Barbara J Carter

Over the weekend I visited two art fairs in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Art Show, and ArtLA. The two shows were a study in contrasts.

These are fairs that art galleries exhibit in. Like Art Basel Miami Beach, but smaller. Each exhibiting gallery shows selected works by its artists.

Summary: go to the Los Angeles Art Show, and avoid ArtLA. (And Miami has nothing to fear.)

The Los Angeles Art Show

I visited the Los Angeles Art Show on Friday, when crowds were delightfully light. Of the 120-ish galleries exhibiting, some showed very traditional work (realism, landscapes, still-lifes, etc), some showed Impressionist work, and some showed contemporary work. More than a few showed work by dead artists, some of it by the biggest names (Picasso, Chagall, Miro, and Matisse, among others). Some of the work was highly abstract. Some was a little too conceptual for me, but I could still appreciate the skill and craftsmanship. I saw some lovely abstract encaustic work, which I’m always strongly attracted to, as well as layered works in resin, which has a similar effect on me. Lots of Early California work, which is always interesting to see. I even got to see one or two Pointillist works. But of course, I’m always happiest looking at work by living artists, and there was plenty of that too.

Here’s a wall of work by various artists from the George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles:

I particularly liked the freeway piece. Didn’t write down the artist’s name, sorry.

The showstopper for me was an abstract piece by elderly but still living artist Frank Taira, exhibited by the Sullivan-Goss Gallery (Santa Barbara, CA). The painting dates, I believe, from 1960. The complexity of the edges and shapes revealed by the myriad colorful brushstrokes kept me coming back, and finally I requested permission to photograph the piece. It’s about 5 feet wide:

I think you can see why I was so intrigued with this painting, given my penchant for bright colors, pointillism, and abstraction. This painting alone made the trip worth my while.

ArtLA

On Saturday I visited ArtLA. I was very disappointed.

Heavy crowds of twig-thin Hollywood-wannabees clogged the narrow aisles and obscured the art from those of us trying to look at the work. Loud noises were blasting through the echoing space, no doubt someone’s idea of an atmospheric soundscape, but it unfortunately sounded like an athsmatic wheezing into a microphone. I persevered. I was there to see the art, not “see and be seen”.

Unfortunately my perseverance was not paid off. Most of the art on display was very low-skill stuff. It looked like a bunch of last minute late-night art school projects. I’m sure it was meant to be highly conceptual, but mostly it came off as excruciatingly self-absorbed and/or very poorly executed. (Do I care which U.S. states some art-school graduate traveled to in the last 3 years? Are badly drawn cartoons of the presidential candidates necessary? Are goofy masks placed on the seats of childrens’ bicycles really that meaningful?)

One exception, and it really stood out for me, was Jonathon Runcio’s sculptural work exhibited by a San Francisco gallery called Ratio 3. This work really belonged over at the other show. It was well executed, balanced, intriguing, and an unusual use of materials. Oh, and colorful too. I always enjoy that.

This photo fails to show the 3-dimensionality of the work and its fascinating light-capturing qualities, but at least you can see the colors. Photo stolen shamelessly from the ArtLA catalog. I couldn’t bring myself to take photos at the actual event.

There’s not a lot of trickery to hanging a painting, but I do have a few tips that I picked up while working in an art gallery.

The quick and dirty way to hang a painting is to pound a nail into the wall and just hang the darn thing up! Or even better, reuse an old nail that’s already there.

That works well enough.

But if you want to hang it slightly to the left, or slightly higher, or it’s heavy and you’re worried the nail will fall out, maybe it’s time to get a little more serious about hanging.

First of all, I recommend using special picture-hanging hooks rather than plain nails. These special hooks do a fantastic job and are much less likely to pull out of drywall or plaster than a plain nail. The hook holds the nail at a fixed angle and doesn’t allow it to wriggle or bend. It’s the wriggling and bending that cause nails to fail. These hooks are shown below.

These hooks are made by the “Ook” company, and are available in home-improvement and home decorating stores.

