What's new Buenos Aires?

(The line is from this Evita song; you'll see why in a minute... sorta). And thus, I've decided to take the next step with my artwork.

For years and years, after I graduated from the University of Washington School of Art in beautiful Seattle, I painted. Because I was mostly living in Europe at the time (Spain and Scotland, with a long stint in between in Lebanon and postgraduate school in Monterey), my artwork focused on what was around me and I painted.

When I returned to the US for good in 1992, I also abandoned painting and returned to my love for drawing. A couple of thousand drawings later, I am ready to take my drawing to the next level.

In my heart, I am a storyteller. I like to use my drawing to push ideas, historical points, narrative, agendas, questions and even fantasies. My series of "Written on the Body" drawings, such as the one below (that's the piece selected by Mera Rubell for last year's WPA auction at the Katzen Museum), I told stories by figuratively decorating the bodies of people with writing anchored in current events, literature, history, etc.

"Age of Obama - Nobel Peace Prize" Charcoal on Paper. 16x12 inches.
I going to expand on that storytelling driving force and here's how I'm going to do it: I'm going to marry drawing with video imagery.
First there will be baby steps. The initial idea is simple. I am going to do a drawing much like this one below, of the psychopath Che Guevara, sanctified of his sins by an adoring public who has little idea who the man really was.


San Ernesto Guevara de la Serna Lynch, known to most of the world as 'Ché' and to many Cubans as 'El Chacal de La Cabaña'
F. Lennox Campello. Charcoal and Conte on paper. 15 x 10 inches.
In his chest there will be heart much like the Sacred Heart of Jesus from Catholic imagery and tradition. There will be a cutout within this heart, a window into the heart if you will, and visible there, through the hole in his heart, will be a video, playing in a continuous loop showing newsreel video of Guevara reciting a poem, then the video ends with the public firing squad execution of one of the many Cubans that El Chacal de la Cabaña had killed in 1959.

A simple story about an immensely complex man, told in a video drawing.





Muchas gracias to my good friend Tim Tate, video sculptor extraordinaire for giving me the encouragement (and technical acumen) to proceed in this direction.

PS - If you don't get the Buenos Aires banner: Che was Argentinean, not Cuban. Ernesto "Che" Guevara de la Serna Lynch was born on May 14, 1928 in Rosario, Argentina. An Argentine blue blood, Che was the son of Celia de la Serna, member of one of Argentina's high society families. His mother's lineage was of undiluted, pure Spaniard blood, and one of her ancestors was a Spanish viceroy of colonial South America for the crown of Spain. His father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch was the descendant of both Spanish and Irish nobility, and his parents Roberto Guevara Castro and Ana Lynch had been born in California, where their families had migrated from Argentina during the California Gold Rush. Yes, Che had American grandparents.

Ten years of Jessica Dawson

The WaPo's Galleries' critic, Jessica Dawson, has an almost nostalgic article in the Post today as it is her 10th anniversary writing for the paper.

Jessica and I have had a very interesting professional relationship over the years. I first met her when she was a young writer for the City Paper and used to swing by the original Fraser Gallery in Canal Square in Georgetown. Back then there were seven galleries in the square, and the 3rd Friday openings were packed with people. Most of those galleries closed over the years, Fraser relocated to Bethesda, Parish expanded into the Fraser space, MOCA went through the loss of Clark & Hogan and it is still there, as is Alla Rogers and her almost new neighbor Cross MacKenzie.

At one point we were even writing for the same editor, as for a shining short period of time the WaPo had several writers, including Jessica and yours truly, writing online gallery reviews for the brand spanking new washingtonpost.com site. Imagine that! Online art reviews to expand the WaPo's print section's art reviews. Ahhhh... the good ole days.

When she first started writing for the print version of the paper, as she notes, her "prose smacked harsh" and many of us gallerists were left with our mouth open in some of her reviews. One former Dupont Circle area gallerist kicked her out of her gallery and prohibited her from ever returning - they've since made up.

As she notes in today's article, over the years she "wised up and recognized that there are kinder ways of saying "shape up" than likening art to "a dental hygienist scaling your tartar with a metal pick." Ouch! I don't remember that one.

Also over the years I have been an avid follower of her writing, and protested when it was reduced in appearances (she used to write every Thursday). I recall an angry email received from Eugene Robinson, who then used to anchor the Style Section. I had complained to him that Dawson's column had been missing for two weeks. He responded with a terse: "She's gotta go on vacation sometime!" I wrote back in an even terser note saying: "It would be nice if you told us that she'll be back in two weeks, as you do for all other columns!"

Through this blog I've trashed, praised, criticized, admired, hated, defended, attacked and also liked Jessica's writing at different times and on an individual review basis. I've been left astounded, educated, surprised and pleased by what she has written over the years, but I've always read it. "Jessica goes yard!" announced one of my banners; "Jessica off the mark... again" reads another

Ten years is like a 100 years in gallery-years, and the legacy of Washington art galleries to Washington art and artists has been documented in print by Dawson at the Post, and I for one, still look forward to her columns and how they make me react.

