John Wentz

We've been on a little bit of a hiatus here at Arteaser, so thanks for sticking around. I met up with John Wentz at the Palace Hotel some time ago, where we bonded over Donald in Mathmagic Land and I got the story behind his "Adaptive Radiation" series.

Some might argue that science and religion do not mix, but they do have something in common - they both tackle big questions, albeit in very different ways. For John Wentz, both modes of thought were influential to his art as he grew up in the East Bay, attending Catholic school:

"When I was growing up, my mom [...] went to nursing school in Fremont, but we didn't have a lot of money and she couldn't afford day care, so she took me with her and she would give me her anatomy books to draw to keep me busy"

While drawing from anatomy books may have been a more subtle driver, Wentz recalls comic books as a conscious source of inspiration to draw. Although he did not realize it at the time, the comic book stories had a spiritual appeal:

"First thing I remember was drawing [...] I remember my first two comic books were Spiderman #6 and Batman #4, and that just really sparked [my interest in] drawing. [...] Comic books kind of served that side of me, that religious side"

After graduating high school, Wentz lived a transient life for a couple years, but was always drawing. Fascinated by questions of faith and spirituality, he considered pursuing a religious life, but came to other conclusions:

"I actually wanted to be a priest for a while - I went back to that, the religious thing - I wanted to be a Buddhist monk... Then I wound up studying world religion and [...] I realized that role of comic books, how they kind of serve in a lot of ways that function. They have the same archetypes as you find in any great hero myth [...] I realized it was a modern day mythology"

Eventually, Wentz decided to pursue a degree at the Academy of Art after seeing a friend's progress. Ever the rebel, he quickly learned that his first choice of majoring in Illustration was not for him and switched to Fine Art:

"To me at that point it was like, 'Oh, somebody telling me what to do? No, I don't want to do that.' It was that simplified for me so I immediately switched over to Fine Art"

Traditionally a pen and ink draftsman, Wentz first began painting while working at Tower Records, where he air-brushed album cover posters in large scale. While at the Academy, his instruction was in more traditional oil painting and after graduating he regularly sold his work. But before long, Wentz had another crisis of faith, as it were, and temporarily ceased to paint. A chronic insomniac, Wentz eventually saw a documentary on late night television on the Caves of Lascaux:

"Looking at this cave art - which was completely beautiful - in an area that probably at that time you risked death going in there to see, let alone make that art, [I couldn't help but start] thinking about who they were making it for, why they were making it, what compelled them to make it... There didn't seem any hesitance in it, but they were risking life and limb"

Meanwhile, Wentz had been reading Carl Jung and found his ideas about archetypes the collective unconsciousness very interesting with regard to the common experience he had observed between religion and comic books. Finally, Wentz had an epiphany while observing the chronic chatting, texting, and tweeting of his fellow San Franciscans:

"The essence is communication. We did it back then [with the cave drawings], we did it before language and now we're still finding ways to communicate. No matter what kind of technology springs up, we find a way to communicate through it. So that coupled with the Jung book just brought me back to comic books"

Having restored his faith in painting through a combination of cave drawings, psychology readings, and communication habits, Wentz began work on a series of paintings exploring comic book archetypes:

"The first paintings I did in the series were very illustrative of [Jung's concept of a mythological vocabulary]"

Using familiar comic characters, Wentz combines the comic style and realism. He used his adolescent nephew as the primary non-comic subject, representing familiar coming-of-age challenges:

"He turns to video games. When I was a kid I turned to comic books [...] So it was a nice contrast: it was dialogue between our childhoods, it was a dialogue between realism and pop art or realism and comic art. But it didn't make sense [if I put it in a specific landscape]. I wanted it to be a dialogue between just the two of them"

Like the cave drawings on stark, rocky surfaces, Wentz orients his subjects on largely blank, white surface to keep attention on the dialogue. On this approach, he was influenced by the golden backgrounds in Byzantine art, seen on a trip to Italy:

"The environment is all gold and the idea behind that was to tell the viewer that these figures were in a spiritual realm [...] If I put them in this all white background, that would maybe also hint that this is in a psychological realm, this isn't a real place. This isn't even a comic book. It's a blank slate"

