seedbank

If you get the values, you’ve got the painting. It doesn’t matter what the value of something is, as long as it is right in relationship to the value next to it. (Brian Simmons)

Wild Purse, 2010. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30.

June 4/5 and June 11/12, Saturday and Sunday
11:00 a.m. — 6:00 p.m.

Jack London Square Pavilion (formerly Barnes & Noble)
98 Broadway at Embarcadero
Oakland CA 94607

See a preview  of my work here.

Readymades as objects and as ideas.

Dieter Daniels, “Marcel Duchamp: The Most Influential Artist of the 20th Century?”  In Marcel Duchamp.  (Ostfekldern-Ruit, Germany: 2002.)

Two ways to recycle:

Domes covered in car roofs. Drop City commune, Colorado. Circa 1965, .

Panhandle Bandshell covered in car hoods. San Francisco, 2007. By CMG Landscape Architecture.

In honor of CMG’s talk at USF last night.

Drop City commune dwellers scavenged car roofs from junkyards to enclose their dome structures.  CMG did a similar, though more slick, version of recycling 40 years later.

Sunlight is Part of Nature Too (The Nomad Series), 2011.

Getting ready for East Bay Open Studios!
June 4-5 and 11-12, Saturday and Sunday from 11 a. to 6 pm.
I’ll be showing paintings at the Jack London Square Pavilion, 98 Broaday at Embarcadero (the old Barnes and Noble building), in Oakland.
More info as the show approaches.

See more of my work on my Painting page.

Daivd Lews, Save the Bay:
“…Undeveloped parcels at sea level [are] the most dangerous, highest-risk, costliest places to build…”

SPUR and the Bay Citizen have posted an edited video of the recent debate between Peter Calthorpe and David Lewis over the Saltworks development proposal, so you can get a taste of the arguments on each side.

I have no objection to Calthorpe’s basic tenets that we must provide more housing in the Bay Area, that infill housing alone can’t meet our needs, and that privately-financed development is the only feasible way to fund housing and the associated infrastructure.

But.

When for-profit development interests use environmental arguments to justify projects, we need to look closely at what happens to goals–civic, social, cultural, scientific, ecological–that might be incompatible with profit-making.

Calthorpe made a side remark at the debate (not included in the video) to the effect that, since the Saltworks area has been industrialized for more than a century (he used the word “eons”), it is effectively no longer a part of the “natural” ecosystem of the Bay, and should not be considered for full restoration, as Save the Bay is proposing.

It’s that kind of slippery argument that raises my suspicions.  First, none of the industrial activity on the Bay, or anywhere on the west coast, dates back more than about 160 years—recent in geological or even human history.  But more to the point, we can’t defend the encroachment of development into the Bay simply by saying it’s been that way forever (eons, even.)  Salt ponds are one of the more reversible encroachments into the Bay, certainly moreso than the steel-reinforced concrete foundations of waterfront housing.  We still have the chance to reverse a century and a half of destructive industrial waterfront activity without creating even more invasive development.

Calthorpe argues that the Saltworks development is the only feasible way to pay for levees to protect Redwood City from rising sea levels.  David Lewis counters that wetlands provide natural flood protection and mitigate the need for levees.  The SPUR debate wasn’t the forum to resolve this argument—presumably that’s one of the things the EIR could do.  But I can’t imagine that 12,000 units of housing and associated infrastructure would make the Bay shoreline better protected from sea level rise.  In short, it seems like the end result of the Saltworks development would be a net loss for Bay ecology.  As David Lewis said, developers’ arguments have historically been, “In order to save the Bay, we need to destroy part of it.”  I’m not ready to sign off on that.

At this point, the Saltworks proposal looks like too much development for the site.

If you’ve read this far, read more to learn about Save the Bay’s efforts to oppose the Cargill Saltworks project.

Saltworks, Redwood City

In the recent debate at SPUR, Peter Calthorpe of Calthorpe Associates and David Lewis of Save the Bay argued about the fate of the Saltworks, a 2-square-mile section of salt ponds near Redwood City that has been used for industrial salt mining for over 110 years.  Calthorpe is the chief designer for a proposed development that would put 12,000 units of housing on the site, along with retail, schools, transit facilities, and so on.  Half the site would be preserved as permanent open space, including tidal marsh restoration.  Save the Bay advocates for restoring the entire parcel to tidal marsh.

