Doug Mc­Clellan

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  print June 1963

  Max Bailey

  Simplified forms evocative of the sea and shore are the ingredients of the recent paintings of this artist who was born in Alaska and reared in Nova Sco­tia. Bailey’s style uses much of the neu­tral shape and surface of the hard-edge painters but at times the restraint will loosen certain areas to gain an infer­ence of nature or will depart from the plane to hint of volume as a dramatic note in the inherent flatness of the pic­ture. Fundy Rock III presents an im­mutable central form, a hard, flatly-painted black shape, and the softened forms around it convey the movements of waves. By using soft

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  print June 1963

  “The Object Maker”

  Collected from south­ern California studios and galleries, this group of over 40 objects makes a re­spectable show, being as it is quite elegantly installed by yards of space. The hit of the show is a magnificent machine Akinomatic Gear Assembly by Lawrence A. Wahlstom, an amateur gadgeteer who has patiently assembled hundreds of gears, cogs, axles and oth­er parts, producing a machine that makes a very complex and enchanting business out of doing absolutely noth­ing but run. Somehow this craftsmanly earnestness mocks the absurdity of the machine age in a more penetrating way than the gag objects

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  print June 1963

  Robert Bosworth

  Large, transparent watercolors that evoke an overall tranquility are the work of this Northwest architect-painter who has found his way toward the Orient through his admiration for Morris Graves. Tech­nically the works are akin to those fun experiments in which the paint, freely used, is allowed to find its own way but these are far removed from the juicy, happy accident approach to the medium. The colors, muted and thin, are unified by a very close value rela­tionship. The finished works are rubbed by hand to produce a silky finish and are framed meticulously, often in a panel series. The

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  print June 1963

  Michael Seuphor

  Little of the formidable talents that make Seuphor a significant critic and poet-philosopher seem to come through in his drawings and collages. He is tasteful and unerring in his control of the linear strata that is the basis of most of the drawings and in such small works as Commencement a genuine excitement is created when the varying horizontals are displaced along the rising diagonal. But when he increases his scope with the inclusion of color or by expanding scale, his inventive capacities seem to wear thin. As an idea the series of related framed panels are a promising extension of an

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  print June 1963

  Group Show

  A mixed show featuring smaller works that combines gallery artists with graphic works by Picasso, Lautrec, Kandinsky, Gauguin, Marini and others. Interesting among the supporting cast are the rather over­powering technical displays in an em­bossed color print by Silva, La Ley des Mas Fuentes’, Erna Bowman’s seri­graph The Earth is Burning, a strong thing but a little too stylish to be a good old-fashioned world-ender, a small but tactiley explosive Lee Hill, and the always fresh ceramic sculptures of Vallien.

  ––Doug Mc­Clellan

   

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  print June 1963

  William Brown

  This figurative painter has fielded an exhibi­tion of consistently good paintings that show his innate sense of the pictorial. Brown finds much relevance in the vision of the early part of the century and makes a use of the Intimist view of the world and the Fauve’s sense of independent color that seems genuinely contemporary. Within the show there are two approaches, that of Brown-small and that of Brown-magnified. In the smaller works the composition is tight with an interlocking of object and space into bite-sized shapes. Only in the larger paintings can the idea of a “back­ground” be sensed.

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  print June 1963

  George Herms

  What is there about a Victorian postcard of two silly women looking beautiful? Is it a gas? Is it proper to look in private shrines containing private jokes and relics and funky memorabilia? If so, is it proper to do so in Pasadena? Does lettering on things make it undemocratic because it excludes non-readers? Does it mean you have a dirty mind if you think the things in an art show might be dirty? Is “melt­ed plastic bottle” a durable art mate­rial? Pure?

  ––Doug Mc­Clellan

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  print June 1963

  Frank Sardisco

  The rich­ness and glow of heavy glazes over elab­orate underpainting are the language of this younger painter. Fresh from a one­-man show at the Pasadena Art Museum, Sardisco expands his material to in­clude many smaller works which add to the sense of range within the style he has chosen. Typical would be Re­flections, a near-monochrome of deep red activated by textural variations that become soft shapes. The value range is close, almost monotonous, so that texture and color subtleties can smolder effectively. But as long as the sense of value and shape must be subordinate to the textural