• This is how Sean Johnson felt during the last election.

To get the pennies, he had to call ahead; it seems banks don't have vast penny populations just lying around. ...

Isn't it funny how people distrust contemporary artists more than banks?

Keep reading about this sculpture, the artist "honored" with redesigning the back of the American penny in 2010, and this other sculpture that went crashing into the wall when I was at the gallery recently, here.

• The Barnes Foundation
• Good lord, that's an awful painting. It lives at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

As I've written before, Renoir painted fruit well, and he painted women. Problem is, he painted women like fruit. Exhibit A above. So I was none too excited by the prospect of reviewing Renoir, the new film. But! My review:

There would appear to be nothing promising in a film that takes place when Renoir is creating his late nudes on the sunny French Riviera: They are kitsch for repressed pervs. Renoir is one of the most uneven artists in the history of brush to canvas. But Renoir, this new feature film by Gilles Bourdos, is actually interesting. It begins with the death of his wife, and throughout, women are far more than pretty subjects for looking at. It’s 1915, the war is ongoing, and Renoir’s injured son Jean—the eventually famous film director—comes home to convalesce. He meets Renoir’s beautiful red-haired nude model, the woman who eventually becomes Jean’s leading actress and first wife. What happens onscreen involves dappled light, yes, and a hallowed painter, but also delicately, and in few words and not too much melodrama, raises the subjects of art’s place in wartime, the early tension between painting and cinema, and the power and variety of women despite their regular flattening into a crew of fleshy nudes. Yay for the closing credits, an encouragement to seek out the real-life films that feature said model, Catherine Hessling. She died an unknown; she’s less so now.

Here's a clip of Catherine Hessling. She just got such good roles! Um...

• It's beautiful out and this woman is trying to give you some art. What are you going to do? Jennifer Schwartz was at Pike Place Market and Cal Anderson Park today. Next stop is Chicago.

"Can I interest you in some free art today?"

That's the refrain of the five Seattle photographers stationed outside an aquamarine 1977 VW bus next to Cal Anderson Park this afternoon. Earlier they were at Pike Place Market, but they were asked to relocate by complaining vendors. No problem. Jennifer Schwartz packed up the bus and came up the hill to find another high-foot-traffic area. Seattle is one of 10 cities she's visiting on her Crusade for Art, "a passion project," she calls it.

In advance of her arrival, Schwartz picks five local photographers. Each brings 10 prints, all the same image. They ask people whether they want to stop and talk, people say yes or no (mostly no, but it's only 10 anyway), and if the people want the print after hearing about it, they can take one with them. The artists can exchange information with their new "collectors," if they want to.

"Maybe somewhere down the road it will change the way they feel around art," she said, wearing sunglasses and jeans and acting as a street dealer who charges no fee and takes no cut.

This is what she did rather than stationing herself at IKEA.

"If I could stand at the register at every IKEA in the nation when people were up there buying their mass-produced tulip posters, and I could stop them and say, 'Hey, here's this original artwork and here's the artist,' I really feel that most people would choose the original," Schwartz said.

Schwartz has a gallery specializing in emerging photographers in Atlanta. It's simple: Emerging artists need emerging collectors. "How do you find people that aren't looking for you?" she said. Crusade is how. She bought the bus on eBay and set out for two total months on the road (away from her husband and three children). Her next stop is Chicago.

• Seattle photographer Ray Rogers and her naked self-portrait in the mountains. For today, Jennifer Schwartz was her art dealer.

Rogers brought along an image of a frolicking naked person in a white-out storm in the mountains. The figure is seen from behind, wearing snow boots and throwing up hands. The gender is not quite definite. Rogers explained it's a self-portrait she shot one day when she was all alone in the Cascades. As the snow came down, she turned a stump into a makeshift tripod and let loose. The portrait has a certain something.

"Making self-portraits with a camera has helped me to see myself with totally different eyes," Rogers said brightly, giving her thoroughly lovable two-minute artist lecture at this pop-up shop. "It's so much different from seeing yourself in a mirror."

Art, ladies and gentlemen. Come and get it.

• Sean M. Johnson's portrait of a lost child, made out of nails hammered into drywall and based on the photograph from an FBI poster, is at LxWxH Gallery in Georgetown.

How real is the theory of six degrees of separation between every human? Is there a similar separation between birds in murmurations? (Spectacular video of starlings.) And what about the separation between humans and other animals? Can humans convincingly imitate birds? How much of what we do is "natural," and how much "cultural"—because, isn't culture natural?

