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A screenshot of Erica Lee Sears’ Instagram grid

A screenshot of Erica Lee Sears’ Instagram grid

Wishlist Wednesdays

Alex Guajardo March 3, 2021

Is that too cute? “Wishlist Wednesdays”? I was trying to think of something pithy, and catchy, but mainly, “Wishlist Wednesdays” sounded better than, “This-is-what-I’m-totally-obsessed-with-and-dream-about-adding-to-my-collection-all-day-long”. . .

This week: Erica Lee Sears

Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo

Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo

Sears is a painter, to put it as concisely and understatedly as possible. She is a master (that’s not a word I use lightly!) of the quotidian, a master of the banal, of taking midnight trips to McDonald’s and me-time in the bath and late-night snack runs to 7-11, of whipping it up like Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother getting her outfitted for the ball, and making it shine.

Wayne Theibaud, Sandwich, 1963

Wayne Theibaud, Sandwich, 1963

Sears’ style offers a study in texture–her reflective surfaces, are burnished so that you can almost find your face in them–and in light–contrasty and direct, serving to elevate the ring pop, or orange slices with multi-colored seeds, wine glasses, and the invasive cat from next door, to the heroic. Her still lifes conjure whispers of Wayne Thiebaud’s cakes, of his gumball machines, and his sandwiches, which are similarly positioned, alone or in groups on spare backgrounds of gently gradated pastels. I cannot aptly convey her facility for color in words but is simultaneously mindful of its impact, and completely unabashed of its undeniable beauty. It was her use of color that initially drew me to her work. That and her commitment: A. Painting. A. Day. Folks. If that’s not deserving of praise in this very weird moment of “let’s applaud that we got off the couch today,” then I don’t know what is.

I am well and truly enamored of them. Check out her Instagram, follow her for daily doses of deliciousness, and dream about adding them to your collection. Here are some of my favorites.

Erica Lee Sears, Silver, 2020 | Image courtesy of the artist

Erica Lee Sears, Silver, 2020 | Image courtesy of the artist

Erica Lee Sears, Chocolate and Fries, 2021 | Image courtesy of the artist

Erica Lee Sears, Chocolate and Fries, 2021 | Image courtesy of the artist

Erica Lee Sears, Match, 2021 | Image courtesy of the artist

Erica Lee Sears, Match, 2021 | Image courtesy of the artist

Erica Lee Sears, Ringpop, 2020 | Image courtesy of the artist

Erica Lee Sears, Ringpop, 2020 | Image courtesy of the artist

Tags women artists, women painters, Wayne Thiebaud, Cinderella, reflections, art as life
Linda Vallejo, Chiquita, 2014, Acrylic, aluminum sublimation print | Image courtesy of the artist

Linda Vallejo, Chiquita, 2014, Acrylic, aluminum sublimation print | Image courtesy of the artist

Chiquita? Chicana.

Alex Guajardo November 27, 2020

I am the daughter of a Mexican immigrant. I am first generation on his side. I am the first woman from his family to have attended college and finished. I am the first women from his family to have been awarded an MA. All of these firsts aside, my identity growing up never felt particularly chicana. We visited with our family in DF less often than we really should have, spent holidays making tamales and tortillas and tiramisu (believe it or not) with our cousins in the suburbs, but that was largely the extent of my mexicanidad.

“Al”, age 17

“Al”, age 17

My father arrived to the US with his mother, older brother, and younger sister when he was 12, desperately poor, and with no language. His story is not different than those of today’s immigrants–his family sought better circumstances, they sought the ”American Dream”. He taught himself English on the football field where he found his peers more easily overlooked his Mexicanness in favor of his athletic ability. He went by “Al” rather than “Alfonso” because it was easier to pronounce. He stopped speaking Spanish. He assimilated. Years later when his daughters were born, he, like all fathers, wanted to give them the whole world. He wanted them to live lives full of possibility and open doors and yeses rather than nos. He wanted his American-born daughters to live American lives where their heritage was a factor of who they were rather than the fact of who they were.

Andy Warhol, Banana, 1966

Andy Warhol, Banana, 1966

For many years, I was afforded the immense privilege of sameness–I am light-skinned and fine-haired. I never looked for anyone who looked like me because I didn’t look all that different from those around me. It was in my early teens I began to understand my otherness, faintly as it dawned on me, I began to want my background, to seek out my roots. I recognized the impulse so handily captured in Linda Vallejo’s work to turn the whole world brown and make it make sense to me from a Mexican perspective. Make it make sense to everyone else, that without brown, white cannot exist. Linda’s piece, Chiquita, a riff on Andy Warhol’s banana image, is a succinct comment on that desire, and is my pick of the week.

