Art Events

4:30 p.m., Venice Los de Abajo is a Southern California printmaking collective whose members strive to keep alive the Latin American tradition of printmaking while also experimenting with new techniques and individual expression. Their show "Division: Reflections and Shadows" at SPARC in Venice, Calif., an Art Deco former police station, is socially-engaged in a way uniquely appropriate to the coming Trumpocalypse, as in Yvette Mangual's Flight, inspired by the Caltrans immigrant crossing signs on the I-5, or Daniel González's Unidos o Morimos, which plays off of...

26 June, 2016 /

Local artists Alyssa Arney and Liz Flynn are very aware of the superficial nature of Southern California, where beauty is valued over health, and the constant presence of advertising is louder, brighter, and more attractive than honesty. Finding their way, separately, toward fiber arts, was an important journey for each artist, but finding their way toward each other, and creating an open dialogue with their community, other women, and internally, has fueled their artwork and their collaboration with meaning, purpose, and passion. Their collaborative exhibit, “Pleasure Objects,” curated...

11 May, 2016 /

The Orange Coast Review is Orange Coast College's literary journal. The current issue (which I art directed) contains sixteen pages of art from mostly local artists working in various media, including works by Bradford Salamon, Lindsay Buchman, Pamela Diaz Martinez, Nguyen Ly and Riley Waite, who is represented by two pieces from his Playing With Fire series of portraits of young heroin addicts drawn with candle soot on paper. The cover painting by Fatima Jamil combines traditional realism with contemporary abstraction. A reading from the journal...

26 April, 2016 /

“SUCCESSIONS” OPENING: April 2, 2016 Jamie Brooks Fine Art 2967 Randolph Avenue Unit C, Costa Mesa, CA 92626 949-929-4143 What is better than an artist’s fresh, brand new, and stimulating paintings? It is seeing David Michael Lee’s 15 year retrospective “Successions”. In this expanse of time, Lee, through his daring and personal exploration of accepted painterly elements, broadens our understanding of artistic possibilities. From graduate school to the present, the groupings of work encompass the artist’s thought processes and perseverance, and how he tackles each problem with zest. Yet, noteworthy...

12 April, 2016 /

Red, by John Logan, is a play about the business of being an artist — the commissions, the professional jealousies, the rivalries between generations and the physical and mental act of putting paint to canvas. Originally staged in London in 2009 and now at South Coast Repertory through February 21, the play features Mark Harelik as the painter Mark Rothko — at the height of his success in 1958, newly commissioned to paint a series of murals for the Four Seasons Restaurant at Manhattan's Seagram Building...

10 February, 2016 /

Trace Mendoza creates hypnotic work that makes you feel inspired, inquisitive and strangely euphoric.   A seemingly schizophrenic fixation with cultural iconography, his Southern California homeland, psychedelic design, deconstructivism, and unlikely pairings, OC artist Trace Mendoza finds strange and fascinating narratives in his creations that are just as fantastical and weird as the artist himself. With an overtone of whimsy, Mendoza’s artworks combine the darkness of the unknown spaces in each of us with the bright and colorful obsession with advertising, capitalism and cultural pressure that is inherent...

10 December, 2015 /

Written by: Roberta Carasso The selection of work by artists – Arno Kortschot, Connie Goldman, and Gary Petersen – is a look into the dimensions artists develop to express formal and spatial ideas – fully dimensional, the suggestion of dimension, and the illusion of dimensionality on a flat canvas. Also, because the art is intermixed, one artist’s work hung near another artist’s work, the viewer is given an additional opportunity to contemplate far more spatial and formal possibilities had the art been compartmentalized artist by artist....

24 November, 2015 /

By Roberta Carasso Artists deal with human issue just like everyone else, except, being visually-minded, they make their thoughts accessible to all who can appreciate their meaning. Katie Stubblefield is drawn to that moment when things shift, the cliff hangers of life when events suddenly are no longer the same. Working with various artistic disciplines, her metaphors embrace imagery inversion from methods of horizontal and vertical processes. The final canvas captures a movement with no direct destination, a sense of uncertainty. Tom Dowling observes that when...

11 November, 2015 /

By Richard Chang Irvine resident Tim Schwab dons a few different hats. During business hours, he’s director of design and installation at Laguna Art Museum. When he’s not on the clock, he does freelance graphic design for several local companies and makes ceramic art. Trained as a bronze sculptor, Schwab now finds his passion creating artistic pottery. The BFA graduate of Laguna College of Art + Design is showcasing his recent clay creations in a show with painter David Michael Lee at F+ Gallery in Santa Ana....

16 September, 2015 /

The First Friday art walk in Oakland, California — known as Oakland Art Murmur — is a chance for galleries throughout the city, from uptown to downtown to Jingletown, to throw open their doors for an art-loving public. Current shows of note include Kurt Fishback’s “51 Portraits of Women Artists” through July 18 at Transmission Gallery in West Oakland and Chicago-based painter and textile artist Samantha Bittman’s “Material Data” through July 4 at Johansson Projects. The Friday commute is a killer for Orange County residents though,...

