Kallock.com | painting archives

This dog wouldn’t sit still for more than 2 seconds, which made it very difficult to paint. The hot florida sun and a helicopter that kept circling overhead also didn’t help. acrylic paint on housepaint on roofing paper. 8 by 9 in.

This day’s Surrealism began with a relaxing game of virtual golf with the kids in the living room on the new Wii console. It’s the one video game I’ve played where I didn’t have to kill anything. It also made relaxing sparkle sounds when the ball landed on the fairways. Later on that evening a bunch of us headed to the Dali Art Museum in St. Petersburg FL, home of one of the largest collections of his paintings donated by a couple who amassed his works throughout his years. The collection included pieces from when he first began painting at 13 to some of his later masterpieces and movies. All the paintings were impressive. I looked with mostly envy trying to dissect the way he may have layered the paint on canvas, creating spacious landscapes with meticulous detail, clumping chunky metaphorical ensembles below and along the horizon. And that’s it, it was the horizon that mattered. Amidst the pale atmosphere he always had a vanishing point, with stucco buidings, geological features, and odd-shaped rocks scattered in between. And as you walked away and looked at the painting further back, the composition solidified and looked more and more beautiful. I imagine he had a large studio where he could do the same and analyze the canvas from various distances. If it’s not beguiling from far away, why bother, right? A dusty pallete and endless horizons. He interpreted an older traditional painting from another artist that depicted a farm couple saying a prayer out on the field as one of the most erotic and sexually charged images he had ever seen. Actually most all his paintings had an erotic charge to them, and I suppose that is what made them intersting. Dali also painted advertisements for hoisery ads, make-up ads, and Vouge magazines. The most moving was the painting depicting his love, Gala, nude and looking out of a window onto the Mediterranean as a larger composition of Abraham Lincoln seen from afar. As Scarry said, Beauty equals Truth?

Surrealism continued.

Pictured: One of Dali’s paintings from the brochure

Palm Trees near Pompano Beach, FL.  Looking east over strong Atlantic surf and onshore winds which made it difficult not to get the coarse coral sand grains in the painting. Watercolor and acrylic on house paint on roofing paper. 9 in by 10 in.

Quick sketch of the next door garden. watercolor and acrylic on roofing paper. 10 in by 10 in. sorry for bad resolution

The next day the sun was shining and we hit the other venues that comprised Art Basel Miami: the old hotels which gutted their rooms and turned them into galleries, and the interesting installation near the beach sponsored by Hotel W of 20-odd shipping containers that also functioned as individual exhibition spaces.  The containers were for younger, upstart galleries to showcase their work.  Once again, many of these galleries showed conceptual installation art, which proved to be akward in the cramped overheated containers and didn’t manage to hold many viewers attention for very long. My favorites were the photography at Taxter & Spengemann (NY), and the paintings at Zach Feuer Gallery (NY).

After the containers we went to Flow and Aqua, held at the old hotels, the former being put on by fellow Seattlites who wanted west coast galleries to have a greater representation in Miami during the festival.  It was in a charming old hotel built around a large courtyard with palm trees and a fountain people were putting their feet in.  By this time, it was Sunday evening and the festival was coming to a close, and it looked like everyone was a little more relaxed (or exhausted).  It was time for a beer and to catch the bus home.

After finally finding a parking spot near the Convention Center it was already about 5 pm, which meant 1/2 price admission and about 3 hours left to see what one of the largest contemporary art fairs in the world had to offer.   Once inside, the sensory overload began.  It was packed and the entire floor of the center was laid out like a little city, with each of the over 200 galleries showcasing their best pieces.  Wandering in and out the white wall labyrinth I employed some guerilla marketing tactics of my own, giving postcards to just about every gallery owner I spoke to, finding that the international galleries tended to stick toward the periphery, and the domestic heavyweights stayed in the middle.  I was surprised to see the amount of Picassos, Bacons, and my favorite, Dubuffets, just hanging there on the wall.  The festival was fabulous in that sense.  One got to see paintings by really great late 20th century artists (like Milton Avery and Tom Wesselmann) that have not hit accessible museum retrospectives yet.  Contemporary pieces in both painting and sculpture definitely tended to be large and loud, with figurative work sacrificing technique for showiness and abstract work relying solely on technique.  Galleries from Latin America and Europe liked conceptual pieces, and many from Germany focused on large scale photography.   Sean, my art companion, ran into Beyonce and J-Z in front of the Dubuffet paintings, whose bouncers kept using their umbrellas to shoo people aside, and I gave Keanu, who was carring a motorcycle helmet and looking disoriented, a postcard on our way out of the center.  Yay art Basel!  

Pictured in park are weeping willows, araucaria (monkey trees) and birch.  Playground equipment inspired by old playground near Raymond, WA.  Oil on canvas, 42 by 38 in.

Plein air painting done in Stanwood, WA. Cold December early evening sun. 9 by 10 in.