Our Day in the O.C. Part 1

When we learned Max's birthday was Monday, we asked him to join us on a very full day of exploring Orange County. He was IN!

After coffee and croissants, we headed to a first for all of us, the Orange County Museum of Art. Since its founding, OCMA has been a leader in presenting and preserving the art of our time. When thirteen visionary women came together in 1962 to open the museum, they shared a powerful conviction that Orange County needed a venue where important art could be enjoyed. From the seed of that idea, this exceptional museum has evolved into an incredibly impressive destination. And what is extra cool is the fact that admission to OCMA is free, thanks to the generous sponsorship of Lugano Diamonds.

We all loved this A suggested guide for your art experience.

First, take a minute to ground yourself.

Take an inhale, then an exhale.

Consciously relax your body.

Calmly relax your mind.

Then ask yourself the following five questions.

1. What am I observing?

2. Is there anything that seems familiar or reminds me of myself?

3. How do I feel and how would I describe that feeling to someone else?

4. What surprises me?

5. Do I care? (the most interesting of them all)

I wanted to see the newest exhibit: Joan Brown (now to June 2, 2024). "This retrospective is the first in nearly twenty-five years to present the offbeat and enigmatic work of artist, mother, educator, and lifelong San Franciscan Joan Brown (1938-1990). Tracing the arc of her defiantly independent practice, the exhibition unfolds over four galleries, opening with canvases made during her student years at the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute). There, inspired by expressive abstraction, Bay Area Figurative art, and a newfound love of art history, Brown forged a painterly vocabulary that fused energetic, thickly applied paint and everyday subject matter."

With such canvases, Brown's star rose early. She was the first of her San Francisco cohort to achieve national success: by age twenty-two she had New York gallery representation, and a painting acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, with another gracing the cover of Artforum.

This girl was something! "Joan Brown’s work offers some of the finest and most exciting examples of the rich mood (and mode) that has been developing in San Francisco over the past decade. If there is a San Francisco style, a San Francisco attitude, that style and that attitude can be found epitomized in her paintings. That it was not her intelligence that went into the formation of this sensibility is irrelevant; that it was not out of her lifetime that the years of labor and experimentation came is simply her good fortune; what is important, and what is fascinating, is that the product of that intelligence and those labors appears in her work in pristine form. What is important is that what she inherited she did not adulterate, and that what she brings to her inheritance is a strong and considerable talent." Artforum, JUNE 1963, VOL. 1, NO. 12

Only a few years later, unfazed by market pressures or the expectations of her peers, Brown radically changed course, abandoning heavy impasto in favor of a flat, vibrant style that would come to define her iconic works of the late 1960s and 1970s. In graphic patterns and high-key colors, Brown depicted subjects she knew well, often against the backdrop of San Francisco with its distinctive skyline, bay waters, and bridges.

"Her portraits of pets, friends, and family are somehow both familiar and incomparable, while her resplendent, unflinching self-portraits picture the artist swimming, traveling, painting, or surrounded by an ever-expanding symbology that reached its zenith in the 1980s as she pursued a more spiritual, metaphysical path."

In 1973, Brown began renovating her home studio. Unable to paint during this time, she began composing sculptures in her kitchen, using everyday materials around her, such as cardboard, beads, string, and house paint. A resourceful artist who found scrappiness to be a powerful inspiration to her creativity, Brown here used cutout cardboard to render her head and looped a strand of wire to whimsically suggest curling cigarette smoke.

The 1970s saw the era of Swimming, Travel, & Romance for Joan. It was then when she resumed a favorite childhood activity; swimming at Aquatic Park, an open-water cove on San Francisco's north shore. She even began entering races and training with International Swimming Hall of Fame coach Charlie Sava to cut her time. For Brown, swimming not only unlocked the physical advantages of exercise but also gifted invaluable metaphysical benefits, from feeling a loss of ego to experiencing meditative flows that inspired plentiful creative ideas. Brown produced numerous swimming-related works.

One really does need to read the information accompanying paintings. The Weight Room at the Dolphin Club surprised me. Brown would regularly visit the Dolphin Club, one of San Francisco's open water swimming clubs, as a guest of its president Gordon Cook, to whom she was married from 1968 to 1976. However, none of the swimming clubs in the city permitted women as members. In 1974, Brown and five other women sued the Dolphin Club and two additional local clubs to challenge this policy, winning their case in 1976. Painted during that legal battle, this canvas is nearly void of any figure, save for one of Brown's legs seen as though she is walking out of the club's distinctive weight room. Interesting. It says so much about who she was.