07 June, 2015 /

The 2015 faculty exhibition opened tonight at Cal State Fullerton’s Begovich Gallery (a chance, perhaps, for students to grade the teachers). Fine artists in the show include Julie Orser, Joe Biel and Joe Forkan. Rebecca Campbell fills an oven with classic paperback literature in Liebe Mütti (courtesy of LA Louver), presumably to be cooked until done at 451° Fahrenheit. Jim Jenkins supplies a kinetic sculpture consisting of school chairs, dunce cap, globe and paper airplane entitled I Ain’t Much for Book Learnin’ and John Leighton...

12 April, 2015 /

Based in the abstraction of the human form, "Figurative Perplexities" at the Q Art Salon in Santa Ana takes a different look at the classic fine art subject, through the lens of six very different artists. Jason Shawn Alexander, Shay Bredimus, Alex Krigbaum, Cecilia Paredes and Orion Fischer join Dan Catalano in the exhibit, tranforming the space of the Q into a kind of cathedral, in worship of the human form. Each room is precisely arranged and glows like smaller altars to the figurative gods....

31 March, 2015 /

Saturday night the Mat Gleason curated exhibition conTEXTual abstraction opens at Peter Blake Gallery. This group show will feature artists that utilize various forms of text in their work and includes Mark Dutcher, Jonmarc Edwards, Gary Lang, Molly Larkey, Adam Mars, William Powhida, Cole Sternberg, and Tim Youd. Gleason, a long time art critic and curator, founded the Coagula Art Journal in 1992 and now runs the dynamic exhibition space Coagula Curatorial in Chinatown.  Gleason is also a long time Angels fan and is no stranger...

16 March, 2015 /

If you happen to be traveling through John Wayne Airport over the next few months please take a look at the show OC Art Blog publisher Chris Hoff curated titled Hidden Treasures: Art from the Permanent Collections of Orange County Colleges and Universities. In this exhibit travelers to and from OC can explore local art from five Orange County colleges and universities in the HIDDEN TREASURES exhibit on display at John Wayne Airport now through August 2015. From the art collections of California State University, Fullerton;...

08 March, 2015 /

[caption id="attachment_6257" align="alignleft" width="470"] [/caption] An exhibit of Iberian Peninsula-inspired paintings by Laguna College of Art + Design students and faculty opens this week at the LCAD Space at Forest & Ocean Gallery in Laguna Beach. “The Majesty of Spain and Portugal” shows the artistic response of participants in last summer’s LCAD summer abroad tour in Madrid, Toledo, Salamanca, Porto and Lisbon. The artists are Amy Bergener, Aaron Brown, Gabriel Castro, Andrea Clarke, Lani Emanuel (whose oil painting Sorolla’s Steps is shown above), Madelyn Foster, Juliette...

02 March, 2015 /

In the sculptural work of Portuguese artist Miguel Palma, a cast concrete block might mark the open page of a favorite book. A half-finished Erector set model of the Eiffel Tower might appear alongside a 19th century photograph of the real Eiffel Tower at a similar stage in its construction. Engineering, architecture, history and even biomechanics all provide stimuli for the artist’s toylike imagination. Currently wrapping up a three month residency at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, the Lisbon-based artist's recent focus is on...

17 January, 2015 /

With gas prices down and the stock market reaching all-time highs as we approach the end of 2014, no doubt you’re looking for a place to put your excess cash to work. If so, you might want to consider throwing your weight around in the local art market this holiday season. Here are a few options in and around Orange County:   Cal State Long Beach’s 47th Annual Holiday Art Sale runs through this Wednesday, December 10, and features everything from ceramics to printmaking. Something tells us...

08 December, 2014 /

[caption id="attachment_6093" align="alignleft" width="465"] Las Damas, oil on canvas, appeared in the 2008 issue of OCC's Orange Coast Review. [/caption]A celebration was held Saturday in Santa Ana for Newport Beach artist Marilou Hogeboom, who passed away this month at the age of 87. Her work in recent years was seen most regularly at Orange County Fine Art’s co-operative Showcase Gallery, where the memorial was held, but in the early 1950s, as daughter Katy recalls, she exhibited large tapestries at the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts....

23 November, 2014 /

You probably didn't notice unless you rode a bus to the beach this summer, but for a while there was a bit more art in the streets than usual. Sponsored by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America and with monetary support from various related advertising companies, the Art Everywhere US project featured reproductions of American art from the collections of LACMA, the Whitney and other participating museums. The outdoor exhibit was nationwide, with billboards and subway posters in some locations. But in the local area it...

05 September, 2014 /

Late summer is hardly peak season in the art world: Schools are out of session and gallery owners are on vacation. If art is being seen, it’s most likely at one of the outdoor festivals at the foot of Laguna Canyon Road or in the art competitions at the local county fair. Obviously nobody wants to be indoors when it’s 90 degrees, but there are a few shows ending soon that will make a quick venture indoors a worthwhile endeavor. [caption id="attachment_5974" align="alignright" width="135"] A.M. Rousseau,...

19 August, 2014 /