Weekend Recap 1.10.10

I spent most of the weekend in a bookbinding workshop at the San Francisco Center for the Book, where I happened to see the next exhibit being installed. Restless Dust: A ghost walk with Darwin features work by artist-in-residence Gail Wight. The exhibit will run through April 17, with an opening reception on January 15, 6-8pm. Here's a little preview:

Leslie Morgan

I first saw some work by Leslie Morgan at Zonal in January and then literally ran into her at the ArtSpan Benefit Auction in March. Now that summer is around the corner, she has a slew of shows on the calendar, so it's time to be introduced.

Some people never forget the things that surrounded them in their youth, but Leslie Morgan can't seem to forget what was absent:

"I grew up in the middle of a really ugly west Texas desert [...] It was brutally hot there and the closest body of water was 600 miles [away] in the Gulf of Mexico. So, I was always obsessed with water."

When something so essential is so exotic, it's probably bound to make an impact. From an early age, water was therapeutic for Morgan, in a literal sense:

"I had asthma and allergies really bad and my mom put me on a swim team when I was eight in order to increase my lung capacity. I was really good at it and I would just kind of space out in the water. I guess it was one of my first forms of meditation"

Morgan was also creatively engaged in her youth, but her experience was dominated more by the people involved, feeding her sense of visual humor:

"My mom was really big on crafts, making stuff [...] She put me in oil painting classes in junior high with the lady who was our local artist/character [...] She had a big piece of property in the middle of town and the trees [were] planted in the shape of Texas, so if you flew over her house you would see Texas. She was kind of eccentric"

Knowing she loved the water, Morgan wanted to be a marine biologist, but she didn't have the grades in science and math. So, pursuing her interest in people, she studied psychology in college. There, she discovered photography, which became a lifelong interest, but, again, there was a strong social element to her practice:

"I went to a liberal arts school that forced us to take an arts class every semester, which I loved, and I got really into photography. I did a lot of black and white photography through college. Even in my twenties I always had a dark room in my apartment and I would go out and do photo shoots with my friends"

Morgan stopped doing photography when going to graduate school in San Diego, and it would be many years before she resumed. Focused on her career, she moved to the Florida Keys, where she was the only female clinical psychologist for a fifty mile radius:

"I answered an ad in the American Psychology Association Monitor. This guy needed a clinical psychologist for his psych ward, a locked psych facility [...] He ended up being one of my best friends"

Over the next ten years, Morgan practiced as a psychologist and enjoyed being surrounded by her beloved H2O. She kept upgrading boats until she was living on a 47 foot motor yacht:

"I got my captain's license and every chance I could get I was out on the water. When I wasn't listening to patients sitting in a chair, I was on my boat - I spearfished, I scuba dived and basically hung out in the water as much as possible"

About six years ago, Morgan moved to the Bay Area to be closer to her brother and adopted niece. It proved to be a bigger change than just zip codes and one that led her to making art:

"I gave myself two years off from psychology [...] and the farther away I got from it, the less I wanted to go back to it. I realized how toxic all those years of listening to pain and suffering had been"

When her brother, who collects art, was preparing his daughter's bedroom, Morgan suggested hanging work by a female artist. He insisted on only hanging original art, and Morgan took on the challenge:

"I painted a picture of Frieda Khalo [...] They were really afraid because they never seen any of my paintings, so they were afraid it would be really bad and what would they say [to me], what would they do with it"

But Morgan's humor prevailed and despite friendly teasing, her painting replaced a piece by an established artist on the wall of the bedroom, instead of assuming the wall of the closet. As aquatic reference go, the floodgates opened:

"I kept painting, I just got into it. Then [my brother] moved to Barcelona and I think that kind of freed me up, too, because my brother had always been an artist and not having to compete with him and not have him show me his San Francisco artist world, I discovered a little bit of it on my own. It gave me freedom to explore."

Meanwhile, Morgan had become involved with a local synchronized swimming team, which became a major source of subject matter. She then began working from older photographs that her mother had taken around the pool, evoking a sense of nostalgia:

"I just think water is so universally human and necessary. And I think we also all carry inside of us the memories of the joy that swimming pool water provided us as kids. That kind of glee, that joy. Nothing changes your state of mind like jumping in a pool of water"

Then things got really... deep. Reviving her interest in photography, Morgan experimented with taking pictures underwater:

"I went out to a pool in Walnut Creek that a friend of a friend's had. I took the dogs and a couple of disposable underwater cameras and got some amazing pictures. [After that,] I bought an underwater camera and I started taking pictures of my team"

By taking her viewers underwater, Morgan gets closer to her own therapeutic relationship with submersion:

"I used to hold my breath and sink to the bottom of the pool and lay there. [I would] look at the sunlight coming in and just kind of trip out on how beautiful the water was. I think that's what I'm trying to convey, especially for my underwater pictures, is that perspective. That sense of ease, that beautifulness that you get to have if you're relaxed in the water"

Dive in to more of Leslie Morgan's work at her open studio this weekend in Hunters Point. She also has upcoming shows at Studio Gallery in May and June and at Frankee Uno in August. She frequently shows at City Art and her work is regularly on display at Zonal, where she will be the featured artist in June.

