Regina Hackett

After she bungled a question in the Miss Teen USA pageant, contestant Caitlin Upton become her own event horizon. No light penetrates past her media coverage. Jesse Edwards‘ painted her pixelated to the edge of her form. His version of Pointillism is a critique on fame that lights up the Web, like fireworks in a night sky, except it trails after its subjects forever. Even if Upton becomes a Rhodes Scholar, her misadventure in front of a microphone will be there whenever anyone clicks on her name.

Detail:

Pageant (oil on linen
40 x 36 inches) was part of Edwards’ show at Flatcolor Gallery last month. I saw it on the last day and didn’t intend to write about it, but it stayed with me.

The rap against Edwards in Seattle is that he’s all over the map. It’s true. Then there’s the fact of him. Below, the opening of a profile I wrote in 2006:

Jesse Edwards lives in a downtown studio that is packed with his paintings. They lean in stacks and protrude in piles. His bed is a sack on the floor, which is littered with fast food packaging, art books and objects he uses for his still lifes, including a skull, a skateboard, pop cans, bongs, porn magazines, shredded dolls, a toy cop car and the odd piece of fruit.

He has a computer covered in graffiti on a wrecked table beside half an office chair, foam spilling out, that he found on the street.
Creature comforts are not his thing.
“I’m an artist,” he said. “I want to paint in oils like the old masters.”

An aspiration to old master painting is not the first thing that comes to mind on meeting him.
He looks like a thug. At 29, he’s tall and lean with thick muscles running up his tattooed arms and down his torso. His smile doesn’t often reach his eyes, which bore into people.

“I’m an ex-thug,” he said. “In the old day, I’d stomp people who disrespected my tags.”

Stomp?

“Put them down so they don’t get up. I was a kid. I didn’t know any better.”

His landscapes look as if they’re sweating – open stretches of summer fields working hard for the money.

Landscape oil on linen 60″ x 40″

Some of his ceramics are tributes to his adventures as a graffiti writer. (Image via)

The art world breaks artists’ hearts. First to break are those who ring wrong bells when they walk into a gallery. Edwards can’t change that, anymore than Caitlin Upton can, but she could learn a lot from him. He’s stout-hearted and keeps on keeping on.

White Fear, oil on linen, 38 x 28 inches

Title a variant on a theme.

About artists and serious books, Robert Storr sees a divide.

There are some artists who read theory seriously but not all that many.

Increasingly, however, artists treat books as objects. They empty them out or roll them like stones against the mouth of a cave.

Jill Sylvia

Stella Waitzkin

It’s a self-portrait. Beres is a member of SuttonBeresCuller, but he draws alone. (image via)

In response to comments made about this post, Sylvia Mendel wrote:

Yes, I expect that if any group is invisible in certain organizations
or societal settings it’s worthy of question. For, you may be the one
who is excluded at some point in the future. If you are a curious
person you’ll notice that older women artists are invisible in the art
world and most other arenas of life, unless they’re generous
philanthropists or volunteers – which I call work without pay.

 I have
actually experienced this invisibility/exclusion recently. A Chelsea
gallery owner saw my work on a website. She made an appointment to see
the actual work. She saw me in person when I visited her gallery to
check out the space where my work might be shown. I said I was looking
forward to her visiting my studio and she canceled the appointment by
email the following day pleading sickness and never rescheduled.

Women
are even more biased against older women than are men. That’s just the
most obvious incident. I recently did a series on age with one piece
called Wear Masks and have been asked to write a piece against this
invisibility for an art publication.

Mendel, Wear Masks and Missing Pages II

The milky light suggests cataracts on the lens. (Via)

The cartoonist Gahan Wilson will be at Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery Dec. Feb.13, 6-9 p.m., to celebrate the publication of GAHAN WILSON: 50 Years of Playboy Cartoons with an exhibition of his originals and a book signing.

