Category Archives: Painting and Sculpture

Biography Books Painting and Sculpture Performance Poetry Theater

“Music for Airports”: Brian Eno and 512 Hill Street, Ocean Park, CA

August 19, 2016 – 9:06 pm

Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports” and Ocean Park, California

Back in the mid-1970s, I was living in an apartment in Ocean Park, California on Hill Street. I had originally moved into the neighborhood in early 1973, and ended up living in that same apartment for 20 years. With my 70th birthday only 15 months away, it’s doubtful I’ll ever have such a long stretch of residential stability. I still have dreams of walking around in that apartment, and the dream-time is as real as this keyboard feels to my fingertips, typing these words. Indeed, more palpable. My life as the editor and publisher of Momentum Press took place entirely within my occupancy of that space, and there isn’t a memory of all that publishing that is not intertwined with its pair of upstairs bedrooms. Over the years, I had a number of roommates, the most famous of which was Nick DeNucci.

I got more than a frequently anthologized poem out of my co-habitation with Nick, however. After HIDDEN PROOFS came out, I got a phone call from a stranger one afternoon. “Are you Bill Mohr?” “Yes.” “Did you really know a fellow named Nick DeNucci?” When I admitted, somewhat reluctantly, that he had indeed been a real life roommate, and not just a character in a poem, the person calling me shared his experience of knowing Nick DeNucci. Nick had been a musician, and he had swooped in and out of number of other lives rather briefly. In the case of Brooks Roddan, the person calling me, the brief encounter did not even involve meeting him face to face. According to Brooks, Nick knew Brooks’s roommate, and had occasionally borrowed his roommate’s car to get to a gig. Unfortunately, on one particular night, that car was not available, but Brooks happened to have an extra car parked in front of their place, and the roommate lent DeNucci Brooks’s vehicle, which didn’t surface again for a couple of weeks, when it was found wrapped around a telephone pole on Vermont Avenue.

Instant commiseration! Brooks and I felt bonded immediately, and I am grateful to the auspicious fate that has kept us loyal, dear friends. I would think of him as a profound friend, in fact, even if we were never to spend any time in the same physical space again. I doubt that will happen, but I believe there is an intimacy each of us finds in our artistic solitude that is similar to the intimacy of our friendship.

The intimacy of this imaginative friendship also involves experiences that have no originating attribution. I have no recollection, for instance, of who encouraged me to buy Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports.” All I I remember is standing at the kitchen sink, doing the breakfast dishes, and listening to that album one or twice a week for about a month. It was as close to some profound communion with the Eternal Pulse of Being as I will ever come. A winter month, overcast, and there were many slightly damp mornings, and rainy nights. As I ran hot water over each clean plate and bowl, I could feel the cool grey from the Pacific Ocean just eight blocks away from back door.

I had not yet begun reading the poets associated with the Language movement., but in the middle of the next decade I would write a piece that was absolutely grounded in the poetics of “Music for Airports.” Thanks to Rod Bradley and the sculptor Mineko Grimmer, you can see a performance of the poem I wrote out of my meditations on Eno’s music.

“BARELY HOLDING DISTANT THINGS APART”

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Ecology Ground Level Conditions Painting and Sculpture Poetry

The Blue Cut Fire and the Wheel of Mutability

August 18, 2016 – 9:54 pm

Thursday, August 18, 2016

The Blue Cut Fire and the Wheel of Mutability

The most recent post centered on water, but the pre-Socratic philosophers must be afoot in Southern California, because fire is the chief element at work right now. The Blue Cut fire in San Bernardino County has burned over 35,000 acres, at last report, which would roughly be equivalent to an area seven times the size of the City of Santa Monica. When I first learned of the outbreak and spread of this conflagration, I immediately thought of the proximity of the Love Art Gallery to the heat perimeter. According to a message from Hye Sook Park, the Love Art Gallery is still intact. From looking at maps posted on-line, however, it appears that the fire came within less than five miles, if not closer, to the gallery.

If one is an artist and writer in Southern California, it is difficult not to have had the annual fire season affect some part of one’s life. Those who have been following my blog since its inception will recollect that a major fire broke out in the mountains around Idyllwild less than six months after my first post; the town had to be evacuated, and almost everybody left, except for the brave owner of Gary’s Deli, who kept his place open in order to feed the fire crews on the front line.

