I went down to Palo Alto to visit Nancy White at her studio last weekend. She’s one of my favorite painters. Her work is just so realized — it’s completely the whole package.

She had two bodies of work up, 2D and 3D, all small scale gouache and acrylic on flat or folded paper. Each shape within her paintings is a flat color. The paintings are reductive, angular, and minimal in form, but the color play elicits a complicated emotive response. Colors push against one another and vibrate off each other. The constrained size of the paintings force attention and pause from the viewer. Even within her narrowed color palettes, she brings the tones of disparate colors to an even par, creating an aura of elegant restraint.

Nancy’s work is so rewarding to look at, to stare at. Her paintings are at once sublime fractured crystals, and at the same time nothing more than interwoven shapes. Totally lovely.

http://nancywhite.net/

I didn’t know Hardy Hanson had died. I wasn’t in his inner circle, or even really his outer circle, so it took a few months for me to find out. Gina Borg told me at her opening on Thursday, and of course I had to know, but now that I do, I wish I didn’t.

You know how you can have a teacher who changes everything? Who sees something in you before you can see it in yourself? Hardy was like that for me. He had a major hand in helping me solidify my love of art. He was the first to show me that art is a life’s practice, and that my own art was worth more than mere dabbling. His opinion of me was everything to me — and he believed that I could make good art.

I will miss his bright eyes and his hand on my elbow, telling me that an area of a painting was receiving too much attention. I will miss the thought of his amazing terraced garden. I will miss the thought of him creating his art. I miss the thought of him being alive.

My work is now available through Karen Imperial at her gallery in San Francisco’s 49 Geary Building named K. Imperial Fine Art, and her Palo Alto gallery, Bryant St. Gallery.

I’m excited to work with Karen. She’s been watching my work grow for about three years now, so when I got the email that she wanted to see work in person, I was thrilled. I packed up a dozen paintings and drove them down to Palo Alto. Karen took five paintings to try out. We’ll see what happens, but I think it will be great.

I got into San Francisco State’s M.F.A. program. I am so happy and proud of myself. The program is highly selective…  I think it’s only about 10-12 students a year, which probably translates to about 3-4 painters.  It’s a three year program, which to me is far preferable to the more common two year program. Two years goes by too fast, with no time to breathe before you have to start on your thesis. Plus, I just really love being in school. I’m super excited to work with the professors, especially Paul Mullins and Chris Finley, and to be challenged beyond my dreams by my new classmates.

I was so scared that the narrative wouldn’t go my way, and I would have to announce that I didn’t get in anywhere. But here it has all gone my way, and I have gotten into a school that I am totally thrilled to go to.  Thanks to my recommenders for writing lovely recommendations for me, and thanks to my husband for always encouraging me to paint. I’m so itchy to start.

My most recent show, “Emerging Artists 2012″, closes tonight at the Driftwood Salon in San Francisco. I was super lucky to be a part of the exhibition. The owners of the gallery, Camille Ochoa and Anthony Macias, searched through a ton of artists’ work from all around the bay before deciding on the final twelve. I always have such a sense of relief when I make a cut like that. The show was beautifully hung, well curated, and the opening was very well-attended and a lot of fun.

Camille and Anthony have done something really wonderful with Driftwood Salon. Artists themselves, they have created a space in which every artist would love to show. The physical space is gorgeous – in an alley on the edge of SoMA and the Mission – the ceilings soar and the lighting is great. Their own studio occupies part of the building, and they offer up the rest to gallery space. The gallery has an energetic feel to it, partly because of it’s location, and partly due to the energy put into it by the owners. On top of being geniunely nice people, Camille and Anthony are on the ball and patient with their artists. They make it easy to show with them.

