CatSynth

Islais Creek in San Francisco is a favorite photography spot of mine, and also home to an art studio complex featuring many metalwork sculptors. While walking outside of Islais Creek Studios, I encountered this gray cat.

It’s not the first time I have come across cats at Islais Creek Studios. Indeed, I posted about a cat I encountered there last year. It seems to be a natural environment for outdoor cats, lots of places hide in the industrial debris, and friendly people who leave food for them.

In the picture, we see the cat sitting near large metalwork sculptures by the artist David I McGraw. I like the abstract shapes and focus on single, and the fit well with the environment. And they go well with cats.

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We participated in this year’s BlogBlast for Peace, which occurred yesterday. Cats have been quite prominent among the entries every year. You can see our peace globe here.

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Weekend Cat Blogging #335 is hosted by Kashim, Othello and Salome at PaulChens FoodBlog?!

Carnival of the Cats #399 will be hosted this Sunday by Nikita and Elvira at Meowsings of an Opinionated Pussycat.

And the Friday Ark is at the modulator.

San Francisco Open Studios has been going on all of October. I have live tweeting from my various studio visits each weekend using the hashtag #SFOS. But as both the month and Open Studios draws to a close, we look back and my own experience on the first weekend, showing my photography at Art Explosion and in the showcase at SOMArts.

The works were mostly drawn from the same set that I featured in the solo show at The Parts Room in Oakland in early September, include the “triptych” of the large red, blue and yellow pieces.

The show in Oakland was a great experience, the best visual arts show to date. And I learned a lot about hanging which I put to use for Open Studios. This was most true for the showcase at SOMArts, where I showed up fully equipped to have my piece perfectly centered and mounted in the allotted space. The tools and meticulous measuring and drilling of holes seemed to impress the staff at ArtSpan.

And the work paid off with the end result (though the camera distorts the leveling a bit).

During the preview party, I received numerous positive responses from visitors and various people in the arts community.

The response at the studio itself was also positive. There weren’t always a lot of people visiting, it came in waves throughout the weekend, but those who did come were quite engaged.

[Photo from Art Explosion Studios Facebook page.]

I received both positive and constructive feedback over the weekend. One thing that is clear is the strongest works are those, like the “triptych” that focus on details of the urban landscape, a particular shape or pattern or color. Those are also among the most rewarding to work on, so I will likely focus more on this in the future. I will probably continue to have humorous pieces as well. People of course loved the big orange cat. The doll was a lot more polarizing (see the most recent Wordless Wednesday for an example), with some people really liking it and others hating it.

In balance it was a good experience – it was also great to share it with the other artists in the studio. It was also nice to get it out of the way during the first week, and spend the rest of the month as a viewer rather than presenter. But I am left with a sense of “OK, what next?” in terms my visual-art work…

Open Studios has become a semi-annual experience for me since moving to San Francisco in 2008. Each time, I frenetically go from studio to studio in my guise as a reviewer and collector, seeing large amounts of work and interacting with artists. This time the tables were turned, as I was presenting my own photography work as part of the Spring Open Studios at Art Explosion. So rather than reviewing art, I will be reviewing the experience of presenting art, and interacting with viewers. Art Explosion is composed of two large buildings of artists’ studios in the ambiguous industrial neighborhood between the Mission and Potrero Hill. It was often one of the first stops on my Open Studio tours, and the small open studios were and supportive community were a natural choice for presenting my work.

I had two walls of an open studio space, along with additional space in the main hall and one piece in the entranceway (every artist had a piece here as part of a “sampler” wall). You can see the three walls in the images below (click on the small images to enlarge).

[Click images to view full size]

In all, I had 16 pieces featured. Additionally, I made a few “mini editions” of some of the pieces (4×6 inches) and had two video presentations of works that were not physically part of the show.

