#34 Kim Abeles

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Kim Abeles Essay

#33 Lita Albuquerque (Visiting Painting)

#34 Kim Abeles (Response painting)

Why did I remember one red dot, rather than seven, and a slight one that drifts back toward the distance? That one red dot.

I recollected, many times over, transformed into scores of gold leaf spots. How could I have missed the rest of those red dots?

My distractions are aging, my mother at 92, a zealousness for projects that make for a lot of work, and dishes in the sink that won’t disappear. My distraction now, at this moment, is one of the scrappy republican debates that I can hear in the background like a schoolyard fight.

I fly too fast and don’t remember much of where I was before this moment. The hummingbird moves her wings eighty times a second and like me, she can move backwards. The search for nectar is a hunger and I fly too fast.

But the bird is in a confined compartment, a satin-lined casket, and melancholia stalks her every day of her life. There is no nectar in those flowers but a memory of the hummingbird’s feast.

At a certain age, let’s say 60, everyone starts dying at a steady pace. Each death reminds us how lucky we are to have-another-day. Each passing friend continues to watch us, prodding us to quit whining over our failures and prompting us to keep trying since that’s where faith is located.

So at some point, seven or nearly eight dots give way to 120 gold spots, maybe stars, or probably angels. 

#35 Deborah Martin

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Deborah Martin Essay

#34 Kim Abeles (Visiting Painting)

#35 Deborah Martin (Response painting)

In dreams, dead birds can symbolize a loss of freedom. Various cultures view birds either as a way the soul is carried to heaven, or, in the case of vultures, ravens and crows, as a symbol of death. The dead bird is often used to represent the death of one’s spirit in literature.

The hummingbird symbolizes many different concepts. Because of its speed, the hummingbird is known as a messenger and stopper of time. It is the only creature that can stop dead while traveling at full speed. Hummingbirds are also a symbol of love, joy, and beauty.

It has been said that the hummingbird, the tiniest of all birds, brings a special message to us. The hummingbird is able to fly backwards, teaching us that we can look back on our past. This bird also teaches us that we must not dwell on our past; we need to move forward. When the hummingbird hovers over flowers while drinking nectar, we learn that we should savor each moment, and appreciate the things we love.

Skeleton keys represent talismans that can get one through a time of change. The skeleton key or passkey is a powerful symbol as this key can open more than one lock. The key placed in a door is a symbol of hope for the future and freedom of choice to move forward and appreciate the spirit of life. 

#36 Jeff Colson

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Jeff Colson Essay

#35 Deborah Martin (Visiting Painting)

#36 Jeff Colson (Response Painting)

I am presented with this serene and lovingly painted image of overlapping doors. After a few seconds I realize something is amiss, nothing matches up! There’s no locking those doors! And certainly no assurance of a cooperative and stable picture plane. Immediately, I’m sent into a careening, nausea-inducing fun house of irreconcilable chaos! Out of self-preservation, my immediate response is to provide a rational, structural overlay in an attempt to tame this head-spinning beast! 

You will find when overlapping the two images, the composition instantly snaps into a perfect state of formal compliance. 

#37 Eddie Ruscha

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Eddie Ruscha Essay

#36 Jeff Colson (Visiting Painting)

#37 Eddie Ruscha (Response painting)

First off, who doesn’t like a good game of Telephone? I like to see the mangling and re-mangling. An idea misconstrued. One person hears one thing and another hears another, another. An other version. Versioning excursions. A continuing re-mix.

When I first opened the well designed, sturdy, protective crate, I saw the painting you see here of a haphazardly put together wooden contraption. Oddly enough, I felt a kinship to it because I used to draw absurd formations made out of planks of wood many years ago. In any case, I guess I would say my first thought was to go against what I saw and tighten up the lines. I guess I wanted it to be more like a fake marble hall in an obsolete hotel. I knew it wouldn’t be complete without some black inky oil dripping onto it down from the unknown.

I am happy with the results. I think the next person who gets to re-interpret mine may indeed bring it back down to the softer lines of the painting before. Maybe they will paint my image in a far away landscape about to get run over by a gigantic cosmic bulldozer. They might be so determined to derail the image and in turn paint something entirely new, but we just can’t be sure until all are seen. 

#38 Billy Al Bengston

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Billy Al Bengston Essay

#37 Eddy Ruscha (Visiting Painting)

#38 Billy Al Bengston (Response painting)

#39 Christopher Monger

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Christopher Monger Essay

#338 Billy Al Bengston (Visiting Painting)

#39 Christopher Monger (Response Painting)

So I stare at the painting that has arrived in my home. A small white circle sits on the bottom edge of a pale, slightly metallic ground. My immediate reaction is that it is an unwanted guest: This painting is the antithesis of my work.

