Sarah Arnold: Painting a Rapidly Disappearing Past in Perfectly Present Images

Posted on by Diversions LA

Painting the Los Angeles neighborhoods of times past – specifically the 1920s and 1930s – artist Sarah Arnold creates lush, layered images that are as contemporary as their subject is historic.

The expression “to live in the present” is echoed in each of her works. She creates a vivid present-moment image of a rapidly changing landscape, one in which the architecture is historic, or perhaps already from the past. Just as shadows shift throughout the day, so does the look of the city, and she captures her own perception in the immediate.

Her thick, feathered brush strokes and rich textures form a mosaic-like detail; as layered as a collage, a tactile as if they were woven from fabric. Her lovely palette intimately reveals both light and color. Each landscape is depicted in an intensely measured, almost musical composition, as if each painted stroke were a rhythmic note played in a perfect tempo. She captures and preserves images of landmark structures with a graceful, flowing style, and infuses them with an inward glow, as if capturing them in a clear amber, in a resin that’s dipped in sunlight and shadow.

Each image appears as a moment frozen in time. That is not to say her images are either rigid or lost. Rather, the scenes are preserved – as befits an artist who also describes herself as an “avid architectural preservationist.” She describes the neighborhoods she captures as having diverse home styles and mature landscaping of lawns, gardens, and trees.

The eclectic nature of the communities she depicts include a sea of constant change – classic structures replaced by modern, and in danger of being eliminated by the drift of time and the urgency of construction.

Arnold says that she looks for neighborhoods teetering on the edge of irrevocable change, preserving through her art a singular moment in a community’s physical look, and its gestation of light and dark, tradition and change. Her work is not specifically representative of one home, one block, one roof; rather, she shapes a complex world, a special place that elevates a single moment in time, a single emotional moment – the Zen of home, a cocoon of comfort and a destination of the spirit. She depicts a rootedness that is too often pulled up, torn down, and obliterated in the ceaseless flow of urban life and popular landscapes. Each landscape is entirely different, though evoked in the same almost-dreamy style.

Her style is somewhat abstract, with a grounding in realism. We see the trees, buildings, flowers, sky but in an abstract/contemporary impressionist way. We get a sense of the neighborhood she’s revealing, whether through a unique tree or terrain, an architectural style or a quality to the rooftops catching the light of the sun.

With her painting “Wilmore City Jacarandas,” the darkest purples convey shadow and early morning light, they are lush and almost wild, a cascade of color and vibrating, lingering darkness.

The subject may be jacarandas again – her purple palettes are among the most compelling – but it is an entirely different view in the more muted late afternoon of “Purple Building with Jacaranda.”

Her view from “Kenneth Hahn Park” is all blues and greens in the foreground, intensely vivid; the long view of mid-Wilshire and Los Angeles is lost in a hazy blue grey, the nature both dominant and restricted.

“Terrace Park” gives us a long panoramic horizontal view of a street of houses and their trees, a larger blue building at the far right of the work, casting a shadow of dominance and change to come.

“Wilshire Vista,” is more urban, multiple-unit structures in groupings of quintessentially-LA architectural Spanish and deco styles and paler colors punctuated by a few in brick-red.

Using a plein-air technique, Arnold’s work, while perfect balanced, also conveys a sense of immediacy, an emotional presence impressed upon each scene. Fascinated with these Southern California neighborhoods, her many museum and gallery exhibitions include a lush current solo show at South Los Angeles Contemporary through October 31st.

Arnold’s work is paired at SOLA with that of artists’ Charity Malin, Carmen Mardonez, and Kim Marra who comprise a wonderful group exhibition, Tactility. Arnold’s work deftly conveys similar themes to their beautiful show, those of memory and domesticity, and of creating a sense of place.

The place that Arnold creates is both dreamy and wondrous, poignant and poised to become memory. As an artist, she creates memories for the viewer that link emotion to place, and texture to landscape.

The gallery is open Thursday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., COVID-19 mask requirements are necessary; appointments are not, although can be requested for additional viewing times. SOLA is located at 3718 W. Slauson Avenue in South L.A.

  • Genie Davis; photos provided by artist

Pam Douglas – Sanctuary Part Two Offers Exceptional Images of Escape and Memorial

Posted on by Diversions LA

Pam Douglas has created an enormous – literally and figuratively – installation artwork in her Sanctuary series. The series is in three parts, with the second on view at TAG Gallery by appointment now through October 31st. It is filled with grace and power, as the artist uses sculptural and drawn images to create works that are visceral and resonant.

