Journal of a Cranky Boy

So's I call Roni, and I leave her a message says: Yo, stop bloggin' so much. You makin' me look low-down, dig?
Lazy.
So, really, I just left Roni a message saying I was going to make a blog-post in the near future, and that, basically, validated my tardiness in posting, and forgave my trespasses as we forgive those who post two times in a row to make us look bad. JK. JFK. Just freakin' kidding. President.

H-Bomb, the bomb photographer friend and loyal roommate, took Brian, Jim, and I to a show at NEITOFINEART called States of Kinesis. I, cranky, having not been in a gallery show for more than a year now, looking at all this salable art, not intending to drink any vino or eat any snacks, took to rating the artists out loud, but trying not to be heard by them, silently hoping maybe one would hear me and engage me in conversation, almost, ended up just forcing my friends into my cranky conversation. Luckily, and mostly not to my surprise, looking back at their websites, I would, this morning, afresh and anew, rate them the very same way.

I'll start with my least fav., but Brian's first fav., Eric Bailey. Maybe I have just seen too many cupcakes these last few years. I assume that paintings of sweets (save the mesmerizing and taste-bud-taunting paintings of Wayne Thiebaud (xoxo love love heart drool)) will soon lose their savoriness to the art-buying population. I see cupcake paintings everywhere in the Mission, or on Haight, in every cafe/boutique/gallery around. Not to mention cupcake t shirts, earrings, icons. Cupcakes are even being offered parts in music videos. All in all, I suppose I fell back on what I was taught in school--asking "what does this mean for art? Where will this fit into art history? How is he changing the art world?" And my answers were-- "Nothing. Nowhere. And he isn't." And because he was in a gallery, and I wasn't, and he was unimportant to art as a whole, I was cranky.
And I still stand by that. And I'm still cranky. And. His best painting in the show still bothered me when I realized I would have liked it better if it were a Kehinde Wiley piece. It was of a bear.

Fernando Reyes' paintings were much more interesting than Mr. Bailey's, but I would have prefered him to have just surrendered himself to Adobe. I just do not feel that he needs paint. His pictures were interesting, but the blocks of colours were slightly annoyed by the brush strokes, just enough to itch, but not inspire. His best piece in the show was a sketch. Obviously.

And, strange as it is for me to choose her as my favourite of the night, Peggy Gyulai really kind of made me feel good. She had a depth and softness to her paintings, something that I appreciated, maybe even more-so in my previously mentioned moodiness. It is so not like me to lean toward the colour-fields, and finger print trails, I know. But, especially in that space, she just felt good. And that's okay, right?

Right.

Aaaa