Katie Gilmartin

I met Katie Gilmartin at a show in December, where I peppered her with questions about how she executed her mixed viscosity and lino-cut prints. Armed with the story of her signature technique, I followed up for the rest of her story.

Always the studious type while growing up in Long Island, Katie Gilmartin's bookish tendencies were matched by her creative pursuits early in school. Indeed, a book-making project assigned by her favorite art teacher foreshadowed a lifelong relationship with books, words and the creative process, but the story would take time to unfold:

"I did actually more art as a kid than I did in my early adult life. Once I went to college I had this crazy idea that I had to get serious and buckle down and dispense with all such frivolousness"

Majoring in English Literature at Oberlin College, Gilmartin now regrets somewhat not getting involved with the reputable art program there. She went on to graduate school at Yale, first for literature and then switching to American Studies

"American studies enabled me to branch out a little bit. Whereas literature is pretty much you're studying texts, American Studies gave room for studying all kinds of things including more pop culture things, including doing oral history interviews, at looking more at art. So I started to get more interested in those things, but still I was on my route to a career"

Gilmartin focused her research on Lesbian History, collecting oral histories of women in the Rocky Mountain region about their experiences in the 1940s-60s. It was in this research that she was introduced to pulp novels and their importance.

"The 40s, the 50s, the 60s really interest me a lot. As a historian, that was the period I studied [...] Really interesting things were going on with gender roles at that time. Gender roles actually got more conservative then they had been in the 20s and 30s. And yet today [...] most people look back at that time and think that that's normal, that that's how gender roles have always been, when in fact that was a certain rather conservative [movement]"

With this polarization of gender roles, Gilmartin also observes a counter-weight in the portrayal of feminine sexuality. Perhaps not by coincidence, Gilmartin sees the roles and portrayals rebalanced in contemporary society: 

"I think there was an incredible power to women's sexuality in that period. I think it was in part because women didn't have access to power in a whole lot of other ways, but it seems like there's a lot of imagery of women from the time, and literature as well, of women using their erotic power - using the power of their bodies - in ways that I'm not sure happens in the same way anymore"

After getting her doctorate, Gilmartin went on to teach Women's Studies, American Studies and Community Studies at UC Santa Cruz for ten years. Although she enjoyed teaching, her academic role was unsatisfying:

"I was miserable! So, I started taking printmaking classes [...] It was kind of a shot in the dark and it ended up really working for me"

First studying with Debora Iyall at InkClan (now SOMArts), Gilmartin was initially attracted to printmaking by the aesthetic of WPA and Soviet-era relief-type posters and prints. However, after living in the cerebral world of academia, the physical application of printmaking was also attractive:

"Part of the reason I was attracted to [printmaking] as well is that it's really a craft. It's not just you and the paint. You learn your equipment and its a very physical medium: you carve your image with your hands"

As Gilmartin became more involved in printmaking, she began using educational skills to teach classes. Compared to the power struggle inherent in academic teaching, Gilmartin took immense satisfaction in teaching printmaking and she continues to teach today: 

"I really enjoy teaching in a context where we're both just there because we want to be [there]. The students are there because they really want to learn, not because they need to please me to get a grade"

Contrasting her happiness making and teaching printmaking with her academic role, Gilmartin's priorities began shifting:

"Part of what I was learning at that point of my life - it took me a long time to learn it, but it was a really big lesson for me - was that I end up happier if I follow what gives me pleasure. Sometimes I can't figure out why, but if it gives me pleasure I try to trust that and follow that."

