Monday, March 10, 2014

El Paseo Art Scene, 2014

I seem to find myself in the Palm Springs, California area every March while my wife is at the Indian Wells tennis tournament. When not being her taxi driver, I goof off various places, including the El Paseo, a fancy shopping street in Palm Desert. There are plenty of art galleries there, and my visits sometimes serve as grist for blog posts such as here and here.

I tend to focus on representational paintings, so while browsing on a Friday Art Walk evening, I took notes on names of artists whose work caught my attention for one reason or another. Not all the images shown below were on display when I went gallery-hopping; but I want to indicate what those artists were currently doing.

Gallery

"Summer Heat" by Mark Bowles
A number of Bowles' paintings at first glance seem to be color-field exercises. But on closer examination, they are actually abstracted landscapes.

By Vanni Saltarelli
I wrote about Saltarelli here, but thought it worthwhile to show you something more recently displayed. He dashes things off, including sketchiness with more painterly passages, to put it in artist jargon.

"Black Imperial" by Kent Scaglia
Hyper-realism probably based on a photo (note the reflections he incorporates on the side of the fender). But I'm a car guy and an automobile history buff, so what's not for me to like here.

"Rainy Day Solidarity" by Jeff Jamison
The lack of facial detail on the subjects bothers me, despite whatever rationalizations are offered for this.

"At the Rialto" by Bruce Cody
Cody has painted a number of small paintings such as this, dealing with small-town scenes from Texas or the mountain states.

"Spartan Camping" by Jason Kowalski
Kowalski paints in the same subject vein as Cody. But the painting above is a bit different. I viewed the original, and was impressed by the brushwork Kowalski used to build the image.

By Eustaquio Segrelles
Joaquin Sorolla's Valencia beach scenes must resonate seriously with some Spanish painters. A while ago I posted about Ginar Bueno, whose work struck me as being both too similar to Sorolla and definitely inferior to the master's work. Segrelles uses the same subject matter, but his style is more solidly constructed than Sorolla's, making his paintings easier for me to accept than Bueno's.

"Gossip" by Michael Carson
I dealt with Carson's change of style here, but thought I'd include an image of a painting of his I saw at the most recent Art Walk.

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