Arthur Bloomfield

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  print July 1962

  Arthur Okamura

  Watch out! Arthur Okamura is going through an exceptionally productive period, and this always intriguing artist is marching ahead toward greater heights. He certainly reaches them in Towards Olema, a large picture which puts Okamura closer than ever to the deep, sweeping brand of landscape for which Walter Snelgrove is especially well-known. Okamura, of course, is interested in a more refined, less immediate approach, but the strong horizontals, diagonals, and darkly romantic spaciousness provide points in common.

  The Feingarten show also reveals a renewed interest in the figure, witness the

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  print July 1962

  James Strombotne

  The paintings of this show are quite wild and entertaining, if not what you could call first rate in visual interest. The southern California artist’s bronzes are another story—and one of more quality. Here the stark, clever and macabre give way to something simple and strong. Strombotne catches his figures in tensed, body-glorifying positions, ready to spring or fight their way out of a motionless state. The paintings stress the satirical and the horrific: they are not so much aesthetically satisfying as conversation pieces. I certainly wouldn’t want to condemn pictures like Search for Unamericans

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  print July 1962

  Nell Sinton and Melvin Moss

  Linger over these Sintons: there’s a great deal going on in them, and they add up to wonderfully productive gardens of flowering color. For me, paintings like Lake Tahoe and Green House are more successful than Victorian Interior, possibly because of their intriguing central lighting and the thrust—easy-going but assertive—of the many snatches of design which form the whole.

  Moss’ sculpture is uneven. When there’s breadth to his work, witness that grand orange “propeller,” or wit, as in Don Quixote, with its face out of The Wind in the Willows, or plaintiveness, demonstrated by a cow sticking

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  print July 1962

  Jan Hillcourt

  It’s sad to see Jan Hillcourt, one of the better painters on the low-budget commercial circuit, overpowered by such clichés of that circuit as city rooftops and nests of sails. The urge to rigid blocking of composition might have been considerably repressed. In any case, there was one bit of salvage: a lovely little picture called Coastline.

  —Arthur Bloomfield

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  print July 1962

  Charles Safford

  Safford certainly knows how to turn out Abstract Expressionistic paintings which are beautifully colored, well organized and good to look at. But a lack of inner excitement keeps them in the class of the glorified exercise. They miss the buoyancy, vibrancy, and grandness of statement one expects.

  —Arthur Bloomfield

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  print July 1962

  John Ramley

  This is the fun show of the month, at least on this reviewer’s beat. An initial “So what” to the bright colors and the general air of primitivism gives way to appreciation for the visual punning—not in a class with Roy DeForest but there nevertheless and worth investigating. This is contrived innocence and irreverence involving witch doctors, native girls and Lord knows what all. Ramley should bear watching.

  —Arthur Bloomfield

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  print July 1962

  David Atkisson Walker

  Big, dynamic, strong-angled, squiggly, close ups of the Midwestern farm scene. This is a fresh view, and a virtuoso talent.

  —Arthur Bloomfield

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  print July 1962

  Keith Boyle

  A sensitive artist, at his best here in delicate, quietly whimsical drawings, and less good in some paintings which have taste and promise but don’t always jell into very decisive aesthetic experiences. One’s eager to see the next Boyle show.

  —Arthur Bloomfield

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  print July 1962

  Gary Woo

  Elegant, highly attractive paintings with much subtle motion in their handling of negative space, and beautiful modulations of close color harmonies.

  —Arthur Bloomfield

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  print July 1962

  Lorena Dreyer

  This reviewer cannot muster any enthusiasm for these neat, dry, vaguely Surrealistic pictures which don’t come to a point of aesthetic focus, a point of communication.

  —Arthur Bloomfield

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  print June 1962

  “San Francisco Art Institute Art Bank Show”

  The total effect of this non-juried show was disappointing. But very likely your reviewer had the misconception that a giant wing-full of local contemporary art has to be a blockbuster, a real index of what’s going on in the area. In the large gallery we saw some excitement—paintings by Fred Reichman, Art Holman, Joel Barletta, Louis and Lundy Siegriest, Joseph Romano, Bruce Conner, John Saccaro—but elsewhere there were more yards of mediocrity than we like to think about. The Art Bank’s capital might well be bolstered: some of the bay area’s best don’t choose to join the institute and some of

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  print June 1962

  “Rose Rabow Gallery Group”

  An April visit to Rose Rabow’s Russian Hill living room. Fred Reichman: a wintry, low-keyed portrait of a tree, with a characteristic activation of negative space into something very positive. Also a mouse and branch painting in the inimitable Reichman cocoa. Julius Wasserstein: now to be with Dilexi, showing an action painting with a vigorous, semi-calligraphic whoosh which wants to expand beyond the limits of the frame. A long, thin hunk of color and movement—to that Procrustean frame. Just when Gordon Onslow-Ford seems to have caught himself in the web of his circles, lines and dots, and