The Byzantines' use of sacred geometry was also influential, particularly as Wentz began to move from the smaller, graphite early pieces to larger paintings with greater compositional demands. Technically, he had first encountered the idea in childhood watching Disney's Donald in Mathmagic Land, but recalled the concepts while teaching an anatomy class for the Academy, which included using the Golden Ratio:

"I started thinking about anatomy, [and asking], 'Well, what's the anatomy of a painting?' If I could strip off the flesh and the muscles, we have the skeleton - that's our foundation [...] Where would [compositional elements] be located? That got me back into sacred geometry"

That sacred geometry had historically been seen as a means higher powers meant that it solved not only an aesthetic question of composition, but also fit with his mythological themes. Wentz began plotting the shapes that echoed the shapes of the figures in the piece:

"What I wanted them to at least kind of look like, if not represent, would be mythological stories. Like something you would see in a cave or would see inside a pyramid, where you just see these characters on a black space interacting with each other, that has some kind of meaning to it [...] There is a formula to this hero story, to the myth"

Keep watching the Arteaser Calendar for future shows featuring John Wentz.

David Becker

I met David Becker at Southern Exposure's Monster Drawing Rally. We met up again for this interview across the street from the annual Game Developers Conference, which proved to be a strangely appropriate setting.

When David Becker watches George Lucas' "American Grafitti," it reminds him of growing up in Stockton, California in the 1960s: 

"A valley town like that [has a] big car culture, so you kind of grew up with people that were building hot rods and cars to race. Drag racing is a big thing in Stockton"

Inspired by the aesthetic of 1960s poster art and Rat Fink creator Ed Roth, Becker embraced the creative energy of the Hot-rod "Kustom Kulture" movement: 

"We were all through junior high copying all those [hot-rod] T-shirt designs, [using] spray paint, paint, various [mediums] - anything we could figure out would stick [...] We would do t-shirts and what have you and sell them at school."

While making t-shirts and designs was a social experience for Becker, the drive to create was personal: 

"I had my hand in some kind of artistic activity all through growing up and then decided to see the world through art school [...]  It was a natural [...] inclination to do that."

Although it wasn't a preferred career choice, Becker's father, a hobbiest photographer, understood his interest. While sorting through issues with the draft, Becker went to the local community college and studied art:

"I had a teacher at Delta College that was influential, very supportive [...] I think back on that a lot, because it was probably  a moment in time [when] you're young and you have someone like that who unequivocally believes in you: it gives you the kind of confidence to keep doing what you're doing [...] despite all the other things I was going through at the time"

It was in community college that Becker discovered printmaking. He next attended CCAC, but soon after went to study in London, with a focus on printmaking:

"I took to it and I liked the process and I did a lot of that all through college [...] That was my life. I got through whatever menial job I had and I would stay up all night and do prints and I loved it and it was great"

When Becker returned to San Francisco, he enrolled at SF State, where he explored installation work and studied film. However, it was when he returned to a more traditional medium that the next chapter of his life unfolded:

"I got into doing large drawings [...] I submitted those to the Whitney Museum study program and got into their studio program. So from there I went to New York [...] I basically did that and just didn't come back"

Inspired by the downtown NYC art scene of the 1970s, Becker stayed there for the next eighteen years. His involvement with art ebbed and flowed, as he made a living working with architects and builders, as well as sculptors, but his exposure continued to broaden meaningfully:

"I discovered painting in New York [...] I got there and I was doing everything but painting, right through the Whitney program: I was doing installation, wall drawings, ephemeral sculpture... And then I had a girlfriend at the time who said, 'You know, you're a painter. Why don't you paint? Everything you do looks like a painter who's trying to do other stuff.' At that point, I had never ever painted"

As he gravitated towards painting, Becker began to appreciate art's place in history as well. He found that understanding the context of a painting contributed to its timelessness:

"I would just go to the Met and I would just love to look at paintings. You start to look at it through those eyes, from that vantage point, and whether its fifty or a hundred or two hundred years old, it doesn't matter."

