Orange County News Blog

Few local artists provoked as much outpouring of good vibes as Janice Lowry Gothold, whom God called to her reward Sept. 20. The woman, a continual presence in our pages and Best of OC 2007 winner for Visual Art, was a walking smile, a gal with so much talent that the Smithsonian has her personal journals and correspondence as part of its permanent collection of American Arts and Letters, a testament to Janice's genius.

My Janice moment: Early in the morning at the Gypsy Den, getting some coffee for my chica. She approaches me and says she loves my work. She knows I'm not much into art (she must've seen some article I wrote with my stock response: Art ends for me at Norman Rockwell, R. Crumb, and Jose Guadalupe Posada), but nevertheless insists that I take a reproduction of one of her journals. It stays inside my mailbox for months until I finally read it. Couldn't put it down--personal mixed with gorgeous, inventive art. Just like Janice.

Her memorial service is this Saturday at 2 p.m. at the Episcopal Church of the Messiah, 614 N. Bush St., SanTana. In lieu of flowers, Janice's family suggests donating to the wonderful Taller San Jose, a program near to Janice's heart. Her husband Jon tells us he will continue to update her website at janicelowry.com. Finally, a clip of Janice:

Laguna Art Museum

"Silver and Gold" by Granville Redmont

In this troubled economy, it's no surprise that many things are going on sale. Yet, the last thing I expected to find a reduced price for were pieces of art--let alone 100-year-old pieces of original art.  If anything, art is one of those rare things--like a vintage Chardonnay--which seems to increase in value over time. The recent auction of a late Picasso, which fetched a hefty $11.5 million (the artist painted it in 1969), is an example of this concept.

The Los Angeles Times broke the story of Orange County Museum of Art director Dennis Szakacs selling 18 California plein air paintings from OCMA's permanent collection at a deep discount to a private collector.

The Times has also stuck to the controversy like rice paper, filing follow-ups revealing a reader's tip led the fishwrap to the dickheaded move and allowing the paper's noted critic Christopher Knight to pile on.

But the Los Angeles County Museum on Fire blog is the only information/disinformation outlet to make the connection between OCMA and the Iranian government.

The good news: Tehran Bureau, the independent Iranian news site, is back online this morning after being censored much of yesterday. The bad news: When you click on the the "Collection Online" link of the Orange County Museum of Art site, it returns you to the logo animation--and then the home page.

LACMF also makes this smart observation: One of the sold paintings, William Wendt's Spring in the Canyon, was considered such a key work that it appears in the Collection Online button (right) on OCMA's website. Scan the post's reader comments for more details on what you can and cannot access through the OCMA site.

Szakacs, incidentally, has defended the sale. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be so proud.

Courtesy of Plug Ugly Films

Straight from the horse's mouth with Michael Slàdek.

Though Norma Desmond only lived at the cineplex (and now Netflix), she famously said, "I am big. It's the pictures that got small." Filmmaker and one-time Newport Beach resident Michael Slàdek is not yet big, but he is turning the phrase uttered by Sunset Boulevard's gloriously spaced-out Gloria Swanson on its head. For him, it's the film festivals that got big.

Five years after Slàdek's debut feature, Devils Are Dreaming, premiered at the 2004 Newport Beach Film Festival, Con Artist, his new feature-length documentary on New York "business artist" and composer Mark Kostabi, makes its world premiere April 25 at the Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan. It's a long way from Newport Harbor High School, where Slàdek finished high school after his family moved from Denver when he was 16.

"It was definitely a culture shock," he recalls by phone from his new home in New York City, in between busily finishing post-production on Con Artist in preparation of the festival that runs April 22-May 3. "I remember coming to town. First I started high school at Corona del Mar, then I went to Newport Harbor. I was wearing jeans, boots, a black trench coat, the sides of my head were shaved. I was looking a little like a punk rock kid. And everyone else was in shorts, tee-shirts with long, surfer hair. It was definitely quite different."

Larry Fodor's work can be hard to defend. When people carp about "modern art," when they talk about canvases full of smears and glops and they holler, "a chimp could have painted that," they're probably thinking of art like Fodor's. Even if you're proud to call yourself an artsy-fartsy weirdo, a little of this kind of art goes a long way.

But if you're in the right mood and you open yourself up to the experience, Fodor's smears and glops can be glorious. You can become mesmerized staring at his canvases the same way you can go into a trance looking at river rocks, or at the texture of the wood in an old barn. Stochastic XI, one of the pieces on display in Fodor's solo show "Ligatures" at the SCAPE gallery, is as simple or complex as you want it to be. Either it's just a bunch of colors and scratchy marks, or it's an apocalyptic sunset, a stretch of stagnant marshland, the stuff you see dancing behind your eyelids when you clamp your eyes shut on a very bright day. If you can hang with Stochastic XI, the rest of the show should be a breeze; some of Fodor's other paintings have an alluring, jewel-like glow, they're eye-catching in a way that Stochastic XI isn't. Stochastic Blue-Green/Violet is probably the belle of the ball here, the pretty one who demands your attention across a crowded room. But Stochastic XI has personality. This is the kind of painting you could take home to meet the folks.

Larry Fodor's "Ligatures" @ SCAPE
2859 E. Coast Hwy. Corona Del Mar
(949) 723-3406
Through Dec. 8th.

