Saturday March 6, 2010

Opening Reception
March 5, 7-10pm

The Art of Painting in the 21st Century:
An Annual Conference in Davis

The John Natsoulas Gallery
February 24 - March 20, 2010

Conference: March 6, 9 - 5pm
Student exhibitions: March 5, 1pm - 9pm and March 6, 10 pm- 5pm
Book signing and performance art: Saturday, March 6, 6:30pm - 9:30pm
Prices: Before 2/28, Student $95, Adult $105; After 2/28, Student $115, Adult $125

The Art of Painting in the 21st Century is an annual conference geared towards nurturing dialog on contemporary painting and the shared ideas that define current trends in the field. Many painters work alone, an isolated process that deprives the artist of thriving debate until the work is shown. The conference provides a unique venue for artists to participate in panel discussions, breakout groups and attend lectures by some of the most exciting visionaries in the field, including Philip Pearlstein, Deborah Oropallo, Tom Holland, David Hollowell,Boyd Gavin, Manuel Neri, Raimonds Staprans, Peter Selz, and Gladys Nilsson and many others. Ten downtown Davis student exhibitions, curated by the instructors of Northern California universities and colleges, are meant to encourage youth participation and community involvement.

"If you are an instructor at a college or university in California, and would like an exhibition space to promote your school, please contact us at : art[at]natsoulas[dot]com. Limited space available. There will be free exhibition space provided within walking distance from the conference headquarters.

The exhibitions begin the afternoon of March 5, 2010, with opening receptions at each of the locations in the evening. The majority of the educational events will take place Saturday, March 6, from 9 to 5pm, and are filled with panel discussions, lectures and breakout groups intended for all conferees. Saturday evening includes book signings by the artists and a final performance-painting event featuring the captivating jazz painter Nancy Ostrovsky.

The conference's goal is to gather artists from varying communities, allowing for open interaction between young students and professionals in the field, fostering the strong tradition of painting and culture in the Northern California region.

Participating Panelists and Lecturers

Philip Pearlstein, the President of the American Academy of Arts, and a survivor from the heroic days of American mid-20th century Modernism. Pearlstein is a great recalcitrant-- an artist who opted for realistic depiction, at a time when the whole tide of taste seemed to be running the other way. He once said that it was his ambition to make photography obsolete, by demonstrating how much better a non-photo based kind of painting could do the same job. He described his approach to the visible world as a non-narrative one, devoted to a kind of rapture of seeing-- the pure pleasure of the eye.

-Edward Lucie Smith

Oropallo has always regarded her artwork as based in photography. In her early work she painted imagery from found photographs. Later, she placed objects on a stat camera, capturing a shadow or silhouette from which she made silkscreens and stencils that transformed images of mundane objects into visual abstractions. Recently, Oropallo has been using her own photography, and digital work as a natural evolution. The images in her current body of work were initially borrowed from internet sites for sexy costume. Women in revealing pirate, soldier, and other outfits are posed in photographs that recall, in Oropallo's words, "the formal portraiture male power stance with elaborate costume." The artist deconstructs and enhances the images to investigate the seduction and power that are evoked by gesture and pose.

-Anna Lucas, Achenbach Graphic Arts Curator

Tom Holland lives and works in the Bay Area and has been painting for 50 years. After having attended Cal Berkeley, he went to Chile on a Fulbright Grant. He then returned to Berkeley to begin teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. He has also been on the faculty at UCLA and Cal. He received both an NEA Grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He now works full time in his studio in downtown Berkeley. After having painted in traditional oil on canvas, in the 70's he began using materials in his work which were light and strong but which did not require a frame. Using fiberglass and aluminum, making pieces of color which hang on the wall like stiff tapestry, the thin edges allow the painting to become a part of the space it occupies. Using simple materials and a unique approach combining painting and sculpture, he cuts thin sheets of aluminum to build either a wall painting or a free standing sculptural form. He then rivets the cut pieces to the sheets of aluminum or fiberglass. He uses epoxy paint to achieve the effects of depth, light, reflection and shadow. Known as one of California's most important contemporary artists, Holland considers the color surfaces and the interaction and motion in his work as the most important aspects of his paintings.