Second, I recommend using two hooks for all but the tiniest paintings. This will keep the painting hanging straight even if it gets slightly brushed or bumped. With only one hook, paintings get skewed very easily. Also, with two hooks, the possibility of one hook failing is less likely (because each is only holding half the weight) and even if one does fail, the other one is your safety backup.

If you insist on using ordinary nails, I recommend that you position at least one of them in a wall stud. Use a stud-finder (available at any hardware or home improvement store) to locate your wall studs, and pick the one that’s closest to where you want the painting. The second nail (you ARE using two nails, right?) doesn’t necessarily have to go into a stud (though that would be great), just position it so that the painting hangs where you want it. The center of the painting will rest exactly halfway between the two nails, assuming you put both nails at the same height. (Below is a detailed description of measuring for precise hanging from two hooks).

Let’s hang that painting precisely where you want it.

First, pick the location for the painting. Make a tiny dot on the wall with a pencil that shows where you want the top center of the painting to be. Measure this carefully, because everything counts on this being accurate. If you can recruit some help, have your assistant hold the painting where you think you want it, so you can step back and view it from all angles to make sure you’re happy with the placement. This is easier than hanging it up and THEN deciding you want to move it.

If you’re only using one hook (tsk), hook the end of a tape measure from the center of the paintings’s hanging wire, hang the full weight of the painting from the tape measure, and measure the distance to the top edge of the painting. Place the hook that distance down from your dot on the wall. Make sure you’ve got the bottom of the hook, the part the wire actually rests in, at the measurement. I’ve nailed more than one hook in with the nail on my mark instead of the bottom of the hook. It’s an easy mistake to make! But if you get it right, when you hang the painting the dot on the wall should be exactly at the top edge of the painting as you intended. (If you’re within 1/4 inch, that’s pretty good.)

If you’re convinced that two hooks is preferable (yay!), the measurement becomes slightly more complicated, so bear with me.

First you have to decide how far apart you want the hooks. I’d put them about 1/2 to 1/3 of the picture’s width apart. So, for a 24-inch-wide painting, put the hooks 8-12 inches apart. To make sure, look at the wire on the back of the painting. Depending on how it’s wired, you might be constrained in how far apart the hooks can be. If the wire is only 12 inches long due to the construction of the painting and its frame, you’d better keep the hooks no more than 6 inches apart.

Now that you’ve chosen a reasonable spacing for the hooks, measure that out on the wall, centered on your dot. You need to put two more dots at the same height as your original dot, each half the hook spacing from the center dot. You can erase the center dot now. You’re left with 2 dots, spaced the same distance apart that you want the hooks to be. But they’re at the level where the top of the painting is supposed to be. Now comes the hard part.

Use your tape measure to figure out where the hooks will land on the wire on the painting, e.g., 12 inches apart or whatever your spacing is. Hold up the painting with one finger on the wire at one hook’s location and with the end of a tape measure at the other hook’s location. You want your finger and the tape measure to hold the full weight of the painting, because the wire stretches a little when it’s hanging. Measure the distance to the top of the painting (or the frame) for the one hook. Now transfer that distance down from both dots on the wall. Those are where the bottoms of the two hooks should be when you nail the hooks into the wall.

Hang the painting on the hooks. If you can only get it on one hook, don’t worry. Just scootch the painting, still on the one hook, all the way toward the other hook. That should free up more wire and give you enough slack to reach behind the painting and pull the wire over the other hook. Once you’ve got both hooks on the wire, slide the painting back to the correct location to straighten it. After you’ve done this maneuver once or twice, it becomes second nature.

If the painting is slightly tilted, you’ll need to slide it slightly to the left or right to get it to straighten. Once you think you’ve got it centered, knock it slightly to make sure it’s stable. If it tilts when bumped, it’s not quite perfectly centered. Once you’ve got it centered, slight bumps won’t knock it out of alignment. Cool, eh?

Check how close you came to your target marks on the wall. If you’re within 1/4 inch, you did really well!