Over the three main days of Open Studios (and an additional Saturday the week after), I sat and waited as people walked by and sometimes stopped to view my work, and occasionally ask questions or give feedback. Some walked through without stopping to look, others spent a couple of minutes viewing intently without saying a word, or maybe a quick “very nice work” before wandering off. But a decent number of people did ask questions or more detailed responses. The most common questions I got were about the locations of the photographs, i.e., “Where was this one taken?” All the pieces I presented were from the Bay Area, New York or Shanghai, and discussing the locations or having viewers try to guess which was which became part of the interaction. There were definitely clues in each, in particular the more exotic architecture of the Shanghai high-rises and the distinctive San Francisco “No Parking” signs. Very few people were able to recognize the half-demolished overpass from the Transbay Terminal in San Francisco featured in the largest piece, though this one was among pieces most positively received.

The other pieces that seemed to receive the most intention were Asians.com (Invisible Bike) with the big orange cat, and Dragon (Moganshan Lu) with the dragon mural, half-demolished building and garbage-strewn street. I did an experiment moving these two pieces around after the first day to see if it was the location or the content that attracted people, but they still seemed to get the most attention. I had not predicted that Dragon would get so much attention – or eventually be the first large piece to be sold! It was one of those interesting surprises when exposing the work to public viewing.

I also had an interesting conversation about the location in 5348, one of two pieces in the show featuring a model. I have used that building on multiple occasions, with its mysterious mess of hanging cables.

It turns out that someone who came through and saw the show was familiar with the building and the people who owned it, and informed me that the structure with the cables was in fact for lifting large objects, freight, etc., but had not been in use for a while. A group of viewers said that the big orange cat was part of a scavenger hunt they participated in.

]Some people seemed more drawn to the aesthetics of individual pieces rather than the subject or context – like me, the focused on lines and textures. Among these viewers, 7059 (Blue) got the most attention. A few viewers did try to look for “musical” elements within my work after learning that music was my primary art form – they noticed repeated patterns and motives in the lines.

Overall, it was a good experience. I was able to show my photographs in physical form to a large number of people and received quite a bit of positive feedback. Among those who came to see the show were a few of the artists I have reviewed here on CatSynth in the past, which was very gratifying; and many friends came by over the four days I was showing. Selling a large piece and a handful of miniatures, of course, nice as well. Interestingly, I also managed to sell some music CDs. Some things I may do differently in future shows is have a larger variety of miniatures on hand – e.g., at least one of every piece I think can be reasonably represented in a small size (some just don’t look good small). I may also experiment with different types of framing and mounting – this was probably the hardest part of preparing for the show.

One unfortunate aspect of presenting my own work is that it left me very little time to explore and see what others were doing. I did take a few breaks to see friends as well as discover new work, though not at the level of detail I would have done in previous shows.

You can see images from Open Studios at this flickr set, or visit my page at Art Explosion.

After much work and excessive anticipatory blog posts and tweets, Spring Open Studios starts tonight! If I can, I will try and live tweet @catsynth wish hashtag #sfopenstudios. It will be interesting to experience an art event from the point of view of a presenter rather than a viewer.

Here is one more picture of installation in progress:

This is a separate wall from those I showed in this previous post. I felt it was a bit unbalanced, so I added one more piece to the upper left, directly above the large picture. One of the many countless details I have dealt with incrementally over the process. The biggest challenge has been taking what was essentially purely digital and changing it into physical objects. It’s one thing to post a photo every Wednesday, it’s another to print, matte, frame and hang it.

One of the things I am interested in seeing tonight is how the experience differs from music, and from the performing arts in general.

It’s October, so once again it is time for Open Studios here in San Francisco. We at CatSynth will be out and about, revisiting friends and hopefully finding new art and artists as well. This time, in addition to full articles, I will also be “live tweeting”. You can follow @catsynth or with the #sfopenstudios tag. If others use it, too, it will be all the more fun.

UPDATE: there is an iPhone/iPod/iPad app available via the ArtSpan site for following artists and posting Twitter updates. I will be checking this out for tomorrow

Week 3 of San Francisco Open Studios features South of Market (SOMA), my neighborhood, and Mission Bay, the corridor along 3rd street further south. This is a rather large piece of territory within the city, and a mixture of old industrial areas and downtown that seems to me very creative. I have decided to divide my experience into three distinct sections: abstract, architectural/urban, and figurative/characters. These are by no means authoritative groupings, they just represent the main areas of my interest among the work that I saw, and a way to separate the large number of artists I saw into something a bit more manageable. And of course many of the artists blue the boundaries between these distinctions. This article presents a few of the artists whose work was primarily abstract.

