The worlds of rock music and fine art have long traded personnel back and forth, from John Lennon dropping out of art school to make music as one of the Beatles to Captain Beefheart dropping out of music to make paintings as Don Van Vliet. Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh, whose solo show at the Akron Museum of Art just ended, is a more recent exemplar of the creative spirit who is able to walk in both worlds. Several more examples can be seen in the exhibition “Rhythm” at Irvine’s Great Park, which...
When I first visited DAX gallery for its opening in 2013 owner Alex Amador had big plans for the Costa Mesa space that would bring fine urban art to Orange County. Over the past few years, in part due to how hard it can be to maintain a gallery, DAX has shuffled around some of its original aspirations. I was curious to see what the gallery was up to when I met with curator Alec Van Sealund for the August 13th opening of No Name. Van Sealund joined DAX in 2015 and explained the gallery...
Mark Zuckerberg by Ray Turner 6:45 p.m., Costa Mesa Mark Zuckerberg, having done as much as anyone who isn’t Steve Jobs to push us all headlong into the digital age (whether we wanted it or not) now tastes the revenge of the analog world in a show of paintings at Coastline Gallery. Curated by David Michael Lee, Like MARK features the Facebook founder’s face as portrayed by the likes of F. Scott Hess, Julio Labra and Bradford J. Salamon. “Revenge” may be overstating it a bit, but Hess’ portrait...
4:30 p.m., Venice Los de Abajo is a Southern California printmaking collective whose members strive to keep alive the Latin American tradition of printmaking while also experimenting with new techniques and individual expression. Their show "Division: Reflections and Shadows" at SPARC in Venice, Calif., an Art Deco former police station, is socially-engaged in a way uniquely appropriate to the coming Trumpocalypse, as in Yvette Mangual's Flight, inspired by the Caltrans immigrant crossing...
Local artists Alyssa Arney and Liz Flynn are very aware of the superficial nature of Southern California, where beauty is valued over health, and the constant presence of advertising is louder, brighter, and more attractive than honesty. Finding their way, separately, toward fiber arts, was an important journey for each artist, but finding their way toward each other, and creating an open dialogue with their community, other women, and internally, has fueled their artwork and their...
The Orange Coast Review is Orange Coast College's literary journal. The current issue (which I art directed) contains sixteen pages of art from mostly local artists working in various media, including works by Bradford Salamon, Lindsay Buchman, Pamela Diaz Martinez, Nguyen Ly and Riley Waite, who is represented by two pieces from his Playing With Fire series of portraits of young heroin addicts drawn with candle soot on paper. The cover painting by Fatima Jamil combines traditional realism...
“SUCCESSIONS” OPENING: April 2, 2016 Jamie Brooks Fine Art 2967 Randolph Avenue Unit C, Costa Mesa, CA 92626 949-929-4143 What is better than an artist’s fresh, brand new, and stimulating paintings? It is seeing David Michael Lee’s 15 year retrospective “Successions”. In this expanse of time, Lee, through his daring and personal exploration of accepted painterly elements, broadens our understanding of artistic possibilities. From graduate school to the present, the groupings of work encompass...
Red, by John Logan, is a play about the business of being an artist — the commissions, the professional jealousies, the rivalries between generations and the physical and mental act of putting paint to canvas. Originally staged in London in 2009 and now at South Coast Repertory through February 21, the play features Mark Harelik as the painter Mark Rothko — at the height of his success in 1958, newly commissioned to paint a series of murals for the Four Seasons Restaurant at Manhattan's...
Trace Mendoza creates hypnotic work that makes you feel inspired, inquisitive and strangely euphoric. A seemingly schizophrenic fixation with cultural iconography, his Southern California homeland, psychedelic design, deconstructivism, and unlikely pairings, OC artist Trace Mendoza finds strange and fascinating narratives in his creations that are just as fantastical and weird as the artist himself. With an overtone of whimsy, Mendoza’s artworks combine the darkness of the unknown...
Written by: Roberta Carasso The selection of work by artists – Arno Kortschot, Connie Goldman, and Gary Petersen – is a look into the dimensions artists develop to express formal and spatial ideas – fully dimensional, the suggestion of dimension, and the illusion of dimensionality on a flat canvas. Also, because the art is intermixed, one artist’s work hung near another artist’s work, the viewer is given an additional opportunity to contemplate far more spatial and formal possibilities had the...
By Roberta Carasso Artists deal with human issue just like everyone else, except, being visually-minded, they make their thoughts accessible to all who can appreciate their meaning. Katie Stubblefield is drawn to that moment when things shift, the cliff hangers of life when events suddenly are no longer the same. Working with various artistic disciplines, her metaphors embrace imagery inversion from methods of horizontal and vertical processes. The final canvas captures a movement with no...
By Richard Chang Irvine resident Tim Schwab dons a few different hats. During business hours, he’s director of design and installation at Laguna Art Museum. When he’s not on the clock, he does freelance graphic design for several local companies and makes ceramic art. Trained as a bronze sculptor, Schwab now finds his passion creating artistic pottery. The BFA graduate of Laguna College of Art + Design is showcasing his recent clay creations in a show with painter David Michael Lee at F+...
