Tere Diaz on Hispanic/Latino artists

Read a terrific interview at authentic art visions.

Go to this DC opening on Wednesday!

Gallery 101 over at Georgetown University has a must see show opening tomorrow with an opening reception on October 15 from 5:30-7PM.

It is Introspection, animated portraits by Scott Hutchison.

Hutchison has been working for years now in his animated portraiture, where he combines portrait painting and traditional animation techniques with digital capture and editing tools. Essentially Scott analyzes facial expressions and then paints each moment of the expression frame by frame.

Yep... each frame of his videos is an original painting. Then these hundreds of small individual portraits become the cels for looped animations that truly open up the personality of the sitter.

This is the sort of innovative work that for years now has been building the bridge between traditional painting and video, and which in most other cities would have already come up to the attention of local museum curators.

If you want to see something truly different and new, check out Hutchison over at Georgetown.

Gallery 101 is located in the Walsh building of the University, between N and Prospect Streets in Georgetown. The show runs through December 5, 2008.

"Overlap" 100 5"x7" paintings on paper and video by Scott Hutchison

Tim Tate opens in London


At London's Steps Gallery with a public openings 17th October - 26th October 2008. You all know what I have been preaching about Tate for years...

Mellema on Glass and Photos

Kevin Mellema over at the Falls Church News Press reviews the current three person show at Maurine Littleton and also Frank Day at Addison Ripley Fine Art.

Read the reviews here.

Tim Tate opens in LA today

Tim Tate: A Look Into a Video Mind opens at Billy Shire Fine Arts with an opening reception on Saturday, October 11th, from 7-10 pm.

This will be Tate's solo debut in Los Angeles. You can see some of the videos online here.

Lecturing today

As I noted before, last week I juried the current show at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop in DC, where I looked at about 100 works of art and selected 35 for exhibition and handed out six awards (three honorable mentions).

The opening is today, Saturday, Oct. 11 from 5-7PM.

I'll be there giving out the awards and also doing a talk with tips to artists on how to improve their chances of getting accepted into juried competitions. The opening and my talk is free and open to the public, so come by and say hi.

The Capitol Hill Arts Workshop is located at 545 7th Street, S.E. Washington DC, 20003 (the corner of 7th and G Streets, SE). If you take the Metro, they are two blocks south of the Eastern Market metro plaza, which is on the orange and blue lines. After exiting the metro stop, walk down 7th Street (there’s a CVS on the corner) two blocks, away from Pennsylvania Ave. The Arts Workshop is located at the corners of 7th and G Streets, SE, entrance on 7th Street.

Driving directions here.

The power of art

Powerful art elicits powerful emotions, and when those emotions are tied to strong political sentiment, it is even more powerful and sometimes dangerous.

Heather Goss over at DCist relates the story of DC area artist Dana Ellyn and what happened when some of her anti Sarah Palin artwork got exposed to political sentiment in a DC area store. Read it here.

Winston Churchill once said that "any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."

Having been both a very dangerous leftwing nut in my young years, and a complacent conservative in my middle years, I am now very happy in my current incarnation as a happy independent, and I am now always puzzled by people who (on both sides of the political spectrum) try to muzzle or interrupt the other side's opinion, such as the idiots in this DCist story or the jerks who crash the other party's convention, or heckle the other politician's rallies, etc.

Nations where only one side of the political spectrum is allowed to express their views are called dictatorships: Cuba, North Korea, China, Iran, etc. and more and more Russia and Venezuela.

Artists: keep painting all the anti-Palin, and anti-McCain, and anti-Obama (is Joe Biden even in the news?) art that you want, for art is a powerful tool of political expression. And never forget that an anti-Castro painting in Cuba gets you 20 years in the Isle of Youth, and you'd probably get whacked in North Korea if you did an anti-Elvis painting there...