I'm thinking about all this because of three seemingly unrelated art exhibitions in Seattle right now. One: Sean M. Johnson's Pieces of a Whole at LxWxH, up through May 4. Two: Cass Nevada's Release at Shift, just up through today. Three: Joseph Gregory Rossano's Whitewashed at CoCA, which opened on Earth Day this past Monday and is up through July 19.

• Cass Nevada at Shift.

At LxWxH, Johnson's portraits of lost children are murmurations, too. The nails are hammered in at varying depths, forming an undulating surface (and creating the effect of shading you'd see if this were a pencil drawing). The surface has its own rhythm. But it's premeditated. The pencil lines the artist set down to guide his hammering are still visible.

Rossano's exhibition Whitewashed is a demonstration of his admiration and respect for extinct and nearly-extinct animals, including tigers, basking sharks, and polar bears—his feeling of closeness with them. Why does he identify? Why do any of us?

• One of Rossano's boxes contains this unexplained archival photograph of a tiger in a lab.

Meet Betty Sander. I got this email from her daughter, Shaw Sander:

I imagine our information sent on Betty Sander’s “Psychedelic Phantasm” show was overlooked in the email slush pile, but we very much want you quality folks at The Stranger to know about this incredible work. Now on display in the hall gallery on Broadway Market’s quiet 2nd floor, the show runs through May 23rd, 2013.
(Though this show is family-friendly abstract acrylics on paper, she is most famous for her full-frontal eye-popping high color male nudes. We’re seeking a Capitol Hill venue for those, if you have suggestions!)

Originally based in the Midwest, Ms. Sander’s six-decade resume extends from Chicago’s radical art scene to permanent display status at Indiana University’s Kinsey Sex Institute.
After her PNW debut at the 2012 Seattle Erotic Art Festival, Betty Sander’s intricately detailed sensual eye candy has commanded a cult-like following for her bold psychedelic style.
Creator of delicate pencil and crayon life forms, rich landscapes, psychedelic wild abstracts and textured collages, octogenarian Betty Sander’s infamy includes her masterpiece embellishing Richard Avedon Beatles’ White Album photographs entitled “Beatle Bijou.” Elaborate and visually sensual, Betty Sander creates lush vibrant color-bursts undulating through her work, filling the eyes with concentric layers of unbelievable beauty.
She also plays 12-string Dobro guitar, holds a Master’s from the University of Chicago, effortlessly reads Greek and Latin, tilled a forty-acre Rodale organic farm, managed a folk-music coffeehouse in the turbulent 1960’s and raised three daughters, of which I am one.

Ladies and gentlemen, Betty Sander.

• Courtesy of the artist
• One of Betty Sander's many nudes.

See the art next time you shop at Broadway Market.

• A detail from the row of painted postcards in Ruth Marie Tomlinson's installation Lost Long at Jack Straw New Media Gallery.

It's in a small enclosed room steps away from the traffic of Roosevelt Way, with one brick wall, two long cloudy windows, and a dumb thin black carpet laid down in squares. I've been to this place before: It's a gallery, the Jack Straw New Media Gallery, and a couple of months ago it gained a glassy lobby—you used to have to ring a doorbell then walk down a dim hallway to enter it, which could not have been a less fortuitous beginning. When the gallery door closes behind me this time, I have traveled someplace new. There are sounds: empty playground swings clanging against metal poles, a female voice reading weather conditions ("cloudless, windless"), distant thunder and dripping rain. A continuous line of white pins along the white walls outlines a mountain range, ringing me into a valley. In the center there's a low long table that glows.

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You still have a minute to see Polari at True Love Art Gallery, the group exhibition that's the visual-art component of the marvelous musical 'Mo-Wave festival. The show contains multitudes, even if those multitudes are a little overly dudey. I came away with a few favorite works. One is by Adam Boehmer who, if I'm not mistaken, is also the singer-songwriter of one of the lead musical acts from 'Mo-Wave, Tenderfoot. He created the collaged portrait of subdued timbertown homoeroticism you see above. (My apologies for the inadequate photo with reflecting fluorescent lights, or maybe it adds a layer of imagining that this vision of history is actually hanging in a wood-paneled conference room somewhere, some den of sexual repression.) Boehmer nestled zones of crumpled magazine pornography on an archival aerial view of the Puget Sound Pulp & Timber company. The land itself is writhing, surrounded by all these hard lots of industry.