Idyllwild is typical of many mountain communities in Southern California in being extremely vulnerable; the longer the area goes without a fire, the more devastating the embarkation is likely to be, once ignited. The close calls come with a price: Idyllwild still mourns the death of firefighter Captain Mark Loutzenhiser, in the Esperanza fire of October, 2006.

In thinking back, in fact, of the decade during which Cecilia Woloch ran the Idyllwild Poetry Festival, it is quite remarkable that not once did that festival get interrupted by a mandatory evacuation. Not every arts organization has been as lucky. Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, just outside of Temecula, had all of its venerable cabins burnt down in a fire in the late spring of 2004. It has been partially rebuilt, but nothing can replace the inspiring quaintness of the original setting, which I was fortunate enough to spend a couple months at during the winter of 1997.

And fire affects individual artists: perhaps fire spared the Love Art Gallery because it had already helped itself to enough of the art produced by one of its exhibitors. One thing I did not mention in my review of Hye Sook Park’s show at the Love Art Gallery (see “The Fall of St. Paula,” April 13, 2015) was that she had lost an immense amount of work in a studio fire about four years ago. The storage shed that contained dozens of her canvases somehow caught on fire and destroyed years of work. I am grateful to learn of the survival of the Love Art Gallery and look forward to seeing more of Hye Sook Park’s new paintings, which affirm the work yet to be done as always already being made vivid by the indestructibility of the joy of creation.

For those who want to visit:
Love Art Studio
15551 Cajon Blvd.
San Bernardino, CA 92407
(909) 576-5773

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Biography Books Contemporary Fiction Ground Level Conditions Painting and Sculpture Performance

The Plasticity of Reenactment’s Homage

July 27, 2016 – 1:07 pm

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

The Plasticity of Reenactment’s Homage

I first read John Rechy’s novels back in the late 1960s, when my roommate Tony Landmesser loaned me his copies of City of Night and Numbers. In many ways, Rechy’s forthright accounts of hustling on the streets of Los Angeles enabled me to have an immediate context for the poetry of Leland Hickman, when he sent me the first five sections of “Tiresias” to publish in Bachy magazine’s second issue. There is more of an echo of Rechy in Lee’s writing than he was ever willing to admit; the echo, however, is not so much an imitation as a complementary flowering of the compressed chaos that both Rechy and Hickman drew upon as the groundswell of their internal muses.
A pair of Rechy’s novels are the current project of Los Angeles artist Tim Youd, who has embarked on the close reading of typing up 100 novels. He finished his reiteration of City of Night about three weeks ago, and I would guess that he has almost finished – if not in fact finished – typing up Numbers. According to an article in the L.A. Times, he began working on Numbers at the Fern Dell entrance to Griffith Park on July 6. Given the heat wave of recent weeks, I wouldn’t blame him if his pace had slowed down a bit, and he were still working on this book.
For those who might be working as scholars on Rechy’s writing, I would recommend taking a look at the interview that Lee Hickman conducted with Rechy on February 7, 1980. It was published in issue number 17 of Bachy magazine. To read an interview with Tim Youd about his experience of typing up Rechy’s City of Night, see:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-tim-youd-city-of-night-20160628-snap-story.html

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Painting and Sculpture Poetry

Maw Shein Win — Reading in Los Angeles at Jason Vass Gallery

February 13, 2016 – 3:34 pm

Maw Shein Win, one of the poets included Cross-Strokes: Poetry between Los Angeles and San Francisco, will be reading at the Jason Vass Gallery in DTLA (Downtown Los Angeles) on Saturday, February 20, in conjunction with an exhibit of paintings by Mark Dutcher. Win has written a series of poems based on Dutcher’s Time Machine, a collection of ten paintings that trace the aftereffects of an epiphanic encounter in 1983 with a painting by Susan Rothenberg at LACMA. In addition to the poems responding to Dutcher’s paintings, Win will also read from a manuscript-in-progress entitled “Score.” Artist and poet Eve Wood will also read a poem written to accompany another painting by Dutcher entitled “The Poet and the Sailor,” which concerns American poet Hart Crane.

Win and Wood will read at 2:00 p.m.
The gallery is located at 1452E. Sixth Street, Los Angeles, CA 90021. It is near the intersection of E. Sixth Street and S. Santa Fe Avenue. The phone number is (213) 446-0788.

