Lu Ann Barrow's 'Soul-Journers': Friends, Family, and the Fabric of Daily Life
Austin Museum of Art -- Downtown, through Nov. 5

By Nikki Moore
Austin Chronicle
Friday, October 6, 2006

If you have ever watched any of the bonus material tacked at the end of a Pixar DVD, you've had a glimpse into the complicated world of digital art. I was particularly drawn in by a lengthy bonus piece on The Incredibles DVD. Apparently one of the most difficult parts of that computer-animated film was making one of the lead character's long hair look real. To avoid creating just a mass of long black nothing, each hair was programmed to act independently. But this independence had some very odd results: Before they perfected the process, each individual strand of hair stood out and was distinguished from its animated environment, giving this character more of that "electrical storm" appeal than desired. Where the Pixar team wrestled with how much detail and independence a mass of hair needs to reflect in order to look real, Lu Ann Barrow's work is a testament to what happens when detail-oriented caution is thrown to the wind. Individualizing nearly every inch of her brilliantly colored canvases like wildly printed fabrics, Barrow does what an eye without the filtering power of the brain might do: She not only clarifies but highlights each blade of grass, every cobblestone, pebble, flower, dress, and wallpaper pattern, painting them in bold colors that excite rather than drown one another out. The result is like Christmas morning: With each ornament sparkling on the tree above a mound of brilliantly wrapped presents, it is difficult to decide where to look first.

Looking, however, is only part of what Austinite Lu Ann Barrow's work is about. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Henri Matisse, Barrow creates forms that are idealized and stylized. The strong influence of "primitivists" such as Henri Rousseau is evident in Barrow's flattened depths of field and her deceptively "untrained" technique. Barrow's themes are stylized as well, yet Barrow breaks away from stereotypes as she mixes locations, peoples, and lifestyles from her travels and memories into something far more imaginary than typecast or attemptingly descriptive.

In the most brilliant of her paintings, the balls on Barrow's painted chenille robes and slipcovers are so gayfully textured that you want to reach out and touch them. Yet as you nearly do, the eye-popping wallpaper steals your eye only long enough before your gaze is drawn into the almost psychedelic colors of the braided rug that unites her dancing characters to their floor. Barrow's paintings are paintings that have gone through, in the mind of their maker, abstraction, impressionism, and, as her graduate work at the University of Texas attests, all the academic genres. Yet her work, true to her roots, comes back without pretension to storytelling, to laughter, and to Texas.

Back to top

"Daniel Bozhkov: Recent Works"
Arthouse, through Oct. 22

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
Friday, October 13, 2006

Darth Vader. The Black Sea. Brita water filters.

Crop circles. Larry King. Flying lessons. A green sofa.

The scent of America. An Istanbul hotel. Ernest Hemingway. A look-alike contest in Key West.

Odd things are linked together in the work of Daniel Bozhkov. The Bulgarian native has a knack for combining seemingly incongruous elements, and in the seven projects of his now on view at Arthouse, that may be what's most arresting and, at least initially, most engaging about them. You just don't expect to see a 250-by-300-foot portrait of Larry King made of flattened milkweed stalks or a perfume dedicated to the über-macho author of Death in the Afternoon (much less one with the sissified appellation Eau d'Ernest), and the curiosity of it grabs your eye.

At a glance, these works might come off as little more than the conceptual-art equivalent of throwaway gags. Having the sinister Dark Lord of the Sith knee-deep in water, pouring a portion of the sea from a Brita filtration pitcher into a plastic jug, is such an absurd juxtaposition of unrelated items that the laugh it provides could be an end in itself. But there is much more to these images than meets the eye. Underlying each is a story of interests and associations, of a subject with personal significance to Bozhkov and of him following a thread of meaning through this realm and that one and the other, however disparate they may appear. So a consideration of what the scent of America might be leads to Hemingway as a symbol of masculinity and rugged individuality from, as Bozhkov says, "a time when America smelled good." Which leads to the Büyük Londra Hotel, where Hemingway stayed as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star and to the Hemingway look-alike contest in Key West, where ringers for Papa weigh in on the fragrances that best reflect the old man's essence. So while the end product has its comic punch -- and that bottle bearing a passport mug shot of the sober-faced young writer is a deliciously wry commentary on contemporary packaging -- the path to it is a rich investigation into cultural identity, traversing societal attitudes, literature, history, the media, consumerism, and more.