Tags Linda Vallejo, Alphonse, Chicana, Mexicanidad, Mexican artists, women painters, banana

Simone Gad, Black Dragon Society, Acrylic and glitter on canvas, 36 x 30 inches | Image courtesy of the artist

Peanut Butter and Glitter

Alex Guajardo October 6, 2020

The Italians have such wonderful things: La Dolce Vita!, gelato, language that tastes like candy, wines that make EVERYTHING taste like candy, birthplace of the Renaissance, and many, many, many, of art history’s most effusive terms. Everyone learns, in Art History 101, about contrapposto, a positioning of the legs as if one were mid-stride, found in sculpture dating as early as Ancient Greece all the way to modern-day, which serves to both create a dynamism of movement and also as a subtle balancing-tool. Italian can also claim chiaroscuro (a quality of light and dark in paintings), sfumato (a filmy, smoky-like atmosphere in other paintings), and finally, my favorite, impasto. Impasto describes the way that paint is built up, the texture of visible brushstrokes, the physical shape the paint takes as it is layered and scraped and piled onto a canvas. Impasto reminds me of taffy. Of delicate peaks of whipped cream. Of peanut butter plopped onto a piece of bread. Impasto proves that paint is not only a vehicle for imagery, but also a tool to shape that imagery in a tangible, three-dimensional way.

Simone Gad, detail

Simone Gad, detail

Painter cum performance artist cum actor, Simone Gad, understands impasto better than most and spreads layer after layer of acrylic paint (and glitter! Oh my god, glitter!), to give her paintings real heft and depth. The canvases are alive with color and shape that make me want to reach out and stick my hand in it to see what that world might feel like. She captures the kitsch and the neons and the vibrant textures of LA’s Chinatown with vivid and fearless abandon. Simone’s painting, Black Dragon Society, delights me, and it’s my pick of the week.

Tags Simone Gad, impasto, Chinatown, Italian, glitter, contemporary painting, women painters
Strings, 2016, Oil on canvas, 16 x 12 inches | Image courtesy of Victoria Morton and Sadie Coles HQ

Strings, 2016, Oil on canvas, 16 x 12 inches | Image courtesy of Victoria Morton and Sadie Coles HQ

Victoria Morton

Alex Guajardo November 1, 2018
Spoken Yeahs From A Distance, 2016, Oil on canvas, 98 x 86 inches | Image courtesy of Victoria Morton and Sadie Coles HQ

Spoken Yeahs From A Distance, 2016, Oil on canvas, 98 x 86 inches | Image courtesy of Victoria Morton and Sadie Coles HQ

There is something about the tactile surface of a painting that I love. Something so tangible and sexy in the way paint is built up, layered, made to stand out from its surface, as if it cannot be contained within the boundaries of two dimensional space. It feels almost like watching the artist work in front of you, watching them make decisions and marks and erasures, watching their arm arc to create a shape, it is positively intimate. Impasto. Im-PAS-to. Im-pas-TO. IM-pas-to. Even the word feels bouncy, like bubblegum in my mouth, like taffy-pulling, like peaks of whipped cream. That’s what that is called, the paint that has physical shape in which brushstrokes and palette knife scratches are visible. The word “impasto” is derived from the Italian word for “paste”, you get the idea. The Italians got it right. The Italians always get it right.

I think this appreciation has a great deal to do with the fact that I am utterly incapable of putting brush to canvas and creating anything I like more than the blank, unmarked canvas itself. It’s true. I agonize over every brushstroke, dislike every gesture, am intrinsically unsuited to painting a picture. My inability to experiment, to get out of my own way and out of my head has engendered within me an awe of those who are able.

I stumbled–I like the idea of stumbling, I feel like that’s how I learn about a number of artists these days, by forming no set itinerary or intention and just wandering until I literally trip on something that makes me pause–on Victoria Morton’s work at an art fair last year and immediately fell for her brushwork and for the large swaths and washes of rich color laid to suggest volume and shape. Some pictures are geometric, unstudied and unpracticed, others bear faint hints of figures and pointillist dots. I simultaneously admire and envy her ease with a brush.

