Erik Keilholtz: A Midwinter Survey of Paintings

Welcome to the Erik's Rants and Recipes Art Gallery.

Tonight is the opening reception of Erik's latest show, a survey of paintings. Since this is our first virtual opening, we thank you for your understanding for our numerous glitches.

However, the wine isn't one of them. Normally, galleries like to serve white wine, thinking that it is safer around the art. Hogwash, and cheap red is almost always more drinkable than cheap white (especially if it is a chardo-boring-ney). Since this is a virtual exhibit, we are serving excellent red wine.

You have our permission to sip your excellent red wine, too.

Now, we do need to get the dimensions and (gulp) titles and prices up. By Friday night. And we keep asking Erik for an artist's statement. "No problem," says he. "And keep it short," says We. "Uh-oh," says he.

What we do have to offer for the opening reception is a virtual tour with the artist, who will offer comments and will answer questions. Enjoy!

The first painting is an older one, from 1997. I consider it a breakthrough painting. Before it I was trying to do what I did here (dance on the edge between landscape and total abstraction, a la Ed Corbett or 1955 Richard Diebenkorn (Berkeley series)) in a way that was close, but not getting it. Sometime in 1995 (I think, although it may have been 1996) I picked up Susan Landauer's The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism and was blown away. Here was a link between all of these painters, many of whom I had admired, and many of them were achieving what I had been trying to do for the prior two years!

I read the text of that book three times in a row. When we got married and moved to the Bay Area, we were lucky that SFMOMA had the exhibition that the book came out of, so I got to study many of the paintings repeatedly.

This painting originally started with much more conventional landscape colors, but it was moribund, with far too much stasis. I wanted it to seethe and push around the viewer a bit, but not in a hysterical way, like many of Clyfford Still's works. I was going for tension: between abstraction and landscape, between regions on the canvas, etc. So, one day, under the influence of John Saccaro, I drastically altered the palette. I liked what was happening, and finished the thing in a week or two (after I had been laboring for months on it). While I wanted much of the surface and force of abstract expressionism, I definitely wanted a hyper-controlled painting, very deliberate and carefully corrected. I was very happy with how this came out, and, eleven years later, I still like it. It is based (loosely) on a real place, one that I sketched and studied and painted (more representationally) for years: the little town of Davenport on California's Highway One, about 26 miles north of Santa Cruz.

Copyright 1996 by Erik Keilholtz

Now, I have had a recurring dream for many years (for as long as I can remember) of monster waves crashing into Golden Gate Park accross Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The park was always a bit exhilarating and scary, especially on the ocean edge. The broken windmill was an image that burned itself strongly into my brain. Often in my dream I am watching the waves from the safety (often just barely) of a hillside. The dreamscape is rather loosely based on the area, but it always has that high, chalky light that we get around here (in fact, it is that light that I am quite smitten with in terms of landscape painting. I prefer to go hiking on those crystal clear blue days, when I can see for miles, but when I want to paint, I like to try to capture the mood of the whitish sky). I had to paint this, but also wanted to continue the work from the previous painting and the one after it (not shown). So, from 1997 is this oil on canvas painting called "San Francisco Ocean Beach"

Copyright 1997 by Erik Keilholtz

Now, in my obsession with abstracting landscape, as well as my continued explorations of the history of Bay Area painting, it was inevitable that I would run up against the Society of Six. I had read little bits about them here and there (Thomas Albright's survey of Bay Area art as well as in the show and the book of Facing Eden: 150 Years of Landscape Painting in the Bay Area), and picked up Nancy Boas's outstanding book on the group. Naturally, I was doing a lot of plein air work at this time, as well as getting up half an hour before dawn, driving down to my friend's apartment, and taking off with him for a morning drawing session at least three times a week. We would sketch Lake Merritt, the wholesale produce market, anything that seemed interesting. At one point I attended a workshop with Terry St. John, who was connected to Lundy Siegriest, the son of Society of Six member Louis Siegriest. St. John clearly felt that this was a tradition and not just an isolated group in the 1920's. I agreed, and still do. There is an approach to light and line in Northern California, that pops up in painters as diverse as Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn and even in Robert Bechtle.

