All Art Friday

All Art Friday

Darren Waterston in Houston

I recently happened upon the phenomenal work of abstract painter Darren Waterston of San Francisco. Only in his forties, Waterston is exhibited internationally and his art is in the permanent holdings of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the Portland Art Museum, in Portland, Oregon, and other art institutions, as well as the private collections of Bank of America, Eli Broad Family Foundation, Hallmark Art Collection, University of Washington Medical Center, and Nordstrom, among many others. He's had solo exhibitions almost every year since 1990 and has participated in even more group exhibitions. He's also been the subject of a long list of art magazine articles, newspaper features, monographs, and catalogues.

Waterston's art  comprises paintings, watercolors, and murals. He works with oils on wood panels, oils on canvas mounted on wood panels, and oils on canvas panels (these can be huge), as well as watercolor and gouche on rag paper; he makes haunting original prints with hand-touched and letterpress elements, and luminous encaustics on wood panels that have a romantic and perhaps even "old master" feel about them. Waterston also creates extraordinary murals, such as the 150-foot site-specific mural "Was and Is Not and Is To Come" (2006) at San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. The effects he achieves in his paintings — they've been called "mindscapes" — are otherworldly, deeply poetic, and often astonishingly beautiful (see, for example, the recent work comprising "Spendid Grief", "Aurora", and "Fugure").

Image at left: "Origins" (2002), encaustic on wood panel with oil varnish, 84"x60", Collection of Boise Art Museum. © Darren Waterston.

Waterston showed February 17 to April 10 in the group exhibition Calling Beauty at the Canzani Center Gallery, Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, Ohio. From May 8 to June 30, he'll be exhibiting in Wunderkammer in the Inman Gallery, Houston, Texas. I'd love to see his work in a Washington, D.C., area gallery.

New works on paper available through Inman Gallery are here. These include watercolors and gouache on rag paper and Iris prints with egg tempera on rag paper. Also available through the gallery are some of Waterston's oils on wood panels.

Exhibitions Here and There

✭ By A Thread remains on view at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art through May 15. Images of all the artwork on display are here.

✭ The Guggenheim in New York City is presenting through June 30 Malevich in Focus: 1912 - 1922. The exhibit is limited to six paintings Malevich made over the 10 years surveyed and marks the first time since 1927 that the artworks have been shown together.

✭ Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change opened April 10 at Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and runs through July 18. Muybridge, a 19th Century photographer, is known for his studies of animals and "human   locomotion"; he's been called "The Father of the Motion Picture". This show is the first retrospective to examine all aspects of Muybridge's art; it includes vintage photographs, stereographs, proof prints, books, patent models, and, among other ephemera, the only surviving Zoopraxiscope (a device Muybridge designed in 1879 to project "motion sequence" images). The show travels to Tate Britain in September, where it will be on view until January 16, 2011; it then comes back to the States, where it will be presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from February 26, 2011, through June 7, 2011.

Go here for the National Museum of American History's virtual exhibition on Muybridge. There are a number of Muybridge videos on YouTube: go here, here, or here (a tribute/parody).

✭ Jeanne-Claude and Christo's 24.5-mile-long "Running Fence" in California is the subject of an insightful exhibition about the seminal work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. SAAM acquired the documentation of the work in 2008.

On view until September 26, Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Remembering the Running Fence includes various components from the project, including a scale model that's 58 feet long, hundreds of photographs documenting the process, creation, and installation of "Running Fence", original preparatory drawings and collages, and two films, one (by Albert and David Maysles) chronicling the project as it was underway and one, Revisiting the Fence, co-produced by SAAM. A book accompanies the exhibition.

A recent informative interview with Christo about the creation of "Running Fence" and the people involved in its production is here.

Image at left above: Running Fence (Project for Sonoma and Marin Counties, State of California), 1976; pencil, fabric, staples, pastel, charcoal, wax crayon, technical data, black and white photograph on paperboard. © 1976 Christo, 22"x28", Smithsonian American Art Museum, purchased through Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.


✭ Anatomical art is being shown at the 1820 Gallery of the Art Institute of Washington through May 7. On display are drawings and sculpture from a summer-long project in which students from a life drawing class were invited to join professional illustrators and artists in anatomy lab. Medical illustrator Marie Dauenheimer dissected a cadaver acquired from Howard University Medical School while students "dead drew" anatomical illustrations. There is some beautiful work in "Anatomical Art: Dissection to Illustration". (The gallery is at 1820 N. Ft. Myer Drive in Arlington, Virginia. An interesting article on the study of human anatomy and art that includes a profile of Howard University professor Dr. Ashraf Aziz is here.)

Mosaic Workshop

The superb mosaic artist Kathy Thaden is offering June 2, 9, 16, and 23 in Westminster, Colorado (at the City Park Rec Center), a summer workshop for adults age 15 and older. Thaden will teach participants how to nip and cut glass, select materials, use substrates and adhesives, and grout and finish. The class will be conducted in the evening.