Check out some of my favorites below, and be sure to visit her Insta for the latest. Victoria Morton is currently represented by Sadie Coles HQ in London.

Memory Boy, 2015, Oil on canvas, 95 x 86 inches | Image courtesy of Victoria Morton and Sadie Coles HQ

Memory Boy, 2015, Oil on canvas, 95 x 86 inches | Image courtesy of Victoria Morton and Sadie Coles HQ


Back Stroke, 2017, Oil on linen, 6 x 8 inches | Image courtesy of Victoria Morton and Sadie Coles HQ

Back Stroke, 2017, Oil on linen, 6 x 8 inches | Image courtesy of Victoria Morton and Sadie Coles HQ

Tags Victoria Morton, women painters, contemporary painting, impasto, taffy, abstraction, pointilism, brushstrokes
Georgia O'Keeffe, Sky Above Clouds IV, 1965 Oil on canvas | Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago

Georgia O'Keeffe, Sky Above Clouds IV, 1965 Oil on canvas | Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago

Georgia Gyllenhaal

Alex Guajardo July 13, 2018

When I picture the American Southwest I envision wide-open expanses of scrub, interrupted occasionally by the odd canyon and accompanying rock formations, cacti and tumbleweed, bleached cow skulls and desert roses. I envision all of the stereotypical desert tropes, Wile E. Coyote hiding under a flat-topped mesa isn’t far off in the background. There are a number of things that have informed my impression of the Southwest–the old Roadrunner cartoons, photographs of my mother’s, taken long before my sister and I were born, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

I discovered Georgia at the Art Institute of Chicago. It truly felt like a discovery to me, because she was displayed above a somewhat forgotten staircase. To find her, one must first pass through many halls of Impressionism where Claude Monet’s world-famous Water Lily paintings live, and through lots of rooms of dusty and tortured European depictions of “Christ on the Cross”; look for the bathrooms and there you’ll find her. Indeed, finding the piece is a journey, arriving at it akin to reaching a far off destination. Statistics say that it would take over 100 days, spending a mere 30 seconds with each artwork on view, to see every single thing at the Louvre in Paris. The Art Institute is a smaller museum, however, you can apply the same basic premise to its collections of work displayed. I had been to the Art Institute a number of times–starting at age eight–before coming across the piece when I was 12, which honestly feels a little unfair to Georgia, who donated it to the museum in 1983. Surely she could not have intended for it to be all but abandoned over a staircase when she gifted the work. Sky Above Clouds IV (1965) sprawls 24 feet wide and hangs 10 feet above your head over a marble staircase deep in the museum’s recesses. Thankfully, the stair has a skylight which lends the enormous canvas a subtle glow, all the same though the magnificent piece feels misplaced in its corner of the massive Art Institute.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Two Calla Lilies on Pink, 1928 Oil on canvas | Image courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art

Georgia O'Keeffe, Two Calla Lilies on Pink, 1928 Oil on canvas | Image courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art

I grew up in a household that emphasized the importance of art in everyday life. Both of my parents were creatives–my mother a commercial interior designer and my father an architect, who turned to artists to inspire their work. I was exposed to every kind of art possible at a young age, and I credit my parents with my love for art today. The feeling of “happening” upon Georgia’s painting in a stairwell is familiar because that is how much of her artwork made me feel; like I’d found something truly mythical, that spoke to my very soul. I understand how ironic that feeling is now, knowing what I do about Georgia’s work, her life, her fame–but as a child, I had no way of understanding that Georgia was not simply painting for me, and for me alone. When I looked at a painting of two calla lilies against a white background I could feel the velvet of their petals and I could smell the green of their stems. This was the first time in my life that I would reconcile a painted picture with my experiences, with my life. When I looked at that painting I was not only seeing the image on the page but also the vase of white calla lilies my mother had kept in her bathroom. For the first time, art was personal.

I’ve lived in New York for a number of years now, as such, I have a number of celebrity sightings under my belt. This is not boastful, it’s honest. Many, many actors call New York home, and many film here constantly. My initial curiosity at a Haddad’s film truck has turned to utter exasperation because they’ve blocked the whole goddamn street and I am stuck behind it in a cab with the meter ticking ever higher, my patience threading ever leaner, and my appointment growing ever more tardy. However, I was recently at a restaurant with a good friend when I noticed that the group sitting at the next table included Jake Gyllenhaal. I am no fan girl, but part of my aching, teenage heart still beats and so when I saw his dreamy blue eyes, I nearly swooned. I was thoroughly starstruck.

