What else can I throw in the stew? At any rate, that is the truth. I miss getting out there, looking at art, hopefully soon.

MoOM- The Museum of Online Museums.

Here yee all you shut ins and couch surfers. Come one, come all - all you agoraphobes. Here is the perfect armchair traveling site for you, you that will not need to leave the safety of your house.
In reality, more of a pop-culture marathon by the time you get to the bottom of the list (Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies anyone?). A kind-off short list for the site with mini-updates is found at the MoOM Annex.

Also, I may never really have to leave my room again. Itunes has been posting videos of MoMa exhibits, however their own website leads to a carnival of confusion in attempting to get you there. I actually found it myself poking around Itunes and not MoMA.

(but this one is from youtube)

I was told in my twenties by a friend that when I didn’t get enough time to paint I started speaking with a forked tongue.
This week, as waves of assorted annoyances swept over me- yet not quite taking hold- the flu, fatigue, impatience, I started and stopped quite a few things to say. None of them kind.
So I decided to take the week off.

Instead I have been reading the White Album by Joan Didion.

In this part she tells me about Georgia O’Keeffe.
I have said some unkind things myself about O’Keeffe which makes me think that chauvinism of all sorts is deeply ingrained.
Once when walking into the an O’Keeffe room the Whitney I remarked I best get out of there for fear of getting my period.
Not charitable. And missing the point.

Didion writes in 1976 with only high esteem for the woman she characterizes as hard.

“Hardness” has not been in our century a quality much admired in women, nor in the past twenty years has it even been in official favor for men. When hardness surfaces in the very old we tend to transform it into “crustiness”, or eccentricity, some tonic pepperiness to be indulged at a distance. On the evidence of her work and what she has said about it, Georgia O’Keeffe is neither “crusty” nor eccentric. She is simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees.

Here is the rest of her story:

At the Art Students League in New York one of her fellow students advised her that, since he would be a great painter and she would end up teaching painting in a girl’s school, any work of hers was less important than modeling for him. Another painted over her work to show her how the Impressionists did trees. She had not before heard how the Impressionists did trees and she did not much care.

At twenty-four se left all those opinions behind and went for the first time to live in Texas, where there were no trees to paint and no one to tell her how not to paint them. In Texas there was only the horizon she craved. In Texas she had her sister Claudia with her for awhile, and in the last afternoons they would walk away from town and toward the horizon and watch the evening star come out. “That evening star fascinated me,” she wrote. It was in some way exciting to me. My sister had a gun, and as we walked she would throw bottles into the air and shoot as many as she could before they hit the ground. I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the star. Ten watercolors were made from that star.” In a way one’s interest is compelled as much by the sister Claudia with the gun as by the painter Georgia with the star, but only the painter left us this shining record. Ten watercolors were made from that star.

The White Album, Georgia O’Keeffe, page 271-274
from We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live. Joan Didion.

[Evening Star, watercolor series, 1917]

It is raining hard outside today. I can see bits of the trees starting to turn green and a bit of generosity appears to be on the horizon.