Erik's Rants and Recipes: Art Gallery Archives

March 16, 2007

Fine Art Friday

I think that this might be the first time that a painting was posted on a Fine Art Friday that was finished being created on that particular Friday. Hot off the easel, folks!

Composition 3.1
2007
Oil on Canvas
Copyright 2007 by Erik Keilholtz

Now, you have all seen the cartoons where the gallery worker hangs an abstract painting upside down and nobody notices? Well, part of my last check to see if a painting is complete is to look at it upside down, so that I get a fresh look at the thing (something that is difficult to do when you have been spending hours working on the thing). This time I turned it upside down and liked it better.

So, later this weekend I will post the record of stages of this painting, the first time I have ever recorded my procedure in photographs, and you will see that from drawing to final, the whole thing was painted the other way. Hopefully you will see why I inverted it, too.

Posted by erik at 2:21 PM | Comments (2)

February 16, 2007

And with that...

Lunch is over, even though I almost spit deconstructed haggis all over the computer while reading that post from TSO, below. So I have to go back to the studio. Photography awaits. I know that you are eagerly awaiting Erik Keilholtz: Works on Paper, so I have to get some decent photos of the works on paper.

I am shooting for the end of the three day weekend. I will post updates.

Posted by erik at 12:13 PM | Comments (1)

February 3, 2007

And Speaking of Coming Attractions...

The next cyber-show at the Erik's Rants and Recipes Gallery will be Erik Keilholtz: Works on Paper. The opening is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, because if it doesn't happen by Wednesday, it will have to wait until after the weekend, with the Chesterton event and all.

Posted by erik at 12:53 PM | Comments (0)

January 25, 2007

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.

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"

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):

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:

And here is a little watercolor in a similar mode:

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:

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:

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:

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

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:

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 11:14 PM | Comments (4)

CyberGallery Show Opening! Tonight!

OK. So it might actually be early in the morning, especially if you are reading from the East Coast, in which case you will see it in the morning, and can make it your Fine Art Friday moment.

But I took some more photos, which were a little better. I am still tinkering with the method, and these were done in three ways. I have yet to follow some of the excellent advice given, because, well, I had already planned on these techniques, so I wanted to give them a go. I think I will try the suggestions next.

Hey! Maybe by the third round, they will all come out decent.

Posted by erik at 4:41 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2007

Street Date! Paintings!

I am not at all happy with the photographs. No, let's go further: these photos stink. The colors are a little washed out, the lighting is wrong, the vertical lines are not quite vertical, and the horizontal lines are, well, you guessed it. I need to work on my setup and to practice. It will probably take about a week of work.

So, I could delay on these, but there have been enough delays. Expect new photos of these (and many more) later.

Are you ready?

Good. Let's Begin.

I have decided to open the show with a little oil on canvas that took me decades to do. Decades? Yes. I did a little still life years ago and hated the thing. When it dried, I tried to scrape it off the canvas. No luck. I had neglected it too long. The paint and the canvas were one (I told you, there is rarely a risk of my paint leaving the canvas). It was a thick impasto, and would require drastic means to remove the paint. Well, I found the thing again in a corner of the studio, while looking for an unused canvas. "Oh, that," I thought. What if I tried to rework the painting? Keep the thick impasto, but to add a couple of citrus fruits, add layers of paint, change the colors, etc.? I did that, and a few days later I had a painting that I was happy with:

Now, keeping in the mode of older paintings of vegetation, here is a little watercolor sketch I did of Melanie's garden in Santa Cruz, from before we were married. I still like this one:

And, after we got married we moved to Oakland, where we lived among the pine trees up in the hills. I did this watercolor in about 1997 of a tree in our back yard. It is framed under glass, which is why you see the irritating glare. Like I said, I am working on this art photography stuff. Sorry.

Around the same time I was also having fun exploring the sweeping vistas and exciting landscapes, but doing it in these small watercolors. Here is a (from memory, so don't go holding a photo up to see if it is accurate: it ain't) view of the Bay and everybody's favorite Federal Penitentiary:

Now, I was starting to come up with the approach to landscape and abstraction that would fuel me strongly for the next decade. The breakthrough works (completed in 1996 and 1997), did not come out well in the photos, so they will have to wait. But I can live with the photo of this oil on canvas abstraction based on a view of North Beach in San Francisco:

And, yes, my style remains heavily influenced by Richard Diebenkorn, as you can plainly see in this little watercolor I did last year:

What came between these paintings? Lots of things, like this oil on canvas imaginary landscape:

And, even as I am working on different material now, I still take a dip into these waters, as you can see from this watercolor from last year:

Or in this nocturne, loosely based on my street in East Oakland:

Ah, nocturnes. Difficult to draw (because if you are drawing the observed world, you are doing it at night, usually under very bad light), difficult to paint (all those subtle variations of dark), and nearly impossible to photograph. This is an almost tolerable photo of a nocturne I did of Yosemite. I did the drawing almost completely in the dark, and had some horrid glare problems. I will consider a good photo of this one my triumph. I am not even close yet:

And, I mentioned the matrix for exploring the physical world in an abstract expressionist mode, did I not? It is a complex thing derived from the musical theories of Stockhausen and serialism. This is one of the recent small oil paintings from it:

Well, that is all for now. One, I need to hone my skills photographing these things, and, two, that is a lot of art to digest for the time being.

At the opening on Thursday (remember the cyber-opening!) I will, hopefully, replace the photos with better ones, and will provide the gallery sheet, with title, dimensions, price, etc.

Thank you for visiting the Erik's Rants and Recipes cyber gallery.

Posted by erik at 11:41 AM | Comments (2)