Thursday, March 02, 2006

Signs: Orpheum

This is from our trip to San Francisco's lovely DeYoung Museum. Apparently there was quite a stir about putting something contemporary in Golden Gate Park, but it is a lovely and surprising and intimate place to look at art. My two takeaways are Chiura Obata and Masami Teraoka. Obato was a Japanese American who worked in the 30's (no doubt he was interred in the forties) who was trained in the Japanese style and then hit modernism - so his brushwork is lyrical and the the paintings are gorgeous modern pieces with this flat and spare japanese style. Teraoka is a contemporary artist who did a huge folding screen with bravura brushstrokes representing a woman and child being drowned in a sea of AIDS. Amazing.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is a link to a (poor) reproduction of one of the Obata's we saw. . . the original was amazing! -Camden

http://www.hanga.com/viewimage.cfm?ID=2965

Anonymous said...

P. S. Masami Teroka (amazing, amazing) is being exhibited in a group show at Barnsdall Park (Jan 20 - April 2). . . just one more reason to move to L. A.!

The following is a link to Teroka's website:

http://www.lava.net/~artbeat/index2.html

-cm