Blog

New York, East Coast Post

PREFACE

The previous post was written on my phone. Writing on the Iphone is annoying. Trying to write anything that has to have some editing (and the desire to cut and paste) is painful.

PART ONE

I went to the East Coast for about ten days. The main reasons for the trip was to attend the opening of my new works at Plane Space, see the Morandi show at the Met and see my girlfriend, Sarah, who is in D.C., who was going come up to New York in addition to me ending my trip there, but she was recovering from a bug and traveling up to New York seemed difficult—unfortunately by the time I went down to D.C. I had caught something as well.

New York

In addition to my exhibition and Morandi, I had an idea for a some landscape paintings that are going to consist of images from Central Park and the Los Angeles River. Getting the images was very easy as I would go to Morandi then walk down trough the park taking suitable pictures eventually coming out some where and catching a bus or train back to the West Village where I was staying.

I mostly went to museum shows during the entire trip. In New York I went to: Van Gogh at MOMA, Opie at the Guggenheim, the Whitney (Eggleston was being installed), Peyton at the New Museum (I went before Heilmann was up, but I saw it in the O.C.) and of course Morandi three times.

I am going to remove the fence, gazebo and buildings from this one.

On Thursday, I went to Lisa Sandtiz opening. I like this series of work based on her experience in China, where they have cities that produce single products, in this case socks.

PART TWO

The Weekend In DC

The whole reason for going to DC was to see Sarah. We pack a lot into a short amount of time. I took the train down to DC on Friday afternoon to get to DC by Dinner. It left a little late but that was OK. I had to stand until Newark because they over sold the train. I think Amtrak wants to make sure I never have a incident free trip.

Except for the heavy rain on saturday D.C. was great. We went to the see what was happening at G Fine Art, where I had a exhibition a few years ago. As it started to rain we made our way over to the National Gallery. I have never made it through the contemporary section. And while I was told I hadn’t missed much, I still wanted to see it. In addition to the “newer” art, I looked at the Vermeers and their de La Tour, which might be the finest of the Magdalena paintings. We headed over to the Hirschhorn in the now torrential rain. By the time we got there I was soaked through. We quickly walked through, which was at my pace—missed the Sol LeWitt drawing. I understand the importance of the artist’s included, but I don’t necessarily need to spend any time with the work.

PART THREE

Sunday: The Barnes
this is what the Iphone captured in the garden

Sarah and I went to the Barnes in Philadelphia with Tyler Green, from DC, and met up Sarah’s friend and her husband in Philly. Tyler had warned us of the strict policies of the Barnes. They have timed entrances, not eating on the grounds, and no shortage of guards reminding you to stay behind the black lines on the floor. At one point Tyler and I were looking at a painting and I was demonstrating the size of a bail of cotton (over the line) when a guard I had spoken to earlier about why pencils are OK and not potentially exploding pens (it happens apparently) corrected my behavior.

Cezanne is like pizza or sex, even when it is bad it is pretty good. The Barnes has a lot of Cezanne and some very excellent examples. There were too many Renoirs for my liking—181 of them. But the Cezannes, Matisses, Picassos make up for the weaker work.

The next day I flew back to the pleasant weather of Southern California.