Highlights of the 111th Annual Gold Medal Exhibition with Art Historian Jean Stern

Well, I have been asked to talk about some of the paintings, and I want to tell everybody that this is by far the strongest and perhaps the best of the annual California Art Club gold medal exhibitions that I've been attending since 1993. And when asked to talk about some of the paintings, I was stunned by how many paintings I could pick out and how many pieces of sculpture I could pick out and talk about. So please forgive me if I don't talk about your work of art, because I had to narrow it down to a much more workable number. And again, this is, I would think, the strongest of the California Art Club annual gold medal exhibitions that I have been privy to. So I'll just start very quickly and talk a little bit about some of my favorite paintings. And please understand, there were a whole lot more that I decided I needed to cut down. So this painting by Peter, even though again, Peter is a very important person in the club, but he is also a remarkable artist. When I first saw this painting, I immediately recognized what it was. It was the Fountain by Merrill Gage, which is in Beverly Hills at the corner of Santa Monica and Wilshire Boulevard. But it is a remarkable painting. The painting reminds me of a really important, beautiful fire opal. There's so much color, so much play. And the color is intertwined. The greens, the reds, the yellows, they all come together and make this really vibrant work. And then on top of that, I'm always impressed by the frames that Peter uses. They're a work of art in themselves. So again, this is the electric fountain. And at night, the lights come on and you see this wonderful play of color. So a remarkable painting. I'm just delighted every time I see this. This is a watercolor by Andy Evenson. I've known Andy for many years and he is a wonderful watercolor painter. And this painting impressed me because it is a cold painting. The intent was to make a cold painting and he was very successful at it. I love the white of the snow punctuated by the beautiful blue of the shadows, which is really wonderful color theory. Chevrolet's opposite colors beautify each other. But when I look at this painting, it really catches me because it is something that I've never lived in a snow climate. And I'm always afraid of going in the snow. But this is a beautiful painting because it really catches that feeling of the cold and the combination of the sunlight and of the winter is very, very impressive. Bill Farnsworth's painting of these goats, and it's called On Parade, and the goats are coming right at the viewer, which is a very, very effective way to get your attention, to look at the goats. But also the little stream leads you back into the painting and right where the goats and the stream meet is the goat herd. So a really beautiful composition that controls the viewer, in effect, into seeing what the artist wants to see. But the light, the color, the accurate drawing of the animals and the trees, again, I was very impressed by this painting. This is one of the most beautiful portraits I've seen. It's by Eric Feiguan, and it is unbelievable. The figure is very sweet and very tender and very accurately drawn. The chair that she's on is also very accurately drawn, and the harmony of the colors gives you a very soft, a very gentle, and a very loving feeling. So a very successful painting on many accounts. This is by Amanda Fish, and I've known Amanda for many years, and I love her work. But I looked at this painting, and it was an instant my attention was drawn to not only the very detailed drawing and painting of the lemons, of the leaves, and of that Chinese jar, but also there's a sweet reflection that brightens the piece. And then the angle of the branch makes a nice pyramid with the shadow behind the vase. So a really interesting composition, but what really does this is the light and the intricate drawing of the pieces in the work, including the varnish on top of the table. Ken Goldman is a remarkable watercolor painter, also an oil painter. He lives in San Diego, and he did a series of these for San Diego Gas and Electric of the people working on the electric lines, and it's called Line in Space. And they show the people up in the air on one of those cherry picker devices, and they are working with a very dangerous situation where there's some problem with the electricity. But the space is really remarkable as well. There's like a glow that comes from the center of the painting, and you can see it in the upper right. There's this series of lines, of curved lines, that get from bright to less bright to less bright. So you focus directly on what's going on in the painting with these two people that are working to fix whatever problem there is. But I'm always impressed by the drawing that Ken does, the beautiful detailed work. And this is a watercolor, which is very difficult to handle, because if you've tried watercolor, like I did years ago, sometimes the paint just does what it wants to do. And so you have to really master the technique and master the medium. A beautiful still life by Deborah Holiday. There's all sorts of things in this painting. There's a fortune cookie, there's some marbles, there's a jaw of some sort of animal, and every kind of fruit, every kind of object. And she treats the light so accurately. It's very carefully observed, very carefully drawn, and she has control of the medium. And it creates this amazing variety of objects that are all together. They don't really make sense, but together it just creates this really beautiful mass of exciting and interesting forms, just very well handled and very carefully drawn. When I say draw, I mean, you know, you can tell what you're looking at. You can tell it's a bird, you can tell it's a persimmon. It is the aspect of recreating an object into the work of art so that it is immediately