If you’re not happy with where the painting is hanging, figure out how far up or down (or left or right) you want the painting to move from where it’s hanging right now. Then take down the painting and move both hooks by that amount. You want it higher by an inch? Just move both hooks up one inch, and you’ll be fine. The easiest way to remove those specialty picture hooks is to twirl the nail to loosen it from the wall, then pull it out gently. They leave very tiny inconspicuous holes, which is another benefit of using them over regular nails.

Congratulations! You’ve selected some beautiful original art and successfully hung it in your home! Stand back and enjoy it, you’ve earned it.

“November Sun 7″, 2007, 10×8″

I see two worlds of art, but I struggle to describe the difference between the two.

I hate using the word “decorative” to describe the kind of work that so many artists (including myself!) make, art meant to lift the spirit, to be enjoyed in someone’s home on a daily basis. Besides, what do you then call the other stuff? The work that challenges us? It’s not necessarily nice to look at, and not many people want it hanging over the dining table frowning down at them at every meal, but it’s important stuff nonetheless. It’s educational, mind-expanding, and yes, often very uncomfortable.

I’ve always had trouble knowing what to call these two types of art. Pretty and ugly? I’ll confess to using these tags as an internal shorthand, but they are far too simplistic, not to mention fundamentally inaccurate. After all, some work meant for the home isn’t necessarily pretty: it can be soothing, or contemplative, or just plain weird. And while lots of the challenging stuff is ugly, plenty isn’t. Anyway, “ugly” is subjective, not to mention unnecessarily pejorative. So what then? Hard vs easy? Academic vs commercial? Conceptual vs perceptual? None of these is right.

The other day a fellow artist wrote what I thought was a nice description of the two types of art. Here, with permission, I quote:

There are two kinds of art: “cathartic art” and “chi raising art”.

“Cathartic art” addresses the “story”, the political, social, environmental, etc. subject matters. Many purposes are served by cathartic art both for the artist that creates it and the viewing public. Cathartic art can be beautiful or ugly. Art schools and a lot of curators love cathartic art.

“Chi raising art” is beautiful art. It raises the energy of the space and the viewer and makes one feel good to be alive. The heart leaps when in the presence of a truly beautiful piece of art. Beautiful art tends to be vilified in art school as being trite and superficial when, in fact, it touches the soul and is the highest level of art because it shifts the vibrational frequency to a higher plane, away from fear and pain. The buying public, generally, loves chi raising art.

-Charlene Marsh

Now, I don’t personally buy into such notions as “chi” and “vibrational energy”. (It’s the hardnosed scientist in me.) But I still thought this was a very good summation of what, exactly, we artists are trying to do. And by “us” I do mean all of us, both the academics intent on making a statement, and those of us creating beauty to be enjoyed and lived with. There’s room for both kinds.

Everyone is very clear about what kind of music they like, and what they don’t like.

Ask someone what kind of music they like, and they’ll immediately rattle off a list of favorites. Ask what music they hate, and they’ll list their dislikes with no hesitation. There’s no embarrassment about it. Everyone knows it’s okay not to like every kind of music!

Art is like music. There’s a huge variety of art out there. There’s something for everyone. Not everyone will like everything, but that’s okay.

A lot of people seem to be embarrassed when they see art they don’t like. They think “If it’s in a museum or art gallery, it must be good, right? What’s wrong with me if I don’t like it?” I’m here to tell you: there’s nothing wrong with you.

You don’t have to love all kinds of art.

It helps if you can articulate why you like or dislike something, but even the most highly educated connoisseurs have the occasional knee-jerk reaction. We all have our biases. Sometimes you see something and you just LIKE it. Or HATE it. Looking at art, you never know when you’ll have one of those intense, visceral reactions. It’s part of what makes looking at art exciting and fun.

Certainly it’s good to keep an open, inquiring mind when it comes to styles of art that you don’t immediately love at first sight. A little background information can make a huge difference in how you perceive the work. This is especially true for abstract or conceptual art, but it can help even with a seemingly straightforward landscape or still-life.

Just remember that if you really don’t like something, it’s okay. You’re allowed to have art preferences, just like you have musical preferences. The important thing is just going out and looking at some art!