The large piece, title Oak, was created specifically for the space. I painted the 8 x 16 foot painting over the course of four weeks. I’ve returned to the them of the Oak tree, and especially the branching of California’s valley oaks, several times in the past and have been interested in capturing the branching patterns in real scale.

Opening Reception

Friday, June 1
5-7pm
14045D Armstrong Woods in Guerneville

Map

The gallery is open on weekend afternoons and will be open on July 4 and by appointment. Contact me for more info at 415.235.4821.

The expanse and care of the Getty exhibits are both phenomenal and the LACMA complex offered a great variety of art-related experience, including a celebration of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, complete with dancers and a haft sin table of symbolic items representing the seven elements of life, which accounted for the unexpected assortment.

There was some contemporary art as well, including Chris Burden’s incredibly popular Metropolis II, which had crowds of families enthralled with it’s noisy excess. There was also a large gallery dedicated to the oversized works of Robert Therrien.  No Title (Blue Plastic Plates) is a ten-foot-tall mixed media work and I caught the gallery attendant in the background of the picture featured here. I showed her the image–she was amused and thanked me.

While South Africa’s history has many parallels to the United States, the differences, including the legacy of apartheid, are astounding and sometimes difficult to process. But from a place where there has been so much recent violence and pain, there is inspiration in the natural beauty of the land and resilience of the people. In addition to the important cultural institutions we visited, the markets of Cape Town are filled with the art of many African peoples and I was struck how they embrace the use of recycled modern materials, transforming them by exploiting their aesthetic and constructive qualities.

When I decided to begin some drawings, cardboard seemed like a natural choice because of it’s abundance and practical beauty. I was also attracted to the idea of constructing a large work out of many small pieces and that I could then pack up and bring home. The series, which began with an image of an African wrestler in an abstracted map-based landscape, continues to evolve as I slowly refine the conceptual use of the cardboard. Each drawing visually links with the next, creating a progression of interconnected of images that has the potential to become a mural of enormous size that may never actually be presented in it’s entirety.

One such company was called “Attingo,” a Web start-up with its eye on the greeting card industry–physical greeting cards you could order online and have mailed to you or directly to the recipient with a hand-written note (as I recall). Embedded above is the entire “sitelet” we created to pitch our services to the prospective client.

Highlights

• The resolution of the presentation is about 620 x 460 pixels. At that time, most people had monitors with 640 x 480 and used Netscape browsers so screen space was limited.
• The home page features an early flash animation. Scrolling text was our “specialty.” I particularly like the copy once the animation finishes: “Brothers, Sisters, Cousins”–huh?
• The code includes no style sheets, has “Navigator” javacript that no longer works and includes over 200 separate HTML pages. I only had to fix a couple of bugs to make it work again.
• There’s a portfolio embedded in the presentation showing Ikonic’s showcase work. The screen shots are 300 x 200 pixels and show the level of sophistication of Web design at the time.
• We didn’t get the account. Attingo did not survive the bust–their time had not come.

Peter Howells Studio @ ActivSpace

Studio #532 (5th floor, NW corner)
3150 18th Street, San Francisco [Map]

For almost a year, the trays sat in my studio–I knew I wanted to do something with them but wasn’t sure what. I had recently begun working with mixed media and using and found images, but the trays represented a unique challenge because of their abstract quality. However I intervened, I didn’t want to overwhelm or hide the beauty of the trays and wanted to transform them in some way that was conceptually and aesthetically meaningful. I began by inserting tiny objects either found from nature or from my studio into the tiny slots, much as larger printer trays for English type are used as curio shadow boxes by hobbyists.

Concerned about the kitschy reference,  I thought about trying to make an arrangement of objects that could define a larger composition, using the holes as picture elements. I tried black and white drawing paper folded and fitted into the slots as “pixels.” Unhappy with the result, next I tried higher quality paper  that could be curled into the slots instead of folded, which created the illusion of tiny colorful discs. Pleased with the direction, I started slicing up old calendars featuring Van Gogh and Gaughin prints into tiny strips. While the use of the paper felt right, the resulting compositions of color-paper strips were either random, non-discript or contrived, consistently overwhelming the trays instead of complementing them.

I had recently been to the Friends of the San Francisco Library’s annual book sale, where I found a selection of incredible atlases for $1 and $2, each with maps that I was attracted to because of their distinctive visual language of lines, colors and typography to represent a particular view of the world. I found a beautiful map of the world’s sea floors from an old Reader’s Digest atlas. The maps in themselves had a strong visual quality with aquamarine blue for the oceans and tans, browns and oranges for the land. As I worked on the first work of what would become the Rearranged World series, I wanted to maintain the beauty of the maps even as I destroyed them. I  found the best way to keep the qualities that attracted me was to organize the strips by color and make simple compositions that could maximize the contrast between the areas, resulting in a minimalist composition of concentric rectangles, with blue in the center, surrounded by a white rectangle to clearly divide the aqua from another, larger tan rectangle.

Pleased with the results of the latest effort, I started another to complement. I didn’t want to merely repeat the same pattern and, as I filled the little slots with curls of paper, recognized that leaving some of the slots empty could also be used as a way of adding contrast and variety to the texture. In the end, I completed three pieces which now work as a set.

In 2008 I participated in an show at the Thoreau Center with an environmental theme called  “The Water Project” and included the three new works. As I struggled with the titles, I began to recognize some of the symbolic qualities of the works, as an expression of humanity’s rearranging of the world and how that impacts everything, including the seas, so I settled on the title Rearrange World: The Seas, with the idea that additional works in the same theme would follow.

I didn’t immediately complete the rest of the Rearranged World type tray pieces by using maps. I struggled to understand what made The Seas work while the earlier pieces using simple colored paper and snippets of calendars had not. It wasn’t the use of maps in particular or the composition of shapes but rather a combination of those elements along with the striking texture created by the curls of paper and the empty slots in relationship with the wood and tiny paper labels of the trays. What I enjoy the most about the works in this series is that they can be perceived differently depending on the distance of the viewer. From farther away, they read as works of minimal abstract and rich texture, but up close, new levels of detail and information emerge.