Firstly I approached it compositionally, breaking down the spaces as one would break down an Old Master, finding the construction lines. I draw them on a sheet of paper. I was left with something that looked like a bad Diebenkorn. Next, I tried to look past its simplicity, searching for some literal meaning. I was suddenly terrified that everyone had painted THE CIRCLE OF TRUTH and I loathed such an idea. Maybe I should return that abstract flat circle to something tangible: The setting sun, an eye, a car wheel, the earth, an electron, a nipple, a jar lid, a flying saucer – the list was endless, and boring. It would be a meaningless dull visual pun. I spent a lot of time thinking about it, I didn’t know how to react to it… It was just making me mad.

So I did what I do whenever I’m stuck in my work, whether I’m writing or painting: If something doesn’t work, I try the opposite: A scene refuses to get funnier? Make it dramatic. A painting looks too controlled? Drag the damn thing across the floor. It’s a tool that’s served me well, helping me to make creative leaps, allowing everything to breathe and be full of possibilities. With this is mind I made a list of words that described the painting I had in front of me – and decided to make something that was its polar opposite. Whereas it is cool, my painting would be hot. Where it is controlled, mine would be chaotic. Where it is tasteful, mine would be tasteless. Where it has a definitive focus, mine would refuse to allow the eye a place to rest. Where it is flat, mine would have utterly ambiguous depth. Where as the white circle sits on the edge, even the edge of mine would be ambiguous, being able to be read as either foreground or background. It was a long list.

To this end I gave the painting a ground of a truly horrid, dull camouflage green. Over that I skimmed a really atrocious raw-meat pink, and set to work, making marks and negating them. I used brushes, palette knives, sponges, the ends of old pencil and crayons, bits of cardboard – anything that would carry paint and make a messy mark.

I pity the poor bastard who gets mine. He or she will probably end up painting a white circle on a plain ground. And that’s OK. 

#40 Todd Williamson

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Todd Williamson Essay

#39 Christopher Monger (Visiting Painting)

#40 Todd Williamson (Response Painting)

The search for truth is elusive. It is ever changing and always at the mercy of the greatest debater in the room. It has been said, “Truth is beauty, and beauty truth.” This idea in the art world creates diametrically opposed meanings and great discussions. 

I started this work with a great deal of contemplation as to what truth the painting that I was given had. Was it true in concept? Was it true in color? What did it tell me about what was expected of me? 

After great debate, I realized that the Circle of Truth can only be one thing and that is the truth of your own abilities and creativity. The previous painting had little to do with what I would create other than to sit in my studio and keep me company. It was a catalyst to push me on into this unknown vision started some many months prior. 

Is art as a truth external or internal? Does it reside in me, or the previous artists that long ago started this process or do we both own pieces of the truth? 

By its very nature, art is free from the confines of the world and has a duty to expose concepts and ideas that we do not normally see or cannot exist by any other means. It has its own truth, which in turn forms its own content. This allows for the great debates about truth in art and what beauty is.

#41 Jimi Gleason

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Jimi Gleason Essay

#40 Todd Williamson (Visiting Painting)

#41 Jimi Gleason (Response Painting)

Painting doesn’t need to be able to function or to pursue any particular idea. Instead it boldly sits next to the wonderment and intrinsic thoughts and feelings of Human nature. Thinking about and looking at the painting produced before my turn, my theories, my thoughts, my own issues about right and wrong come bubbling to the surface. Thinking about the color in this painting before me I get a strong feeling of the compression of light. The light looked to have been pulled out, opened up with color. Not necessarily an explanation but more of an incarnation. I wanted to expand on the gravity of this truth.

Since it seemed to be made with palette knives, just as what I also use I thought I could hold on to the truth of this painting by somewhat following the composition this artist used. It was down the center of this beautiful painting to help me communicate. This helped lessen my burden of interior content. Not trying to change the impact. Just opening up and passing along what this painting has shown me. Trying to pull some form of relations with each other. It shows itself but doesn’t necessarily explain itself.

I chose to keep my painting achromatic. I did use thick acrylic to sculpt my relation of composition. I wanted to bind my surface somewhat similar, not too graphic but just enough. By using a silver nitrate surface coat that has been chemically electroplated to the acrylic base on my painting the viewer instantly becomes inter-active with my painting. Reflecting yourself and the light and colors in the room...but leaving it up to the viewer to find his or her own moment of emotion. Activating your own truth. 

#42 Mark Licari

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Mark Licari Essay

#41 Jimi Gleason (Visiting Painting)

#42 Mark Licari (Response Painting)

The crate arrived at my studio and as I opened it there was a flash of light. As I stared into the crate, the lights from the ceiling above reflected back at me. What is it? 

A piece of shrapnel from the New Mexican desert?

I hung this chink of alien armor on the wall. What is it made of? Surely not paint or metal, or glass, it could only be an element that somehow escaped the categorization of the periodic table. This element seemed resistant to decay and the harsh desert environment. The scar splitting the center of the panel was curious as the surface seemed to be impenetrable. 