Meanwhile, Becker eventually returned to the Bay Area and finished his degree, but didn't return his focus to art until about six years ago. Revisiting the sketchbooks that he has kept for years allowed him to reflect on his inspirations, and, in particular, the role of contemporaneous politics in art:

"I like that narrative and I like that reflection of meaning to a particular time and place. I realized why I like that art, I realized why I like the Neoclassical art, and the particular paintings of that period made more sense to me"

With more clarity into these notions, Becker began creating more temporally relevant paintings. Reflecting on such politically-aware painters as Francisco de Goya and Philip Guston, Becker began to think of the art as more secondary:

"These are painters that have a very strong formal basis, that's where they come from, but at some point their desire to enter into this narrative of some sort... it became more important than the art"

Still heavily influenced by the aesthetic of low-brow art, Becker uses graffiti-like words in many of his paintings. His haunting cartoon-like figures are starkly positioned as the subject:

"I'm totally into this avatar/cartoon stuff [and] the way they pervade common culture, more so than people. It's like people have become two-dimensional through these characters and it's become another language to me"

Through this language of characters and graffiti, Becker responds to the times, choosing to participate in the narrative of history: 

"I don't think about the art necessarily - that's almost secondary. I think first about these images and juxtaposing them or putting them together or how they read. [...] The art's there just because I'm so immersed in it"

Keep watching the Arteaser calendar for upcoming shows and events where you can see David Becker's work.

Dana Harel

Thanks to my warm reception at the Frey Norris Gallery covering Josh Hagler's recent show there, I was put into contact with Dana Harel. She and I sat down over tea at the Palace Hotel to discuss how she came to her most recent series, "Kin."

Born in Tel Aviv, Dana Harel observed her father and grandparents paint in their leisure time. Pursuing art only as a hobby, her family members had developed meticulous technique, but did not attempt new content, which shaped her early experiences with art:

“I took some art classes, but I was never pushed to think for myself. It was kind of about learning techniques or painting or looking at other art or landscapes and painting what you see”

The practically-minded Harel studied architecture at university, eventually moving to the Bay Area with her husband and completing her degree at the California College of Arts (formerly CCAC) in Oakland. While the study appealed to her, the profession did not:

“I loved architecture, but I liked it in school where it’s very conceptual and you loved what you do. And then I graduated and started to work and I was very disappointed. I kind of felt broken”

Taking some time off from work when her first child was born, she began to apply her draughtswoman skills towards artistic compositions. At first, her subjects were nominally architectural in nature, but Harel’s interest was more human:

“It would be about intimate spaces, about the body, but I would not necessarily draw the body. I would maybe draw as space that can give you an idea of the body, like maybe confessional booths or restrooms or very small, confined spaces that have some correlation to the body”

These intimate spaces, designed explicitly with the human body in mind, Harel considered to be like organisms themselves that fit into their broader environment. She continued to draw architectural subjects, but began to relate them to their surroundings:

“I was looking at the architecture as landscape […] and was trying to see how the body correlates to the building – like, ‘What’s the connection?’ I knew there was something more than just being in a space”

By introducing natural landscape, Harel explored how the body’s connection to a building ultimately connected back to nature. The interfacing with nature through a building highlights our distance from nature:

“In the building, we know how to behave. It’s a concrete, built environment. It’s manicured to our needs […] We have so alienated ourselves from nature that we don’t necessarily know [how to behave in it]. We pose in nature, we take pictures in nature and then we get in the car and drive off”

Meanwhile, Harel began transitioning away from solely architectural subjects by drawing chairs, which she felt shared structural properties with the human form. As she began to draw from live models, she would continue to draw certain limbs from chairs. The effect is that of surreal subjects in slightly awkward poses:

“[I was] looking at that as a distorted, horrible image, but making it really beautifully. It’s as if we are trying to correct everything in our body that is not perfect. We don’t give in to the imperfection part of life”

Eventually, the architectural elements disappeared from her work entirely, replaced by human subjects. While she continued to draw a natural backdrop, her primary interest was the human form and its relationship to its surroundings:

“I always try to think where the body connects to wherever I’m going, so if it’s in the landscape or the woman, it’s ‘How can I go as close as I can- the closest with nature?’”