Then there's The Democracy of Assholes, a classically balanced, perfectly sanctified dirty/clean geometry of public-restroom silver and gold by Davida Ingram.

Don't miss Kelly O's balls, a watercolor by I-don't-know-who referring to a sexually explicit Akio Takamori sculpture dream, and a tarted-up marionette of Yves St. Laurent by Davora M. Lindner. More here.

• Courtesy Abmeyer + Wood
• Untitled, oil and wax on wood, 30 by 30 inches, at Abmeyer + Wood Fine Art.

I'm not usually in the mood for rehashed abstract expressionism, but this time, it's well done, by Rhode Island artist Ron Ehrlich, at Abmeyer + Wood Fine Art on Second Avenue. Ehrlich thinks of each of the paintings in his recent series of Drunken Horses as a self-portrait, and they're majestic and sorry-looking at the same time, their legs splayed and their surfaces drippy and built up out of plaster and oil paint and wood and wax. They're up through Thursday.

• Courtesy Roq La Rue Gallery
• THE NEW ROQ LA RUE Buildout underway as we speak.

But she was a little panicked, looking for a new place. The very next day she found one: a magically airy place that's "very gallery-esque already," with 15-foot ceilings, at 532 First Avenue South (near King Street, which is one block south of Jackson). In addition to the white cube of the main gallery area, she's creating an upstairs "project room" for smaller exhibitions.

"Excited about this transition happening right on the eve of Roq La Rue's 15th anniversary, we decided to get the gallery properly built out as fast as possible and host our May show in the new exhibition space," Anderson wrote.

The grand opening is May 2, First Thursday Art Walk, with an exhibition by local painter Stacey Rozich.

• Courtesy the artist

This painting, When Will It End, is by Joe Wardwell, who lays rock lyrics over 19th-century Hudson River School-like painted imagery. He lives and teaches near Boston, he studied at Boston University and the University of Washington, and he currently has an exhibition of perfectly exhausted paintings, As We Go Up We Go Down, at Prole Drift in the International District. His web site is here.

Boston Globe Says Authorities Have "Clear Video Images of Two Suspects": Here's the story. But the only thing that seems clear, if you didn't know this already, is that reading the New York Post will rot your mind.

Explosion at a Fertilizer Plant in Waco: Paul posted video earlier. Still not known how many dead and injured, estimates are between 5 and 15 dead.

Sinkhole Swallows Three Cars: In southeast Chicago.

Widespread Flooding in Chicago Area: Crazy weather throughout the Midwest.

How Brittney Griner, WNBA's No. 1 Pick, Talks Simply and Gracefully: About "Being one that's out."

Musharraf Flees to His Luxury Home: In the middle of the court case against him, just after being told his bail would not be extended.

To Recap: Newtown parents watched the gun bill die in a display of corruption that's surprising even for the bought-and-sold-by-the-gun-lobby Senate yesterday.

American Jobs: Moving to the suburbs.

North Korea Will Only Talk: If apologies are issued for all acts of provocation against them, and other demands.

What's red and gooey?: The Elwha River.

Woman Accused of Murder in Kitsap County: Also accused of co-pimping from jail.

Greek Strawberry Farmer Opens Fire: On Bangladeshi migrant workers who asked for their salaries to be paid. Meanwhile, children in Greece: going hungry.

The Private Photographer of Public Enemy: Ernie Paniccioli.

Twitter's New Service: #Music.

I believe this is a morning for the glass harmonica.

Even if you are familiar with Seattle-based artist Susie J. Lee—she won the Stranger Genius Award in 2010, she was celebrated at Portland Art Museum in 2011, she has exhibited and collaborated across this country, in Europe, and in Korea—you may not know that she grew up in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

And like most Geniuses, Lee is always working on something you don't know about.

It turns out Lee has been in North Dakota for the better part of a month, making art that now constitutes her first solo exhibition in her home state. It opened this past Sunday at the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks, and it's called Split Open, in a reference both to the splitting psychological experience of returning to one's home after a long absence, and to the freezing, fractured physical landscape of North Dakota itself, which is currently being fracked so hard that more oil is coming out of the ground every day than can be trucked away.

Lee went right into the heart of that fracked land to make this new work—in planes, in cars, in bars. She took along as videographer another Seattle artist, the excellent Rodrigo Valenzuela. (He currently has a solo very much worth seeing, called (in)habit, at Blindfold Gallery.)