Win was also interviewed recently about her writing in:

http://writinglikeanasian.blogspot.com/2016/02/feature-five-qs-with-maw-shein-win.html

Upcoming in Northern California is a reading at Pegagus Books in Berkeley to celebrate the publication of Cross-Strokes.
Saturday, March 19, 2016
7:30 p.m.
2349 Shattuck Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94704

http://www.pegasusbookstore.com/event/cross-strokes-anthology-east-bay-launch

My thanks to Tim Donnelly and Maw Shein Win for organizing this event, which will also feature Stephen Kessler and my co-editor, Neeli Cherkovski.

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Collage Painting and Sculpture

Terry Braunstein – “Who Is She?” — Long Beach Museum of Art

December 20, 2015 – 9:03 pm

SUBTLE TRIUMPH: The Fortitude of Who Is She?

The book cover image of feminist collage artist Terry Braunstein’s Who Is She? is of a female gymnast with her hands joined together over her head, which is largely hidden within a slightly tilted bucket. The woman is fully clothed: shoes, stockings, knicker-style pants ballooned by some mysteriously yeasty fabric, are all complemented by a full-size, pull-over jersey that extends from her hips to just shy of her wrists. Her neck, too, is covered. The only visible skin is the lower third of the face: chin, lips and part of the cheeks; and the wrists and hands. The uplifted arms do not seem to signify some ultimate triumph as such, but hint more of a contumacious refusal to accept the negation of the bucket. Obliteration of identity is unacceptable in Braunstein’s cosmos. Resistance is on-going, the image suggests, and the apex of the joined hands is a quiet warning to anyone who would suppose otherwise.

The covered face, however, might also suggest another metamorphosis. Women in particular are judged by their faces, and in this case the bucket might be more of a disguise than it first appears to be. A bucket is a work item that is usually associated with subservience; it carries water, and is passive in that task. It merely contains. In contrast, what the viewer doesn’t know are thoughts contained in the hidden head. Indeed, the image is more renitent than might first appear: if the figure can’t see out, it only intensifies what is seen within, and to that extent there is an overtone of a sibyl, in which the bucket operates as a metonym for the cave of her vatic habitation. The process of appropriation in collage art engenders reversals such as this, and the upside down bucket, therefore, might also suggest the upended expectations of a woman’s visionary powers.

The challenge in apprehending Braunstein’s message is not so much in the reception as in the translation of one’s understanding of it into an adequate paraphrase; for that is all one can hope to achieve: a paraphrase. Braunstein’s images give commands to the Impossible, and have no patience with anything less than instantaneous obedience. A woman hoisting one of Rene Magritte’s rocks (“The Castle of the Pyrenees”) above her head and totting “onward” is made to seem a matter of willpower alone. It’s not a question of existence precedes essence, in Braunstein’s cosmology. In an existential paradox, there is an essence of willpower that supersedes all opposition, and the quiet magnificence of Braunstein’s heroines is hypnotic.

The stalwart capacity of Braunstein’s anonymous protagonists is especially striking, given the harrowing circumstances they often find themselves embedded in. The “Nuclear Summer” series, in particular, serves as a reminder that we are hardly in a much better position in regard to the intercontinental missiles than we were back in the mid-1980s; and Braunstein’s “Women in a columned room with a terrorist” (dated 2012) recoils with a humbling urgency: somehow one must dare to live as if one’s paradise were inviolate, even as the daily trauma only accelerates. If this is a form of self-denial, then one indeed knows what it would mean to escape from the spiked coffin of social conformity. Braunstein’s heroines are prepared to flee, but their calm composure whispers, “Not unless you come with me. I will not leave you here alone.”

Although the show’s catalogue book, published by Thistle and Weed Press in South Pasadena, California, contains many of the show’s best images and contains two fine essays on Braunstein’s work, it falls short of capturing the best of her work. “Buddha in drawer,” for instance, is not reproduced in the show’s catalogue nor is her collaboration with Cyrus Parker-Jeannette, “Dancing with Kerouac,” given sufficient attention. The “Buddha” collage, in particular is haunting in its quest: the woman slides between the slightly separated jointed ends of a large drawer; the Buddha figure meditates in a corner. There is no special pleading; the protagonist knows and risk and accepts the possibility to being pinned forever in a liminal state. So, too, does the artist cut that precisely between the entrance of the image and the final sep of its choreography of juxtapositions.

Braunstein’s technical deftness verges on the casualness of a windshield wiper in a heavy storm. The road is so visible that we are almost grateful for the storm in allowing us to see it washed free of anything that would cause us to skid. As the decades have gone by and Braunstein has continued to summon the imperceptible and blend it with the incongruous, her work has contributed to the critical dialogue between what needs to be done and how much that need to alter the world might prove to be beyond our affirmation’s strength. In that sundering weakness, Braunstein’s images renew our fortitude.