Fantagraphics gallery director Larry Reid adds:

Also on display on February 13 for one night only is a recently completed sculpted portrait of R. Crumb by Seattle artist Mike Leavitt. Commissioned for a private out-of-state collection, this is only opportunity to view the fully articulated wood carved figure – the latest addition to Leavitt’s ongoing Art Army series.

The reception on the 13th coincides with the Georgetown Second Saturday Art Attack, featuring visual and performing arts throughout the neighborhood.

When I noticed that the Seattle Art Museum is running a Steve McQueen festival, I was thrilled. After winding my way through its Web site to get to film programs, I realized SAM is hosting the wrong Steve McQueen.

The wrong Steve McQueen: (image via)

The right Steve McQueen: (image via) Profile here.

Of course people want to see the wrong Steve McQueen. I like him too. But SAM is an art museum. Wouldn’t it be great if visitors could go there to see at least the right McQueen’s shorter films from a library of video/film artists available for screening by appointment?  I’d like to see Bear (1993), Drumroll (1998) and Deadpan (1999), the last being homage to Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. Deadpan was at Western Bridge the Henry a few years ago. Be nice to see it again.

The Northwest Film Forum screens a fair sampling of films and videos that are art straight up. Last April it featured McQueen’s Hunger, about Bobby Sands. At the time, I couldn’t force myself to go. Having lost my job a month earlier, I was trying to hang out on the sunny side of the street. I’d love to see it now, and where is it?

The theoretical advantage of film & video is that anyone can see it anywhere. Alas, that is far from the case. In the meantime, SAM is screening the Steve McQueen who is already ubiquitous. Something wrong here.

Rush, Fox News and its zany all recall Father Charles Coughlin, anti-Semitic radio priest of the 1930s. While today’s version is certainly appalling,  none of them go as far as Coughlin, who sided with Hitler right up until FDR managed to talk the American Catholic Church into ordering him off the air.

Here’s the big difference. Coughlin appealed to those who had nothing and wanted someone to blame. Fox appeals to the well-fed.

Maynard Dixon’s Forgotten Man from 1934 (image via) is not a portrait of a Glenn Beck supporter.

Tebaggers aren’t worried about scabs.

Dixon, Scabs (image via)

Nor are they likely to break factory windows. Their goal is to prevent a just and multicultural America from emerging. Since the last election, they have managed to convince a growing number of the disenfranchised to join them. The phenomenon makes the violent strikers of the 1930s look like sages. They at least knew who was on their side and who wasn’t.

Vachel Lindsay

FACTORY windows are always broken. 
Somebody's always throwing bricks, 
Somebody's always heaving cinders, 
Playing ugly Yahoo tricks. 

Factory windows are always broken. 
Other windows are let alone. 
No one throws through the chapel-window 
The bitter, snarling, derisive stone. 

Factory windows are always broken. 
Something or other is going wrong. 
Something is rotten--I think, in Denmark. 
End of factory-window song.

From Emily Pothast of Translinguistic Other:

I’m writing to enlist some help drawing attention to a silent auction to help a Seattle business owner from Haiti (David Pierre-Louis of Lucid Jazz Lounge in the University District) provide direct assistance to the survivors of the earthquake in his old community. The deadline for dropping off work with coordinator Leilani Lehman (lani.lehman@gmail.com) is this Sunday, February 7. Participating artists include Allison Manch, Gala Bent, Celeste Cooning and myself.

Pothast, L’Origine du Monde, college/drawing, 6 x 6 inches

You can relegate it to TV.

Donna Stack

Princess and the Pea (the pea), Down feather brocade Asian floor pillows, monitor and video. The video is looped to display a single pea as it slowly dries out and becomes plump again.

Or wrap it in a rug.

Fred Muram, Rug

You can banish it to the back pasture in your mind.

Grant Barnhart, Way of the Warrior

You can set it on fire…

Lauren Grossman, The Pentecost

Or turn it into a joke.

Grossman again. Drunkard

You can wipe your personal slate clean.

Ingrid Lahti

If all else fails, you can praise it.