She wrote:

We spent ten days in the northwest corner of North Dakota. We flew over the Badlands; we drove for miles on Highway 2 and 1084; we explored a drilling rig; we ate our meals and stayed at a man camp; we played pool and drank beer in Stanley with a drilling crew; we saw the flares, the mud, the towns, and all that everyone talks about. On one side is dusty congestion, then vast emptiness. There is unpredictable traffic and relentless motion and sound. There is a both feeling of urgency and also a geological sense of time.

The earth itself seems to groan in Giantess, another 7-minute video from the exhibition. I don't know where the sound came from on either of these, but I'd like to.

I salute Lee for doing more than just sending a bunch of pre-cooked work to her hometown and making an appearance for the opening. Instead, she dug into these places that are unrecognizable from the way they were when she was growing up around them, capturing the glimmery oil burbling and sliding down a wall of earth, and the wind from the traffic ruffling the feathers of the roadkill, and the infinite train with its reassuring rhythm. Is this romanticism? What were those man camps and bars like for Lee?

I wish I could get over to see the full show, but I don't think I'm going to be able to make it before it closes May 26. If anyone's there, please send me a note and tell me what you see.

• The Stranger
• MODERN LOVE Aerobics and abstraction.

Last week I returned to my hometown of Albany, New York, where I love to visit the really stunning Empire State Art Collection hidden underground, beneath the Empire State Plaza and one of my favorite buildings in the world, the Egg. It's a public art collection.

• Lunging to Louis.

It's also stunning because nobody seems to remember that it's there. Last week, when I asked a guard for the fastest way to get down to the art from the New York State History Museum entrances, he told me there isn't any art down there.

Then there was the aerobics class.

It was in the Corning Tower Concourse Lobby. And it was pumping.

This is not the same place it was five years ago, when I visited the Corning Tower Concourse Lobby. Back then, it was Homeland Security central, a place for metal detection and metal detection only. I had to make phone calls to officials and flash badges and receive passes just to get back behind the security desk to glimpse the paintings for five minutes, after which point I was whisked away.

• Flexing to Frankenthaler.

Freedom fitness! The terrorists have not won.

The only question left is: Which abstract artist is the best for your heart rate?

Jen is out this week, so I'm filling in on the visual art beat—how hard could it be? I'm already stumped. Look at this, uh, lovely piece that's been haunting me from window of Super Genius Tattoo:

Continue reading »

• Courtesy of Davidson Galleries
• The humanity! Goya.

You've got David Byrd at Greg Kucera.

Goya's Los Caprichos at Davidson.

The birds of Justin Gibbens at G. Gibson (with other artists, too, including Maija Fiebig and Joann Verburg).

Matt Sellars, fresh out of the desert, at Platform.

One of Sellars's carved wood pieces is called Hector Salamanca. I sincerely hope it's based on this Breaking Bad character. Elsewhere in the exhibition are carvings reminiscent of bleached and picked-clean bones, and a life-size shack with mysterious contents. Sellars writes in his artist statement that the desert is a "resource of emptiness" for "those who seek to occupy this void." Here's a detail from the shack/video installation:

• Courtesy the artist and Platform Gallery
• Matt Sellars

I am being thuggishly ahistorical here, but to my thuggishly ahistorical eyes, there is always something completely batshit on the walls at the Frye Art Museum.

I'm not referring to provocative art in the avant-garde sense. Nope. I'm referring to paintings that almost never mean to be shocking.

I'm just shocked by the deep silliness of some of the pictures, all dolled up with their gorgeous gilt frames and formal presentations. And I'm not being dismissive. It's just that historical painting often makes me laugh. There. I said it. There's a slapstick element in attempting to look back in time, especially when the pretensions of fine art are thrown into the mix. The results can look like insipidity incarnate.

And so, it is with affection—and apologies to Franz von Stuck's mother—that I present to you yesterday's find...

• Courtesy the Frye Art Museum
• Franz von Stuck, The Duel, 1907, collection of Charles and Emma Frye

No jokes, folks. I love Seattle.

• Courtesy the artist and Greg Kucera Gallery
• Making Bed in Coal Country. She's pregnant.