At South Beach Studios, I once again visited the studio of Paule Dubios Dupuis. I had seen her work last year when I was specifically looking for large abstract paintings, and indeed her rich and vibrant canvases were once again among the largest I saw this weekend. Her paintings feature shapes and areas of color of different sizes with soft of ambiguous borders – the content has a very expressive, even emotional, quality. Her smaller “Graffiti” series is very crisp and tight with shades of black and grey; her exceptionally large Pour toi maman is simultaneously study in color, shape, and use of text, and a moving tribute to her mother.

At 1035 Market Street, I encountered the work of Clare Kuo. Her large abstract paintings have very strongly defined shapes and boundaries, with large fields of color. Within each, one can see different shades in the brush strokes and fine detail, but it is the large outlined shapes that most stand out. Conceptually and texturally, her paintings remind me a bit of Silvia Poloto’s Observations series (from Open Studios week 1), but with a different vocabulary of shapes.

Also at 1035 Market, Andrzej Michael Karwacki presented both abstract work as well as figurative work, and indeed I did not initially realize they were from the same artist.Karwacki keeps the two bodies of work fairly separate, and noted that the viewers and clients for his abstract and figurative work fell into two very distinct groups. So perhaps I was an exception in having an interest in both. His abstract work was very textural, with brighter natural colors often running down the canvas in a manner that suggests water running down the side of a wall. Some of his paintings also feature plant shapes and patterns. His figurative paintings, by contrast, had a very crisp feel with well defined lines, and reminded me of fashion and glamor photos. These images also incorporated text in the form of poems printed in the background.

One of my favorite “spaces” from the weekend was Pier 70, a collection of dilapidated port and industrial buildings in Mission Bay. I featured one of my own photos from this area in last week’s Wordless Wednesday, and will have more to say about it in a future article.

I did see several artists at the Noonan Building at Pier 70, including Phillip Hua. I have seen Hua’s abstract work from his De/Construction series before at Hang here in San Francisco. I was attracted to the large shapes lined with smaller dots and splatters; and stark coloring with broad areas of black set against white and bright colors. His more recent work, re:Action involves ink and tape placed on top of pages of the Wall Street Journal. The images of trees that emerge suggest the “reclaiming” of the Journal pages. The newspaper was created from trees, and now it is being used to recreate trees.

In a lower level of the same building, I found the work of John Haines. His metal sculptures feature soft curving lines, circles and smooth textures. The abstract metal shapes have a very organic feel and the thin lines in some of the pieces convey a sense of motion. It also was fun to try and use the circles as “windows” through which to peer at some of the other sculptures.

It seems that I always end up being drawn to abstract metal sculpture, and thus I ended up again this year atIslais Creek Studios. Some of the artists I saw last year were not showing this time. But I did see Rebecca Fox’s large metal sculptures. Her arrangements of almost perfect circles and other curvilinear forms in arrangements suggest astronomical symbols. The shapes and surfaces have a very smooth, continuous quality to them. They also have a feeling of strength when viewed in person, even some of the pieces composed of thinner circles.

Nearby, Yong Han’s sculptures provided a stark contrast. If Fox’s sculptures are represent simplicity, strength and circles, Han’s are intricate, delicate and very linear. Several of his sculptures featured complex arrangements of wire, bars and rods, sometimes vertical and sometimes at odd angles, and sometimes quite tall. Although not necessarily the tallest of his sculptures, I liked this pair as they reminded me a downtown city block.

Back in SOMA. Reiko Muranaga’s drawings blended figurative and abstract shapes, such as in the large charcoal-and-ink drawing Session. One can focus on either the thick black curving lines, or the figures that emerge from them. This piece in particular seemed to fit quite well with the red table in front of it.

She has also composed some exceptionally large scrolls of her drawings, although these were not on view. Muranaga also presented her Letters to Monet series features soft fields of colors (light reds, oranges, blues) overlaid with very detailed brush strokes suggesting birds or plants.