One of my favorite places to draw, and later to paint, was the Sibley Volcanic Preserve in the Berkeley Hills. Here is an oil painting I did of one of my favorite locations in that park (this photo is not too good, but I wanted to include the painting. I will try to get a better one tomorrow and to replace it):

Copyright 1997 by Erik Keilholtz

Did I just mention Thiebaud? Why yes, I did. I grew up in Sacramento, and Wayne Thiebaud cast a long shadow on all of us in that area who aspired to paint. A long shadow carved in thick pastes of paint, made cool by ultramarine, no doubt. Everyone knows Wayne Thiebaud, but you have to be either an art geek or a Sacramentan to know the equally talented Gregory Kondos. Anyway, I was studying a lot of his work at the time (thanks, in part, to an excellent show of his that we saw at the Monterey Art Museum). This odd landscape was inspired by Kondos' approach to paint, as well as the various canals that deliver water to the various agricultural regions of the Central Valley. It might seem like this is a retreat from more thorough abstraction, but it isn't. I was simply exploring another mode of creating tension in a landscape:

Copyright 1997 by Erik Keilholtz

And here is a little watercolor in a similar mode:

Copyright 1997 by Erik Keilholtz

Now, you are probably noticing that there is a bit of a gap, from about 1998 to 2004, and there was a gap. For one thing, I designed some software (for scheduling production in a commercial print shop) and took some time to market it, ended up getting involved in a consulting business and a high tech start up (which, thank God, fell apart due to problems between some of the partners. If it hadn't, we would have hit the market just at the same time as about three well-funded, well-established companies released a similar product).

Getting fed up with the consulting business, I became the Marketing Director for Arhoolie Records (escaping the dot-com bust by going to the record business has got to be one of the stupidest career moves on earth, along with being an artist and having a day job of being a writer), had a baby (well, I didn't, Melanie did, but I cook for it. I have to watch out. It can read now. "Babbo, why did you call me 'it?'" Fortunately it is very cute, still. Now kindly quit demonstrating the benefits of being in the 95th percentile of height by leveraging your 95th percentile of weight into tremendous Italo-Portuguese wallops. Five years old and four feet tall. Some baby), somewhere in the middle of that started writing music reviews and, later food writing, and it was in all that, that the blog started.

So, I was not painting as much as I should have been. I was working on a couple of big paintings, one of which I should probably photograph for your amusement, but will probably hold off on, because of its size. Let me get the photography down on the smaller ones first.

Also taking my creative energies was the world of sound sculpture. My friend who I used to draw with had moved to San Diego, and focused his energies on sound sculpture. Since we had met in the electronic music program at UC Santa Cruz, we obviously shared this interest. So, we did some sound sculptures (we had worked together on sculpture for a joint show back in college) for a show in a really cool gallery down there (alas, it is no longer, but when it was, it was really cool), and did some models for outdoor sculptures (and finally realized that we probably need to be in the same town to work on anything more sustained than a single show).

So, when my friend (and designer of Erik's Rants and Recipes) commissioned me to do a painting a couple of years back, it was a real wake-up call. Oh yeah. Painting. The thing I do. Or did. So, I jumped back in, head first. And, as I mentioned in a post below, as the writing gigs are less frequent, I have been cranking up the painting, and here we are.

I hinted that I am working on very traditional religious paintings (St. Francis receiving the stigmata, for instance). I am not going to show those right now, because I want to show them with drawings, and I want to wait until the big one I am currently working on is done.

But as I went in this direction, I still wanted to keep working in the direction I had been, and, I felt, this required a resourcement at the waters of Richard Diebenkorn, so I did several homages to him, developing some ideas to take me from his late work into something else. Here are a couple of watercolors from that series:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

And, a particularly gripping visit on the same day to the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers and the new De Young Museum, got me to think about combining disparate textures and structures for some interesting (hopefully) results. There is a whole series, which I will show some other time. The last one, which led to The System, was this one, a watercolor that seems a bit like Douanier Rousseau meets Diebenkorn:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

I realized that, like the early atonal composers, I needed some sort of rigorous system to combine these elements, lest I end up getting into some unfortunate ruts.

Many years ago, in order to solve some similar problems in highly abstract electronic music I was composing, I took Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Four Criteria for Electronic Music" and developed a structural system. I was very pleased with it, and used it even for modal and quasi-tonal works for harpsichord. It made for a great replacement structure for sonata allegro form, which really has to have functional harmony to make any sense whatsoever.

Now, confronting a different problem, yet one that shared some similarities, I went back to the Stockhausen-influenced system, as well as to hyper-rationalism, and came up with a system of rules for combining these various elements of color, line, form, structure, and texture. I think I am only at the beginning of this series. Here, first is the one I posted earlier, but with a better photo:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

And here is a little canvas that I did right after the one above:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

And, since both the religious works, as well as these highly abstract ones are based in careful observation of nature, I continue to draw and paint nature. Here is a retake of the photo of the Yosemite Nocturne. It is a very difficult painting to photograph, but this gives an idea:

Copyright 2006 by Erik Keilholtz

That is it for this week's gallery opening. I imagine that the next opening will be next week, hopefully and exhibit of drawings. Thank you for coming.

Posted by erik at January 25, 2007 11:14 PM