Pushing further into the proximity between the body and nature, Harel began to consider the body as the landscape itself. Taking inspiration from her children’s uninhibited ability to relate with nature, her new series, “Kin,” explores hand shadow puppets. Like her figures that were drawn as merged with chair parts, her hand puppet subjects seamlessly become the animals they are meant to resemble:

“[I was] making it magical […] in a very childish way, but the outcome is almost monstrous”

The viewer is confronted with the body as a part of nature in an explicit, though ultimately unnatural, way. By focusing on the hands, Harel achieves the ‘body as landscape’ notion and separation from conventional figure or landscape compositions that can come with preconceived assumptions upon interpretation:

“It forced me in a way not to deal with the big landscapes and the whole human body. Because I would think about everything and I would need everything to be thought of and have a reason. So the face or the lips being in a certain way […] I just felt like anyone could interpret it in any way they want. It’s a story by itself”

Being relieved of the burden of so many other details reveals the depth and thoroughness of Harel’s compositions, as well as her architectural training:

“The rigor and the ideas, the process and the way I think is still coming from that […] The way I imagine things when I do a picture, I know how it [will look]. Then I kind of build it up - maybe I’ll have an outline - and then I go from the inside out”

Even her subjects in "Kin" are drawn to the scale of the actual animal. Similarly, her chosen medium remains the architectural tool of graphite, but more importantly its fineness allows Harel to construct the detailed landscapes that transcend body and nature:

“I think graphite in a way is harder for me because I can’t use color that much to transfer emotion […] but I like that challenge”

See some of Dana Harel’s work in the “Herstory” show at the Napa Valley Museum, with an opening reception this Saturday, March 7 from 5:30-7pm. Her “Kin” series will show at Frey Norris Gallery in April.

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.

Megan Wolfe

I met up with Megan Wolfe at Cup O' Joe's coffee in Lower Nob Hill, where we discussed the appropriate amounts of caffeine intake and how she got to her latest works at the Bucheon Gallery.

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.

Sarah Newton

I met Sarah Newton at an Open Studios in October at the Noonin Building. We ran into each other again riding a bus from Hunters Point Shipyard studios.

As Sarah Newton prepares to celebrate her pet snake's nineteenth birthday, she reflects upon her early career ambitions:

"In the sixth grade I had decided to be a herpetologist, but I probably imagined that it consisting of drawing pictures of animals all day."

Rather than growing up in a house full of pet toads and turtles, Newton was surrounded by art supplies from her father's creative pursuits:

"We always had a lot of art materials and activities in our home, as my father experimented with a tremendous variety of art media, [...] so there were a lot of slightly used oil pastels, colored pencils, and paints around for us to use"

Newton also cites her Uncle, Van Scranton, a mixed media artist who also worked at UCSB, as an important early influence. She recalls visiting visiting a gallery that Scranton ran for a couple years:

"I think he wanted to support the artists around him and to curate shows that interested him. My cousin and I went to many of the gallery openings and my father had some photographs in a group show there."

Newton started high school in rural Pennsylvania, but returned to California for her senior year. Although she began taking figure drawing at a community college at 16, Newton wasn't excited about going to college, even after visiting art schools with her uncle. After traveling around the state working for a political action group, Newton gravitated towards San Francisco's urban environment:

"It has [been] important to me to live in a place where people are connected in public life. Where I see the people around me on the street, doing errands, meeting friends, talking on the corner, selling things on the sidewalk, playing music."

Newton started taking printmaking, as well as drawing, at San Francisco City College. Originally, she found prints to be an interesting supplement to paintings by artists like Edward Hopper:

"There had always been some painters whose work I was interested in and whose prints I thought captured something that their paintings did not" 

After taking classes for several years, Newton finally decided to pursue a BFA at California College of Arts, where she ultimately focused on printmaking. There she found guidance from instructors Charlie Gill, Barron Storey, and Larry McClary and was challenged to study the intimacies of place:

"One of our assignments in an illustration class was to spend an entire day at one specific location and sketch all day"

This interest in public spaces continued outside the classroom in Newton's everyday activities. As she would return to her apartment in the Mission district, Newton would observe both the activity of people on the street as well as deserted elements of the urban landscape:

"People move from one store and then you see them talking to a different group outside another place. Sometimes there weren't people but these were the only lit storefronts and still the invitation sort of spills out into the street [...] I wanted to capture something that wasn't friendly or welcoming but was still intriguing... something that draws you towards it even though you aren't included in it."

