Open Studios in SOMA - Garage Gallery /
- Garage Gallery is for real... and the space is beautiful. SAAB repair shop and used car dealer by day, a Gallery by Night and on weekends. and Where does the art end and the wall start..Curated by Susan Tuttle - way to go, Susan!
On my second visit to Alcatraz... /
I felt the oppression embeded in the walls and the pain of the inprisoned ghosts, I wouldn't say this was very attractive to me. I find it very strange this place is a tourist attraction.
Looking out of the rock and towards the beautiful city across the bay I can think of only one thing - how very priviliged we are to enjoy our freedoms and to enjoy the freedom to do the things we love.
Open Studios is over for me - I had such a blast /
The Flying Tree hangs at SomArts Gallery /
At 934 Brannan Street in San Francisco, the opening gala is tonight starting @ 6:30 pm.
For unconditional love and other things /
When someone tells you repeatedly they love you - you get used to it and when this is gone you terribly miss it. Unconditional love is a very hard thing to get over and I have been trying to come to terms with that loss this past week. I will never forget this black monday, I hope the worst is over and I can keep my head up moving forward. My grandfather Spas passed away in the morning of September 28, 2009 bulgarian time and I was absolutely powerless to do anything to be able to see him for one last time. I spent endless summers with him, family and friends and these were the happiest days of my life. Once I found out I sent heartbreaking letters to friends who knew him. This is what a friend of mine wrote back:
mirena -
so sorry to hear of the passing of dear diado spas - such a wonderful vital man full of genuine good spirit - i think he must have had a terrific life and earned a lot of good karma to have continued to enjoy everything as he did at a ripe old age - that plus eating a whole lemon every day!
you are a lucky lady to have had such a real connection to this kind of spirit - so seldom in our world today -
i am sure that his positive vitality will continue to inspire you your whole life - this is when memories can truly have meaning -
please give my condolences to nicki his daughter your dad and your whole family -
my heart is with you!
And he attached this picture from my birthday a couple of years ago - Grandpa Spas is in the middle:
Lucidity is out and beautiful /
Lucidity has been announced by Lucasarts and the ign preview is here. There is one essential quality to beauty and it is the fact that it doesn't need champions. People always aspire to beauty because it is a window to a pure world - it lifts them up and makes them aspire to things bigger and better than themselves.
The Flying Tree inspired by Piranesi /
The second in a series of drawings inspired by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. I drew the first sketch a few years ago while on a stint modeling 3d Baghdad for the US army - in between IED detonation simulations I was thinking about the Flying Tree from Stephen Baxter's book Raft... and started imaging it in my notebook. My visual language is drawing on my work as a 3d artist but the look is a few centuries old, an etching technique developed in the fifteenth century and mastered by Piranesi in his capricious fantasies. I really enjoy seeing how the imperfections of the drawing are shaping up in total juxtaposition to the flawless figures I imagine in my head, the dreams of a 21 century polygonal brain.
Waiting for the astronomical twilight on my hands and knees under the dome of the Palace of Fine Arts /
I returned to the palace of Fine Arts to reshoot photographs I took a month earlier - back then I had wondered into the space by chance and didn't carry a tripod... which resulted in grain and noise. I looked up the time stamps on the files and then googled for the sunset time for that day. Turned out besides sunset there are all these interesting terms associated with sunset data like Civil Twilight, Nautical Twilight and Astronomical twilight. According to the charts I had taken the picture (below) 20 minutes after sunset and 10 before civil twilight when wild things come out, obviously, beasts are partial to beautiful light.
Today sunset was around 7:30 pm so I waited 2o minutes for the twilight to set in and some amazing things happened during that time - a guy stood under the belly of the dome and sung with the most beautiful voice a song called "Salve Regina" ... after that I lied to a couple of Tourists that the Palace was a part of a pre-earthquake bathhouse, absolutely not on purpose and out of sheer ignorance.
So Here it is San Francisco palace of Fine Arts - round Two:
Art and Mezklah playing at the YBCA Late Night Party /
Avedon vs Frank vs Adams /
I hit the jackpot st SFMoma and was able to see the three back to back, floor to floor. I totally fell for Robert Frank and the fact that The huge pieces, maybe 4x6 feet, by Avedon had less in them than the tiny by comparison Frank photographs. Yes, frank and honest and authentic, grainy, rainy, oppressive and grim - Robert Frank's pieces were a crime back in the sugary 50s and still zap you today. "Quality doesn't mean deep blacks and whatever tonal range. That's not quality, that's a kind of quality. The pictures of Robert Frank might strike someone as being sloppy - the tone range isn't right and things like that - but they're far superior to the pictures of Ansel Adams with regard to quality, because the quality of Ansel Adams, if I may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. But the quality of Robert Frank is a quality that has something to do with what he's doing, what his mind is. It's not balancing out the sky to the sand and so forth. It's got to do with intention." (Elliott Erwitt)
The think in pictures blog mentions that Jack Kerouac wrote in the introduction of The Americans that “after seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin.”
Sleep of reason /
"The Sleep of Reason" - a piece by Sui Gian Guo at SFMoma, all made with plastic toy dinosaurs and a plastic Mao, sleeping in the middle of the sea of dinosaurs. What I appreciated in this piece is its honesty and irreverent title - I always appreciate others doing the kind of things I struggle with, like colored plastic and ideology. This work was inspired by an original painting by Goya, titled "The sleep of reason produces monsters"... In the same line of reflection was the movie Goya's ghosts directed by Milos Forman, who also directed Amadeus.
Sui Jian Guo: The Sleep of Reason
