This year’s prestigious Turner Prize for artistic achievement was awarded to Simon Starling, who successfully dismantled a rotten old wood boat shed he found located on a river bank, constructed its pieces into a boat in which he sailed down the river – and then reconstructed the boat back into a shed. Starling, who fancies himself an “Installation artist,” claims…
[ Voices of Justice – Vallen 1989. Chalk pastel. On display at the Brand Gallery. ] Some 200 people turned out for the opening of Conflict: Works on Paper, the thirty-fourth annual juried competition at the Brand Gallery in Glendale, California. I am more than pleased that both of my submitted drawings, Voices of Justice and Not Our Children, Not…
My friend Estaño, an 86 year old veteran of the celebrated Mexican Muralist Movement, is having a one man exhibition at the Adriaan Van Der Plas Gallery in New York City. The show, titled Mexican School of Painting, has apparently been a success for our esteemed veterano – who has so far sold three paintings at the exhibit – and…
When academics start writing about a living artist, you might say that artist has achieved a certain amount of success – or infamy as the case may be. I’ve only just been informed that my work has recently been mentioned in two books I’ve not heard of until now. I received a brief but satisfying mention in American Studies in…
I’ll be showing two drawings at Conflict: Works on Paper, the thirty-fourth annual national exhibition at the Brand Gallery in Glendale, California. In this post I’d like to focus on one of the drawings I’ll be exhibiting, Voices of Justice, a large chalk pastel work commissioned in 1989 by the Guatemalan Information Center (GIC.) The GIC was an organization of…
Turning the Frida Kahlo legacy into a brand name tequila is the final straw when it comes to “Fridamania,” the cult promoted by the unscrupulous that the artist railed against her entire life. Isolda P. Kahlo, the niece of the famed Mexican painter and the founder of “The Frida Kahlo Corporation,” is marketing Frida Kahlo Tequila, claiming the right to…
I created this cartoon of a turkey at his Thanksgiving feast when I was only 17 years old. My pen drawing titled, No Thanks!, served as the cover for the Southern California psychedelic “underground” newspaper, The Tribe. This particular edition of the pre-Watergate paper hit the streets on November 26th, 1971. Its anti-Nixon theme certainly didn’t win me any friends,…
“People are crushed under the wardrobe. Without lifting up the wardrobe it is impossible to deliver whole peoples from their endless and unbearable suffering. It is terrible that even one person should be crushed under such a weight: to want to breathe, and not be able to. The wardrobe rests on everybody, and everyone tries to lift up the wardrobe,…