David Hollowell's exquisite figures inhabiting the spaces are rendered in carefully formed historical illusions often with a disorienting sense of perspective. For many years, he has concentrated on figures in interior spaces. "Sometimes my figures are specific individuals," he says, "other times they are more archetypal. The concern of developing an image that plays with a picture plane in a traditional manner has always excited me. I seem to never tire of the magic that occurs when I get to a stage in my work when I actually feel as though I can enter into the space I've created." David Hollowell received his masters in painting at Yale University and is presently Professor of Art at the University of California, Davis. He has won the Westaf Drawing Award and a painting fellowship from the Roswell Museum. He has also won many other awards and has shown at numerous museums throughout the country.

Art historian of German Expressionism and Professor of Art History, University of California, Berkeley,1965-1988. Selz was the son of Eugene Selz and Edith Drey (Selz). Of Jewish parentage, he fled Nazi Germany with his family arriving in the United States in 1936. Selz attended Columbia University for the 1937-38 year. He also established a connection with Alfred Stieglitz, a distant relative, who introduced him to many New York and European expatriate artists. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army in Office of Strategic Services from 1941 until 1946. He became a naturalized citizen in 1942. After the War, he married the writer Thalia Cheronis (b. 1925) in 1948. He attended the University of Chicago, where he received his A. M., in 1949. Awarded a Fulbright grant for University of Paris and Ecole de Louvre, he spent a year in Paris, 1949-50. Returning to Chicago, he taught as an instructor while completing his Ph.D. on a topic suggested by the department chair, Ulrich Middeldorf (q.v.) German Expressionism. A second Fulbright grant was awarded to him to study at the Musées Royaux d'Art et d'Histoire in 1953. His dissertation on German Expressionism, written under Joshua Taylor (q.v.) in 1954, was one of the first from an English-language institution. During these same years he headed the education department at Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, (to 1955). In 1955 he moved to Pomona College, Claremont, CA, to chair the art department and be director of the art gallery. Selz became the curator of department of painting and sculpture exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1958. At the Modern, his exhibitions included the infamous1960 Jean Tinguely "Homage to New York," a sculpture that destroyed itself (and started a fire) in the sculpture garden of the Museum. He also launched important retrospectives, including the first Rodin retrospective in the United States and a comprehensive exhibition of Alberto Giacometti´s work in 1965. That year he was called to University of California, Berkeley to found that university's art museum. He was first director 1965-1973, concomitantly teaching as professor of art history, 1965-1988. He divorced his first wife in 1965. Selz was awarded the Order of Merit from Federal Republic of Germany in 1967 for his study of German Expressionism. Together with his mentor, Taylor, and his colleague at Berkeley, Herschel Chipp (q.v.), he co-edited the first collected essays on American primary source theories of modern art in 1968. He taught as Zaks Professor, Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1976. In 1983 he married Carole Schemmerling. He was a visiting professor at the City University of New York in 1987. In 1988 he became emeritus at Berkeley. He was appointed a member of the advisory council of the Archives of American Art in 1971. For the 1972-73 year he was a senior fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities. From 1993 he served on the acquisitions committee, Museums of Fine Arts, San Francisco. He served as a member of board of directors for the College Art Association 1958-64, and again in 1966-71. As an art historian, Selz was one of the first to examine German Expressionism not as a series of stylistic changes (formalism), but as motivated by the politics of the time. His interest in art as a political phenomenon never altered. Selz was fortunate enough to interview many of the German Expressionist artists or their widows in the 1950s while they were still alive.

Since his 1975 solo debut (at the age of 16), at the Crocker Art Museum, Boyd Gavin has been in numerous exhibitions including the San Jose Museum of Art, Winfield Gallery in Carmel, and the Artists Contemporary Gallery in Sacramento. He received his B.A. from UC Santa Cruz, and his M.A. at CSU Sacramento. Gavin´s quirky, painterly renditions of still lifes, figures and regional landscapes have ensured his reputation as an artist that finds splendor in the mundane.

Gladys Nilsson, a founding member of the Chicago Hairy Who, studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) from 1958 to 1962. Nilsson pursued watercolors, which later became her medium of choice, rocketing her to fame in the 1960s. Highly stylized with distorted figures and accentuated with brilliant colors, Nilsson´s work reflects her interest in playful language -- puns and malapropisms—and other incongruities in life. Today, Nilsson teaches at SAIC and continues to be active in Chicago´s art community.