See, in Bozhkov's world, everything is connected. Who we are is all bound up in where we shop and what we eat and who came before us and what we watch on television and what happens in the natural world. That may be most plain in Learn How to Fly Over a Very Large Larry, his project involving the Larry King crop circle, which at Arthouse is displayed in a large open room. One wall is completely taken up with a large painting of Bozhkov flattening plants in the field in Maine, while opposite it is a smaller portrait of a young botanist who helped Bozhkov identify the plants in the field. In the center of the room is a long green couch that faces a table on which sit five TVs running video documentation of the project: of the botanist, of the field, of Bozhkov's flight over the finished project, and of news reports about the finished project (including an acknowledgment by King himself). Here would seem to be a full record of this endeavor, and yet look above the monitors, and on the wall behind them hang plant samples from the field itself, stalk and flower under glass. It brings home to us in a very concrete way how this work of art came of the world.

The world matters a great deal to Bozhkov, as is clear from the work he created for this exhibition on commission from Arthouse. Cantata for Twelve Choirs and Several Salamanders features sound and video recorded during a session with local choral ensembles at Barton Springs. Each choir sang the same song, "Wade in the Water," and in the gallery we can see the individual faces of the singers as they channel the emotions of this powerful African-American spiritual. Some are young, some are old, some women, some men, but all seem to feel the pull not only of a human struggle from earlier centuries but of the healing qualities in nature, which is up to us to preserve. As we hear the human voices, Bozhkov blends in the voices of other choirs: birds, insects, wind. Everything is connected, they seem to sing. It is a mighty song.

Back to top

Beyond the Blockbuster
With 'Luca Cambiaso, 1527-1585,' the Blanton bucks the trend toward superstar exhibitions and spotlights a lost Renaissance master

By Nikki Moore
Austin Chronicle
Friday, October 20, 2006

Every industry and field has its superstars. Film has its Tom Cruises, music its Madonnas -- names everybody knows. But just because artists like Van Gogh and Renoir don't often get their names flashing in digitized neon on the hottest marquees -- Da Vinci being a recent exception -- doesn't mean they can't sell out the house. Yes, just as there are blockbuster movies, there are blockbuster art exhibits: those shows that you know will draw a crowd, that travel from city to city, advertised on street-lamp banners, right next to the hanging flower baskets. We've all seen them -- or at least we've seen the T-shirts, coffee mugs, and mouse pads that testify to their existence. And there is nothing wrong with them. Superstar shows are what help get the public involved in art, what bring into the museum those who might otherwise spend an afternoon at the mall or on the court or in the bookstore.

Yet, in addition to those blockbuster movies, there are those fantastic, provocative, lesser-known independent films that change your view of everything. Everybody is talking about them; everyone is wishing they'd made them. And this is exactly what the Blanton Museum's current Luca Cambiaso exhibit is doing in and for the world of art. In contrast to the blockbuster exhibitions that abound, the Blanton has put together a major exhibition that scholars and art historians have looked upon as one that really needed to be done. Because the truth is that Cambiaso, this late 16th-century painter whose name you've likely never heard, laid nothing less than the foundation for the Genoese School of painting. By the end of his life, his work spanned the Italian Renaissance to the Baroque, fluxing always between idealism and empiricism, between form and expression. Based on those achievements, he should be well-known. But ironically, Cambiaso's name has remained obscured from our eyes, at least in part, because of the fame he accrued during his own lifetime.

