My Artist of the Day: SF hand painter Jeff Canham. Can I come watch?
It started when I moved out to the SFV five years ago on Hollywood and Clark. There were four cats, a pitbull, an errrr– very temperamental, passive-agro roommate in a tiny space. I threw down on an Old Dutch
*Where's the Naval Jelly...? My baby is getting rusty*
from Bike Attack( still performing free maintenance) and soon discovered the “Val” – KT Von – was a place business owners held onto decades-old signage. I fell in love with the fonts and it’s still one of my favorite things about Los Angeles. It seemed like from my hometown, people entered their signage into retirement, which is also cool to see them up close, but it feels like being at the zoo. They’re a little out of their element; I used to work at a TGIF. I know wall collage. I did my college thesis on camp.
Soooo, the signs have infiltrated my dreams and paintings — my ” Daydream” series last week at Chocolate & Art III picked some of my favorite signs in LA. I wanted the signs to interact with the bodies of the women without either carrying a disproportional weight — the paintings were not about sexy naked women, nor were they just a retrospective of old signs. The women are modes of fantasy or human vessels symbolic of a type of meditation, Beta waves, or if you want to be practical, transcendence of responsibility. The signs are from another place and time and so the bodies of the women are more voluptuous, carefully posed as not to encourage a different kind of fantasy. I always think of people having daydreams while sitting in traffic.
Style influences for the series include Julian Opie, who I’ve liked since my 2004 visit to the Armory Show in NYC.
Pierre Huygue. And my art school friend Jose Versoza, who encouraged a break from representation into conceptualism and adding a sense of excitement and FUN to my work. I’m looking for a balance.
Here’s an ART21 throwback to the gentle soul Margaret Kilgallen, RIP and thank you for loving typography by hand.
Works for me. Here’s some pics from C&A.
