OPEN SPACE

……………………………………………………………"That bottle keeps its blink on its side red from horizon." Clark Coolidge………………………………..

I went down to the Artists Shop at Right Window on Friday evening and bought two pictures by San Francisco painter Scott Hewicker. He is one of my favorites and oh! So cheap! The artists’ shop is a project of the video artist Karla Milosevich and runs this weekend and next down at 992 Valencia Street. Lots and lots of artists, everything very reasonable, and 100 per cent of the $$$ goes to the artists themselves.

First I bought this little piece which I call, “Red Sun.”

Then I fought off several other would-be buyers to lay my hands on this great picture (below). Can you see it or can you not see it? It is like that old etching of Vanity looking into her mirror and canny viewers see a big skull, Or like that old optical illusion Wittgenstein wrote about where it looks like a duck and it looks like a rabbit.  Well, look again, and you will see two black cats aping the viewer’s gaze and staring, like yourself, into the severely luscious weather conditions only Hewicker knows how to give us.

Can you see them yet? One’s called Tex, the other Tom. They’re on either side of the picture, ears cocked as though food or danger were in the offing.

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Over the weekend I finally got over to Gallery 16 to see the last week of Bruno Fazzolari’s exhibition Cold Turkey, a selection of drawings broken up by six recent paintings. This is the last week you can see it, so get down there if you can. As you probably know, the Gallery is only a few blocks from SF MOMA, at Bryant and Third, and if you haven’t been there it is one of the pleasantest places I know with always plenty to see. This time around Fazzolari‘s show is a winner indeed.

The drawings come from a series called “Six Realms” on which the artist has been working for many years; apparently there are dozens of them. I took the traditional gallery walk, with a map in my hand of what I was seeing, and proceeded from left to right, an arrangement that usually adds no meaning, only the comfort of habit.  This time around however, I convinced myself I was catching something happening in those drawings, that I was seeing them progress from simple gestures towards more complex renditions of the social world. From the self — even the self of the young child — to perhaps the loss of that self within the increasingly organized and globalized state. I looked again — made the circle one more time — and by George, I was so pleased with myself!

Nowhere did I manage to agree with even a single word of Kenneth Baker’s review — but wait. I can imagine a few of my readers don’t know who Baker is, but he is the highly respected art writer for the San Francisco Chronicle.  He’s been at his post so long that when I first came to San Francisco and I was gullible, someone told me, and I believed it for a time, that he was the man they named the phrase “a baker’s dozen” after. (Boy did I feel like a fool when I told someone that, and they proved that the phrase was established in, I don’t know, the era of Chaucer!)  Cold Turkey seems to have flickered simultaneous off and on switches in Ken Baker. Like Gerald Manley Hopkins or someone, Baker is nearly impossible to summarize, but you can read for yourself the review that made me so curious. The particular picture that gives KB so much trouble, “Griefly Thurible” (2009) is, for my money, utterly convincing and never brought late Guston to my mind, but to get there I would really have to have more art training I suppose. If the work in the show is guilty of too much “sophistication,” I, suspiciously, tend to embrace it. (more…)