Born in 1527, Cambiaso learned at an early age to paint and draw from his father. Throughout his career, Cambiaso was commissioned by all of Genoa's wealthiest families, resulting in a large volume of paintings addressing mythological, intimate, and religious themes, as well as some extraordinary panel work, including Nativity, which makes its first appearance outside Italy in the Blanton retrospective. Cambiaso's fame in his day rested not only on these prestigious painted works, however, but also on the exceptional volume of drawings that he and his workshop produced and disseminated. In the manner common to the times, Cambiaso took paid students and apprentices, who learned their craft by imitating their master. Yet in a manner uncommon to any artist before him, Cambiaso turned the drawing, the draft for that planned masterwork, into a masterwork all its own, a piece that could stand alone apart from the painting it might have laid out -- an art form that could be honored, purchased, and valued in its own right. For many artists of that era, prints were the means by which their work was replicated and their name established in the larger world, but since Cambiaso's home city of Genoa lacked the infrastructure for printmaking, the artist dedicated his studio to the replication of his works through duplicate drawings. "Line for line, shadow for shadow," as the exhibition co-curator Jonathan Bober says, Cambiaso's students multiplied each piece, allowing his work to travel, to be bought and sold on a larger scale than would have been possible otherwise. Unfortunately, this large-scale dissemination also watered down the bloodline of his work. With so many nearly identical pieces attributed to Cambiaso, it was difficult for collectors, scholars, and historians to separate the authentic Cambiaso drawing from the work of his students. Over time, Cambiaso's work got lost in the output of his studio protégés. His work rarely saw the spotlight outside of his own hometown.

Until now.

While the drawings and paintings of northern Italy between the Renaissance and Baroque periods had always been of interest to the Blanton's curator of European prints and paintings, Bober, it was with the acquisition of the Suida-Manning Collection of European Art in 1998 that this interest became a relationship. This outstanding collection offered the Blanton seven paintings and more than 50 drawings attributed to the hand of Luca Cambiaso, thus putting the museum in charge of more than half of the 11 paintings by this artist in the Unites States. The potential for something big, something important, was evolving. Yet it was not until there was confirmation that a new space would be built for the Blanton that Bober truly began to envision a major exhibition of the work of Cambiaso, the first outside Genoa and the first major U.S. exhibition to share his work with the public.

University galleries rarely touch shows of such a scale, but with the paintings and drawings of the Suida-Manning Collection as a solid core, Bober and the Blanton pushed forward. Still, the lead-up to the exhibition was not without its hurdles.

First, as with any major exhibition, there was the issue of selection. In the case of the largely unseen Cambiaso, Bober didn't have to worry about which works had been overused or what timeless classics every viewer would hope to see. There weren't any. Rather, looking at a major figure whose body of work had never been viewed outside of Italy posed a very different challenge: deciding which works outside the Blanton's own holdings must be seen and working out how the museum could borrow and show them. Due to the sheer scale of Cambiaso's later work, Bober knew that some works simply couldn't travel. He also knew the cost of transportation -- ranging from $12,000 to $15,000 per piece -- would limit the selection. As a result, Bober chose carefully, asking for loaned work from collections which held more than one significant Cambiaso piece. While Blanton supporters and donors, most notably AT&T, stepped up to collectively fund the exhibit, Bober also maximized the power of each dollar by suggesting that various museums and collectors close to one another consolidate their deliveries. Thus, a museum in Munich, Germany, volunteered to carry the work for Stuttgart, Germany, and some major institutions in England collaborated in this vein, as well.

The next major hurdle had to do with people power. To put together an exhibition of the size and scale of the proposed Cambiaso retrospective, the Blanton needed to hire three to four more full-time staff -- at least. The museum solved the problem by entering into a partnership with Genoa's Palazzo Ducale, home to many of Cambiaso's finest and most significant works. The efforts of the joint team and gracious donations of time, scholarship, and curatorial energy by the Genoese overcame the need to bring on more staff. Moreover, the partnership blossomed into a joint exhibition, with the works now showing at the Blanton setting off for Italy to be displayed at the Palazzo Ducale beginning next March and a joint 384-page catalog, in both English and Italian editions, being published by Silvana Editoriale, Milan. With eight essays by leading scholars, catalog entries for each piece in the exhibition, and an appendix of scholarship and extensive illustration, it will be only the third major publication on Cambiaso and the first of its kind in English.

Add to this the facts that the Blanton had previously put together only two multisource exhibits, both some 20 years ago ("Renaissance Nuremburg" in 1983 and "Milan and the Renaissance" in 1987) and that the museum only opened its new gallery this past summer, and the odds of the Blanton successfully pulling off a project of this scale might have been unthinkable. But thanks to the support of the Palazzo Ducale, not to mention the dedication of the Blanton's staff, the unthinkable is not just a reality but an international success.

The global impact of the exhibit can be measured in part by the way curators from the Louvre to Vienna's Albertina have raved about it. In fact, the Albertina's own Heintz Widauer, on the scene of "Luca Cambiaso, 1527-1585," lamented the turn of his own museum toward superstar shows and away from the kind of innovative work represented in the work here by Bober, the Blanton, and the Palazzo Ducale.

