Orange County Museum of Art ... my journey From Starving Artist To 21st Century Picasso

You can see some expressions of Jay Rolfe's unique artistic idea on his website at www.3dssc.com.

I took 5 days of rest and relaxation on the West Coast. One of the things I did on Friday was visit the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach CA. They were showing a huge exhibit, which ended Sunday, of Chuck Close prints titled Chuck Close: Prints, Process and Collaboration. It featured "100 works dating from 1972 to 2002, illustrating the artist’s range of invention in etching, aquatint, lithography, handmade paper, direct gravure, silkscreen, traditional Japanese woodcut, and reduction linocut." There was a great deal of detail about the processes used and many proofs were exhibited showing the process that then combined to make up the finished image. It was quite interesting. As about half of the Chuck Close paintings I've seen have been self-portraits, it was nice to see an image of his wife, the first I've seen. Here's the link to the Chuck Close exhibit, although other than a summary it seems to be under construction now. www.ocma.net/index.html?page=past&show=exhibit&e_id=1473

In the Imaging + Imagining California exhibit, basically a retrospective of 20th century California art, one of the works that impressed me was Robert Irwin's Untitled (#2220) from 1969. It was a 54" in diameter convex circular disk made of white cast acrylic with a silver stripe painted horizontally across it. It is mounted about 2 feet out from the wall and is lit with 4 lights, one high and one low on each side. The effect of the shadows is to make what appears to be 5 (or perhaps 7) overlapping circles on the wall, including the disk. The funny thing is that today I saw the same piece at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC! And it looked different because of the different intensity of the lights! Here's the link. www.ocma.net/index.html?page=highlights&piece=12

There was also an exhibit of titled Dennis Hopper: Billboard Paintings and Photographs. They were nice black and white photos of his actor friends from the early days, as well as some iconic images of LA in those days.

That's the next step on the journey of Jay Rolfe From Starving Artist To 21st Century Picasso.