Art opening at Terrence Rogers Fine Art, Santa Monica, CA

Last Thursday, after a sleepless night of last-minute preparations, I drove down to Santa Monica in a u-haul loaded with five paintings (including one very large one), three watercolours, and two large charcoal drawings. It's been a hectic few weeks of finishing up my work, building frames, and attending to all the details that accompany an opening, but the work is finally on the wall at Terrence Rogers Fine Art. The show is called Equinox and includes my own work alongside paintings by my longtime friend David Molesky.

Equinox opened on the fall equinox, after a torrential thunderstorm that broke a two-year drought, and a day after the Jewish New Year. It marks the end of a cycle of work for me, and otherwise seems a fitting and portentious marker to end an old cycle and welcome in a new one.

My work for the show -- mostly narratives in settings of oceans, wetlands, and other waterways -- comes from a combination of dream imagery and re-imaginings of stories I remember from Genesis. In these works I'm interested in emotions and gestures and in the subtle tensions and interactions that occur between characters; the water itself ranges from oppressive to rejuvenating. Molesky just got back from a year working with the painter Odd Nerdrum, and his paintings, also narratives of a personal nature, have grown more subtle and refined, and have taken on the sunset-palette of the big man.

Here are some pictures from this weekend's opening (some of my paintings can be seen here):


Installing Floodplain. Gallery assistants David and Cathy, with me in the middle.


Nicole and I in front of Encounter in the Garden and Molesky's Landscape with Girl Falling off Bicycle.


Gallery owner Terry Martin with an Oscar winner (for costume design; this is LA after all) in front of my painting New World.


Nicole and Reiner in front of Lady of the Lake, a study for Floodplain.


A happy red dot next to my painting Pelican Flight.

My New Easel

For the last year or so I've gotten by using an old rickety easel, the single-mast triangle profile you might have used in your elementary school art class. It was free but perfectly awful: adjusting the shelf required enormous physical effort, and once adjusted the shelf sagged precariously, leaving me perpetually ill at ease. It was hopeless for larger paintings, so I often worked on the wall, propping paintings on 5-gallon buckets and straining my neck in 180 degrees turns when painting from models.

Good easels are extraordinarily expensive -- and I needed a large good easel, something that would retail for well over $1000. I donate most of my income to my art studio and apartment landlords, so there's never been much left over for equipment like this. I looked in the art supply stores and admired other artist's easels, but made do without.


Last week, as I started work on a big canvas, I decided there is a third option besides doing without an easel and spending a fortune on one. With $50 invested in 2x4's, hinges, and bolts -- and three plus days of work -- I built an enormous, fully-adjustable, wonderful working easel. It's not the prettiest thing in the world, but who needs stained oak when you'll be splashing paint all over it anyway? The mast rises ten feet off the floor and the shelf is over four feet wide, big enough to handle almost any sized painting. It glides around effortlessly on four sturdy wheels, and is heavy enough to stay put where I leave it. It's professional. I love it. I hope to show you some new paintings on it soon.

I'm an art critic :)

I wrote an article that was published in the contemporary art journal White Hot Magazine. The article reviews the Belgian photographer Carl De Keyzer's phohtographs of Siberian prison camps, which is currently on view at the Robert Koch gallery in San Francisco.

Honeur et Patrie

(From last October)

On a rare, sun-filled day this weekend, I went to visit the Palace of the Legion of Honor, one of San Francisco’s three big art museums. The approach to the museum takes you uphill along a driveway that winds its way through a golf course and a park. Through the trees, you first glimpse the sunlit corner of a stone facade, then an old stone railing comes to view, and finally, at the summit of the hill, the San Francisco Bay opens up before you along with the stone columns of the museum’s entrance.

The architecture is rare for the west coast: it’s a formal, old European architecture, an echo of Grecian temples, medieval monasteries, imperial courts, and war memorials. The entrance runs through a double-row of stone columns that leads into a central courtyard, which in turn is surrounded by the three sides of the U-shaped museum. As you walk into the courtyard, you pass Rodin’s solemn and lonely The Thinker , and then see the words “Honeur et Patrie” engraved over the front doors of the museum. These are old words out of place in our modern culture (and our modern war), but I find that I like these words and values of an earlier generation. The Palace of the Legion of Honor is in fact a war memorial, built to commemorate the 3,600 Californian’s who gave their lives in France during World War I.

The museum’s collection is a testament to the achievements of Western culture. Rodin’s marble Severed Head of St. John the Baptist, resting on its side, stares back at me with a beautiful, softly furrowed brow, as if he’s both scared of and honored by his fate. Today I find I love the red officer’s uniform in a Reynolds painting, the red cape of Christ in Rubens' Tribute Money, and the vivid colors and painfully detailed backgrounds in some medieval panel paintings. I haven’t been inside a museum in months, and I’ve missed it. I see an artist new to me, Edward Lear, whose painting Masada fills me with sadness. It’s the fading light on a contested rock in the Middle East, painted in changing tones of orange and red, with the sliver of a blue river behind it. He painted this in 1858, a time of imperial conquests and roaming bedouins, of explorers and expeditions, a time when Honeur et Patrie was in its glorious, furious, murderous heyday. I walk on and see the Norwegian painter J.C. Dahl’s little sketch of the moon rising over pine trees. I am comforted again, because I have seen his vision many times, even if he saw it first two hundred years ago. Down the corridor Monet’s Grand Canal in Venice (and until today I’ve been shamefully bored by Monet) again pulls me back to an earlier time, a time in both my life and in the life of European culture. The old world still exists, even if, like the museum’s architecture, it’s rarely seen. For me, nostalgia for something unknown, or something vaguely remembered, or something heard of from an earlier time, is an essential ingredient to great art.

My New Blog

Dear Reader: It is my intention in this forum to give you irregular updates on my life and work as an artist, to describe my frustrations and victories in the art world, to share musings on art history, to review good and bad exhibitions, and to pass along other pieces of relevant and less relevant information. If you’d like to post comments, for the time being you can leave them at http://michaelrossart.blogspot.com/. So...please return for more in a week or two.

Cheers,

Michael