Even with all this praise from the world's major institutions, Bober says he still looks to his friends, people he knows and sees at Waterloo Records, Sweetish Hill, and around town, to gauge interest in and response to the show. And while "Luca Cambiaso, 1527-1585" may not have visitors breaking down the doors, the gem imbedded in this exhibition is the way that this new name, Cambiaso, and this Renaissance figure most of us have never heard of begins to ask very provocative questions of us, his viewers. As Bober puts it, the impact of this show and its real success lies in answering this question: "What does it mean to look at the Renaissance again, when you think you know the names, the figures, and encounter a really fine and fascinating personality you've never heard of before?" This is "Luca Cambiaso," and this is the stuff of "breakthrough" independent curating and art. This is where contemporary and Baroque and Renaissance collide and share territory: when they move beyond the blockbusters, the sellout shows, and the all-too-familiar to truly open up something new and something unexpected from a world and a history we think we know so well.

Back to top

Drawing alive and well and on view
Three exhibits show that conceptual art didn't kill the pen-and-ink star

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, October 26, 2006

Time was, most everybody learned how to draw. With the rise of public education in 19th-century America, mastering the art of paper and pencil wasn't just the realm of, well, artists. Every good boy and girl learned reading, writing and arithmetic, sure. But a certain competency with classical drawing was not just considered the mark of an educated person, but also part of the standard curriculum.

That dissipated as educational goals changed — and as modernism of all sorts gained a foothold in the 20th century. With its emphasis on individuality and iconoclasm, as well as free-spirited and personal psychological interpretation, modernism rejected formalities such as the rules of classical representational drawing. That many young artists today graduate from glossy art schools busting with self-involved conceptual creations and little ability to render a decent human figure is all too common.

Yet for all the tedious, empty conceptualism and over-dependence on high-tech media from young artists, there's also a sincere renaissance of good old-fashioned drawing, as three Austin exhibits demonstrate. Well, perhaps it's traditional in its rigorous attention to line and technique, but it's got its own new-fashioned style, a style capable of delivering beauty, emotional impact or delightful storytelling.

Liz Joblin, owner of Studio 107, has been thinking about drawing ever since reading a review in The New York Times of an exhibit at Grolier Club, an organization for bibliophiles and graphic arts enthusiasts. Senior Times critic Michael Kimmelman bemoaned the lack of skilled drawing today. Joblin went searching for it. She found five artists who deftly demonstrate their chops.

Most importantly, perhaps, is that Joblin didn't limit her definition of drawing to those works that were simply paper and ink or pencil. She looped in artists who drew with all manner of media. Thus, "The Respectable Appeal of Drawing" features Terra Goolsby, who uses a ballpoint pen and fingernail polish to fashion luscious, delicate abstract creations that combine rich pools of polish with exquisitely fine lines and feathering.

The eight artists behind indie gallery Okay Mountain know a thing or two about drawing. Indeed, they're skilled draftsmen themselves. No wonder they culled 15 summarily strong artists for "Droppin' Drawers." Sure, there's plenty of the alt-comic-book-fueled flair (and fun) on view — a stylistic niche Okay Mountain fills consistently. But several artists take the next step.

Folks such as Oakland, Calif.-based Josh Keyes. He draws with that clinically precise mode you might find in textbook illustration. But he adds a dark twist to things, isolating quotidian images of forest animals (rabbits, deer, raccoons, wolves) and arranging them with laptops, road signs, satellites and other obvious symbols of modern life among hyper-realistic bits of landscape. The result ends up a cold, satirical comment on the clash between the environment and technology and an odd valentine to the sentimental innocence of picture-book nature.

Over at Slugfest Printmaking Workshop & Gallery, Tennessee-based Ashley Nason employs a similar clash of the natural and the technical but with a little more whimsy — an an impressive array of drafting skill. She might sketch a pair nesting birds with scientific detail and authority, render a magical mushroom house with cartoon cuteness, etch out a nuclear power plant smoke stack in simple architectural lines and then assemble all those images on a subtle shaded background. The end effect looks like a collage of different images plucked from all manner of sources old and new.

But no, it's all Nason's hand. And it's simply superb drawing.

Back to top