print October 1989

Patricia Patterson

The easiest thing to like about Patricia Patterson’s paintings is her subjects, but that is not what makes them important. The strength of the work lies in the artist’s sophisticated technique of building space with color, and her rapid, fluid painting style. Until the past year, almost all of Patterson’s work has portrayed a small community of people in the Aran Islands in the north of Ireland. These simple folk are often shown in the kitchen, near the symbolic hearth. In Mary and Jigs, 1988, a woman who looks to be in her late forties sits at a table smoking a cigarette, while her dog stands

print Summer 1989

Raul Guerrero

Until recently, the paintings of Raul Guerrero have been light, whimsical, stagey, and somewhat forgettable. Although they shone with sensuous brilliance, the seemed to lack conviction. The new paintings and drawings demonstrate a marked change. They focus on a segment of the night life of Tijuana; the bars and bordellos from the poor people’s barrios. Guerrero renders his images with a loose, generalized style; the compositions are simple and centrally focused, with uncomplicated action. He employs a fauvist palette, working in flat planes of single hues, rarely mixed. Somehow, Guerrero’s use

print April 1989

Rick Stitch

Without falling into cliché and seemingly without guile, Rick Stich makes Impressionist-inspired paintings—primarily still lifes and landscapes—that are remarkably fresh. Stich prevents the work from becoming mere imitation by using a highly personalized brushstroke and, on occasion, by creating a kind of penetrating perspectival depth. A small tempera-on-silk entitled Reflection: Pond, 1986, seems at first like a too-direct quote from Monet but, on closer examination, the work conveys a welcome tension between pure surface and illusion.

Stich’s paintings tend to be small and intimate, and their

print February 1989

Dan McCleary

Dan McCleary’s recent portrait paintings and pastel drawings share an affinity with works by the old masters. His small oil paintings of Michael Abatemarco, for example, are strongly reminiscent of Renaissance portraiture. McCleary depicts his subject only from the shoulders up, yet reveals much about the person’s character. Abatemarco looks like a boy in late adolescence, with an unlined, almost innocent face that nevertheless is marked by a look of defiance verging on belligerence. In one of the works in this series, the youth’s face is portrayed almost straight on, with just a slight turn to

print January 1989

Eric Snell

The work of Eric Snell, a 35-year-old artist from Guernsey, England, suggests a revival of process art: questions of how the work was made assert themselves throughout the exhibition. All of the pieces are simple in form and often exquisitely rendered. The largest body of work shown here was the burnt-wood drawings. When he arrived in La Jolla a week before the show, Snell spent a day gathering wood and local brush. Using these, he made three large-scale wall installations and several smaller drawings on paper. For each, he burned the wood with a torch, and then used the charred stick as his

print October 1988

Manny Farber

Manny Farber’s paintings haven’t changed much in the past few years, they’ve just gotten better. The works are more subtle, both in color and form; the palette has become richer and the application of the paint more graceful. This exhibition of new works shows Farber making some of his most beautiful paintings in recent years.

Still life is currently Farber’s favored medium, and he has breathed new life into this traditional art form. Each of the pictures, all of which are painted with oil on board, is composed of a scattering of objects laid out on a background of one or more colored panels. In

print Summer 1988

Janis Provisor

Janis Provisor infuses an edgy, nervous quality into her new paintings that counterpoints their seductive beauty. Although these works might be read as lush, elegant abstractions, their imagery recalls thorny landscapes of thick, leafless brambles. With their mixture of oil paint and metal leaf—gold, silver, or copper—Provisor’s paintings bring to mind the memory of Byzantine murals or medieval manuscripts. In contrast to traditional painting’s illusionistic depth and perspective, her images play along the surface, like shimmering reflections on water that remain visually impenetrable. Interspersed

print April 1988

UNDER THE SINGING EUCALYPTUS TREE. . . .

OPTIMALLY, ALL WORKS OF art are experienced repeatedly. In reality, none are seen more frequently than those in the public arena, which are alternately appreciated, disliked, and/or endured by an audience that often is not a voluntary one. The Modern work of art in the street, park, or square is in a sense an oddity, for the esthetic vocabulary it at least attempts to insert into its context may not be familiar to many of its viewers. Outside the protective walls of the artist’s studio, the museum, the gallery, or the collector’s home, art is revealed daily to a large audience that as often as

print April 1988

David Avalos, Louis Hock, and Elizabeth Sisco

“Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation”—this was the slogan that taunted the citizens of San Diego from the rear advertising panel of nearly one-half of the city’s buses during the month of January. It was art with a message inextricably tied to a specific place and time, designed by three local artists: David Avalos, Louis Hock, and Elizabeth Sisco. San Diego is a city with a boosterish attitude, based mostly on the climate and waterfront; it loves to call itself “America’s Finest City.” It is also a city that reportedly relies heavily on illegal immigrants for its support workers,

print February 1988

Steve Ilott and Kenneth Johnston

Sometimes in an exhibition one comes across works by two different artists that, seen together, provide a context for each other that illuminates them both. Such was the case with this two-person show. Although Steve Ilott and Kenneth Johnston did not produce their work collaboratively, in preparing for this exhibition they exchanged ideas at length via the telephone and an extensive correspondence. As a result, Johnston’s quasi-figurative cardboard sculptures and Ilott’s dark abstract paintings complemented each other more profoundly than the work in a typical two-person show.

Ilott’s paintings,

print January 1988

Janet Cooling

“Brave New World” was the title of this exhibition of portraits of women by Janet Cooling. The show concentrated on her recent paintings and drawings, primarily from the past two years, but also included a small selection of paintings from the early '80s. The later works are so superior, both in technical sophistication and approach to subject matter, that it was almost painful to see the early work. Cooling's paintings have evolved from very flat, gaudy images painted on black backgrounds, resembling psychedelic posters from the '60s, into richly textured, painterly portraits that evoke real

print December 1987

Bert Long

The ’50s revival is becoming so ubiquitous that it’s beginning to seem as if the aura of that period has never left. The work of Bert Long, a painter/sculptor who lives and works in the small town of Shepherd, Texas, just outside of Houston, brings this point home. The images in Long’s recent paintings, from 1982 to ’87, demonstrate his continuing affection for the pretentious goofiness of a particular aspect of ’50s art: that whimsical juncture in the devolution of style that saw kitsch transformed into high camp, the Jungian archetype into a cocktail cliché, the Chagall bird into a corporate

Susan Freudenheim