Ripples & Reflections

Long Beach Museum of Art

2011-01-24T09:32:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday I attended the Long Beach Museum of Art opening reception for Influential Element: Exploring the Impact of Water, which for me was the culmination of a very positive experience that any artist can appreciate. My inclusion in this show came to me out of the blue, or so it seemed. I didn’t submit to it. I didn’t know about it. I didn’t, in fact, have to DO anything, except to accept the invitation to have my painting Reflection included in the show, at the request of Megan Ellisor, the co-curator. Of course she would not have found out about me or my paintings if I had not over the years put in a lot of effort into the marketing that anyone who means to make their way in the arts must do – creating a website, submitting to juried shows and galleries, etc, etc. ad nauseum. But even so, it still felt like it came out of the blue, a gift of acknowledgment.

I hand delivered the piece back in November because we happened to be in Southern California visiting our eldest son and his family before taking a flight to San Miguel. I quite honestly had never heard of The Long Beach Museum of Art so I had no idea what to expect. My wife later confessed she had fears that it would be in someone’s garage – almost anything can be called a museum these days. But what a pleasant surprise to find this gem of a small museum! It is located on Ocean Blvd. overlooking the water across a nice stretch of beach. The building is a solid three story structure with two floors of spacious galleries and a lower floor for an arts education program. It has a dedicated parking lot, a lawn area for receptions and another building that houses a museum café. Phew! Meeting Megan and others on the staff, seeing the quality of the work on display, I felt relieved and elated, especially when they told me that my art would be used for the cover of the program shown above!

Flying down just for the day to go to an art opening of a group show seemed a little crazy, but I am so glad we went. Of the eighteen artists represented in the show, seventeen of them attended the reception, many coming from much further than our hour flight down the Coast from San Francisco. It was wonderful to be able to meet so many artists who have the same passion and concern I do for the subject of water. It turns out one of them, whose work I have admired for some time, Eric Zener, lives near us in Marin County, so I hope we will stay in touch.

Among all the really high-quality work displayed, here are a few artists’ whose pieces stood out for me. Matthew Cornell of Orlando, Florida, had two pieces in the show: one a miniature oil on wood titled “Low Country” that is very tightly rendered, Old Masters’ style, and a second, called “Genesis II” a very large canvas of the ocean in reddish tones. Such totally different styles and approaches, but each so well realized!

I looked forward to meeting Elizabeth Patterson after seeing her work “Sunset Highway” done in colored pencil with such photographic detail that I recognized a kindred spirit. She said she is busy preparing for a show in Paris. The thought of working that tight under a deadline makes me a little weak-kneed, and she seemed more than a little stressed, but I’m sure she’ll be up to the task.

Bill Viola is an artist I’ve been aware of since the early 1980’s when I first saw his black and white abstract computer animations at SIGGRAPH technology forums, back when I too was an animator. In this show, his high-speed, hi-def video of a group of people being blasted by water canons (run in super slow motion) titled ‘Tempest,’ was a riveting crowd-pleaser. He told me how great it was to meet all these artists and be able to talk about our work, and I concur. The shared passion we all have for the subject of water and for art made me wish we were all hanging out a bit longer to really explore our shared concern and varied mediums.

Sant Khalsa’s display of 42 gelatin-sliver prints of images she’s taken over the years of water store fronts and signage all over Southern California she says is just a part of an installation that includes Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico. For me one of the most poignant was a sign announcing, ‘Fresh Water Coming Soon!’

It was great to have our son and daughter-in-law there with us, and to have dinner with them afterwards before they deposited us at the airport for our flight home.
If you are in the area, be sure to see the show that’s up through April 3rd.

EVERYTHING depends on water

2010-11-23T08:53:00.000-08:00

We’re staying in our casa in San Miguel de Allende this month. San Miguel is a beautiful colonial mountain town, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in the state of Guanajuato in the very center of Mexico.

In the summer the area is lush with the rains, but when we stay, it is dry. At 6000 feet altitude it is called the Mexican Highlands and is considered semi-arid desert.