I became obsessed with cracking into this surface and getting a glimpse of what might be behind it. Perhaps it was just a matter of time before the super-surface would decay, revealing the secret that it was protecting.

My painting is a glimpse of what lays beneath the mirror like surface, whether it is a portal to an alien homeland, an alternate reality or yet another false front to tear through. 

#43 Virginia Broersma

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Virginia Broersma Essay

#42 Mark Licari (Visiting Painting)

#43 Virginia Broersma (Response painting)

When I first received the painting from which I was to create my own version, I sat down and wrote out all the associations I made with what I was seeing. The things that came to mind were: opening, cracking, bursting, freedom, birth, breaking through the physical/material (symbolized by metals, gold, earth, a shell etc.) to the transcendental – the open night time sky, flickering with stars. I equated the illustration of this opening with the idea of an awakening, a breakthrough; progress through destruction; the necessary collapsing of what was to make room for what will be. 

My work at the time had been focusing on the Portrait and its abstraction as my subject matter. The move from realism to abstraction allows for a less literal interpretation of the image, which for me was closer to my intentions with the work. With this particular painting, I wanted to convey the sense of an emotional or psychological breakthrough – the feeling of power, determination, anxiety, exhilaration and messiness when you are emotionally upended and the chaos and relief that comes from a major change. 

As I began to work on my painting, my goal was to create a posture of strength with the face, while also reflecting the turbulence of the moment, which I accomplished with the brushwork that defines the face while it also obliterates it. Creating an image that felt powerful while containing fragility, reflecting certainty and uncertainty, and beauty without prettiness were polarities I wanted to indicate in the final painting. The paintings themselves – mine and the one that I worked from – look very different from each other and I wonder if people will get the connection? Their relationship makes obvious sense to me, but I think that is what makes the Circle of Truth project compelling. Truth is a difficult thing to pin down, especially in an artwork, and to ask artists to communicate the truth as they understand it, in the language they are most comfortable with, is exciting and provocative to me. What is obvious to one could be obscure to another. In making the painting, I let myself go with what made sense to me, without worrying about there being a quickly understood or obvious connection to the painting that came before me. 

I found the process a satisfying exercise in spending meaningful time with another work of art – not just a quick look and fast assessment, but really sitting with it for some time. At this point, when I have yet to see all the paintings together, I am so curious to see what other’s came up with, and see if their truths circle back around to my truth in any way. 

#44 Bruce Richards

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Bruce Richards Essay

#43 Virginia Broersma (Visiting Painting)

#44 Bruce Richards (Response painting)

The visiting canvas was considered for several days as if it were a crime photo needing detection. The swollen damage on the right cheek, the mouth an afflicted hole and the blackened eye in the work took me back to Andrews Hardware at 7th and Union in downtown Los Angeles.

I lived in Downtown LA from 1980-86. The Ramparts/Pico Union area. I was the manager of an artist studio complex located on the top two floors of the building. My duties included keeping the entrances and parking lot cleaned in the areas used by our tenants. We had a few neighbors.

The Silver Strand Hotel, located across the parking lot was a half way house for Drug and Alcohol rehab, housing 150 persons. Daily, starting at about 3pm, emerged a string of women that began working as the day laborers were returning to the neighborhood at their workday’s end. Their clients varied as widely as the types of cars they went off in, some went looking for a spot or room. Occasionally, some of them showed up on the street bruised since the last time I had seen them. Sometimes it was from a pimp, sometimes a client who wanted more. The swelling was never easy to hide with makeup, scarfs or collars.

This flood of retrieved memories and images lead me to set up a small still life with some elements that may have been seen inside the rooms of the Silver Strand Hotel.

Room key/dropped thong/money envelope on a background derived from the blue/brown of the visiting work to the blue/grey of mine. 

#45 Rives Granade

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Rives Granade Essay

Bruce Richards (Visiting Painting)

#45 Rives Granade (Response Painting)

In contemplating the type of response I would give to the painting presented, a number of options sifted through my head. The painting itself was a genre of still life, a simple motif of objects, mostly pink and black in color, set against a light teal blue background. No shadows present, but not abstract – the painting implied a certain narrative and I felt like it was trying to entice me to be led in a very specific direction by this narrative. This I naturally resisted – sort of.

I decided to respond to the things in the painting that most interested me: the colors, the formal arrangement, and the painting style. That is, I did my best to ignore the narrative aspects. However, I couldn’t shake the fact that to me the still life was referring to something nefarious, and an image of a gun kept coming into my mind; possibly a Hollywood ploy. In any case, I wanted to take the painting out of the realm of painting and then put it back again – if that makes any sense?