Calthorpe’s primary arguments were: the jobs/housing imbalance in the Bay Area is creating environmental, economic, and social crises.  More and more workers are commuting farther and farther to get to jobs.  Increased commuting exacerbates greenhouse gas emissions, climate change, and sea level rise.  The Saltworks project would put housing near jobs.  The project would also provide financing for improvements such as levees to protect waterfront areas from sea level rise, and public transit infrastructure to provide alternatives to freeway commuting.

OK.  But why can’t we find a less sensitive site for a major new development?  We’re only now beginning to mitigate over 150 years of industrial impacts on the bay.  My vote at the end of the night: building on the Bay isn’t the solution to our housing crisis.

Join Save the Bay’s efforts to block the Saltworks development.

The Blue Window. Matisse, 1913.

Through Smithson I’ve come back to the English 18th-century picturesque and to the 17th-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain.

Through Diebenkorn, back to Henri Matisse; interior and exterior light portrayed within the same image, and receding space portrayed as a flat surface.

Now, in Matisse’s 1913 painting The Blue Window (at MOMA)…
A Claude Glass (the dark rectangle at middle-right)–a tinted, slightly convex mirror used by artists and tourists in the late 18th century for viewing landscape scenes.  The mirror would reduce the tonal range of the scene and give it a “picturesque” quality, resembling the paintings of Claude Lorrain.

Claude’s scenes of (invented) classical harbors were the favorite paintings of Guy Debord.  Debord and the Situationists embraced Claude and the picturesque as exemplars of landscape infused with imaginative fantasy and powerful sensibility.  The picturesque supported the Situationists’ concept of phsychogeography, a vision of urban landscape infused with experiment, anarchy, and play.  (The Situationist City.  Simon Sadler, MIT Press.)

Smithson revisited the picturesque, especially in his essay ‘Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape’ (1973), as a means of engaging with the conflict and contradiction that are at the core of human relationship to landscape and land.  The picturesque provided a means of exposing the artifice of ‘nature’ as a constructed meaning, and of engaging with the appropriation and displacement inherent in any creative act. (Robert Smithson and the American Landscape.  Ron Graziani, Cambridge University Press.)

In The Blue Window, Matisse recreates a Claude-like sheltered harbor view, with sunlight reflected off the water, receding groupings of trees that frame the scene, and in the foreground, in place mythic figures on a quay, a table with decorative objects in the artist’s studio–all portrayed in a simplified palette like what you might see through a Claude Glass.  Matisse’s forms are brighter, simpler, and flatter than Claude’s.  His mythology doesn’t play on classical narrative.  More than 250 years after Claude, it was the picturesque itself that had become the myth.

As far as what Smithson thought of Matisse, or of Debord…

Very pleased to be included in the Civic Center Art Exhibition at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Building (Berkeley City Hall.)  Two of my paintings, Oakland Museum 1 (shown here) and Oakland Museum 2, will be shown through the end of December 2011.  There will be a reception in May; details to come.  Meanwhile, please stop by if you’re in downtown Berkeley on a weekday!

To find my work in the MLK Building, go to the second floor and turn right toward the Housing Office.  My paintings are on the right, about 15 feet down the hall.

Directions:
Martin Luther King Jr. Building [Map]
2180 Milvia Street, cross street Allston Way, Berkeley
[Adjacent to the Berkeley Y, Berkeley High School, and central post office;
2 blocks from Downtown Berkeley BART]

Hours: 9 to 5 Monday through Friday  [Closed some Fridays for furlough]

The juried show was organized by the Berkeley Art Center, Kala Art Institute, and the City of Berkeley Civic Arts Program.

View from my studio: another painter, actually a paint prepper, scraping old paint off to make way for the new.  The streaks on the image are torrential rain.

I’m not wearing a haz-mat suit and I’m not working outside, but still feel some camaraderie with this loner.