At Garage Studios on Bryant Street. Alan Mazzetti’s paintings feature a very geometric vocabulary with clearly delineated shapes and textures. Although the linear and rectangular shapes stand out from a distance, up close one can see the the defining elements are the circles. There the large and clearly visible circles, but also the arrays of smaller circles that together form larger objects, and the circles that are hidden in the textures of the paintings.

At SOMA Studios Mark Harris presented an interest mix of purely abstract work from his Letting Go series featuring energetic curved lines, and prints that ranged from abstract to overtly political. Some of his prints were recycled from previous trials, on which he placed text elements including his iconic “signature” shape.

I had initially seen Jeremy Garza’s work as another example of the use of text in abstract art, with his shapes that resembled a sci-fi language. This was apparently a coincidence, though he noted I was not the first person to point that out during the day.

A few artists blurred the distinction between abstract and architectural (actually, several did whether intentionally or not, like Yong Han’s sculptures above). From a distance, some of the paintings in Nanci Price Scoular’s “journeys” series look like abstract color fields with soft muted tones, but on closer inspection they are revealed to be details from structures, such as the “urban still life” pieces featuring rusted iron rings and gates.

Samantha Ricca also crosses the boundary between abstract and architectural, with one series of paintings featuring surved, organic, almost corporeal shapes, and another featuring featuring straight lines and sharply delineated outlines of structures, such as a ferris wheel. Ricca’s studio was back at Pier 70, and a fitting place to conclude until the next article, which will focus on urban and architectural art.

[Images marked with "catsynth.com" are photographs taken with permission of the artists for use in these artists. Other images are reproduced from artists' websites with their permission.]

Just as it was last year, Open Studios is “art overload” – the sheer number of artists and artworks can be quite overwhelming, even just concentrating on a few studios in a small number of blocks in the Potrero Hill and Mission neighborhoods. I concentrated on a few areas of particular interest, such as pure abstraction, conceptual work, urban landscape, and use of technology, but also took notice of other themes such as animals (especially cats) and selected figurative works as well.

The first major stop was Art Explosion Studios on 17th Street (they now have several locations). I usually begin by seeking out larger abstract works (such as might be appropriate for the walls of CatSynth HQ). These could be single large paintings, or collections of smaller objects to form a whole. An example of the latter was Kally Kahn’s black-and-white “pincushion” series.

[Click on any image in this article to enlarge.]

Very abstract and geometric, I did not immediately recognize them as pincushions until Kahn pointed it out. The brought to mind science fiction or microbial illustrations, and as such I thought of Miro’s Constellation. The coloring and texture also reminded of Julia Orshatz’s work I had seen a week or so earlier at First Thursday, although Kahn’s pincushions were rounder and less intricate.

In terms of larger abstract canvases, Heike Seefeldt’s Roller Coaster series stood out. Each 3-foot square canvas featured a central color and set of shapes (e.g., spirals, radial patterns, stripes, etc). Most made use of bright colors, but the Devastation sub-series featured darker colors, including one distinctive black canvas with more rectangular shapes.

I again found Melisa Phillips’ paintings, featuring stenciled text on large color fields as well as embedded abstract figurative images. She also presented some of her figurative drawings this year, but it was still the larger text-based works that got my attention. There is always the question with works that incorporate text about whether it is a purely visual element, or conveys meaning. Certainly, one recognizes the letters in these paintings as letters and thus as language, but for me part of the appeal is that they don’t appear to mean anything with regards to our normal use of language. (I found myself speaking with another artist, Megan Cutler, on the challenges of using text in art.)

Michelle Champlin’s large canvases featured cityscapes that were imaginary but were inspired by real cities, such as San Francisco.

At least one painting featured an outline of the Transamerica Pyramid; another was supposed to represent a neighborhood like the Tenderloin as seen at ground level and incorporated newspaper clippings into the background. Champlin said she was inspired by the cosmopolitan nature of the cities, and the coming together of many different people with different perspectives.

