Category Archives: Art

Lucky in-law

November 12, 2013Around home, Art, Local eventsWm Kirk Moore

Growing up with two successful artist brothers has been a fortuitous education. I got a first hand view of how their art has evolved through the years.

I’m still amazed how they’re able to render personal views/beliefs/emotions into tangible works on canvas, paper, and stone. My older brother, Michael, paints and draws while younger bro Bryan, sculpts marble and wood.

^{Bryan in his workshop in Italy 2012}

^{Michael’s art at “Making Places” in Santa Fe 2013}

Then I received an “extra credit” bonus in my artistic enlightenment when Michael married Linda Fleming.

She’s an incredibly talented sculptor/teacher/artist and has a CV brimming with exhibitions titled “Tangible Mind”, “Galilieo’s Daughters”, “Perishable Industry”, “Tracery”, “Parallel Universe”, “Brainstorm”, and “Modeling the Universe”.

How can anyone produce the sculpture those titles describe?

Linda has done it with ingeniously designed manifestations using a variety of materials.

Over the years those materials have evolved to the sophisticated, laser cut, powder-coated steel layered structures she now employs to translate her nature-derived art. They’re studies in organic and geometric forms that dance with color, movement, light and shadows.

In 2007 I saw “Refugium”, Linda’s mid-career retrospective in Sonoma. In July of this year I got to experience the monumental exhibition with Michael in Santa Fe, “Making Places”. The more I see, the more I am staggered by Linda’s imagination (not to mention her uncanny ability to construct the products of that imagination).

On November 2nd I attended the opening of her newest show, “Evanescent” at the Brian Gross Gallery in San Francisco (248 Utah St. 94103). Rather that attempt to describe it, I will simply share some photos, with the caveat that they do not do justice to the art. You should go see it in person, 11am-6pm Tues-Saturdays until December 21st.

If you do go to the gallery, look through the “Refugium” Sonoma show catalog; it’s a helpful historical document to understand where Linda’s imagination is coming from. As for where it goes from here…this lucky in-law can’t wait to see.

Linda and Michael with “Fieldnotes random walker” bloggers Steve and Michele.

Guest blogger

November 11, 2013Around home, Art, Local eventsSteve Stern

Saturday, a week ago, Michele and I met Richard Taylor at Linda Fleming‘s Opening of Meanderings, an exhibition of sculpture and drawings at Brian Gross Fine Art. When I picked up my camera to bring it along, I realized that the battery was dead and I had forgotten to charge the batteries I had used up on the trip to Maine. Linda’s brother-in-law, Kirk Moore, was there, fortunately, and he has generously agreed to post some of his pictures of the opening.

From way too fast on the road to beauty in cyberspace

October 17, 2013Art, Cars, Web/TechSteve Stern

If you grew up in California in the 50s and were obsessed with cars, at some point you raced on the street. In my case, it was right after I got my license and I got caught about three weeks later and lost my license for the next 60 days. Our idea of racing on public roads was pretty much limited to drag racing, And, for the most part, only the first five hundred feet from a stop light. But in Europe, they were hardcore; they had real, official, racing on the street.

OK, they called it roadracing, but it was the same thing. I am not sure when they started roadracing – probably less than one week after the car was invented – but it pretty much ended by the end of 1950s. By then, racing on public roads had become truly insane with the all-out-racecars hitting speeds more commonly associated with airplanes. Probably the craziest of all these races was the Mille Miglia – meaning a thousand miles and pronounced mille mille as a sort of pun – that started at Brescia near the Alps, ran south to Rome, and then north back to Brescia. All of this on second rate Italian roads with an estimated 5,000,000 Italians watching. Usually watching from very close.

The record for the Mille Milga was set by Sterling Moss in a Mercedes Benz at an average speed of 97.96 miles per hour (on narrow, rough, windy, Italian roads). The car was called a 300SLR and was supposed to resemble the standard Mercedes Benz 300SL sports car, however, in reality, the car was a full blown, hand built, race car. Several years ago, Mercedes built 75 updated versions of this car – only about ten originals were built – to sell to very rich people at about a million dollars each (very rich people who, apparently, don’t need a windshield). But the point of all this is that Jimmy at Peak-Design – I think, it is Peak-Design, I know it is via Deviant Art – thought Wow it would be awesome with a normal hardtop and some black rims. He then resigned it on his computer. I’m impressed and would buy it in a minute, if it were real and I had several hundred million dollars.