If you make the trip to Long Beach to catch this show, you’ll get a rare treat: another show is also up that is worth the time spent driving here. Barbara Strasen’s “Layer by Layer” has some of the most appealing and delightful imagery I’ve had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with recently. Perhaps the highest tribute I could pay to Strasen’s exhibit is that it would easily qualify as part of the “Magical Mystery Tours” that Josine Ianco-Starrels used to organize back in the 1980s for the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park. It’s not that one shouldn’t relax in front of a work of art. It’s almost a given that one is supposed to be in a heightened state of alertness: the whole point is to question the ratio of feeling cantilevered across the work of art to the base line of its own audacious trajectory. On the other hand, if it doesn’t at some point invite you to relax and absorb – slowly absorb – its permeated secrets, then it is also playing a game with one-sided rules. Strasen’s lenticular panels exude a contagious spectrum of shifting perspectives. The afterglow will carry you to your next destination, without even being asked.

DETAILS: Terry Braunstein’s Who Is She? opened on November 20, 2015, and will continue to be on exhibit until February 14 (2016). Long Beach Museum of Art. The show’s catalogue is published by Thistle & Weed Press in South Pasadena.A long-time resident of Long Beach, Braunstein has frequently shown her collages at LBMA; she is hardly a “local” artist, however. She has had solo exhibitions in Spain and Italy as well as in New York City and Washington, D.C., and been included in several important group shows at the LA County Museum of Art and the Armand Hammer. Her honors include a Visual Artist’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1985.

Bill Mohr’s prose, commentary, and poems have appeared in dozens of magazines, including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Antioch Review, Blue Mesa Review, Caliban (On-line), Santa Monica Review, and ZYZZYVA. Individual collections of his poetry include Hidden Proofs (1982) and Bittersweet Kaleidoscope (2006). Bonobos Editores in Mexico published a bilingual edition of his poetry, Pruebas Ocultas, in 2015. His account of West Coast poetry, Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. Mohr has a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego, and is currently an Associate Professor at CSU Long Beach.

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Painting and Sculpture Poetry Translation

International Poetry at Avenue 50

September 6, 2015 – 8:40 pm

(Against Monolingual Torture of Writers, Part Two)

Closing night -- San Luis Potosi Literary Festival. Standing center: Jorge Humberto Chavez; sitting center: Bill Mohr; to my left: Rocio Arellano. Photo credit: Julieta Garcia (c) 2015.
Closing night — San Luis Potosi Literary Festival. Standing center: Jorge Humberto Chavez; sitting center: Bill Mohr; to my left: Rocio Arellano. Photo credit: Julieta Garcia (c) 2015.

Sunday, September 6.

Late yesterday afternoon, Linda and I drove to Avenue 50 Gallery, where Jorge Humberto Chavez was the featured reader. Jorge was the major organizer of the San Luis Potosi International Literary Festival this past August, and I was very pleased that at least 30 people turned out to hear his poetry. I was among the half-dozen poets who read short introductory sets, and I was especially pleased to look out at the audience when I got up to read and see Phoebe, Ron, Chrissy, Liz, Rachel, Carol and Ted. (Carol Colin’s very fine exhibit of aquarium paintings was still up, and I hope to get one of her watercolors.) I started off with a poem that was very popular in my tour of Mexico, “One Miracle,” which is dedicated to Bob Flanagan. Then I recited “Big Band, Slow Dance” and read “Milk,” which is Jose Rico’s favorite poem in Pruebas Ocultas. I finished with “Why the Heart Does Not Develop Cancer,” which caused Nylsa Martinez to jump up and say, “Let me read that in Spanish.” Her rendering of the poem was quietly eloquent and added another layer of deep listening to the poem’s journey since its first publication in 2002. Nylsa’s “acoustic” version of “Heart” made me feel as if I were back in Mexico again, hearing my fellow poets amplify my readings to the audience. I especially appreciated how several people in the audience at Avenue 50 (Tschka Moran, who is a photographer, and his friend, Gustavo; Martha; and Lupe Carranza) talked with me afterwards about the poems.