After graduating, Newton traveled around southern Europe and joined the Graphics Arts Workshop when she returned to San Francisco. Taking inspiration from Vija Celmins and Robert Bechtle, she continues to explore public spaces in her work, such as a series based on a closed paint store across the street from her house:

"It was such a nowhere place - people would throw garbage over the fence, plants grew up through the asphalt, but around the edge of the space there was still a lot of activity"

Lately, Newton has moved beyond the urban landscape to the American landscape. Inspired by how the works of Thomas Moran, Frederic Church, and Winslow Homer promoted domestic tourism, Newton is working on a series of highway rest stops:

"I am thinking a little bit about [tourism and creating ideas about traveling], a little bit about people's expectations from public spaces, a little bit about the artificiality and standardization of these places that are in the middle of another place."

Watch the Arteaser Calendar for future shows with works by Sarah Newton

Fernando Reyes

I first met Fernando Reyes at the Bay Printmakers Open Studios in October. Last week, I ventured out to Jingletown, in Oakland, where Reyes has a studio. I was already intrigued by his background in financial services, but learned much more about the fruits of his artistic labors.

In a family of eight struggling to make ends meet in Fresno, Fernando Reyes didn't grow up with much exposure to art. Nonetheless, by junior high his interest in art had begun to develop:

"I would draw caricatures of my brothers and sisters- those were my really first models [...] My experience with art back them was pretty minimal outside of what I was learning in [...] high school"

To earn extra money for the family, Reyes and his siblings would pick grapes in the summer. As necessity is the mother of invention, Reyes' fruit-picking labor fed his artistic inclinations:

"One of the ways I got my drawing paper was by actually getting it from farming [...] When you pick grapes for raisins you pick them, put them in a box, and then when the box was fully you would lay down this sort of craft paper sheet [...] I would see these huge packages of this large craft paper [...] so, I would just take rolls of it home with me and that's what I would use to draw"

A couple years after high school, Reyes got a job at Bank of America and two years later transferred to the North Beach branch in San Francisco. Over the next fifteen years, Reyes would advance in the bank, ultimately Senior Operations Manager: 

"I virtually stopped doing art probably at the time I started working at the bank" 

Reyes' re-entry into art came only after his parter, Daniel, excavated the remains of his youthful endeavors:

"He saw some old drawings of mine and he saw some talent there. So, one christmas he bought me a pad of paper and drawing pencils and charcoal"

Daniel's encouragement went far beyond supplies as his own life decisions provided a model for Reyes to make a career transition. After seventeen years at Bank of America, Reyes left in 1991:

"I saw that he had quit his corporate job and decided to go back to school to pursue the career he wanted [...] I decided that really I wanted to pursue finding my career in art [... Leaving the bank] really impacted my life at the time because that meant that I am actually free now and I can actually do what I was meant to do in life"

Reyes started taking figure drawing classes at City College of San Francisco, sticking to familiar drawing mediums. When Daniel was accepted into graduate school in Chicago, Reyes joined him:

"It was probably the best move I could make [...] I went to this portfolio day at the [Chicago] Art Institute, and there was every kid in the world there - it was packed [...] All I was thinking was I could really improve by doing this"

Reyes was accepted and focused on painting and printmaking. He also gained the broad exposure to the art world that was never available in Fresno: 

"My interest while going to the Art Institute was always the figure [...] Throughout the entire time I was going to school [...] I was given so much opportunity to explore different artists from different periods [...] Michaelangelo [...] Raphael, Tiepolo, Titian - people like that were my first inspirations because I was so enamored with the figure"

Reyes and his partner returned to California and while Daniel interned for a year at Davis, Reyes worked out of the university's printmaking workshop and broadened his painting horizens:

"I discovered that I enjoyed doing landscapes which is something that I had never, ever done before [...] I didn't have access to a model to work from, so I kind of went to a second choice and really, really enjoyed that a lot"