Rewind about 20 years to when I first saw Sky Above Clouds IV. Apply the same feeling of breathlessness, of admiration, of disbelief at finding something so extraordinary in a situation as ordinary as attending a museum, and that is exactly how I felt. I’m an art history nerd, I am more commonly starstruck by paintings I have studied extensively and admired from afar than I am by real celebrities. My visit to Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper (1495-1498) in Milan is the same as the next person’s chance encounter with Robert De Niro, or insert-your-favorite-celeb-here.

Georgia O'Keeffe with Sky Above Clouds IV at her 1966 exhibition at Texas' Amon Carter Museum | Image courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago

Georgia O'Keeffe with Sky Above Clouds IV at her 1966 exhibition at Texas' Amon Carter Museum | Image courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago

Take a look at Georgia’s depiction of soaring above the clouds and try to replicate that sensation for yourself. Imagine, next time you are in an airplane, that you are not trapped in a tin can that seems to defy physics and all logic, that your neighbor in the next row over is not attempting to cough up their left lung, and that you have more than six inches of personal space. Imagine, for a moment, the electric jolt that runs from wrist to fingertip when you are well and truly thrilled by something unexpected. Imagine that freedom.

Tags Georgia O'Keeffe, women painters, abstraction, post modern, The Art Institute of Chicago, naturalism
Louise Bonnet, The Magician, 2017, Oil on canvas

Louise Bonnet, The Magician, 2017, Oil on canvas

The Magician

Alex Guajardo March 22, 2018

When I was a child I had a recurrent dream. I must have been very young, because I remember still feeling that adults were very big and I was very small. I don't recall much of the dream only that the adults in it used to appear with hugely distorted proportions–pin-sized heads on normal-sized, torsos swinging colossal arms around. I can clearly remember the perspective from which I viewed them as well; I was always looking up at them, as if from a bed, and they, in turn, seemed to peer down at me. I don’t recall being afraid, but I don’t think that I was amused either, just terribly confused at the “grownups'” very apparent disfiguration that no one other than myself appeared to notice.

When I discovered Louise Bonnet (b. 1970, Geneva) and her paintings, I was at first thoroughly charmed by them. I had been wandering through an art fair for the better part of the day and was beginning to feel “art sick”. Namely, I was hot, hungry, feeling completely overstimulated by the barrage of images and completely underwhelmed by their quality, and I was getting very, very bored. Simply put, I was thisclose to calling it quits. However, a booth bearing a single painting of Bonnet’s caught my eye. The painting, The Magician (2017), depicts a figure with comically overlarge and crazily unbalanced features, shrouded by a curtain of their own hair, stretching a piece of rope between two fingers. The image is fairly simplistic, but as I spent more time with it the veil of the painting’s humor began to fall away; behind it I found a representation of those same feelings I experienced in my childhood dreams. I felt neither fear nor amusement, horror nor entertainment, but prudent recognition of something I barely recognized myself. This is the space in which I believe art’s very essence lies, in the ability to speak to you or to a condition or to an experience in ways where speech falls short. The messaging behind an artwork does not itself need to be enlightening in order to succeed, it need only to speak to its viewer in a manner that could otherwise not be communicated.

Louise Bonnet, The Pros, 2016, Oil on canvas | Image courtesy of Nino Mier Gallery

Louise Bonnet, The Pros, 2016, Oil on canvas | Image courtesy of Nino Mier Gallery

Louise Bonnet, Bubbly Water, 2016, Oil on canvas | Image courtesy of Nino Mier Gallery

Louise Bonnet, Bubbly Water, 2016, Oil on canvas | Image courtesy of Nino Mier Gallery

Louise Bonnet, The Slap, 2016, Oil on canvas | Image courtesy of Nino Mier Gallery

Louise Bonnet, The Slap, 2016, Oil on canvas | Image courtesy of Nino Mier Gallery

Bonnet currently shows with Nino Mier Gallery in LA where an exhibition of her new work opens March 24.

Tags Louise Bonnet, contemporary painting, LA Galleries, art fairs, women painters, dreams

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