Saturday, February 28, 2009
Monster Drawing Rally Recap
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Weekend Guide 2.26.09
End of February already?!?! Last chance to catch some great shows around the Bay Area
Openings and Events
Sarah Newton at the Dorothy Herger Gallery on Thursday, February 26 from 11am-12:30pm
Brett Amory at the Monster Drawing Ralley at the Verdi Club on Friday, February 27 from 6-11pm
Ongoing Shows
Phillip Dvorak and Megan Wolfe at Bucheon Gallery through February
Dale Eastman and Zonal Home through February
Josh Hagler at Frey Norris Gallery through February
Mirang Wonne at the USF School of Law Rotunda Gallery
Mirang Wonne at the Ira Wolk Gallery in St. Helena through March 14
For more shows featuring artists interviewed on Arteaser, check out the Arteaser Calendar.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Brett Amory

It was another dark night at the West Oakland BART station, where I met Brett Amory. I was the one in the trench coat and the red leather gloves. He was the one in the white hoodie and glasses. The story continues...
Growing up in Chesapeake, Virginia, Brett Amory was well exposed to creative people. His mother's large family included a number of artists and musicians that intrigued and inspired the young Amory:
"When I was really young [...] I always had a really strong interest in art, but I didn't know what it was. So, I'd go into art stores and just look around. I messed around with paper mache and clay and I used to paint with watercolors"
He began playing trombone at age seven, and continues to play music, but became very involved in skateboarding after discovering the sport at age ten. After high school, Amory moved to Colorado to work at ski resorts and pursue snowboarding, but after a couple years he had suffered so many injuries that it was time to move on:
"I grew up skateboarding and always had a video camera [...] I didn't really know what I wanted to do, so I thought I might want to study motion pictures"
Amory moved to Bay Area to study filmmaking at the Academy of Art and began playing music with the artist, Gage Opdenbrouw. Through Opdenbrouw, Amory became more interested in drawing, but struggled at first:
"I actually failed my first drawing class, I was really bad. Then, I took it again and my teacher told me I was going to fail, but I luckily passed. Then I took a figure drawing class and the teacher [...] pulled me aside and told me, 'You better go to workshops or you're going to fail my class'"
That advice Ning Ho, the figure drawing teacher, proved to be a pivotal moment:
"I started going [to] two a week, then three a week, and then I was going every day. Then I started going to two a day, three a day.. That's really what got me into drawing, I just got hooked on it"
Amory switched into animation, but wasn't attracted to the video game content. After taking a painting class, he was committed to fine art:
"I think it was color. I was drawing so much, but to actually work with color and solid shapes and masses was such a change from just line and contours and black and white [...] Color came more naturally than value and drawing"
He began a series, called "Waiting," which showed scenes of people in waiting situations, like at train stations or in grocery store lines. Meanwhile, Amory worked part-time at a Kinko's and would create photo montages in Adobe Photoshop when the store was slow. He found that these translated well to working with resin:
"I would build these resin blocks - and they'd work the same way Photoshop works - [using] acetate transparencies in between layers [of poured resin], so it [makes] a 3D kind of image by the use of transparent layers [...] The way the imagery sits on top of each other, you can have different opacities and some layers are transparent so you see the layer underneath it "
Next, Amory experimented with building assemblages of smaller paintings on panel, inspired by David Hockney's image assemblages and cubist works by Pablo Picasso. However, creating up to thirty smaller paintings for a single assemblages took up to three months each and he was anxious to continue to explore further. Amory became intrigued by passport photos and began a series of small portraits:
"The passport is - they're interesting photographs - they're not glamourous, they're informational photography. Usually people getting their passport photo are thinking they're going somewhere [...] They're like mugshots, they're not meant to be seen, they're only used for to leave and enter countries for travel reasons"
Starting with an anonymous passport photo, Amory would create characters for his subjects, eventually assigning names that would be reflected in how he embellished the character's portrait. But became bored with the series and longed to re-introduce a computer designed element:
"Photoshop and computer manipulation is a huge part of why I'm an artist. I started doing Photoshop manipulations before I started painting and that was one of the things that got me into painting. So, I always wanted to tie those two things together"
Inspired by Chuck Close, Amory shifted to doing larger pixelated portraits, and then began adding sections of realism, but constricting his painting tiny squares didn't feel right. So, after a seven year break, Amory went back to the 'Waiting' series:
"When I did that first one, it was like freedom [... The first 'Waiting' series] was just about people waiting for stuff. When I went back to it [the second time], it was more conceptual"
Amory gathers his source material by taking pictures on the street of people waiting. He gravitates towards visible quirks and, by his own admission, a lot of his subjects are older:
"They're something about the way older people carry themselves. They seem to be somewhere else"
The disconnection between an individual's physical and mental location fascinates Amory:
"Waiting is anticipation of what what's to come. Most people, when they're waiting, they're not in the present [...] You can't really place where they're at - they're in multiple places"
To reflect the muliple locations of the subjects, Amory uses a computer to assemble multiple photos taken over time. The figure is repeated in the final work to show time passing:
"I think for me it goes back to film and motion pictures [...] My imagery - a lot of it is multiple images put together on one canvas. So, its the whole break up of time and space, and to me that's kind of what film and TV is"
Catch Brett Amory this Friday at the Monster Drawing Rally at the Verdi Club. He also has upcoming shows at the Hyde Street Gallery opening on March 27, at DaDa during the month of April, and with Terminal 22 for the month of May.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Katie Gilmartin