obvious what it is you have painted. So it's a really wonderfully observed work. Every little reflection on every little surface is just right. This is by Bruce Horn, and this takes place in Florence, Italy. There's the cathedral in the far distance. But it is a little segment of time. He's caught these people, one's walking down the hill, the other's walking up the hill towards the viewer. But your eyes are immediately drawn to that wonderful series of shadows that are playing on that wall. And the whole thing works very well together. There's a beautiful sense of perspective that leads you forward. It all comes to you because we are up the hill and this person is walking towards us. But the background is amazing. There's so much detail and so much beautiful color. A remarkable painting. This is one of the most moody and beautiful paintings in the show. There's not a lot of color here, but there's endless varieties of the blues and of the yellows. This is Laguna Beach at night, and we're looking from Heisler Park towards downtown Laguna. And the glow is spectacular. But again, we are drawn, the artist is telling us where we are supposed to look. The top edges of the palm trees on the left lead you straight to the center of the painting. And the rocks on the lower left lead you straight to the paintings. And the surf, the wave that's coming in, so you're directed to the brightest part of the painting. And there's this gorgeous, beautiful glow, which is mesmerizing. This is by Rick Humphrey, a wonderful artist. I've known him for many years. We have some of his paintings. And it's, again, a gorgeous view of nature. The light here is the most important aspect. The drawing is great. You know where you are. And you know that there are trees, there's a cove, there's Catalina in the background, in the far distance to the right, and the clouds. Beautiful portrait of light. This is the kind of painting that you need to be outdoors to study, to make the sketches. And then later, this is a large painting. I don't know that he painted it all outdoors. He may have. He's a wonderful painter. But generally, the artist will work on a small sketch and then expand it in the studio. But there's a tremendous sense of natural light here, which is the whole point of being a plein air painter, a wonderful painter. This, by David Jencks, is a very calm. The colors are muted, the colors are soft. It is a tonal piece. There's very few colors, but lots of tones of those colors, which creates a poetic feeling, a very soft, gentle feeling. On top of that, all the lines in the painting, most of them are horizontal lines, so they're calming. There's no angular lines. Everything is soft. It's gentle. It's a very relaxing painting. It's a kind of painting that when you come home from work, and you've driven on the freeway, and you look at this, and suddenly you feel relaxed. Suddenly, you're taken back to nature. You become a human being again. But it is a very gentle and very calm painting. The horizontal lines are very important in this painting, because they do calm. They quiet you down. Lori Kersey is one of the best painters of horses that I know. She and Kim Lordier, they just know the horse inside and out. When I was at Peterson Galleries, we occasionally sold Western art, and they were horses. I learned years ago that the people that buy paintings that have horses in them know horses. They will not buy a painting unless the horse is exactly the way it is in nature. Lori knows what she's doing. She has seen horses. She has been with horses. She has ridden horses. She is really accurate in the rendition of the horses. From a physiological point of view, these are very accurately drawn. But also, the light comes off the fur and creates this very soft, gentle feeling. You can almost touch the horses. I'm getting a little trouble here. Excuse me. This is my wife, Linda, who knows. Oh, thank you, Linda. She's my 10-year-old child that knows how to use a computer. Anyway, Thomas Jefferson Kitts, a painter from Oregon, I've known many years. A wonderful painting. This is a beautiful little painting. It's not big, but the composition, the colors, the forms, the light, everything works in this painting. As you enter the painting, you come in from the first boat, which is on the lower left, and then you go to the next boat, next boat, and it carries you around, and it makes a gentle curve that leads you to the buildings in the background. And at the same time, the light, the trees, the reflection in the water, all work together very well. So, a beautiful drawing, beautiful use of color, and a really exciting composition. I'm sorry? Hello? Okay. This is by Paul Cratter, an artist that loves to paint trees and loves to paint in the mountains. This is like a mirror painting. I actually, when I first saw this painting and I downloaded it, I flipped it upside down, and it's very, very close. But this is a painting of light. It's a painting of forms. Every form in it, the rocks are outlined in a very gentle white line, but the reflection is what catches your imagination, and you're fixated on looking at the water and looking at the actual background and comparing the two. This is very accurately drawn. There's beautiful detail. Again, Paul is a remarkable painter, and the trees, really great trees, and I just love this painting. I love this painting, too. It's by Lawrence Kushner, and it's very hazy, very soft. Again, this is not a bright, vivid, impressionist painting with all sorts of opposite colors. It's a very gentle, tonal painting. There's not a lot of color, but there's a lot of tones of those colors, and it creates this gentle feeling. So, you're looking at the boat, which is anchored off not too far from the bridge, and it is surrounded by this beautiful haze that softens everything. So, this is gentle. This is quiet. This is the kind of painting you look at and you feel very