Three weeks ago we answered a senior citizen's question about how to go about painting a studio apartment. It seems the landlord would not paint the place and our reader was looking for an efficient alternative. We offered several suggestions, addressing the specific questions posed by the reader.
As occasionally happens, another reader took issue with our response, suggesting we "missed the boat." Often the critic points out another alternative that we didn't mention. If the suggestions are valuable, we pass the information along.
Such is the case with the e-mail we received from Sue Weaver, a self-proclaimed "SF renter x 22 years," and by the tone of her letter, a tenant and elder activist. Her e-mail has been edited for space limitations and to conform to Chronicle style. She writes:
"I'd like to say, with all due respect, your June 23 column missed the boat. There was no suggestion that a long-term, elder tenant could at least negotiate with the property owner to have some of the costs covered. At a minimum, the landlord should pay for the materials being used to improve his property.
"Also, my experience with painters is that they do not need everything packed and moved -- they only need the items moved away from the walls toward the center of the room, and then covered with plastic sheeting. As long as the bookcases, desk, filing cabinets, et cetera, are not too heavy to be moved 4 feet away from the wall, she may be able to avoid emptying them.
"Finally, I wish you had let this reader know where to get free moving boxes, as she had inquired. A Yahoo Internet user group, San Francisco Freecycle Network is one of many Freecycle chapters aimed at reducing landfill by providing an online forum for people offering and requesting used but usable items.
"Freecycle Network serves the immediate Bay Area, but there also are many other chapters in The Chronicle's circulation area. I can verify that moving boxes are frequently offered and requested items. In fact, paint also is offered fairly frequently. For chapters other than San Francisco's, go to
www.freecycle.org.
"This forum also would provide the writer a great opportunity to reduce some of the clutter she refers to. If she is outgrowing her space, she may want to use this painting opportunity to sort through the books and other items she has accumulated and offer some of them on Freecycle.
"Freecycle can be easier than donating to charity because recipients come to the donor (or a nearby safe public place) for pickup -- no need to haul everything to a thrift shop. Freecycle members will take items -- such as a hodgepodge box of office supplies or partial containers of cleaning supplies -- that are not suitable for Salvation Army or Goodwill pickup.
"I do enjoy the column, hope you do not find this too critical."
By
Bill Burnett, Kevin Burnett
Once upon a time, we knew what painting was. As recently as the 1960s, there was, if not a single consensus, then at least several broad and overlapping consensuses about what constituted a painting: It was two-dimensional and used pigments on some type of support, like a canvas; it was abstract, or it was representational; it was defined by its medium and sought to exclude the influence of all others, or it was defined by how prettily or truthfully it employed its medium, etc.
The delightful proposition of "What Is Painting?" — a broad survey of art from the 1960s to today, drawn from the Museum of Modern Art's contemporary collection — is that we have utterly lost our way: We no longer have any idea what painting is, and we are much better for it. Loosely chronological and with an equally relaxed thematic structure, the show makes its argument largely through the variety and quality of the work on view.
A single canvas by Peter Doig, "Pink Snow" (1991), stands just outside the galleries, introducing the show and demonstrating how exuberantly powerful contemporary painting can be, despite its identity crisis. A Klimt-inspired, faintly expressionist take on a winter scene, it depicts an orange-faced skier on red skis standing before a large house in a storm of snow that is white but also red, green, yellow, orange, and black.
The first gallery lingers on the representational, bringing together a handful of what are undeniably paintings, by some influential artists whose work doesn't fit elsewhere. A wonderfully understated Vija Celmins painting from 1964 depicts a hand firing a revolver, a motif one would not be surprised to discover in more recent works by Luc Tuymans or Wilhelm Sasnal, each of whom are represented here. Similarly, the cartoon style of Philip Guston's "Head" (1977), with its elaborate sutures lacing up a pink cranium, infects numerous artists today. Certainly "Ship" (1997–99), a piece by Carroll Dunham found several rooms away, would be unthinkable without Guston's example.
Philip Pearlstein's rigorously perceptual brand of realism, here exemplified by the rather dour nude "Two Female Models in the Studio" (1967), has been largely influential to less stylistically affronting artists than those included in the exhibition. Still, the ripples of his influence extend, if faintly, out to Chuck Close, John Currin, and Pearlstein's old friend Andy Warhol.
After a gallery that groups together '60s-era abstract influences on contemporary work, painting's center begins to disintegrate rapidly. In a room focusing on painting as an idea rather than a practice, John Baldessari's "What Is Painting" (1966–68) — which gives the show its title — presents nothing more than a text, painted, that ends with the coolly ironic statement: "Art is a creation for the eye and can only be hinted at with words." Baldessari's canvas is guarded by other genre-bending efforts, a Barbara Kruger Photostat using a detail from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, and an embroidered "painting," "Sampler (Starting Over)" (1996), by Elaine Reichek.
By
DANIEL KUNITZ
I think I'm in love.
People, meet
Shannon Reynolds, gardener and painter extraordinaire. She is the winner of
Monday's giveway on garden journals; she actually uses wiki software to keep track of her garden. Oh, and she records her garden through oil paintings as well.
Shannon lives in Ontario, where she paints full-time and gardens in between. She sells her small paintings for remarkably affordable prices through
her blog--you can pick one up for around a hundred bucks--and you can see her larger work and commissions
here. But oh lord, these little flower paintings just about make me faint from joy. Shannon, where DID you get the idea to include those pruners in your still life? It's beautiful and authentic and
just perfect.
And those black tulips? Oh, man. I could wake up looking at those every day. That's the great thing about owning a piece of original art. It becomes a part of your life. You open your eyes in the morning, you lay in bed and look at it, and you make some decisions about the kind of day you're going to have.
Here's what Shannon had to say when I e-mailed her and asked her if I could share her paintings with you:
"I'm new to flower painting, but I've been reading about the vanitas paintings and dutch floral masterpieces of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and I think I maytry to develop my small paintings into contemporary floral vanitas paintings. What better reminder of life's ephemeral nature than a garden shifting through its seasons?
For now, I'm following the progress of the flowers in my garden, and approaching each painting as a tiny portrait.
I can partly credit my art school background for making me skeptical about painting for the sheer pleasure of representation, but these small paintings are helping me rediscover the joy of painting freed from weighty capital 'A' art concerns."
A number of painters are starting to use the Internet to allow them to sell their smaller works for an affordable price, without going through a gallery, which allows them to support themselves as artists and still have time to work on larger pieces for shows and commissions. If you want to know more about this movement, check out
Duane Keiser, the
USA Today article, and the
Daily Painters Guild. Follow the links and you're off. There's an extraordinary amount of good work out there, and painters like Shannon inspire me to fill my house with art. Check it out.
http://www.gardenrant.com/my_weblog/2007/06/still-life-with.html
Landscape paintings are a very popular form of
art. By learning more about them, you could help make yourself love and appreciate them even more.When you are searching for prints or posters to add to your walls, you will very often find several
paintings that are completed by a landscape artist. Originals from the master painters are probably not in your price range, but a print or reproduction is probably more in your budget. This makes the landscapes by such artists as Monet, Constable, and Pissarro very accessible to all kinds of people. Amateur artists most often choose landscapes for their first works. This may be due to the lack of studio space and the ease in which it is possible to find a subject out in the natural
world. Most landscape artists before the time of Impressionism, painted inside their home or studio, working by memory or from drawings. Monet and Renoir took their work.
By Mr.Andrew Caxton
Drawing
painting