Jorge read very well, and Anthony’s translations and renderings of the poem made even those of us whose Spanish is limited feel the solemn undercurrent of Jorge’s honest grief. His choice of a poem that invokes WC Williams’s trip to El Paso and Juarez was a brilliant way to end his presentation. Thank you, Jorge, for making this trip to Los Angeles, and thank you Jessica Ceballos for setting up this event. Other readers included Anthony Seidman, David Shook, Mandy Kahn, and Gloria Edina Alvarez, each of whom read work that directly or indirectly addressed issues of translation. In particular, Mandy Kahn read a poem that suggested how much translation is like quilting in the sense of contiguous collaboration. A splendid evening!

 

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Painting and Sculpture Poetry

Jorge Humberto Chavez – Avenue 50 Gallery

September 1, 2015 – 7:29 am

 

 

From left to right: Juan Jose Radians, Bill Mohr, Antonio Malpica. Photograph by Rocio Arrellano. (c) 2015. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
From left to right: Juan Jose Radinas, Bill Mohr, Antonio Malpica. Photograph by Rocio Arellano. (c) 2015. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

I’ve been back from Mexico almost as long as I was there, and have been slow to get back to blogging. In part, it’s due to the start of school. I got through customs at LAX at 10:00 p.m. on Sunday, August 23. I met my first class at CSULB at 11:00 a.m. the next morning. All is going well at school so far; and the anthology I’m co-editing with Neeli Cherkovski is coming down the home stretch. As has been the case with the entire project, I’m in the driver’s seat, but Rebecca Chamlee (the book’s designer) is doing an excellent job at helping me negotiate the final stages of production.

The poetry tour of Mexico was a wonderful morale-booster. I read my poetry at venues in Mexico City, Cuernavaca, and San Luis Potosi, and had a chance to talk with poets from Spain, Ecuador, Israel and Brazil. I also had dinner with my translators, Jose Rico and Robin Myers. Jose was extraordinarily generous with his time: he met me at the airport when I arrived and accompanied me to catch my return flight, too. Our bus ride to Cuernavaca included a session of swapping jokes that left both of us struggling to muffle our laughter so as not to disturb the other passengers. We were sitting at the very rear of the bus, but I am fairly certain that the driver must at times have wondered about what was happening at the other end.

One of the best parts of the trip was the final evening of the festival at San Luis Potosi. Three beloved actors read short selections of our poetry or fiction to a standing-room only audience, which applauded each of us generously. I felt very fortunate to have my work read in an instant anthology alongside the work of Gloria Gervitz, Juan Jose Radinas, Antonio Malpica, Denise Desaultes, Luis Alberto Arellano, Rocio Arellano, Paulo Ferraz, Anat Zacharia, Jose Rico, and Maria Angeles Perez Lopez.

This coming Saturday, April 5th, Los Angeles will have a chance to hear the poetry of the main organizer of festival at San Luis Potosi, Jorge Humberto Chavez, at Avenue 50 Gallery. I will be reading briefly at his reading along with David Shook and Anthony Seidman. In addition, Carol Colin will still have her paintings up.

In recent weeks, Los Angeles has lost two important and inspiring artists. Lynn Manning, a vigorous poet and indefatigable cultural worker, died around the time that I left for Mexico, and Noah Davis, a marvelous painter and visual arts activist, died just a few days ago. I met Lynn only a few times over the years, and was always impressed with his poetic commitment; I devoutly hope that he is included in the anthology that Luis J. Rodriguez is putting together. I never met Mr. Davis, though, and feel a pang at his passing. There are people who would seem to be cut off early on and have left much undone, but about whom that is mere illusion. In point of fact, they did exactly what they were meant to accomplish. Noah Davis lifted off from this planet, though, with his vision still unfolding, and he deserves to have the implications of his projects kept in mind by his peers for the next several decades.

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Painting and Sculpture

The Other Vietnam Wall — Chris Burden

May 11, 2015 – 9:07 pm

Chris Burden died yesterday, on Sunday, May 10. Respectful praise undulated through several obituaries that were posted almost immediately, but I found it odd that important work was either misdescribed or completely omitted. The LA Times, for instance, mentioned “The Reason for the Neutron Bomb” as an “important sculpture,” but failed to provide the larger context for Burden’s choice of 50,000 as the number of nickels arrayed on the floor of a gallery.  Among other things, Burden’s point was to remind us of the scale of tanks deployed in Europe by both the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. It was all too easy to ignore the enormity of the war plans that were on some level of tactical alert all the time. Burden refused to let us hit a daily, naive re-set button that somehow cleared away our apprehensions.