Back in the Bay Area, Reyes diligently pursued his craft, inspired more by modern figurative painters like Paul Cadmus: 

"My drawing has just improved throughout the years because of the amount of drawing that I do [...] once I moved into this studio, one of the first things that I did is I started drawing sessions here in my studio every week. I would have other come artists draw with me, so I would draw continuously"

These early years were still lean, as Reyes hadn't established himself as an artist. Reyes' resourcefulness was again applied, but this time with unexpected results:

"When I was really, really poor [...] after graduating art school and I would go to theses classes or sessions, so I wouldn't waste so much paper, I would draw more than one figure on one sheet [...] I realized I had something here I should investigate"

This discovery led to a painting series of overlapping figures, Body Language, and later a print series. Meanwhile, Reyes' style had begun to emerge:

"That's really what [my work] is about - it's about the figure and the line [...] - it's about the unspoken word"

See Fernando Reyes' work at Alta Galleria in Berkeley through November 25 or in the Reflections of the Bay juried exhibit at the California Modern Art Gallery through December 2. He is also showing at the Falkirk Cultural Center through the end of the year with fellow Bay Printmakers, Javier Chalini and Mike Kimball. Reyes will be participating in the Jingletown Holiday Art Walk from December 5-7.

Phillip Dvorak

In anticipation of this month's Open Studios, I visited Phillip Dvorak at his apartment where he works. We chatted as we passed through rooms filled with Mexican masks, skulls, and neat stacks of drawings and etchings.

As a boy in Southern California, Phillip Dvorak pursued his archeological ambitions by digging for bones behind his parents’ house:

“I was convinced there were dinosaurs buried in my backyard”

When he wasn’t digging for T-rex, Dvorak was always drawing. Even at an early age, his grandmother encouraged his artistic habits, enrolling him in figure drawing classes in the Hollywood Hills:

“It was all adults and I was just this little kid”

It wasn’t until junior college, at the suggestion of an instructor, that Dvorak began to consider pursuing a career based on his artistic talents. He considered design, but ultimately studied illustration, in which he saw more opportunity for creativity.

“Growing up, the idea of making pictures that would be in books or on an album cover--that was just the coolest thing imaginable. And I still like the idea of having my drawings and ideas published, and being accessible to lots of folks, as opposed to the handful of people who may go into a gallery and see my work.”

Meanwhile, bones - prehistoric and otherwise - continued to be a source of inspiration, in addition to the sexual surrealism of Hans Bellmer, the figurative drawings of R. B. Kitaj, and the corporal explorations of Kiki Smith. Although he works in a number of mediums, Dvorak considers himself primarily a draftsman of the human form.

“It seems like a simple thing--drawing the nude--and in a way it is. But to do it well is really very challenging, in a Zen sort of way: being in the moment, being aware, being patient. There's something so pure and sensual about it--nothing can be faked. I like that about it.”

In addition to his striking nudes and compositions of layered forms, Dvorak’s work includes abstract pieces that have organic, if not recognizable, shapes. They are often appear as delicate as the paper they are drawn on:

“I love doing abstract work because it just becomes about shape – shape, color line without being any object, it’s just pure drawing in a way. […] Just drawing a shape for the sake of itself or a nice line for the sake of itself. But being inspired maybe by something that you’re looking at.”

Many of his pastel and charcoal compositions explore intersections: between animal and human, beauty and the grotesque, and male and female. In a recent series, MexiCali, Dvorak conceptualizes another intersection- that of border towns:

“I don't think things are as black-and-white as some people would like, and the idea of creating images which try to break or blur some boundaries seems like a good one.”

In the last year or so, Dvorak has been exploring photo collages, assembling familiar subjects (bones, flowers, body parts) into bold compositions:

“I like chance and randomness and it’s a nice way to get images that you wouldn’t have gotten just by thinking of something and drawing it”

That quality of chance, rather than premeditation, defines the artistic process for Dvorak:

“Making 'art', at least for me, is more about the process--not knowing how it will turn out, experimenting.”

See more of Dvorak’s work during weekend two of San Francisco’s Open Studios, October 10-12.