Art Walk January

Another second thursday – another art walk downtown. Once again, I drove to Sam’s office to pick her up. I decided to take a new route to try and avoid traffic, which was maybe five miles longer and looped around downtown – but was much quicker. This put me on the 5 south connecting to the 10 west. It was about 5:30 and the sun was setting. The view from that little section of freeway is nice as it is raised up above the city streets and the view of the downtown skyline is clear. Unfortunately my photos are not clear, but you get the idea.

Much more impressive in person.

This art walk was largely even further diminished from that of December. There seemed to be less of a crowd and less art. More galleries were closed and some that were open had nothing changed from last month (including the half-assed show at Bang). The food trucks were out in abundance though. Sam and I split a pomegranate black tea boba drink. Even though the proprietor assured us it was “decaf tea” I didn’t get to sleep that night until 2am the next morning – not good on a Thursday night.

There is a gallery that is on the second floor of a building near the epicenter of the Art Walk. If you’ve gone, you know what gallery I’m talking about. On this Art Walk the space below that gallery (ground floor) was rented out for BlueCanvas.com’s show. The show was actually quite impressive, a mix of traditional art and newer art forms (or just now recognized as art) like tattoo and digital painting.

Here are some impressive pieces from the show:

John Park live painting demo.

Figure based photography prints by Andrea Pun. Reminds me a lot of Brooke Shaden – not sure who came first, but they’ve both exhibited work at/on BlueCanvas.

Tony Hong had a number of lovely intricate ink drawings inspired by trees (both the insides and outsides).

James Paick had some great environmental design digital paintings and was doing a Wacom sponsored demo.

Korin Faught had a few small paintings (or perhaps they were prints). Korin’s work is largely figurative and she uses a lot of symbolism. This is one of those artists that I’m sort of jealous of – as I wish I had the skills to paint the figures I see in my head the way she can and put them in believable environments.

Aron Wiesenfeld, one of the current darlings of the New Brow art scene had a small charcoal piece. I’d actually seen this piece online before as Aron’s shows have been covered in the art press, and his work often finds its way into daily art photo blogs like thisisnthappiness.com (which I subscribe to).

Right next to Aron’s piece was a similarly sized piece by another New Brow darling – Andrew Hem (arguably more popular right now than Aron).

There were several life-size paintings from Lance Richlin in the show including the one above called “actress.” You can’t see from the photo – but the detail work is amazing in Lance’s work. The statuette on the table has tarnish on it that is only visible from about a foot away. Just like a few of the other painters I mentioned earlier in this post (and appeared in the same show), Lance’s work pairs stunning skill in realistic rendering (look at that granite counter top!) with subtle symbolism (note the arm on left with wrist cut, ghost with crown, etc.).

The gallery also had a tattoo parlor doing a live “demo.”

After seeing all the great art that BlueCanvas had on display we headed to the upstairs gallery… where… we found stuff like this:

(sigh)

When we got to the Temple of Visions it was full of new art. Many many Amanda Sage pieces and four or five by James Zar. As we walked to the back of the gallery we passed a man and a woman sitting on the benches. The women looked like she was asleep – but then I noticed her hands were outstretched (on her knees) and open in a meditative posture. THEN I did a double take at the man sitting next to her. I’ll be damned if it didn’t look like Gallagher. I kid you not, after doing a double take on him I noticed he was wearing a coat that literally said “Gallagher” on it, thus leaving no doubt to my previous suspicions. Within five minutes others noticed and started having their pictures taken and I tried to very slyly document the moment. The result was this horrible shot:

Next door at the hive we walked through the Tarot card themed show. Below are some of the pieces (to see mine go to my post from a few days ago) that I liked:

Yoko D’Holbachie was one of the featured artists and had a bunch of these little paintings that look like candy coated Hello Kitty monsters. I think she could take this farther (less cute, more crazy) and go to some really interesting places in the future.

Asia Eng also has a nice style that will be very interesting to watch change and mature over the next few years. She has a way of painting very vibrant abstract paintings that incorporate very intricate details not too far away from realism (like detailed butterfly wings emerging from a sea of swirling colors). Above is a small photo of a large painting of Koi. I’ve always liked Koi, so of course I’m drawn to work like this.

Asia’s paintings were right behind the Tarot table (which was by the door last time).

Sze Jones had a pretty cool alto-relievo sculpture. I didn’t post it, however, because upon investigating her web site I found the above sculpture which is intensely beautiful and much more refined than the piece in the show.