Tormenta by Los Angeles Artist Gronk

 
Whenever I'm in a Los Angeles art gallery if I notice a piece by Gronk I always get snagged and hang around in front of it for too long. I tire easily of galleries and museums because of the general impatience you encounter in those places. People are at their absolute bottom level of stupidity when they saunter through a gallery, stopping for just an exquisitely timed observation period sometimes directly in front of where you happen to be standing. They also tend to move around a room in the same direction, going with the flow or listening to their little tape-recorded tours. I like to go backwards and jam these people up a little. I also like to massively flirt with pretty women but often get into trouble with their boyfriends whom I haven't noticed lurking in the opposite corner.
 
Gronk makes me feel at home in a gallery because I like to stand before greatness. I'm not fond of the equalization of creativity. This guy just casually blows everything off the walls like he's the kind of great artist we made in the time of Pollock. There's an air of hard-edged bohemian mixed with muralist mixed with art history scholar. In other words, he knows what he’s doing. He's got an enormous classical underpinning that may sometimes get obscured if you too closely associate him with the Los Angeles street. I mean classical in the more inaccurate general sense of an artist that has a deep connection to the artists and major movements that came before him. I see a calm and understanding continuation of American art history coming through the few Gronk works I have had the pleasure of standing in front of.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxbgDQHRyks
 
Gronk on ArtNet.
L.A. Times 2005 profile of Gronk
Complete list of works
 
 

Los Angeles Streetcars – The Final Years

 
This is a short documentary about the last of the Los Angeles Yellow and Green streetcar lines of the mid-1950s. For me, Los Angeles is the most beautiful American city because of its nearly mystical relationship with the natural landscape intruding so markedly upon the urban scene. One gets the feeling that at any moment the terrain could obliterate the city entirely. The resulting dichotomy makes for eerie and unsettling intrusions of nature into the urban landscape. Turn a corner, even today, and you are quite likely to find yourself looking up a natural hillside with only a dirt path for access. Old films like these fascinate me for their glimpses of the cityscape and its long-ago relationship to the desert surroundings.
 
 
 

How Can Sidewalk Chalk Art Be Illegal?

 
I took this today in downtown Los Angeles' Pershing Square where Occupy protesters intend to make more chalk art tonight. Last month protesters were attacked by police in riot gear simply because they were drawing on sidewalks. Apparently the legal scholars at the LAPD think the use of children's chalks made by Crayola is illegal when an adult is doing the drawing. As protests go it seems to me that chalking is one of the less obnoxious. I have read that courts nationwide are dismissing these chalking cases. Prosecutors in LA have refused to press charges against those recently arrested by our inexplicably cranky police.
 
It's really okay, officer! Seriously. Just enjoy all the pretty pictures and move along. It all washes off in the rain.
 
 

Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights

 

Alladin by Errol Le Cain 1981

Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights (Studies in the Arcadian Library)is a massive volume written by Robert Irwin and published by Oxford University Press that provides an overview of illustrated versions of The Tales since the first Dutch images of 1714 by an artist named David Coster.