Just Got Back

We just got back from a long-needed mini-vacation to the Napa Valley. No great spriritual or culinary insights, although we saw nature in all her splendor, viewed as the Creator wanted it to be viewed: from a hot air balloon, and we ate some very good food and had some very good wine.

The food at Mustards and Tra Vigne was fantastic, but was basically in the same school of cuisine that I normally write about. You know the rule: good ingredients cooked as simply as possible to bring out their basic flavors. The best dish was the bollito misto at Tra Vigne. I give them bonus points for including tripe and tongue in it.

One thing that really got my goat was the listing at Tra Vigne's casual cafe for "biscottis."

Look, I am semi-literate in the Italian language, but that is just plain sloppy. If they don't know that biscotti is already in the plural, can they be counted on to make them properly? Well, probably, but it still irks me.

Another observation on the "art" galleries that dot the valley is that they are dominated by a lot of really bad landscapes. There is clearly a strong demand for rural landscapes out there, but is the audience simply tolerating those wretched colors, banal compositions, lousy draftsmanship, poor paint handling and other abuses or do they in fact like those things?

If they were able to get their hands on the same subject matter painted properly, would they jump on them? I suspect it is like the situation with Marc Chagall in that there is a yearning for something, and the people will gravitate towards anything that partially fulfills that yearning, even when it is technically and aesthetically deficient.

Sometimes I think that the excesses of 1960's, 1970's, 1980's, 1990's "avant-gardes" (a completely useless term since the mid-1950's at least) are finally going to implode in a black hole of irrelevance. In many ways they already have: the artists who think that conceptual art is not a contradiction in terms are pretty much going only by the support of a very small and insignificant population of art theory fanatics.

I am no populist, but there is a need for comment when the supposed brave fighters against stodgy traditionalism are looking entirely like the dessicated academic painters of the past. Obviously, the art is different, as those old academic painters at least mastered their craft, but the incestuous circles of artists, critics and (very few) patrons, with the art completely failing to capture the imagination of anyone outside the circle rings a familiar bell.

One of the paintings that I noticed really borrowed heavily from Bonnard, who is one of my all-time favorite painters. It fell short, in that it was a compositional mess, with the background done as an afterthought, completely killing the potentially interesting space that the foreground suggested.

This painting, as awful as it was, gave me hope that there is some part of the brain of most people that responds to Bonnard's approach. I think there is, and that the French Symbolist, fauvist and assorted post-Impressionists present tremendous ideas worth mining.

There is this little voice in the back of my head that keeps saying, "the paint handling of Thiebaud, with the composition of Bonnard. Just do it. Just do it." But then there is that other voice that says, "no, late Diebenkorn. He was on to something that needs further exploration."

We shall see. I am working on a small nightscape, and it has been leaning more towards the former than the latter.

But, it will have to wait, as will more blogging. Tomorrow is the third Thursday of November, when we have the first opportunity to drink the wine of 2003. Get it while it's fresh! Cassoulet must be made (as well as a vegetarian entree for those with that disorder). The fun starts at 7. If you are on the East Coast, you can catch a morning flight and be here in time. Otherwise, next year. Same time (and there is always my variety meats festival in February for the brave).