Extracting herself from academia, however, was a long slow process:

"I gradually had less teaching to do and gradually did more and more printmaking. And then when I started teaching it became clear that between teaching, printmaking and doing my art I could actually make a modest living. And that finally gave me the courage to quit academia, but it took a while"

Despite having leapt from the ivory tower, Gilmartin's core academic interests continue to influence her work in many ways. On an visual level, she looks back to the same time period that she focused her research on:

"I get a lot of my inspiration from historical images, in part because contemporary society's aesthetic around female bodies is so focused on thinness [...] Thirty or forty or fifty years ago, there was much more of a celebration of a variety of women's bodies, but in particular fuller women's bodies. Which both represents me and also an aesthetic that I enjoy [...] When I was looking for images of women that I like to look at, a lot of that brought me back to that era"

Her "Pulps" series not only reflects a genre that she discovered doing her graduate studies, but it also satisfies her affinity for words. But instead of a library, Gilmartin frequents the pulp section of KAYO Books for samples of the over-the-top verbiage that defines the genre:

"I really enjoy working with words [...] The way I usually work is I come up with the text first and then the image kind of comes from that [...] I certainly use bits and pieces of actual pulps. Terms like, 'lusting hunks of women flesh,' I could not have come up with on my own! But a lot of what I actually do is editing them down [...] and really try to refine it down to convey the most impact in the fewest words"

Exploring many of the same gender and sexuality topics of her academic past, Gilmartin is now free to use humor and expression to engage and enlighten her audience:

"I think that there's a way in which poking fun or creating a satire of something helps people see it from a slight distance and maybe be able to laugh at it a little bit"

See Katie Gilmartin's work in "Hot! Hot!! Hot!!! Erotic Art" at the City Art Cooperative Gallery through February, where she will also participate in shows in March and June.

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

Noah Dasho

One of my first fine art purchases was a print by Noah Dasho at the annual Fort Mason Holiday Print Sale. Years later, I met him at the Bay Printmakers Open Studios. We met after work downtown one evening for this Arteaser interview.

Originally from the Bay Area, Noah Dasho began spending his school years in North Carolina with his mother. They lived near a wildlife refuge, which fed Dasho's early interest in birds: 

"When I was probably six years old I wanted to be an ornithologist [...] I had every bird book there was [...] Roger Tory Peterson was someone that made field guides and he painted every single bird there was, and John James Audubon as well, the naturalist. I would just look at the way that they could draw every bird under the sun"

These detailed bird drawings were more akin to Dasho's own creative pursuits, despite his father's preference for practicing music:

"My dad was a musician and he always wanted me to play an instrument, and I just never took up any instruments, but I've drawn since I was little and I guess always kind of considered myself an artist from a young age" 

Dasho continued art into high school, where he was first exposed to printmaking. These early attempts, however, were not encouraging:

"I did a couple lino-cuts in high school art class and absolutely hated them. I just couldn't get what I wanted. [...] I just remember trying to rub a linoleum block with a wooden spoon in high school and being incredibly frustrated [laughing]" 

Dasho returned to the Bay Area for college at UCSC, where he ultimately majored in Art and Economics:

"I've  always done art, but didn't think I would study that in college. I started trying to take art classes and couldn't get into any unless I had that major. Then I [thought], 'I can do two majors in four years.' So, I did it"

Despite his earlier frustrations in the medium, Dasho found himself back in a printmaking class in college. This time, however, he connected with the technique:

"In college I had no interest in photography, so I took the printmaking course because it fulfilled the same elective. Once I started doing it, I just fell in love with it [...] I love detail and I love line. Printmaking just gave a line that I had never seen before, especially etchings"

The process and precision work of printmaking appeals to Dasho. He enjoys a high level of detail and the patterns it can create:

"Whether it was feathers on a bird, I used to meticulously draw every feather - it was sort of the pattern. And lately I've been doing scales on fish and sort of the patterning of those and different things in urban landscapes. I'm really drawn to those kind of details"

Extending the notion of patterns beyond the image, Dasho is interested in the reproduced nature of the print itself. He reflects this by replicating images within a composition:

"Everything starts with line. I'm incredibly interested in pattern as well. Within that I really like that there's a sort of a nod to the fact that you're creating multiples and I like to do small groupings of things [...] like little flocks of birds"

Dasho doesn't confuse detail with realism. Replication is just one of his stylistic traits:

"I like to kind of flatten shapes a little bit and kind of change the perspective in a lot of my prints. I want do something a little bit beyond just straight photographic [images]"

His early stylistic influences came from traditional printmaking artists:

"I think the reason that I got into printmaking was definitely Japanese woodblock artists [...]  it's the composition, the flattening, the styling, and the colors, sort of the scale [...] I love the big sky and the intricate, yet stylized detail"

Dasho has branched out and now takes inspiration from urban graffiti artists like Barry McGee, Andrew Schoultz, and Evan Hecox:

"Currently, I'm extremely into urban art, and I'm into people who have strong line, strong pattern [...] and also their use of color and imagery"

The defiant nature of urban artist is exciting for Dasho, but he is challenged to reconcile his passion for traditional printmaking: 

"I kind of want to get out of that [traditional] box a little bit, but there's something so beautiful and contained that draws you in about printmaking. It's not really something you view from a distance, it's something that you walk up to and inspect, at least for me, and I hope that my audience has that same relationship with it, that they can go in and see the craft and the detail"

Noah will be participating in the Fort Mason Annual Print Sale from December 5-7. He also has a few works on display at the Falkirk Cultural Center through the end of the year.

