A Sandow Sampler

Otis Fine Arts alum ('88) Sandow Birk has been a busy guy lately. Among his recent activities- His solo show "The Depravities of War" just closed at the Cal State Long Beach University Arts Museum (after premiering at Catherine Clarke Gallery) and he is participating in a group show at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. His film latest "Dante's Inferno" was recently screened in London. Here is just a sampling of the buzz his work has been creating:

Depravities of War
Los Angeles Times review
Orange County Weekly review
Long Beach Press Telegram review
The District Weekly review

The Landscape of War
Metro active review

Dante's Inferno
London screening
Household Opera blog review
A Distant Mirror blog book comments

Passionate About Painters

(Chad Robertson Untitled 2006)

In this December 2nd piece for the Los Angeles Times Painting Gets a Broader Brush, Christopher Knight makes the case that painting is not dead, has not been dead for some time (if it ever was) and is not likely to be dead anytime soon- "Lingering animus toward painting is so end-of-the-20th century. Painting hasn't been the black sheep of the art family for a couple of decades now, except in academic backwaters of provincial thought."

Knight suggests that if anything, Los Angeles is the hot bed in the United States for painting- "Unlike New York, Los Angeles never had an established reputation as a painting town. That might help to explain the abundance of painting now: Without history's heavy baggage, the field seems wide open -- ripe for the picking."

To illustrate his points he identified 45 Los Angeles (broadly defined) artists under 45. The list includes seven Otis alums- Kevin Appel '89, Michael Brunswick MFA '07, Gajin Fujita '97, Sandeep Mukherjee '96, Chad Robertson '91, Steve Roden '86 and Timothy Tompkins '03. It was gratifying to see the College so well represented in Knight's list.

As a further illustration of the LA influence on painting, Knight called out Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects as the gallery that provides painters with the most "parity." Vielmetter represents both Roden and Tompkins.

Each artist was represented on the cover of the Arts and Music section (where the story ran) by a detail of one of their paintings. The full images can be seen on the Times' website.

(Kevin Appel Houses and Timbers 27, 2006)