Twain Harte 091503
Twain Harte- history
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Lloyd, there's an interesting and related angle to what you wrote today -- "But if the example of California is to be any indication (Hawaii is too small and isolated a place to obtain solid generalizations), then I feel the chances are good that, in the not-so-distant future, considerations of one's ethnicity and race won't be an overweening factor in everyday social intercourse." -- in the SF Chronicle: "Diversity flourishes in gay, lesbian couples; In Bay Area, 25% are biracial or inter-ethnic."
...an estimated 25 percent of gay and lesbian couples in the Bay Area are in biracial or inter-ethnic relationships, according to an analysis of Census 2000 data. Comparatively, 7.4 percent of married couples are in similar relationships nationwide, and 15.6 percent of married couples in California are equally diverse.
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Good interview about painting with Gary Stephan by Bradley Rubenstein at artkrush.
GS: Yeah, I'd like to make abstract pictures that go right up to the line, and sometimes fall over into representation. I'd like to load them with as much stuff as I can without having people say, "oh, a dog" or "a golf course." But I'd like to get that level of complexity, that level of world-like material. See, the problem for me with representation is -- I love it's complexity, it's richness -- but I am troubled by the fact that once you read it, essentially all the meanings are collapsed at that moment. Like when you see something in a bedroom, a shaft of light comes in the window and catches a wrinkle on the sheet and for a split second you think there's a toy duck on the bed -- that moment where it's open is great -- it's completely open, then the minute you realize "oh, no, I know what it is" the whole thing collapses. You can never turn it back into a duck, it just won't go, the brain sees that as a mistake. So I'd like to see if I can make abstract pictures that have that kind of openness to them, where you can still find them highly suggestive....
BR: So it can always be a duck...
GS: It can always be a duck, or if you make a duck out of it you know it's your making, not mine, I'm not making pictures of ducks... although oddly people have complained that these pictures fail because they saw something they had imagined and they were so convinced that I had willed it. They didn't realize their responsibility as constructors of the images...
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Also at artkrush...
WRITERS ON ART:
Stations of the Cross:
The Paintings of Barnett Newman
by Erin Hogan
Their linearity can, from afar, be seen as a kind of facility, a technology of the hand that reduces painting—as Newman was accused of doing—to stripe-making. But this iciness is offset by what can look like mistakes. A flock of paint specks in the fourth station, for instance, makes it seem that Newman forgot himself and turned around too quickly with a loaded brush in his hand. And amidst the elegance of his lines, the cleanness of his canvases, Newman’s signature looks completely forlorn, these tired blocky letters shakily spelling out his names, both first and last, "Barnett Newman," as if "Newman" alone couldn’t possibly be enough. Jackson Pollock’s signature, in comparison, is dashed off and in keeping with his loose lines. But in Newman’s emphatic fields, his signature is utterly incongruous. Against what he is doing in these paintings, he has to assert himself the only way he can because his subject is too vast to be human. How hubristic and inconsequential of Newman, really, to even sign these things.
You can contemplate the divinity of what he’s trying to do, you can sit in the midst of all of the paintings and marvel. You can see a developing narrative, if you want. You can shoulder the cross. But the closer you come to them, the more the paintings break down. You see Newman’s signature. You see his unprimed canvases, all full of flaws and knots and knurls. They look so utterly like canvas, like what they are, a substance many of us nonpainters have forgotten about, buried as it usually is under layers and layers of gesso, ground, paint scrapings, varnish. Humility raises its head again here. The nakedness of the canvas makes the paintings seem vulnerable, as if you are looking through them, seeing the back of the stage set where the lighting technicians are ugly. In a curious reversal of the trope of painting-as-window, you see through the paintings not to a world beyond or a world pictured, but to a naked canvas that we regularly overlook. The closer you come to the paintings, the more evidence you see of their making, and the sublime turns to the sympathetic. The physical facts of the paintings hurl you back down to earth. The contradiction between what Newman is claiming to represent and how he does so is astonishing.
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OK, time to get serious about figuring out which presidential candidates are worth following and working for. Right now I don't have a clue. A good place to start is On The Issues. I have tried to swear off voting for Democrats, and want to vote Green. But I've heard both Dean and Kucinich talk and they interest me. I would like to hear Carol Moseley Braun speak. Could I honestly consider Al Sharpton?
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