Jhina Alvarado’s stark Forgotten Memories series was based on old photographs she collected. It seemed odd to possess “other people’s memories”, which led her to create these series where the people were presented on empty backgrounds, and their eyes covered with black boxes. Alvarado suggests that blocking out the eyes added anonymity, as well as some mystery to the figures, and to separate them from the memories of the original owners of the photographs.

Interestingly, some Alvarado’s work was displayed into the main hall next to another series of paintings in which the main figure’s eyes were hidden. Romolo R Nisnisan Jr’s In the eyes of a hakujin included a large portrait of a blindfolded Asian woman, supposedly a caricature of western mens’ perceptions of Asian women (or at least that’s what the poorly worded artist’s statement suggested).

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On my way to Art Explosion, I stopped at a small studio on Potrero Avenue, featuring paintings by Calixto Robles. Several of his large paintings feature iconic and stylized images of jaguars.

Most were singular portraits like the examples above, although Robles sometimes incorporated them into other pictures with dreamlike or religious imagery.

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At 1890 Bryant Street, I met Sevilla Granger. Most of her canvases feature trees in silhouette surrounded by warm colors. The trees often have sharp bends in their branches and patterns reminiscent of the cypress trees along the California coast. Interestingly, these “arboreal portraits” are sometimes painted over initial abstract layers of paint that are never seen except as texture beneath the surface. She actually presented one of these preliminary images as a finished work, and found that it received a very positive reaction.

Catherine Mackay’s paintings focus on the “visual urban experience”, and her new series Wharves and Warehouses continues this theme. I had seen Mackay’s work before, which featured familiar locations from San Francisco and New York. Unlike her previous paintings, which featured very think paint and strokes that obscured the industrial quality of the scenes, the current series is very finely textured and almost photographic in some cases.

I instantly recognized one of the piers from along the Embarcadero near the Bay Bridge, an area which has been a rich source of material for my own photographs – this led to an opportunity to share some of my own images and discuss our experiences with the urban landscape.

While some artists focused on a particular media, theme or technique, Mr. Rogers was focused on a single character “Bunnymatic.” As the name implies, bunnymatic is a sort of robot/bunny character, inspired at least in part by the characters of Sanrio (e.g., Hello Kitty, etc.). We see bunnymatic in a variety of media (painting, graphics, popsicle sticks, kinetic sculpture) and in a variety of situations, such as playing drums, partying, towering over a skyline, etc.

Another comic/cartoon-like image that caught my attention was this one illustration by Matt Delight, featuring a young woman and her pet mollusk.

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A block or so away was Project Artaud, which houses a warren or live/work artists’ spaces, studios, galleries and a large performance space (where the 2008 San Francisco Electronic Music Festival was held).

Around a corner, I came to the studio of Janet Scheuer, whose colorful paintings feature cats. In particular, they feature her cat who passed away at the venerable age of 21.

In another corridor, I heard electronic music coming from the studio of Saiman Li, where a small group was performing live. The walls were covered with a variety of objects, photos and conceptual works relating to Asian visual imagery and Asian identity.

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I made a brief detour to Cellspace. I mostly know Cellspace as a performing arts venue rather than a place for visual art. I did see large black abstract sculptures by Corey Best in the main hall. I also saw a few minutes of a dance performance entitled “Happenstance of Social Blunders”. Basically, it seemed to be deliberately clumsy dancing, set to some light jazz music provided by a live band.

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After Cellspace, I visited the private studio of Silvia Poloto. I have a small mixed-media piece of hers, and have always liked her very deliberate arrangements of geometric shapes, color fields, organic elements and the occasional snippet of text. Her studio, like her canvases, was clean and smart and organized and was well suited for displaying some of her larger works.

Some, such as the blue painting from her Observations series, resemble that original small piece and have a the look and feel of a rough drawing.  Others, like those in the Absense Presence series are very smooth and polished, and divided into sections with abstract shapes or photo-realistic elements in each.  A third series, Highland, appeared to combine both styles into a very tall narrow dimensions.

[Images from the artist's website reproduced with permission.]

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From Poloto’s studio, I wandered down Folsom Street to Workspace, Ltd., a large and inviting collection of studios in a converted old industrial building.