Their next show, “Breaking Time”, opens March 2nd. I’m excited to see their future shows and the future of Driftwood Salon.

http://www.driftwoodsalon.com/

The artists in the exhibition with me were: Kate Daly, Hugo Kobayashi, Alberto Ybarra, Irene Hernandez, Solongo Tseekuu, Kevin Pincus, Ryan Jones Beatrice Hunt, Bern Rauch, Ytaelena Lopez, and Paul Morin

Hung Liu, "Migration Immigration"

I went to Hung Liu’s lecture at the Berkeley Art Center last Thursday. It was a fabulous lecture covering her whole career from a propaganda painter for Mao to a world renowned artist. Her paintings are gorgeous memorials to everyday Chinese and Chinese American people. She mines photographs (often photographs which were meant to be destroyed in the Cultural Revolution) for images of the working class, then monumentalizes their image on large canvases. Embedded in the paintings are traditional Chinese iconographies – the crane, the lotus flower, the circle. The artist simultaneously creates and destroys the image with thinly layered drips of paint that wash out parts of the image. The viewer can see that the root of her paintings is still in the style of Maoist propaganda, but Hung Liu has reclaimed the subject matter for herself.

Her paintings visually collapse history with a balance of ambiguity and technical perfection that leave you always wanting more. She will have a retrospective at The Oakland Museum in 2013.

Paul Mullins, Weak Knees

You only have until Dec. 17 to catch Paul Mullins’ show at Marx and Zavattero. He paints in the tradition of macho painting in his show, For Here or To Go.  Walking into his show is like wandering into a hick bar. There are several paintings of inner lip tattoos, paintings of male crotches (in bleached jeans), a large painting of a woman leaning in for a big smooch. Overlaid on many of the paintings are small collages and drawings that look like what might be carved on a bathroom wall.

Mr. Mullins is, sigh, my favorite kind of painter. His subject matter is so confrontational, yet his palette is so restrained, his work is painterly, and he leaves white space for the viewer’s eye to breath. He uses this shift in surface that is so fantastic that it makes me smile big. He paints his difficult subject matter beautifully.

Make sure you see his show so you can swoon, too.

Thread Painting 2011-1, 2011 48 × 40-5/8 inches

I went to Hadi’s opening on Thursday… a totally sublime show, but from him I would expect nothing less. His work is a beautiful attempt at perfection. Using a fully stripped down color palette of black, gray, and white, he uses dark gray panels with a tiny lip to tightly suspend many individual threads a breath above the panel.  Then he paints part of some of the  threads black so that cumulatively one sees through them to the panel below. The play on positive and negative space and the perfect craftsmanship is both immersive and meditative.

In all his perfection, though, I wonder if perhaps Hadi knows his medium too well. I wonder what would happen if he pushed the medium until it began to fall apart — a thread out of place, the slightly imperfect line or shape. The desire for perfection and calm is always hovering in our minds’ eye. It is in the imperfect hand that conveys humanity. The only visible imperfection in Hadi’s work is in the fuzziness of the thread. I wonder if he had a choice, would he eliminate that, too? I hope not.

Hadi’s show is up through December 23^rd.

Blue Band

Mel’s class has ended. Usually, when her classes end, I have her next class to look forward to. Not this time, though. She has cut me off. It’s time; I understand. I’ve been taking her painting classes for far too long. It is time for me to move on and apply for grad school. There are so many other great teachers in the  Bay Area. I hope I get into a school and get the chance to take from some of them. The art programs in the Bay Area are terribly competitive.

Some people in my life are advising me to not to go to graduate school… to do it on my own. But I think in general the art world is finicky about it’s rules, one of them being that getting into top galleries means you probably have your MFA. Jamie says it’s like finishing school for artists. You may go in accomplished, but you will come out polished. I’m excited to apply.

Today I had a surprise visit from my old college teacher, Hardy Hanson. He brought me two gray litho stones and an afternoon of his time. Hardy was  instrumental in teaching me how to paint. It’s his voice that I hear in the back of my head when I paint. He was the one who taught me that light destroys form, a central tenant in my work.

Hardy  reminded me to slow down in my work. Sometimes I paint so quickly because it feels like I have so much to paint out of myself. But painting quickly just leads to impatience with my work. He also reminded me to approach my work with humility, and to follow every intuitive tug. Don’t worry about the fickle nature of the art world. Just paint because I love to paint.

His opinion is that I not go to grad school. I’m already on my path, he said. The answer is not in the schooling but in the painting itself. I don’t know if I have the courage to test this reality. I’ve got 5 more months to think about it.