Art I'm Looking At: Suzanne Jacquot on The Art Wall at Shige Sushi (May 2 through July 2, 2017)

This week is the last week to see the Contemporary Bay Area Photography show on The Art Wall at Shige Sushi (through April 30). Next up is a solo show of recent paintings by Suzanne Jacquot. Opening May 2. Opening Reception May 8, 2017 5:00-7:00PM. The show will run through July 2, 2017.

For more information, visit the Art Wall website.

Art I'm Looking At: Deborah Salomon and Lisa Beerntsen on The Art Wall at Shige Sushi

I'm pleased to announce the upcoming show on The Art Wall at Shige Sushi. We'll be showing paintings (oil and watercolors) by Lisa Beerntsen and collages by Deborah Salomon. The new show is entitled Facets: Collage, watercolors, and oil paintings by Lisa Beerntsen and Deborah Salomon. Lisa Beerntsen’s delicately colored paintings are suggestive of mineral formations and complex organic molecules. Deborah Salomon’s subtle collages of found material are overlaid with multi-faceted forms that reflect a life-long interest in crystal structures. Two Sonoma County artists take a faceted approach to space. On the Art Wall at Shige Sushi, 8235 Old Redwood Highway, Downtown Cotati, 94931. February 2 through April 3, 2016. Opening reception Monday, February 8, 2016, 5:30Pm to 7:30PM. Light refreshments served. Hope to see you there.

For more information about current and upcoming shows on The Art Wall, visit The Art Wall website at http://ctalcroft.wix.com/artwallatshige/

Art I'm Looking At: Turner at the De Young

San Francisco's De Young Museum is now presenting a major show of the late work of J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851). Organized by Tate Britain in association with the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, this is the largest exhibition of Turner's work ever mounted on the US West Coast. The De Young show runs through September 20, 2015. The exhibition is a large one, including more than sixty oil paintings and watercolors, but the museum has devoted a great deal of space to their display. The galleries therefore feel spacious, with the works widely spaced on the walls, making it easy to see them without feeling hemmed in by other viewers.

While this show is likely to attract attention for some of the famous large oil paintings on loan from institutions around the world (such as Peace—Burial at Sea (1842), pictured at the top of this page), it's an excellent opportunity to see a large number of Turner's very fine watercolors together. I've always had mixed feelings about Turner. Some of his work seems sublime. Some moves me not at all--for reasons I can't quite articulate. I don't much care for the allegories, for example, especially those that include figures. I think Turner was at his best when using his eyes to depict what he saw rather than attempting to tell stories. I most enjoy the work that veers off strongly in the direction of abstraction, which is perhaps why I find the often more loosely drawn and quickly executed watercolors especially interesting. The interior scene reproduced immediately above (of one of Turner's hotel rooms in Venice, circa 1840) is a good example. Only the ceiling decoration and the distant view of the Campanile anchor this little painting in reality. Without these, it's mostly a composition dominated by vaguely defined blocks of color.

An 1841 watercolor depicting the Ehrenbreitstein fortress on the East bank of the Rhine, overlooking Koblenz, is similar. Only the fortress on top of the rock is drawn with much precision. The rest of the composition is highly impressionistic, rendered in textured washes. It's easy to see why Turner is often considered to have pointed the way toward Impressionism. There is much in the show that brings Monet to mind. This piece even made me think of Rothko, with its horizontal bands of soft color. Looking at the pieces in the show (the largest group of Turners I've seen at one time), I noticed diffuse bands of color serve as the compositional armature of many of his works--although mostly vertical bands—typically deep colors on the sides of a composition and a swath of bright, pale color in the middle, suggestive of color field painting, a development that lay about 100 years in the future.

I was also struck by a pair of watercolors entitled The Red Rigi and The Blue Rigi from 1841-1842, depicting a mountain close to Lake Lucerne, in Switzerland (the latter shown here). The idea of painting the same subject in a series in different lights and from different angles immediately brings Japanese printmaking to mind. Although it wasn't too long after this time that Hokusai's most famous series of images of Mt. Fuji (originally published in 1831) was becoming known in Europe, 1841-42 was probably too early for Turner to have been influenced. Monet certainly was aware of Hokusai.

Inclusion of unfinished works at the end of the exhibition is a nice touch. Turner was criticized in his own day for, among other things, his dissolution of form—for his distinctive indistinctness that many took to be incompleteness. Being able to see truly unfinished pieces makes it abundantly clear how calculated Turner's apparent incompleteness was.

Art I'm Looking At: Impressionists on the Water at the Legion of Honor (July 17, 2013)

A small but worthwhile show of mostly Impressionist works is now underway at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. "Impressionists on the Water" looks at boats and boating in the works of the Impressionists, some of whom were enthusiastic boaters. One, the ever-interesting Gustave Caillebotte, I was surprised to learn, even designed yachts--apparently a couple dozen of them. Among the highlights of the show are a hull model carved by Caillebotte himself, a beautifully built wooden kayak-like boat, and the equally exquisite scull displayed at the entrance to the show (above). These little boats are art in themselves.

The show begins with a few examples of "traditional French maritime painting" before moving on to a body of Impressionist works interspersed with others probably not properly given that label, but the works are united by boating and waterways as a theme. Annoyingly, photography was allowed only in the entrance foyer, which makes it impossible to illustrate much here, but among the most interesting works were a pair of albumen silver prints (1856 and 1857) of boats by Gustave Le Gray from the collection of the Getty Museum; The Village of Gloton (1857) by Charles-Francois Daubigny; Storm Over Antwerp (1872) by Eugene Boudin with a wonderful glowering cloud and red pennants stretched and fluttering in the wind; an 1874 oil sketch of Monet's studio boat (apparently a number of artists had small studios built onto boats so that the could work directly on the water); View of the Right Bank of the Seine (1880), by Jean-Francois Raffaelli, showing an industrial landscape along the river; prints from the Rutgers University collection by Henri Riviere, including one from a very Japanese-influenced series of 26 views of the Eiffel Tower; a Signac view of the lighthouse (now a church) at the port of Colliure; and a rather surreal-looking Edoard Vuillard painting of a man in a rowboat, known as The Boatman or The Oarsman (1897), striking for the row of orange-yellow poplars and their reflections in the background, rather photographic cropping, and the way the line of the horizon is made to almost pierce the rower's face. Several early paintings in the show by Monet were interesting as examples of his work before he had settled into a mature style. Worth a visit. The show runs through October 13.