Images of America: Precisionist Painting and Modern Photography

Tsujimoto, Karen

San Francisco Museum of Art / University of Washington Press

Wayne Thiebaud

Arts & Photography

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Univ of Washington Pr

History & Criticism

SFMOMA / Univ. Washington

The prolific talents of painter Joan Brown (1938-1990) inform every page of this shining testament to a singular artist. For Brown, art was a means of self-revelation and self-investigation, a fact made abundantly clear by the autobiographical nature of her work. In the first book to fully explore Joan Brown's artistic career, Karen Tsujimoto provides an overview of Brown's life from her San Francisco childhood to her years as a mature artist and teacher. Jacquelynn Baas focuses on Brown's use of universal and personal symbolism by analyzing one of her most celebrated paintings, The Bride. Both authors make extensive use of interviews that let Joan Brown speak for herself about art and the creative process. Brown greatly admired her teacher, Elmer Bischoff, and his style of Bay Area figuration. But she also was attracted to the freedom found in abstraction as expressed by de Kooning, Picasso, and Matisse. Finding her own way, she used images of family, animals, water, romantic relationships, and self-portraits to explore the complexities of human nature, often hiding her rigorous self-reflection beneath a facade of painterly spontaneity. She had a lifelong interest in philosophy and religion, and much of her later work reflected universal themes and symbols. Serious, full of energy and passion, Brown approached both her personal and her professional life with characteristic intensity. Married four times, she was a devoted mother, a competitive swimmer, and an outspoken opponent of the art world's growing commercialism. Many issues she dealt with early in her career anticipated similar concerns raised by the women's movement in the 1970s. In 1990, while installing an obelisk she had created for the Eternal Heritage Museum in Puttaparthi, India, Joan Brown was instantly killed when a concrete turret fell on her. What lives on in her work is her fascination with the human condition and a determination to record its essence as reflected in her own life.

The Art of Joan Brown

Baas, Jacquelynn

University of California Press

The Art of David Ireland: The Way Things Are

Widely recognized as one of the West Coast's most important and critically acclaimed practitioners of conceptual and installation art, David Ireland (born 1930) has taken the concept of art itself as one of his subjects. A self-described "post-discipline" artist, guided by Zen thought and postmodern aesthetics, Ireland moves fluidly from making small drawings to creating sculptures as large as houses. Freely incorporating anything within his conceptual or physical reach—dirt, concrete, wire, and other everyday materials—his work is subtle, puzzling, and witty, and consistently challenges traditional definitions of art. In this book accompanying the first full-scale retrospective of Ireland's work, curator and author Karen Tsujimoto provides an insightful overview of more than thirty years of the artist's accomplishments, from his drawings, sculptures, and site-specific installations to his remarkable series of architectural transformations, including his well-known house at 500 Capp Street in San Francisco. Chronicling Ireland's circuitous route to his calling, Tsujimoto explores how key life experiences have influenced his artistic perspective—from his early art-student days, through his years as an African importer and safari guide, to his long-standing interest in Eastern, and particularly Zen, philosophy and his deep connections with the San Francisco Bay Area conceptual art community. An illuminating essay by art historian and curator Jennifer R. Gross also considers Ireland's art in terms of historical materialism—assessing his use of neglected materials and artifacts as a process of cultural preservation.

Gross, Jennifer R.

Widely recognized as one of the West Coast's most important and critically acclaimed practitioners of conceptual and installation art, David Ireland (born 1930) has taken the concept of art itself as one of his subjects. A self-described "post-discipline" artist, guided by Zen thought and postmodern aesthetics, Ireland moves fluidly from making small drawings to creating sculptures as large as houses. Freely incorporating anything within his conceptual or physical reach―dirt, concrete, wire, and other everyday materials―his work is subtle, puzzling, and witty, and consistently challenges traditional definitions of art. In this book accompanying the first full-scale retrospective of Ireland's work, curator and author Karen Tsujimoto provides an insightful overview of more than thirty years of the artist's accomplishments, from his drawings, sculptures, and site-specific installations to his remarkable series of architectural transformations, including his well-known house at 500 Capp Street in San Francisco. Chronicling Ireland's circuitous route to his calling, Tsujimoto explores how key life experiences have influenced his artistic perspective―from his early art-student days, through his years as an African importer and safari guide, to his long-standing interest in Eastern, and particularly Zen, philosophy and his deep connections with the San Francisco Bay Area conceptual art community. An illuminating essay by art historian and curator Jennifer R. Gross also considers Ireland's art in terms of historical materialism―assessing his use of neglected materials and artifacts as a process of cultural preservation.

Gross, Jennifer

Squeak Carnwath: Painting Is No Ordinary Object

The paintings of Squeak Carnwath (American, b. 1947), often subtly illuminated by meticulously applied layers of glaze, embody complex layers of meaning. "Paintings are not ordinary objects," the artist observes. "Painting is a carrier of meaning, of human touch. Each brush stroke or smear of pigment is freighted with philosophical inquiry." In Carnwath's works, rows of writing are placed to slow the eye, "to put the viewer in real time." Recurring motifs touch on personal and universal themes, from a rabbit tentatively seeking his place in a chaotic world to the seated blue Medicine Buddha, healer of ills and reminder of the latent Buddha nature in each of us.Published in conjunction with the exhibition organized by the Oakland Museum of California, Squeak Carnwath: Painting Is No Ordinary Object celebrates the wonder and spirit embodied in each of Carnwath's works. Over eighty full-color reproductions trace the development of the artist's distinctive style from 1970s to the present, while essays by curator Karen Tsujimoto and art critic John Yau explore the personal, social, and artistic context of this powerful body of work.

YAU, John

Individual Artists

Pomegranate

The paintings of Squeak Carnwath (American, b. 1947), often subtly illuminated by meticulously applied layers of glaze, embody complex layers of meaning. "Paintings are not ordinary objects," the artist observes. "Painting is a carrier of meaning, of human touch. Each brush stroke or smear of pigment is freighted with philosophical inquiry." In Carnwath's works, rows of writing are placed to slow the eye, "to put the viewer in real time." Recurring motifs touch on personal and universal themes, from a rabbit tentatively seeking his place in a chaotic world to the seated blue Medicine Buddha, healer of ills and reminder of the latent Buddha nature in each of us.
Published in conjunction with the exhibition organized by the Oakland Museum of California, Squeak Carnwath: Painting Is No Ordinary Object celebrates the wonder and spirit embodied in each of Carnwath's works. Over eighty full-color reproductions trace the development of the artist's distinctive style from 1970s to the present, while essays by curator Karen Tsujimoto and art critic John Yau explore the personal, social, and artistic context of this powerful body of work.

David Ireland: A Decade Documented 1978-1988

Wortz, Melinda

Sesnon Gallery

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