This work and two subsequent paintings (one of her at her desk, below) were a means of coming to terms with a particularly traumatic swim, or, as Brown put it, attempting "to get this damn thing out of my system." During the all-women's swim from Alcatraz Island to Aquatic Park in which she participated in 1975, a freighter unexpectedly passed by, causing dramatic eddies and thirteen-foot waves. Brown lost her bearings, becoming hypothermic, and was one of several swimmers who had to be pulled from the water. Here the confident figure standing beside a roaring fire strikingly contrasts with the struggling swimmer depicted in the painting above the mantelpiece.

I had to photograph this couple. What you can't see is the fact that they are looking at Portrait of Mike, Joan's fourth husband (and love of her life) with whom she shared her deepening spiritual interests and love of travel. There was just something about this couple, reading about love, that touched me.

This last piece is a sad symbol of the passing of the artist. In early 1990, Joan Brown began working on a 13-foot obelisk in her studio. She had become increasingly interested in Eastern religions- "she was in the realm of the ethereal, creating a vision that came to her while meditating, foretelling of a golden age when all beings would live in harmony."

The obelisk was intended for the Eternal Heritage Museum, in South India, to honor her beloved yogic guru’s birthday. While she was installing it, a concrete turret collapsed on her, killing her instantly, along with two assistants, and destroying the obelisk. She and Mike believed in reincarnation. I loved this quote, regarding this exhibit, "Most artists, even those who were famous while alive, fade into oblivion. And while the work of some of Brown’s contemporaries are currently languishing in a basement somewhere, hers is alive again, here for all of us to enjoy. And to answer question #5 on the above suggested guide, "Yes, I do care!"

While I came to be introduced to Joan Brown, I thoroughly enjoyed the introduction to Jennifer Guidi: And so it is.

"Jennifer’s layered painting practice investigates and generates meditative states of being—spaces in which spiritual, natural, and ethereal boundaries cease to exist. She produces abstract, colorful compositions that build on ancient theories of energy and perception to transport us into heightened states of being." This piece felt like it was buzzing. It was incredible.

"Using a methodical system in which sand is applied directly to the surface of the canvas while wet, Guidi creates a ritualistic, repetitive choreography—one entirely her own. OCMA’s exhibition is the artist’s first US museum solo show."

Each one of her works mesmerizes. The amount of time, and patience, to make this art is mind-blowing! Wow.

"Focusing on the importance of place, especially evident within Guidi’s embrace of the colors of California—the fleeting pink and red of sunrises and sunsets, the hazy light of Los Angeles, the snow-capped mountains seen from a distance from her studio—the exhibition reveals an intricate body of work that operates as its own energy source." Each piece surprised and caused us to pause. The photos do not do it justice.

Start, Start Again explores strategies of renewal, accumulation, and repetition by pairs two works from OCMA’s permanent collection—Charles Long’s participatory installation 100 lbs. of Clay (2001) with Richard Jackson’s 100 Drawings (1978), a series of works on paper.

How very interesting. This is how Long’s 100 lbs. of Clay begins, as a blank slate, if you will. Visitors are then invited to collaboratively shape the work over time.

This contribution just seemed so fitting. I love it.

"In 100 Drawings (1978), each work proposes a concept for a painting action. Across artist Richard Jackson's many iterations, he envisions the use of buckets or fans rather than conventional brushes to apply paint, not only to canvases but also onto floors, furniture, or everyday objects. The series includes both imagined and executed painting ideas in sketch form. Jackson's inspiration for using sketches as an art form stems from his background, melding engineering drafting and hands-on construction experience. As a result, the act of sketching evolves into a daily practice, an intellectual labor, and an exercise in persistence."

Originally created for a university exhibition, Jackson introduced a playful element by grading the drawings, awarding some with A grades and occasionally commenting on others in red pencil. Some he even adorns with gold stars. Funny, playful stuff.

The building, itself, is a masterpiece by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne. Click here to read more. You'll be impressed.

Has there ever been a more truer mug? "Modern Art= I Could Do That + Yeah, But You Didn't"

Lunch was at The Crab Cooker, a Newport Beach staple since 1951. It has been ages since we've been here.

How fun that it was Max's first visit!

What a day and I've only posted the first half!

Oh, here's Max's story. He was our 37-year-old's 3rd and 4th grade teacher. This is a photo of the day he entered our lives (1995). It will be 30 years next year. Wow. We do love our boys' teachers! They helped make them into the men they are today. Wow.

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1 comments:

Erin Marlowe said...: The Crab Cooker was right down the street from where my paternal grandparents lived. I spent my first 30+ years going regularly to Newport Beach. :-); January 29, 2024 at 10:43 AM

HAERR TRIPPIN'

Our Day in the O.C. Part 1

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