I was just down in San Diego and caught a fantastic exhibition currently showing at the William D. Cannon Art Gallery in Carlsbad: Andre Kertesz: On Reading. Born in Hungary in 1894, Kertesz is known especially for his contributions to photographic composition, his unorthodox angles, and for developing the photoessay. Another famous photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, once mused about himself, Robert Capa, and Brassaï, that, “Whatever we have done, Kertész did first.” It was fascinating to see an exhibit of lesser-known Kertesz' prints focusing on the simple pleasure of reading when we've all gone so hi-tech.
Last night, world-class artist Robilee Frederick spoke in front of near a hundred Oxbow School students, fellow artists, and interested locals. For those of you who don’t know, The Oxbow School is Napa’s own art school on the river: a semester-long program where high school students (juniors and seniors) board from all over the world. Their Visiting Artist Lecture Series is one of the prestigious, insightful events that keeps the Napa Valley abreast of current art culture.
Robilee is a warm, wonderful, well-spoken woman. She catalogued her work, and then showed a film about her collaboration with Eleanor Coppola and other artists on the installation “Circle of Memory.” In the installation, one enters through a narrow passage into a circle piled high with hay bales. In the dark space, a thin trickle of salt descends from the center of the roof to the floor. The piece is meant to invoke memory and loss, and to commemorate the deceased children throughout the world, and visitors are invited to tack notes about personal loss onto the hay bales.
In her slideshow, Robilee showed a picture of a piece she had made after her studio was flooded with two and a half feet of water from the Napa river. In the aftermath, she was inspired by the rust left on a steel plate and created a work on canvas to go alongside the plate as a diptych. At the time, John and I shared a studio in the same complex as Robilee—Tannery Row—as well as many other artists that have since gone their own way. The elegiac nature of Robilee’s work brought back warm memories and a little nostalgia for those years on the river.
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