Therefore, I took a photo of the painting with my iPhone. I then found a 3D model of a pistol on the web and downloaded it. I uploaded the iPhone painting pic to my computer and then mapped the picture of the painting onto the 3D model gun. I then printed the 3D model picture out and used it to paint from, doing my best not to recreate the colors of the original painting so much as the colors that were in the print out. In this way my painting incorporates the old painting into it in a literal and also abstract way while at the same time maintaining and pushing forward the narrative quality of the still life. 

#46 Robert Williams

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Robert Williams Essay

#45 Rives Granade (Visiting Painting)

#46 Robert Williams (Response Painting)

In keeping with the ever-changing sequence of 49 artworks, this painting, number 46, takes previous painting number 45 in an oblique direction. The oddly colored Colt .44 pistol is exploited as an objet d’art – a painting inside a painting. But, the handgun’s relevance ends there. The subject is now the objective observation of the subject. In fact, the academic critique has upstaged the whole picture this painting portrays.

The central figure in this work is a cartoon character of absolute cultural principals. Depicted as the demigod of accepted precepts, the blue characterization, formed from socks, sandals, and an oversized buttocks, epitomizes the unquestioned pillar of aesthetic sophistication.

With respect to the historic tradition of art educators, critics, and museum management functionaries, many art cognoscenti have exceeded the fame and notoriety of legendary artists themselves. Literary figures such as John Rukin, Oscar Wilde, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, William Wilson, and Robert Hughes have risen to heroic status – and this without dirtying their hands with brush or chisel.

Nonetheless, their scholarly machinations are justified. This becomes more obvious as scholastic acceptance of Dada continues and certainly, more recently, with the creation of conceptual art theory. Conceptualism allows the unheralded theorist to simply become the honored art conceptualist, thus freeing the artist from the nuisance of hands-on art drudgery – creative genius knows no bounds.

However, there is one higher accolade above theoretic art brilliance. Not only is this master-hypothesizor the artiste, he has unwittingly become the art. And, being such, he’s opened up the vulnerability for being himself rejected.

#47 Cal Lane

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Cal Lane Essay

#46 Robert Williams (Visiting Painting)

#47 Cal Lane (Response Piece)

The crate sat in my studio for a couple of days before I opened it. Wanting to be ready to work with the piece as soon as I saw it, I didn’t want to spend too much time over-analyzing it, muddying the way I interpreted it.Eventually I opened the crate. Inside was a painting, 

a bright-colored scene of an outdoor dry climate. There were two figures in the foreground having a discussion, the narrative was not so much about them but the discussion they were having. The conversation appeared to be between a teacher and a student, the teacher was an odd, blue, blob, toy-like figure with a graduation cap and a pointer. It wore socks under Birkenstocks and pointed to a large canvas with an image of a gun on it.

The blue-blobbed teacher was talking to a young woman carrying books. She was looking unimpressed with whatever the blue thing was saying. The focus of the narrative in this piece seemed to be the gun on the canvas, although the setting is outside the environment, it seemed to be a classroom. Could it be about the guns in schools debate? Not sure. Then there is the image of the old ruins in the background which made me think of the relationship of past destruction, war, history.

In my visual interpretation I decided to lay two materials onto the canvas. I generally work with objects and materials and not paint on canvas so limiting myself to a space and form was a challenge. 

­I chose the background of an old toile fabric first. I liked this fabric for its imagery and its relationship to the past. In the fabric pattern are conversations – people living, working, playing outside and castles on hillsides. Over this fabric I drew and cut into steel the images of two guns pointing at each other with a map

of the world. Then using the lines of foolscap to hold the images together. For me placing the two materials of steel and fabric creates a tactile relationship of opposing elements, soft and warm, cold and hard. The fabric suggested a lot of the narrative that seemed to be happening in the painting that I received, while overlaying the steel brought in the focus of the conversation. The guns point at each other showing a useless conflict. The map and foolscap bring in visual suggestions of school and history.

In this piece I tried to represent specific images in not so specific ways to keep the conversation open, for I find things are more interesting in a dialog than in an answer. O

#48 Lisa Bartleson

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Lisa Bartleson Essay

#47 Cal lane (Visiting Paiece)

#48 Lisa Bartleson (Response Piece)

When I first viewed work #47 in July of 2014, I was immediately confronted by the imagery of colonialism and world violence.

Colonialism – a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another, related directly to something that had weighed heavily on my mind at the time. In recent years, through mass and social media, the world became witness to the increase in violence against women and girls seeking access to education.

The women were shot, doused with acid, poisoned, kidnapped, raped and killed – and still many persevered.

This work is comprised of media clippings concerning violence against women and girls seeking to better themselves and their community through education. The weight of the words is carried on the back of a typical school uniform blouse. 

#49 Ed Ruscha

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Ed Ruscha

#48 Lisa Bartleson (Visiting Piece)

#49 Ed Ruscha (Response Painting)