Perhaps one of the most unique collections of work I saw was that of John Zaklikowsi. His source materials are a combination of discarded electronics (hard drives, cell phones, etc.), gears and chains, and musical instruments, which he arranges into large and intricate sculptural works. Some are flat wall-mounted collages, including one titled Number Theory; but he also had a grand piano covered with electronics and embedded with flutes, a clarinet and even a tabla.

I did not try to play it.

The corridors and studios of Workspace, Ltd also featured a variety of more conventional work. Leslie Andelin’s The Big Bang was a huge canvas covered in rectangles. The bright greenish colors are not really my preference. I did like the industrial and abstract paintings by Amy Curkendall and Alex Zenger, with lots of straight lines and angles. Ali Saif had a large collection of darker abstract canvases, mostly black and silver, with bits of red and other colors – his titles suggested industrial themes like classic cars.

As 6pm approached I did find a place to “decompress” from the artistic and sensory overload. Delfina Piretti had set up a tent as a quiet space where people could compose images from their dreams. While I mostly just wanted a moment without any additional input, I did contribute a drawing, trying to unload a bit of everything from all the different themes and trends into a single image. I left it behind in the book, unlabeled and unsigned.

[For Weekend Cat Blogging, please follow this link].

Since last Sunday (after my performance at the Y2K8 Looping Festival), visual art as taken over. October is Open Studios in San Francisco, where artists open up their studios to for public visits. I took advantage of the opportunity to get acquainted with local artists, mostly in the neighborhoods in walking distance, and the local art scene.

Taking in so much art and so many artists in such a short period of time is quite overwhelming, and I will only be able to describe a small fraction of what I saw. What makes a particular artist memorable and noteworthy is not only the quality of his or her work, but the conversations and personal connections. In some cases, I remember artists whose work may not fit my own aesthetic, but whose meeting was memorable. It was also the setting, and how their work fit in with my vision and sense of the neigbhorhoods.

Potrero Hill, The Mission District, and Bernal Heights

My first day out was last Sunday during which I visited several large studios in the Potrero Hill and Mission districts. The first stop was Art Explosion Studios. Here I met and had a change to talk with Amy Seefeldt; and Victoria Highland, whose large city-scape on a hill in front of a bay (where have I seen that before?) was one of the better large-scale paintings I saw. Heidi McDowell had an interesting large-scale painting featuring a young girl at Lassen National Monument, which I visited last year. The recent work of Melisa Philips is perhaps closer to my own interests. One of her paintings featuring stenciled text is shown to the right. I have discussed here on CatSynth in the past my interest in text within visual art, and whether the words and letters are simply visual elements or retain their meaning. Melisa Philips and I had an interesting conversation about this topic. Additionally, her earlier work includes some of the more interesting female figures I encountered on this particular day.

It is hard to tell specifically where Potrero Hill ends and the Mission begins, and many of the venues on this particular trip sit in that ambiguous area of old industrial buildings dotted with lofts and art spaces. Within these spaces, I encountered not only traditional fine art, but other media as well, some which would have been traditionally classified as “craft.” There were several jewelry makers, for example – there is a fuzzy dividing line at which things like jewelry become art, perhaps when they become more an item to collect and display, rather than to wear. There were the chandeliers by “adventurer” Derek E. Burton, which were quite intricate and intriguing, and although they are completely opposite of my personal style and the style of CatSynth HQ, I enjoyed hearing Derek’s story and his passion for his work. Aliza Cohen presented mix-media art, but it was her wool pillows that caught my attention. I did also encounter more traditional media, such as the photography of Christine Federici that incorporated some architectural and space details, as well as a mixture of natural and artificial textures.

Interestingly, it seemed that “modern” art, which is my main interest, was a distinct minority among the works encountered on this first trip. Certainly, there were many artists working with abstraction, but overall it did not have the stark geometric or textural qualities that I have come to expect.