When Jody Isaacson moved to the sleepy New York town of Sidney Center, she was immediately curious about a driveway she kept passing. It teemed with old wheelbarrows, cinder blocks, machine parts, pieces of wood, lawn mowers, wheels—all placed just so. It looked like a junkyard arranged by an aesthete, and for three years, she only marveled at it. When she finally worked up the nerve to knock on the door one night this past September, she found herself face-to-face with a house just as full—but of paintings. There were so many that they were hung three to a single nail: small, medium, large, so that when she took one down, there was a smaller one nested underneath.

David Byrd, the house's resident hermit, made all of the paintings. Because of Isaacson's intervention, he is having his first-ever gallery exhibition at Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, where Isaacson also shows. Byrd is 87. His first gallery solo comes 77 years after he attracted attention for his grade-school drawings, more than 60 years since his brief formal art studies with the Parisian cubist Amédée Ozenfant, and 25 years after his retirement from the humble occupation that provided his greatest artistic inspiration: being an orderly, for three decades, on the psychiatric ward at the Veterans Administration Medical Hospital in Montrose, New York—watching the aftershocks of World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam.

If Isaacson had not knocked...

"I thought an auctioneer would find my paintings after I was gone and sell them off—I just thought it would go that way," Byrd said by phone from an emergency-room waiting area in upstate New York last week, where Isaacson took him after he fell ill. His planned trip to Seattle was hanging in the balance. It was to be his first plane ride, traveling to be reunited with the almost 100 paintings, drawings, and sculptures that had already been shipped to the gallery.

"We've never done a show quite like this," says Greg Kucera.

Keep reading about it here, where there are also lots of images.

Here is Kucera's Byrd-pedia, with even more images.

And in case you're wondering, no, Byrd has not yet arrived in Seattle, and he already missed one flight (yesterday). I hope he will make it on his first plane ride. He is supposed to be at the gallery opening tomorrow night during First Thursday. Possibly he will be scowling at the crowd. It's easy to imagine him preferring to be alone with his paintings.

Below is a painting he made of his mother. When he was a kid, she worked as a movie ticket seller in Brooklyn. Sometimes she was able to support all six of her kids, sometimes not. She was a single parent.

Byrd paints entirely from memory.

• Courtesy the artist and Greg Kucera Gallery
• Chapter Four, 1994

Keep reading >>

• Brian Sanchez, detail

What's up at Vermillion right now is a whole lot of visual—by Sanchez, Jesse Brown, Jay Clark, Alex Johnson, Todd Lown, and Zach Rockstad. They all have a kind of streetwiseness, whether it's Barry-McGee-style or more metal. These paintings and drawings and sculptures will turn up the corners of your mouth, maybe make it water a little.

The piece below is Brown. His full web site is here.

• Jesse Brown

Because Blick just acquired Utrecht. The press release is on the jump.

Continue reading »

• Courtesy the artist
• Barbara Earl Thomas's prints go on display Thursday at Paper Hammer.

Where Barbara Earl Thomas's people are from, worms are called night crawlers. Night Crawlers and Earthworms (above) is her etching of three people lying on the pages of an open book.

A wall of serpentine grass rises behind them as they focus on their work, intently plucking wriggling night crawlers from the thicket of pages. Their tools are their fingers, pointed at the tips as if adaptively shaped for picking. In contrast, bare feet are soft and slack and curvy, as languorous as the occupation that runs back through Thomas's Southern family: fishing. Waiting, sometimes days, for a bite. "We fish deep," she wrote of her family of fisherpeople, which came to Seattle in the 1940s. She's the first generation out of the South, and resultantly, her images are frozen storms of opposites. They're borderline visions that she says straddle North/South, warm/cool, black/white, emotional/stoic.

Thomas has such a good life story, and is such a good storyteller, that her art can be overlooked.

Keep reading >>

You: Love art, know a thing about it, and want to be or already are a writer.

You: Have a sense of humor. Please.

You: Are not a flake. Really. No, seriously.

The visual art intern job at The Stranger involves compiling the art listings for print and online, occasionally Slogging about what you see, and possibly getting to write a piece for print. It's an 8-hour weekly commitment that lasts three months, and you should be able to come in to the Capitol Hill office to work.

While the internship is unpaid, most interns do get the benefit at least one published piece by the end of their time. Interns also get into press events and sometimes cover weird events or track down esoterica. The visual arts intern needs to know — or quickly learn — the basics of contemporary art and the local art community (so that you can notice, for instance, if a major event or venue is missing from the listings).

Still interested? Email me a note and a resume along with an answer to this question: If you could see any art show in the world right now, which would it be and why?