Jessica, I look forward to 10 more years of me delivering one-voiced arguing, or yelling at your writing, or admiring your points, or agreeing with your views, or disagreeing with your conclusions, etc., but always reading your words.

Un abrazo sincero.

Opportunity for Photographers

Deadline: December 17, 2010

Call for entries for the Fifth Annual Photography Exhibition at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. Entries must be received by December 17, 2010. The Capitol Hill Arts Workshop is seeking submissions of any and all photographic processes, black and white or color, traditional or alternative, material or digital, time-based, performance based, any work exploring the act of photography. The exhibition will open on January 8, 2011 from 5:00-7:00 p.m. and will run through February 4, 2011. Cash awards will be announced at the opening.

The juror for the exhibition is Bruce McKaig, local artist and art educator. Bruce McKaig chairs the Photography Department at CHAW and teaches at Georgetown University and the Smithsonian Associates. He has exhibited nationally and internationally for over thirty years and every once in a while reviews a DMV show in this blog. For more information about his work, please visit his website here.

HOW: Submit the following:
➢ Three to five jpegs on a CD
➢ Image inventory list specifying title, size, medium, date and price (or insurance value)
➢ Contact info including a mailing address, phone number and email
➢ An entry fee of $25.00 for up to five images, payable to CHAW

WHERE: Please hand deliver or mail these materials to:

CHAW
545 7th Street SE
Washington DC 20003

Jury Duty

At the BlackRock Center for the Arts to select the exhibits for the gallery for September 2011 through August 2012.

More later...

Wanna go to an opening this Friday?

Curated by Zoma Wallace and featuring work by Jamea Richmond Edwards, Kristen Hayes, Amber Robles-Gordon, and Danielle Scruggs, FOCUS GROUP: Four Walls, Four Five Women opens at the DC Arts Center (2438 18th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20009) this Friday with an opening reception from 7-9PM.

Presented by the Black Artists of DC (BADC), this exhibition "seeks to spark a visual discussion between artworks created by black women and a verbal dialogue between those that view and purchase artwork. The topic of discussion is material. What are artists using? What materials do they feel drawn to? How does black femininity affect or reflect itself in the chosen materials, if at all? How does femininity affect the delivery and/or reception of the message?

The voice of each woman in this exhibition is heard primarily in material form. Embracing both visual and verbal discussion, FOCUS GROUP: Four Walls, Four Five Women hopes to determine how effectively unique material languages are deciphered/valued/appreciated/ or acquired by a universal audience and market."

Through January 9, 2011.

Small Works at the Art League

Selected by Emily Conover, who is an adjunct professor of art at the University of Maryland, where she teaches drawing and painting, the Art League's Small Works show, and much like the Target Gallery's 5x5 show reviewed here, proves that if the talent is there, size doesn't really matter in art.

Conover awarded the Eleanor Boudreau Jordan Award to Untitled I a very cool silver gelatin print by Andrew Zimmermann. The Second Place Award went to a superb oil titled Playing with Dandelion by Kim Stenberg. She also passed Honorable Mentions to the entries by Diane Blackwell, Kathy Clowery, Marcia Dale Dullum, Avis Fleming, Janice Sayles, Jean Schwartz and Xiaolei Zhang and from the 530 works of art entered, she accepted 158 for the show.

With prices as low as $35 for an original work of art (check out the images, titles and prices here), this is a terrific show to visit and come away with either an unique art present or a small addition to one's own art collection.

In this show I was once again floored by the technical ability of Wendy Donahoe, whose entry titled Haley is a breath-taking small graphite portrait that jumps out of its tiny environment because of the artistic prowess of Donahoe.

The woman doesn't just draw well, she draws spectacularly well and then she manages to go beyond being simply a talented hand and also manages to cross the line into the realm of solid composition and that psychological "it" that is so hard to capture in a portrait.

Keep your eye on Donahoe and somebody better go buy this drawing now.

The tiny monumentality of Xiaolei Zhang's Single Pear, a gorgeous little oil painting that you can pick up framed for $80, underscores the fact that most good painters know: a tiny, small oil can be just as difficult and challenging to deliver well as a large painting. In fact you can even make the case that it is even harder because of the scale.

Zhang's pear succeeds because Zhang knows how to paint and now the challenge becomes delivering with skill on a small scale. It is a success in this case.

The image here is terrible (it should have been scanned rather than photographed), but I also liked T. Pham's Beach Season Begins, a brilliant little pastel that crams a lot of visual information into one very small piece. Even up close hanging on the wall, it has the feel of a large work, not an easy trick to accomplish in such a small scale.

I also liked U. Dehejia's gorgeous employment of wet on wet watercolors to submit an impressive flash of color in this tiny landscape.

And I have no idea how H. Rodkin's diminutive photograph Mist Of The Potomac manages to come across like a giant Thomas Cole painting, but it does.

The show goes through December 6, 2010.

Chicken Wars

I am surprised to report that Giant's rotisserie chicken is much better tasting than Whole Foods.