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.

Mike Kimball

I visited Mike Kimball in his studio at the SOMA Artists Studios. In addition to participating in open studios with the Bay Printmakers and at his SOMA studio, Kimball sits on the ArtSpan board which oversees SF Open Studios. Kimball is also an organizer behind SOMA Open Studios, which promotes the arts community and consciousness of the SOMA district.

Toy trains have been a favorite of many children, but growing up in New Mexico, Mike Kimball had close encounters with the real thing. In those early germinations of a life long interest in industry, Kimball’s talents as an artist manifested in drawings of trains:

“When I was maybe three or four, we lived in a city that was part of [the] freight area for the Santa Fe railroad that ran through that area […] when I was really young, I used to draw a lot of trains […] they’re just little kid drawing, but even then […] you can see the beginning of putting stuff in perspective” 

Supported by his parents from a young age, Kimball received art training early:

“When I was in grade school and high school, my parents - they noticed that I had drawing skills - so they were really good about letting me take art classes and painting classes” 

After high school, he attended a vocational art program in Denver, but ultimately dropped out of an undergraduate program at UNM to pursue a career in illustration and graphic design:

“I picked up this pretty sweet job [at a] newspaper where I was doing illustration, like editorial illustration, and graphic design […] so I never finished [my degree]” 

Eventually, Kimball moved out to San Francisco in the hopes of finding broader options as a graphic artist. The move would also prove to feed his interest in the visual landscape of cities and industry:

“I’ve always been fascinated with cities […] When I was driving out here [...] I came through the Caldecott Tunnel […] and laid out before you is all that: the port, and farther away is the city on the horizon […] It definitely made an impression on me” 

After twenty years in the graphic design field, Kimball began taking painting and printmaking classes part-time. But the journey back to fine arts was not without its artistic baggage:

“I had in my mind that I should disassociate anything that was graphic design influenced from what I was trying to paint, so for a while I was trying to paint very realistic […] I was even approaching printmaking the same way […] thinking, ‘How would Rembrandt make a print? I need to be like Rembrandt.’ […] I studied quite a bit of art history so I had in my mind all these precedents” 

An instructor at CCSF, Glen Moriwaki, pressed him to embrace his graphic instincts:

“I was trying these different things, trying something that was more loose and brush stroke and trying to figure out ‘what is it to be an artist’ [… He asked], ‘Why are you running away from what you are naturally inclined to do?’[…] That has always stuck with me” 

Kimball has since completed his degree at CCAC, left his position as Art Director for the San Francisco Business Times, and continues to work as an artist and freelance graphic designer. In serigraph, Kimball has found a medium that connects his fine art with his graphic arts heritage:

“It’s very similar as far as the way you produce a graphic design and a screen-print and it lends itself to very graphic images, so I’m starting to feel very comfortable in it”

In his serigraph series, “Cargo”, completed while on an artistic residency in Belgium in 2005, Kimball pushed the medium, as well as his artistic tendencies:

“I want to try and make these very geometric compositions so I’m dropping out a lot of detail, but I’m so tempted from history to paint in every little bolt” 

But he has not completely abandoned realism, taking inspiration from precisionist painter, Charles Sheeler, and local photorealist painter, Robert Bechtle. Instead, Kimball navigates between the abstraction of graphic arts and his realist influences:

“The thing I liked about [the ‘Cargo’ series] is that a lot of times when people see them […] they’re thinking that red has nothing to do with the port […] But if you went to the port you’d see all those colors” 

That first-hand observation of modern industrial landscapes has marked Kimball’s work from his early drawings of trains and continues to inspire new subjects for exploration:

“I think a lot of my art kind of glamorizes the skyscraper, but I also like to look [at] what it looks like where trailers are parked under an overpass […] there’s plenty of places in the city, but its more gritty and it’s more industrial. It’s not the perfect, pristine skyscraper buildings that you see in the Financial District” 

See more of Mike Kimball’s work at Open Studios, from October 24-26. Along with fellow Bay Printmaker, Javier Chalini, Kimball also has works on display at the Falkirk Cultural Center through the end of the year. 

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.