The First Friday art walk in Oakland, California — known as Oakland Art Murmur — is a chance for galleries throughout the city, from uptown to downtown to Jingletown, to throw open their doors for an art-loving public. Current shows of note include Kurt Fishback’s “51 Portraits of Women Artists” through July 18 at Transmission Gallery in West Oakland and Chicago-based painter and textile artist Samantha Bittman’s “Material Data” through July 4 at Johansson Projects. The Friday commute is a...
The 2015 faculty exhibition opened tonight at Cal State Fullerton’s Begovich Gallery (a chance, perhaps, for students to grade the teachers). Fine artists in the show include Julie Orser, Joe Biel and Joe Forkan. Rebecca Campbell fills an oven with classic paperback literature in Liebe Mütti (courtesy of LA Louver), presumably to be cooked until done at 451° Fahrenheit. Jim Jenkins supplies a kinetic sculpture consisting of school chairs, dunce cap, globe and paper airplane entitled I Ain’t...
Based in the abstraction of the human form, "Figurative Perplexities" at the Q Art Salon in Santa Ana takes a different look at the classic fine art subject, through the lens of six very different artists. Jason Shawn Alexander, Shay Bredimus, Alex Krigbaum, Cecilia Paredes and Orion Fischer join Dan Catalano in the exhibit, tranforming the space of the Q into a kind of cathedral, in worship of the human form. Each room is precisely arranged and glows like smaller altars to the figurative...
Saturday night the Mat Gleason curated exhibition conTEXTual abstraction opens at Peter Blake Gallery. This group show will feature artists that utilize various forms of text in their work and includes Mark Dutcher, Jonmarc Edwards, Gary Lang, Molly Larkey, Adam Mars, William Powhida, Cole Sternberg, and Tim Youd. Gleason, a long time art critic and curator, founded the Coagula Art Journal in 1992 and now runs the dynamic exhibition space Coagula Curatorial in Chinatown. Gleason is also a...
If you happen to be traveling through John Wayne Airport over the next few months please take a look at the show OC Art Blog publisher Chris Hoff curated titled Hidden Treasures: Art from the Permanent Collections of Orange County Colleges and Universities. In this exhibit travelers to and from OC can explore local art from five Orange County colleges and universities in the HIDDEN TREASURES exhibit on display at John Wayne Airport now through August 2015. From the art collections of...
An exhibit of Iberian Peninsula-inspired paintings by Laguna College of Art + Design students and faculty opens this week at the LCAD Space at Forest & Ocean Gallery in Laguna Beach. “The Majesty of Spain and Portugal” shows the artistic response of participants in last summer’s LCAD summer abroad tour in Madrid, Toledo, Salamanca, Porto and Lisbon. The artists are Amy Bergener, Aaron Brown, Gabriel Castro, Andrea Clarke, Lani Emanuel (whose oil painting Sorolla’s Steps is shown above),...
In the sculptural work of Portuguese artist Miguel Palma, a cast concrete block might mark the open page of a favorite book. A half-finished Erector set model of the Eiffel Tower might appear alongside a 19th century photograph of the real Eiffel Tower at a similar stage in its construction. Engineering, architecture, history and even biomechanics all provide stimuli for the artist’s toylike imagination. Currently wrapping up a three month residency at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica,...
With gas prices down and the stock market reaching all-time highs as we approach the end of 2014, no doubt you’re looking for a place to put your excess cash to work. If so, you might want to consider throwing your weight around in the local art market this holiday season. Here are a few options in and around Orange County: Cal State Long Beach’s 47th Annual Holiday Art Sale runs through this Wednesday, December 10, and features everything from ceramics to printmaking. Something tells...
The OC Art Blog was created in 2004 as a way to build community and promote the marginalized but dynamic Orange County art scene.
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By Mason Fujikawa Awakening at Gallery Sonder is the first exhibition in the United States by Mexican artist Moncho. Moncho takes an instinctive approach to his practice. He doesn’t sketch or even plan before painting. Instead, he draws from his subconscious, working...
By Alisa Ochoa Low and Slow is on view at House of Danger Gallery, nestled in an unassuming shopping center just off the 55, beside a Circle K and below the Attic Skateshop. The space is operated by Jackie Danger, a visual artist and brand strategist who opened the...
By Chris Hoff I’ve been messing around with learning to play guitar for as long as I can remember. It’s been a story of starts and stops for years. In a more recent start I picked up the book How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy. I thought it might provide some...
By Maggie Luy What shifts when the ground beneath everyday life begins to move? Infrastructure is usually what disappears first. In “Breakdown/Breakthrough: Art and Infrastructure," it stayed exposed. The exhibition, on view at UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum...
By Maggie Luy What does it mean to be remembered, and who gets to be seen? Through textured brushwork and carved forms, Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma honors labor and ancestry. That legacy continues in Edgar Fabián Frías’s layered digital collages and psychedelic video...
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