In the same mann, I found it odd that “The Other Vietnam Wall” was not cited except in an article in The Nation. According to that article, Burden’s huge retrospective a couple years ago in New York deliberately left out that piece. I find such an omission very disturbing. It is one of Burden’s most provocative pieces, and the willingness of the curators to collaborate with those who want to erase America’s memory of its war crimes is not much different from the refusal of Turkey to acknowledge the genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire.

Burden is notorious for his early performance pieces and their emphasis on subjecting one’s body to a self-imposed penalty shot, either literally or in some manner involving deprivation. I suspect that this early work will remain critically tantalizing, but I also believe his later work will prove to be the most substantial and enduring.

 

 

 

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Painting and Sculpture

“The Fall of St. Paula”

April 14, 2015 – 6:07 pm

FullSizeRenderLinda and I went to Hye Sook Park’s exhibition of paintings, “Work in Progress,” at the Love Gallery in Wrightwood on Saturday evening. There were a number of paintings leaning against the wall. A huge pair of canvases, each one probably about eight feet high and more than 10 feet in length, radiated a glow worthy of Lee Mullican. Entitled “California,” the diptych was joined in the center by a left and right hemisphere of solar density. The solar winds swirled outwards with a palpable beneficence. If anyone’s brushstrokes could prove an incantation to dissolve the ongoing drought, then Hye Sook Park’s painting might at least start the process.

Another painting, on the floor directly in front of the right half of “California,” showed the face only of a prone figure, isolated from the vast trajectory of stars burning without the aura of mythic constellations; here was an image of human consciousness unable to reconcile its ability to discriminate on a microscopic level  and the perceptual capacity to calculate and gauge the exponentially expanding universe. The figure was calmly distraught, or so the coloring hinted, and yet distress was pushing against the facial surface.

A more buoyant picture was leaning against the wall directly across the wall from California. “The Fall of St. Paula” was upside down, but the joyous ripples of colors across the skirt of a dancer seemed to suggest a moment of gleeful redemption. I hope to see that painting in its completed form before it finds its home in some collector’s private study, not to be seen again for many, many years.

The last large painting that caught my eye was “Merry-Go-Round,” a photograph of which was taken by Linda and inserted into this post. It featured snake-like creatures writhing underneath and to the rear of a bird-like figure, who is evocative of the creatures in Bosch’s “Garden.” Hovering at the edge of some unseen residue of exhausted yearning, she has somehow been purified by a long night of ferocious, inner choreography. A huge ladle juts behind her, representing both the cross she must carry into her exile and the cup out of which she drank during her nocturnal ordeal. Whatever her destiny, perhaps the journey now set out upon will unexpectedly be the best part of eternity for her. The painting takes the audacious risk of tempting us to wish her well.

Hye Sook Park paints out of the deep need to test the limits of fate. It would appear that the fashion of contemporary art has overlooked an artist unwilling to compromise. Her underlying hints of fertile delicacy and passionate essences give one pause: could it be that modern man (and I emphasize the male aspect of that word choice) has made far worse choices than it appears. Park’s representations of inner dialogues suggest that radical meditation – something more daring than even Zen would prose – is needed.  If such an implicit manifesto has yet to be heeded, then so be it, says Park. The skepticism of the post-modern is far from corrosive enough to daunt the aspirations of genuine artists. Hye Sook Park has no intentions of surrendering to anything less than the inability to pick up a brush. The work indeed is in exhilarating progress.

 

 

 

 

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Ground Level Conditions Painting and Sculpture

Art Show — Hye Sook Park

April 6, 2015 – 8:37 pm

An exceptionally fine artist, Hye Sook Park, is having a solo exhibition of work-in-progress on exhibit for a month at a gallery in San Bernardino. The show will be up until the end of the month. All of the work is from on-going project. While it’s certainly a long drive to San Bernardino, if you happen to be in the vicinity, I would urge you to swing by and spend a half-hour with her art. She has been working as a painter for well over 30 years and is one of the hidden treasures of Los Angeles.

Love Art Studio

15551 Cajon Blvd

San Bernardino, CA 92407

(909) 576-5773 or (909) 573-9929

www.loveartstudio.com

The Love Art Studio is owned by two Korean American artists, Sung Il Kim and Hong Bi Kim (Mariana Kim). It is located on Route 66 and is less than a quarter-hour drive from Lost Lake, which is more like a hefty pond, according to some accounts. Nevertheless, if you want to ride the whirlwind, it is is almost directly above the San Andreas Fault. If the Big One cuts loose while you’re taking a stroll around it, at least you’ll be near a body of fresh water that is continuously fed by natural springs.

 

 

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