relaxed. And the drawing, again, every little ripple in the waves, the cargo ship in the background, the disappearing bridge into the distance, very well handled. This is a watercolor, and I respect watercolor painters as much as oil painters because they have their own problems to deal with. And this is so perfectly handled. The forms, the outlines, the reflections, the curves, the detail in the leaves. You could spend hours looking at this painting and noticing something you didn't notice before. But again, it is an impressive painting in itself, but you have to be a specialist in watercolor to be able to get this type of result. This is a pastel by Clark Mitchell, who's one of the best pastel painters around, and it's painted in Palm Springs, and Mount San Jacinto is in the background. What impressed me about this is the detail in the light, but most of all is the placement of that cloudy atmosphere that comes down from the sky and reaches down into the land. If that wasn't there, it would be an interesting and very beautiful detailed painting. But that cloud makes a sense of mystery. It's a mystical painting, and it is placed there with very strong results because it creates a sense of wonder and of nature at its most exciting and its most mystical. Michael Obereyer, I've known for many years as well, a remarkable artist can get the form, the light. This is down here in Orange County in Arch Beach, and in the far distance you can see Dana Point. But the softness of the light, again, this is atmospheric. There's a lot of distance in this painting, not only because the forms get smaller as they get farther away, but because the atmosphere, the mist, becomes stronger and stronger as you go farther and farther back. So, he creates this remarkable sense of depth, not only by using the sizes and get smaller as you get farther back, the linear aspect, but also because of the atmosphere, the haze that plays a very important role in this painting, and he's able to capture it. This is early in the morning when there's still a lot of haze at the coast, and you are literally there. You look at this painting and you are right there in Arch Beach and Laguna Beach. Frank Orgas, I looked at this painting and I was amazed. It is a very beautiful, very tightly drawn, but also a very central painting. The flowers, the hollyhocks, they add a lot to this painting, in my opinion. It is a very attractive figure, a beautiful woman, and she's wearing this poncho, but also the surroundings she's placed in this Eden of the painting, very sensual, very accurately drawn, and very beautifully painted. By contrast, you have this strong light, Rita Pacheco, who's a wonderful artist. I assume it's her on the right side because it looks just like her, and it's got this big, beautiful dog, but she's outdoor. She's having a nice conversation. She's checking her phone like all kids do, but the light is very important here. There's a very strong, intense light, and again, your light is only as bright as your shade next to it is dark, so the contrast is important here because this painting jumps. There's a lot of contrast. There's a lot of bright colors. There's a lot of dark colors, and they work together very well. This is, by contrast, a very gentle, a very soft painting. The colors do not jump. The colors are harmonized. They're soft. They're very gentle, and then you come into this scene, and it says open, but there's nobody there, and that's part of the mystical presence of this painting. As you walk into it, you follow the lines, and you go deep down all the way back along the coast there, but the colors and the stillness in this painting are very effective, and it creates a very gentle, very moody painting. This is not at all the bright, sunny scene we just saw by Rita. This is a very pensive, a very gentle, very quiet scene. Okay, we're having a little problem. When I first saw this painting, I was really puzzled. I was wondering what the heck's going on, and the more I look at it, the more I see it's by Annette Power, who's a wonderful artist, but the foreground is completely abstract, and the upper third is completely impressionist, realistic, and it is a view of abstraction in nature. This is essentially what the artist is seeing. The very bare foreground is not bare at all. There's a lot of forms. There's a lot of color. There's a lot of light, and if you cut off the top third, it is a completely abstract painting that you cannot relate to anything that you know in nature or that you've seen, but by adding the background, the top layer with the people, the cars, and the light, you realize that you're looking down at the foreground, at the sidewalk, and you say, oh my goodness, this is such a beautiful abstract thing, but you're still in a realistic setting because she's put you right on the street with the cars and the people. A beautiful study self-portrait by Brittany Ryan. This is in clay, and I don't know if she's going to eventually cast it in bronze, but the expression on this painting, it's a self-portrait, and there's so much power to the forms, to the way the light hits the different surfaces, the different curves, and it is something that reaches you deeply because you are confronted with a very attractive person, and she has this pensive look, and that you are like you are next to her, but it is a very, very great portrait of, in essence, of her own, but it's still a portrait of a human person, and it reaches you on a very human level. This is a neat painting by Dan Schultz, and it's got this great optical illusion that the young boy is standing in moving water, and he's got his fishnet, and he's looking for the fish, but the setting is very personal. You are there. You are, in fact, in the water, and you are the young boy, but you're looking for the fish, but other than the figure of the child, it is also an abstract painting. If you took the child out, it would