African American artist, Cliff Joseph, was the co-founder of the 1960’s Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in New York, an artist’s group involved in creating socially conscious artworks. Joseph’s oil on canvas painting, titled My Country Right or Wrong was created in 1968 at the height of America’s war on Vietnam. The artwork derided the blind patriotism that made the war…
As a teenager in the 1960’s I found out about American artists like George Bellows, Stuart Davis, Robert Minor, Rockwell Kent, Alice Beach Winter, John Sloan, and many others whose works were based on social realism. Reading about these artists and their approach to art had a great impact on my own philosophy regarding the role of artists. I therefore…
In recent years the reach and influence of corporate power in the arts has been steadily growing, and while the super wealthy have always had clout in the art world, we are now looking at a totally different situation. Rather than just providing patronage, corporations are beginning to monopolize and control what was once a public institution… art museums. That…
A series of three bold and brightly colored abstract paintings will go on the auction block at Bonhams, the prestigious London auction house. The three emotive tempera on paper artworks are energetic pieces that many say epitomize the school of abstract action painting. “It’s a painting, not a picture” is an expression often used by circles of modern painters who…
This past April I received an invite to attend an art opening at the Transport Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. The show, titled Mark of the Beast, was scheduled for one night only on April 23rd, 2005, at the small gallery space located in the Factory Place art colony. Graphic artist Brandy Flower curated the show, which consisted of recognizable…
Here’s a novel idea… let’s scrape all of the nuclear weapons in the world and turn them into works of art. Artist Tony Price (1937-2000) at least showed us this possibility by starting such an undertaking on a small scale. Price settled in New Mexico in the late 1960’s and discovered the Zia Salvage Yard at the Los Alamos National Laboratory….
April 30th, 2005, marks the 30th anniversary of the US defeat in Vietnam. As a twenty two year old in 1975, I commemorated the end of the war by creating a large oil painting simply titled, Vietnam. The preliminary sketch for that painting is reproduced at left. The Vietnamese peasant woman portrayed in my artwork glances at you with cold…
I did this small oil sketch on canvas after witnessing the Los Angeles Rodney King riots of April 29th, 1992. Titled Lost Angeles, the canvas is part of a series of paintings memorializing the violence that swept across my city. When people heard the LAPD officers who had nearly beat King to death were found “not guilty” the city went…