Thursday, February 19, 2009
Weekend Guide 2.19.09
Mardi Gras may not be until Tuesday, but we've got something to show you this weekend. Just stop by any of these local venues - bead necklaces not required:
Ongoing Shows
Phillip Dvorak and Megan Wolfe at Bucheon Gallery through February
Dale Eastman and Zonal Home through February
Josh Hagler at Frey Norris Gallery through February
Mirang Wonne at the USF School of Law Rotunda Gallery
Mirang Wonne at the Ira Wolk Gallery in St. Helena through March 14
For more shows featuring artists interviewed on Arteaser, check out the Arteaser Calendar.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Weekend Guide 2.13.09
Love is in the air, so when you've finished reading ALL of your valentines, show some love for local artists by checking out these exhibits. Go ahead and wear your heart on your sleeve!
Ongoing Shows
Phillip Dvorak and Megan Wolfe at Bucheon Gallery through February
Dale Eastman and Zonal Home through February
Josh Hagler at Frey Norris Gallery through February
Mirang Wonne at the USF School of Law Rotunda Gallery
Mirang Wonne at the Ira Wolk Gallery in St. Helena through March 14
For more shows featuring artists interviewed on Arteaser, check out the Arteaser Calendar.
Dale Eastman
Monday, February 9, 2009
Weekend Recap 2.9.09
Friday, February 6, 2009
Megan Wolfe

Growing up in northern Mississippi, in a small town suburb of Memphis, Megan Wolfe was accostomed to having various lifeforms circulating through her environment:
"My dad was always fishing turtles out of the swimming pool, so we'd always have critters around us. I grew up going out[side] and playing with the spiders"
Drawing from an early age, Wolfe began taking art classes when she was nine. Despite a limited local art scene, Wolfe's parents did what they could to support their daughter's interests:
"My parents did try to take me to museums and things like that [...] My mom would drive me an hour to [art classes in Memphis…] They were always very positive and 'Go for your dreams, and do what you want to do, and live your dreams' "
Meanwhile, Wolfe was being home-schooled and craved more interactions with lifeforms beyond those in the backyard. Finding networks of illustrators online piqued her interest socially as well as creatively:
"I was kind of looking for a community to get involved in [and] the internet was this big, new, shiny thing. There was this online community of illustrators. They were high school students and college students and I thought it was really cool because they were giving feedback on each others work and helping each other. I thought it was a good way to grow and moving myself forward because the classes I was taking weren't pushing me enough, so it was kind of this challenge"
But Wolfe didn't have any experience with illustration. Nonetheless, her diligence and determination led her to develop her skills:
" I would go through anatomy books and just pour over and memorize everything"
Wolfe then came out to pursue illustration at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, where she met her future husband in a painting class. After a couple years, Wolfe began to have second thoughts about a career in illustration after observing her boyfriend go through the process of launching his professional illustration career:
"There would be times when he would come home and he wouldn't be happy at all with what he was doing. After that I kind of thought about it and [realized that] the stuff that my teachers [were] getting me to do, I don't really like either"
Meanwhile, Wolfe noticed some other emerging artists in the Bay Area were transcending the academically strict separation between illustration and fine art:
"[These artists] kind of do a little bit of both. They kind of do a bit of illustration and turn around and do the fine art and be in galleries [...] I thought that was very interesting [...] We have a lot of flexibility in this community"
Switching from illustration to fine art, Wolfe began with portraiture and figure work - in some ways a natural shift from the character-focused content in illustration. But eventually she began to explore inanimate subjects:
"I got onto still lifes because I thought, there's more to people and their lives than the face or the figure. There's also the stuff that they have, the stuff that they cherish, and the stuff that collects and builds up in your apartment"
The elements of nostalgia and sentimentality apparent in her series, "It Meant Something To Me", are also reflected in the style of Wolfe's pencil drawing. She discovered that using the paper's texture gave the right emotive sense:
"There's something about the grain that I felt was more interesting and more unique. I really have an affection for photography and there are some old photographs that have that film grain look to them. It gives it an old classical feel and I wanted to also incorporate that into the drawings"
Wolfe then expanded on the notion of the familiar, but ignored elements of the urban dweller's environment. She returned her focus from inanimate objects to lifeforms, but this time weeds and pigeons:
"Like with the still lifes, I sort of look for things that people don't pay much attention to […] People in the city compete with other living things [...] weeds in the sidewalk - it's kind of the same thing - It's life trying to live along side us and we kind of hate it. We want to pull it up and get rid of it and don't want to deal with it"
Now surrounded by people and with no shortage of community in the urban landscape of San Francisco, Wolfe contemplates the struggle of these other lifeforms and the very creatures themselves:
"[Mississippi] birds are actually birds. They don't walk around next to you - they fly away. In regards to the pigeons, it really fascinated me was how they just walk around. I'd never seen a bird do that before! You walk down the sidewalk and you get right next to it and it just doesn't move. It kind of looks at you. I think that's what I like about them. [...] It's the only animal that can kind of co-exist with us"
See some of Megan Wolfe's new works at Bucheon Gallery through February.