Tattoos and F1

August 6, 2013Americana, ArtSteve Stern

Of all the things that I didn’t see coming down the pike from the future, I think that tattoos are at the top of the list. Much higher on the list than, say, hamburger meat manufactured in a lab – OK, we all knew that was coming – or truck farmers making a comeback, or smart phones. As an aside, to very loosely paraphrase Che Guevara, Computers are not revolutionary, they are bourgeois. Smart phones are revolutionary! End aside.

I so didn’t see tattoos coming, that they just sort of snuck up on me. I don’t watch much football on TV, so that didn’t tip me off. Sure, I read about Anglia Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton getting matching tattoos, still that seemed like an hyper-hip exception. By the time I saw the adorable Ana Pascal in Stranger Than Fiction,

with her tattoo being a big part of her charm – even though she was played by a tattooless Maggie Gyllenhaal – I knew something was up. Nevertheless, Ana was a nonconformist. What I didn’t expect was for Formula 1 drivers to sport tattoos.

They are, after all, ambassadors for the multi-billion dollar companies, such as Mercedes-Benz, that are often pretty conservative.

When they are working, they even disappear into the car itself.

The two best driver in Formula 1 right now are probably Fernando Alonso from Spain and Lewis Hamilton from England. Alonso drives for Ferrari which is famous for putting the car before the driver – I reminded everyone, including the drivers, that Ferrari comes before everything, the priority is the team. Rather like a family father pointing out the need to respect some family rules. Ferrari president Luca Di Montezemolo explained, after he tweaked the ear of Alonso who had the audacity to complain about his car – so I was surprised to see that he has a tattoo of a samurai on his back. Not so much that it is a samurai, but that it is there at all.

But, when I saw Mercedes’ Hamilton’s tattoo, I knew it was a new world.

Picking Charlotte up and dropping Another Enigma off

July 2, 2013Art, California, FamilySteve Stern

Saturday, I had the opportunity to go with Samantha to pickup Charlotte from a week of Summer Camp. It was forecast to be well over 100° in the Valley and I was worried about the heat, but I needn’t have. Samantha picked me up at the BART station in Richmond, and we drove up to Mountain Camp in her Audi SUV.

Sort of as aside, Audi names their SUV series Q and that always makes me think of World War I Q-ships. During WWI, the British started hiding guns in freighters to surprise German raiders and they called them Q-ships. Over the years, I have taken it to mean a car that is disguised as being milder than it really is. End of sort aside.

I first discovered Yosemite – as an adult, not a child in tow – in my mid-twenties and drove there, alot, one year, especially in the summer. Crossing the Valley, at night, in an un-air conditioned car, stopping to cool off at a Giant Orange every hundred miles was awful. We would arrive worn out. In 2013, we effortlessly glided through the Central Valley in a cocoon of exactly the temperature we wanted. 68° for Samantha and 72° for me.

The camp is at 5500 feet and at that elevation, it was a nice, warm, summer day. Now, I have no idea what I was expecting, but I was surprised at how similar Mountain Camp was to the camps I was sent to as a child and, much later – while in college – spent a summer as a councilor. The same single wall cabins, dirt trampled by hundreds of kids each summer, but this camp also had a ropes course and a climbing wall – a climbing wall that my Granddaughter climbed to the top of – and fencing instructors, and a Lake. A real Lake, a big Lake, with sailboats and ski-boats.

After she showed us around camp, Charlotte said goodbye to her councilor, Chris,

and we drove back through the baking Central Valley, in perfect comfort, to the Bay Area. When we got to Berkeley, where I got back on BART, it was a pleasant 80°. It wasn’t until I got home that I ran into the heat that, I read, is blanketing the West.

I bought a painting of Mike Moore‘s, Another Enigma of the Sheldon Range, before I ever met him. At the time, I was living in an old farm house in Los Altos Hills and Another Enigma hung the end of the entry/livingroom, when I moved, it moved to the wall in my office. Then Another Enigma stayed with Samantha in Berkeley for a while, and now, it moved in with us at 19 LeRoy where it is in the bedroom.

Now Mike and his wife Linda Fleming are having a major retrospective in Santa Fe and Another Enigma is going down there to be in the show. But first we had to get it to their home in Benicia where it will be loaded on the truck to Santa Fe. I rented a van, loaded the painting and drove to an old Art Deco building where Mike and Linda have made a home in a former brewery. It is a great space filled with art and hard to not just wander around in awe.