When we fell in love with San Miguel, something gringos do quite easily it seems, we were concerned about buying real estate in a place where water was so scarce that it was expected to last only another twenty years. Over margaritas in our favorite rooftop bar it seemed quite reasonable for me to say, “Then we’ll sell in fifteen!”

Our casa, like the majority of those built here, is equipped with a huge cistern hidden underground so that if the city runs out of water before the next rainy season, we would still have enough. We have yet to have to put it to use, but it is comforting to know it is there. We added a water purification system so we wouldn’t have to always be buying bottles of water and remembering not to drink from the tap.

Yesterday my wife mentioned the water didn’t taste as good as usual. So we checked the system, and sure enough, the ultra-violet light on the filtration system was out. Someone will come today to replace it, but it puts us in a temporary condition that forces us to face the reality of the state of water here and in much of the world.

We who live in the United States, a country of long showers, bubble baths, swimming pools and large lawns, are hard pressed to imagine how it would be to have to choose not to wash in order to drink and in order to irrigate enough to grow a little food to sustain us. These are not choices being made here in San Miguel, but they could be. And they are certainly being made in many parts of the world.

Water is scarce. Water is precious. EVERYTHING depends on water. When there is no water, life becomes much more dangerous. Disease thrives on the lack of hygiene. Starvation is often caused by drought and the inability to grow food. Water becomes a precious commodity over which wars are fought. People die not just from thirst but from many other conditions brought on by the scarcity of water.

I remember some art blogger writing up a clever piece making fun of pretentious artists’ statements. And of course there’s a lot of pomposity and romanticism when artists start talking about their work. The blogger decided to use a few sentences of my statement as an example. Fair game, but what he poked fun at was the idea that I considered water a precious resource. He seemed to be oblivious to the precarious state of fresh drinking water in the world, how easily it can become undrinkable through pollution and how many tens of thousands of people are dying every day from thirst and starvation due to lack of water.

This made me aware that the biggest part of the problem is our blindness to the existence of a problem. When I decided to have a blog, it was in part to continue bringing attention not just through my art but through my words to the vital importance of doing everything we can to assure that we have ample potable water for all life.

Mami Wata

2010-10-18T19:38:00.000-07:00

With such rich cultural and political imagery within the African American community, why would I, a black artist, focus solely on the subject of water? Well, perhaps the answer is in the current show at the Cantor Museum at Stanford University titled Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas.

Zoumana Sane, Mami Wata, 1987. Pigment, glass. Collection of Herbert M. and Shelley Cole. Photo by Don Cole

Most viewers would be hard pressed to see any relationship between my ultra-realistic paintings of water and this tribal collection of sculpture and images. But both my wife and I felt a strong response and sense of recognition. We were reminded of a time in the mid-eighties when we were snorkeling in Hawaii. I am not a strong swimmer but I felt reasonably confident snorkeling above the reefs. Either my absorption with the tropical fish – all that rich color and pattern – or perhaps tidal drift carried me out beyond my ability to touch the ocean floor, and I panicked. I was way out beyond where anyone else was swimming. Off in the distance, very small, I could see my children playing on the beach. There was no way anyone would hear me if I called for help. I was sure I was going to drown, and surrendered to the inevitable.

Just then, out of nowhere, a large native Hawaiian woman was suddenly beside me, telling me to relax and float on my back. Her words immediately calmed me and I did what she said. I turned to thank her but she was gone.
How did she just appear and then disappear? How fortuitous that she showed up at my side exactly when I needed her. Was she a real woman, a goddess, a spirit? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter to me. She saved my life, and I have always been grateful.
But when my wife and I walked into the Mami Wata exhibit, we looked at each other and had a simultaneous ‘aha!’ moment. Mami Wata, the spirit honored by my ancestors, saved me that day. Perhaps she spoke through a real woman or as Hiʻiaka, the Hawaiian water goddess; but however she did it, she was there.
Suddenly the past decades of my painting fell into place. Without questioning why, I have devoted myself to painting water. Now I can see this intense focus as an expression of gratitude to Mami Wata for giving me back my life.