The Orange County Museum of Art's 2008 Biennial features twenty exhibits beyond the museum itself, scattered all the way from San Francisco down to Tijuana. Einar and Jamex de la Torre's "Pho’zole 2008," at South Coast Plaza's Orange Lounge, seems weirdly symbolic of the Biennial itself, offering up so many bowls of food that it would probably take the rest of your life to eat it all. The bowls are mounted on the wall, wrong way out, so the food looks like it's about to come dribbling out and land on your shoes with a wet splat. On their own and placed on a table the way a sensible person would do it, any one or two of these colorful meals might look tasty. But clustered together in one vertiginous sprawl like this, the effect is anything but appetizing. (Actually, it feels sort of like you've been swallowed by a hungry giant and you're trapped in his stomach with his last few dozen undigested meals.) As if all of this wasn't already unsettling enough, the de la Torres brothers have also included a video of people talking about food around the world; the video is embedded in the wall, and shines eerily through a pile of semi-transparent chow like the dream of a glutton sleeping off his latest binge. The food court's just a short walk away. Hungry?

Einar and Jamex de la Torre at Orange Lounge
South Coast Plaza, 3333 Bear St., # 303
Costa Mesa, (949) 759-1122 ext. 272.
Open through Mar. 15th

Sofa, King, Cool, Travis Collinson's memorably peculiar acrylic painting, really doesn't belong in the Huntington Beach Art Center's baseball-themed art show, "2332." But then again, an argument could be made that Collinson's hapless characters would be misfits pretty much anywhere.

In a dimly-lit apartment that looks like it smells of microwave popcorn and cat pee, a sickly man reclines on a sofa, seemingly too depressed to move. In the foreground, his birdlike lady friend sits with her hands in her lap, lost in her own heavy thoughts. Whatever they were talking about, the discussion has hit a long, unhappy lull. Through the sliding glass door behind them, we look out on a world without promise, just another cheap apartment beneath a dishwater sky. The scene is so grim it's kind of hilarious; even the poor plant on the table looks like it's aching for better days, long past.

It's hard to guess if Collinson paints people who look like Steve Buscemi's family reunion by choice, or because he's still figuring out how to render faces. His people are crooked, pop-eyed and unlovely, but you peer through this window into their lonesome little world, and you can't help but feel for them. Call this one a home run.

"2332" @ The Huntington Beach Art Center
538 Main St., Huntington Beach
(714) 374-1650.
Through December 21.

Roger Weik's Abstract Number 73 looks like any number of horrible things. Maybe a close-up view of a mummy's back, with jaundiced, rotting flesh peeking through the frayed, graying bandages. Or maybe it's more like some sort of a huge, nasty insect nest you'd find inside of a hollowed-out tree. If you were refurbishing an old house and you ripped open one of the walls, you might be distressed to discover something that looked a lot like this: dirty, spongy stuff covered with stringy bits of some kind of rotting fabric.

Any way you look at it, Abstract Number 73 is pretty hideous. But just because something is hideous and you'd never, ever want to hang it on your wall, that doesn't mean it can't be great. Abstract Number 73 doesn't look like something that a human would make. This is the kind of texture an object acquires after years away from people, in a dusty attic or way down at the bottom of the sea. It has the fascination of the natural, your eye is drawn to it the same way its drawn to petrified wood and mushrooms on the side of a rock. No matter how much time and hard work Weik put into this piece, it has the peculiar virtue of looking like he had nothing to do with it.

"The Paper Show" @ Grand Central Art Center, Rental/Sales Gallery
125 N. Broadway, Santa Ana
(714) 567-7233
Through Oct. 26th

Andrew Holder seems to live in a cheery 1968 wonderland; it's as if he went to see Yellow Submarine when he was seven years old and he never left Pepperland again. His work features bright, lysergic colors and bold, flat, graphic designs... Making it all the more arresting when his stuff lurches off of the walls of the Hibbleton gallery and into the third dimension, as it does in his mounted, Trophy Deer Heads covered with what we can only describe as psychedelic tattoos. The papier mache deer have no visible eyes or mouths, but the designs crawling across their necks and faces are alive with head-trippy details. Bustling little towns play host to giant animals - a pair of geese the size of skyscrapers wander through, and nobody seems to mind. A turtle as big as a luxury yacht splashes lazily along on a winding river. Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream...

Obviously, this stuff won't be for everybody. If you're some cranky hippie hater, Holder's art will probably hit you like brown acid washed down with stale bong water. But if you're on just the right, groovy wavelength, Holder's imagination is a beautiful place to get lost in. Lay down all thought, surrender to the void...

Andrew Holder: “Neon Frontier” @ Hibbleton Gallery
112 W. Wilshire Ave., Fullerton, CA
(714) 441-2857.
Through Oct. 26th.

Robert Rauschenberg was one of the great pranksters of the art world, with a punk rock, wiseguy attitude decades ahead of his time. He got noticed in a big way when he purchased a drawing by de Kooning just so he could erase it. Throughout his career Rauschenberg loved to blur the line between art and garbage, turning art into garbage (as he did with poor de Kooning's work) and turning garbage into art (as he did with old bicycles, newspapers and other cast-offs he happened upon.) For a group show of portraits of gallery owner Iris Clert, Rauschenberg sent a telegram that really said it all about his approach to art: "This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so." In a time when many artists and critics were spinning their wheels trying to figure out what art was, Rauschenberg's guiding principle - "It's art because I say so" - served him surprisingly well.

When you first see Rauschenberg's Cardbird series, it's easy to think that he has taken this "because I said so" stuff a bit too far and he has simply gotten lazy. It looks like he has just gotten some old cardboard boxes, squished them flat and put them up on the wall. Even for Rauschenberg, this is a bit much. Is it supposed to be some sort of a joke? Well, yes, of course it is... And it's a wonderfully subtle and subversive one. What looks like something the artist accomplished by stepping on a refrigerator box is actually the result of a tediously complex process involving photography, lithography and lamination. Rarely has an artist worked so hard to look like he didn't give a damn.

Robert Rauschenberg's "Cardbird Series"@ the Long Beach Museum of Art
300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach, CA
(562) 439-2119.
Through Oct 19th.