be like, what am I looking at? It doesn't quite relate, but by putting the child in and putting the action in, you see it is exactly what the artist intended. It's somebody in the water trying to net a couple of fish for his aquarium. Nian Situ, one of the great artists in the United States, if not in the world, he was trained in China, learned to draw and to paint in the academic method, and when you look at this painting, the subject that he wants you to see, the geese and the three people are confronting you. They're right at you, and the background, which really is not as important, is somewhat soft and somewhat faded, but your eye goes straight to what the artist wants you to see, and as you look at the geese and as you look at the figures, there's a very strong pyramid form because the geese make the bottom of the pyramid. It's a very solid composition, and as you look up, you see the three people that are confronting you and looking at you. The geese also are looking at you. Most people think, oh, the geese are looking to the side. No, geese look from the side. They can only see sideways, so they're confronting you just as you are confronting them. Another gorgeous sculpture. This is by Chris Sladoff, one of the great, very wonderful, has done a lot of work throughout the country, and this is called Two Daughters. This is in the working stage where it's going to be cast stone, but again, the figures are very strong, very powerful. There's a mother and there's the two children, the two daughters. One of them on the left you can see, but you can just barely see the one on the right because she has her head turned, but being a sculpture, you can walk around it and you can look at it from endless different angles, so very, very powerful and very accurately presented sculpture. Paul Strahm, by the way, I'm doing these alphabetically. It's not one over the other, but again, this is a charming, this is a fun, this is a happy painting. There's a lot of happy colors. There's a lot of beautiful light. The figures are not real developed because you're looking at the whole scene. You're not looking at individual figures and individual portraits, but you're at the beach. The strong compositional lines from the banister in the foreground, the tables and the roof lines, they all lead you to this beautiful, deep, and as you look farther and farther down, you see more and more color, more and more interesting, busy action. So your eye is directed at the part that's mostly on the right. On the left, it's empty beach, but the right is, by contrast, is full of color and full of people. Another watercolor by Brenda Swenson, one of the great watercolor painters, and these are hollyhocks, and we saw hollyhocks earlier in the painting by Frank Orgas, but again, every single petal in every single flower is handled perfectly. There is not one solid area of color. You look at some of the hollyhocks in the foreground, there's all sorts of shading, all sorts of color, all sorts of soft handling of the watercolor, and to me, beautiful flowers are very sensual. They delight your eye, and they delight the sense of smell, so because they reach you, because they put you in a very happy, in a very soft, gentle mood, it's a very well-done painting. She's really good at doing these flowers. And then finally, in alphabetical order, Michelle Usubelli. Michelle likes to do very bold and very loose, but lots and lots of color. She is great with color, and she doesn't spend a lot of time on the detail, but she really draws your attention by the intense color that she puts together next to each other. This is a tabletop with some wine glasses. The background is almost dark. You can see there's probably a painting hanging in a very deep background, but your eyes are focused on the front, and then the lines of the tablecloth lead you deeper into the painting, and on the way, you see the fruit bowl. You see other glasses, and it is a delightful painting because there's so much to see, and it is full of color, so a beautiful painting. Oh, one more. Well, no, there's two more. Anyway, Cleo Villette. I don't know the artist, but I do know great art when I see it, and this composition is remarkable because part of us is under the water, and part of us is above the land. This is the casino in Avalon in Catalina, and you are placed there because the casino is well known, but also as you're down in the water, and you're confronted by not only the cat, but by the Garibaldi fish, which are all around Catalina. The Garibaldi is named after Giuseppe Garibaldi, the great hero of Italian independence, who not only had red hair, red-orange hair, but all of his armies, all of his followers wore red shirts, so because the fish are so brilliantly orange, they got the name Garibaldi. They're strictly protected, by the way, but again, the artist places you in the most remarkable situation where you cannot, I cannot imagine doing this, but as I look at it, I am amazed. This is a remarkable composition, and you are both in the water and looking up at the land, so just amazing composition. And I think this is the last one, Mary Kay West, who's always remarkable in terms of a technique called trompe l'oeil, which is French for fool the eye, and trompe l'oeil has been around for a long, long time, but the intent is to make you look at a painting and think it's actually jumping out at you, and it's actually, things are happening, like in this case, the vase of flowers has gotten too close to the edge, and some of the flowers are out on the frame, and then this house finch is flying, just flying by and landed right on the frame, but it's all painted as one work of art, and it's all designed to just do that, to fool the eye, to trompe l'oeil. Thank you for listening in, and I'm looking forward to actually seeing these paintings firsthand and seeing all the other things, so again, thank you very much for watching this.