When searching for “abstract” on the main website, the work of Pauline Crowther Scott showed up on the list. Her works features images of cats. Cats and abstraction seem like a good combination, so I made the trip out to her home studio in the Bernal Heights neighborhood. The trip to the narrow and sometimes vertical streets and older houses in this neighborhood in the southeast of the city, on a somewhat chilly late afternoon, was an interesting experience in itself. Scott’s work was much less abstract than I had expected (she was in fact surprised by the designation), but she did have several works featuring cats that were added to earlier (and indeed somewhat abstract) images. One example was Three Cats on a Bedspread.

South of Market and Mission Bay

This weekend featured open studios the South of Market (SOMA) area, which is my own neighborhood. Overall, the works I encountered were decidedly more modern, and often seemed to take inspiration from the industrial and urban surroundings. Indeed, the mixed media works of Rebecca Kerlin draw upon the highway overpasses, such as I-80 and the approach to the Bay Bridge, that I have featured in many posts here at CatSynth, such as in this Wordless Wednesday post. Her work incorporates photos of familiar landmarks and details into mixed media pieces.

One of my longer pieces about walking in SOMA included this photograph featuring an onramp to the Bay Bridge over Bryant Street, near the landmark Clock Tower:

It turns out that building in the foreground contains several artist studios. Among the artists at this locations was Paule Dubois Dupuis. Her work includes large abstract modernist paintings, the type of art I am currently quite interested in. Some of her pieces also included stenciled text, another common theme among works that draw my attention. In addition to the art itself, her studio is in quite a location, with windows that look out onto the bay, the industrial/office buildings and the highway supports, depending on the direction of one’s gaze. I was inspired to take this photo:

At Clara Street Studios, I encountered the work of Jerry Veverka, whose work involves plays on architecture and geometry, with some surrealist elements. I had seen an example at the SomArts exhibit, and was particularly drawn to his “Impossible Cities Series,” an example of which is displayed to the right. (Click on the image for a full size version at his website.)

Two other photographers I also encountered at included familiar sights from both New York and San Francisco in their work, and I had fun identifying and discussing them. I have unfortunately misplaced both photographers’ contact info (and I cannot find them on the original list. Hopefully, I will be able to get in touch them soon.

Back at Soma Artists Studios (same location as Rebecca Kerlin), I saw an interesting progression the work of Flora Davis. Her early work featured oil paintings of cats, while her more recent work involves sheet metal. They were quite separate, indeed they were displayed in two separate studios. However, I think it would be interesting to place one or two of the smaller cat paintings next to her multi-panel metal works, and considering them as a unit. Indeed, it would summarize my experience as modernism, abstraction, geometry, and cats.

After an exhausting but rewarding walk around the neigbhorhood, I did have to time for a brief excursion south to some studios in the Mission Bay area, which includes much of the old industrial waterfront.

The view behind the studios at 1 Rankin Street onto the Islais Creek Channel were quite inspiring, even without the presence of art. Fitting with the environment, this studio featured metal sculptures. The large sculptures of Béla Harcos greeted visitors. No matter how much I am supposed to be looking for prints and paintings, I am still drawn to abstract metal sculpture. Rebecca Fox also had large works on display, and I able to glimpse her workspace and her collection of metal waiting to be used. The “artist blacksmith” Wolf Thurmeier has some smaller, even “miniature” abstract metal sculptures (what I would consider “apartment-sized”), forged from recycled metal.

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The Anderson Collection

Quite by coincidence, I also had the opportunity this weekend to attend a private tour of the Anderson Art Collection. The collection is located in Menlo Park (south of San Francisco, near Stanford University), and features late 20th century and early 21st century American art. It includes over 800 works, spanning about five decades and several notable styles and schools, including color fields, minimalism, the New York school of the 1950s and 1960s (e.g., Jasper Johns and Robert Rauchenberg). There were also recent computer-assisted works by Chuck Close, as well as emerging artists that the Andersons are supporting. One interesting discovery for me was Frank Lobdell. I will have to look for him on the outside. I found it interesting how some of his work resembled the Jasper Johns’ prints featured in the collection (especially the reductions in the very detailed brochures).

This visit to one of the premier private collections was an interesting contrast to many local independent artists over the past week. I would to think that my art experiences will continue to include both.