Shotgun Review Archive
L.A. Paint
January 20, 2009"For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hell-broth boil and babble, Double, double, toil and trouble, Fire burn, and caldron bubble." -William ShakespearePresent day Los Angeles is a bubbling caldron, like a witch's brew, where a tremendous number of creative people are making interesting art. It should not be a surprise that the art reflects the conflicting personality of the city itself. According to Mike Davis in his book City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, "The ultimate world significance--and oddity--of Los Angeles has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism." Bertold Brecth's apt description of Los Angeles as both heaven and hell seems to take into account the freeways, the smog, the violence, the endlessly sunny days, the beaches, the Hollywood dream factories, the waves of immigrants, and the homeless tent cities near Bunker Hill. Add the ingredients of important schools, major collectors, museums, and lots of exhibition opportunities, and you get one of the most interesting art cities in the world. Davis talks about an "emergent university-museum mega complex" that constructs and deconstructs the city of Los Angeles. Many well-known artists like Don Suggs, Mike Kelly, and John Baldessari teach at the city's influential art schools: California Institute of the Arts, University of California Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Art Center College of Design. These days graduate schools have become like Renaissance workshops where the relationship between master and student is far reaching and complex. The cutting edge museums, and talented artists, mixed with popular culture forms like graffiti, comic books, and car culture, makes for a heady brew. Art in Los Angeles mirrors the adolescent, dangerous, shiny, well-crafted, wasteful, violent, light-filled, and sublime aspects of this magical consumer mecca, the city of angels. The "sunshine noir" qualities of the city have been profiled in a number of major museum shows. Now we have a local offering called L.A. Paint at the Oakland Museum of California assembled by Chief Curator of Art, Phil Linares. Linares has been traveling to L.A. for many years. The 11-person show, while not comprehensive, offers up a taste of what is going on in Los Angeles. He points to 4 distinctive expressive modes: abstraction, narrative, surrealist/fantasy, and the cartoon and graffiti street-art-based "lowbrow" school. (Linares and I spoke about the rich cultural diversity of the city's restaurants and artists, which can sometimes result in the location of a good Indian or Cuban restaurant next to some interesting artist's studios in a local strip mall). Limited by time, and space, Linares decided to concentrate on painting and offers us a sampling of some contemporary artists living and working in the greater Los Angeles area. He strongly agrees with Doug Harvey, art critic for LA Weekly, who describes painting as an..." ongoing exploration of the longest lasting, most constantly reinvented medium in fine arts." Among the 11 artists, Don Suggs, Brian Fahstrom, and Hyesook Park are abstract painters. Suggs is a long time art instructor at University of California Los Angeles. His works are often task related and the outcome of this activity often results in many different styles of paintings. Featured in this exhibit are several round canvases painted in concentric circles and based on the colors found in famous paintings. In one large piece based on Picasso's Le Desmoiselles D'Avignon, the colors are painstakingly applied using turntables to make large radiating mandalas.