Creating a vital conversation about America’s ongoing humanitarian crises during pandemic times is difficult at best, and yet she has more than succeeded. Depicting both seeking, finding, and not finding sanctuary is the subject of the mixed-media series, which offers a look at those who seek by land, sea, and refugee tents. 

In all three sections, viewers find themselves in an immersive and textural environment that seethes with the fury at the dehumanization of people seeking refuge. There is a cruelty that undercuts so much of this world, and Douglas does not shy away from revealing it in her limited but lovely palette, cerating images that appear bronzed by the elements. 

Part One took viewers into a world of life-size drawings with sculptural elements that were displayed from floor to ceiling behind a chain link fence. Walking figures sought refuge; children were caged behind ropes.

In her current Part Two, above, Douglas has created hand-made rafts built on “logs” shaped from burlap fabric and roped around foam rolls. Some she had covered  with bark. The extreme tactility of these works engages the viewers’ senses as well as their eyes and hearts.

Douglas has also utilized sails made from the same canvas she works with in the other iterations of the series. Some of the rafts are even larger than the images she exhibited in part one, and rise 4 to 5 feet in height. They spread from a 36-foot abstract mural which also contains scraps of clothing and a clothes hanger. They echo the devastation the refugees are escaping from, making use of found objects such as rusty metal wires, discarded shoes, wood, rope and more.

The work is nothing short of dramatic, and Douglas herself describes her refugee rafts as seemingly escaping from that mural, which depicts a devastated land. The artist says she began the project last year as a response to refugees seeking asylum both on the U.S. Border and worldwide. “In 2020, the series grew into a metaphor for all of us adrift in the winds of change,” she relates. 

For Douglas, as for many cultures, the raft itself has potent symbolic meaning. “The Buddha compared his teachings to a raft that helps us cross over to the other shore – the shore of peace, freedom, and well-being. Of course, rafts were entirely real for refugees from Cuba in the 20th century, and recently they’ve been a grim memorial for families trying to navigate the Mediterranean Sea fleeing climate disasters and wars.”

Shaped from simulated logs and tree bark, Douglas has created 12 rough crafts for Sanctuary Part Two, some afloat, some capsized, each 4 to 5-feet high. They fly canvas sails, with images of the raft passengers drawn in charcoal with great sensitivity and loving detail.

“Remnants of daily life such as a clothes hanger in ‘Grandma Tried to Dry Our Clothes’ (above) make these lives immediate,” Douglas attests. “In ‘Almost There’ a mother cradles her sleeping baby’s foot. In ‘Prayer for Safe Passage,’ a lone girl draped in a coffee bean bag conveys hope.”

Douglas powerfully weaves ordinary aspects of life with courageous ones through the people with which she has populated her rafts.  

As with Sanctuary One, Part Two features her limited palette of charcoal and chalk on natural linen and tan burlap taken from coffee bean bags. Both muted and magical, the palette itself allows viewers to focus on “the struggle and the beauty of the faces.” Much like a newspaper image, the visuals seem to be drawn from daily photographs of the relentless struggle of immigrants, although Douglas notes that none of these figures are actually taken from newspapers. 

“I hope viewers comprehend the scale of Part Two that ranges from small details – like a mother’s hand clasping a baby’s foot, tiny praying hands atop a flagpole and baby’s shoes left on an abandoned raft – to a 36-foot painting, and includes intricate construction of rafts in plywood, bark, burlap, rope, twine and other materials. Compared to the wall-hung figures drawn on canvas in Part One, the rafts are a significant progression,” Douglas states.

It’s important to Douglas that viewers note the evolving conceptual advances in the series as well as the materials used and her own artwork. “Integrating drawing with physical artifacts in 3-dimensional space has been one of the challenges in Part Two,” she reports. “Looking at ‘Prayer for Safe Passage,’ for example, how does a drawn figure ‘kneel’ on a raft? How do her hands of clay emerge from the drawn body seamlessly? Where is the line between artifact and reality? This philosophical question grows throughout the series and will culminate in Part Three.”

She wants viewers to take special note of the continuing use of found and re-purposed materials similar to the used coffee bean bags she utilized in Part One. “From an environmental perspective, materials that are found in nature or recycled touch the soul of all three parts of the show: nothing and no one is a throw-away,” she asserts.

Following the October installation of Part Two, the entire Sanctuary exhibit including Part Three, Shelter, occupies all 6500 sq. ft. of TAG Gallery. The third installment will take place January 19 to February 13, 2021.

It’s envisioned by Douglas as a culmination of these travels, revealing poignant images of refugees arriving homeless to fabric-draped shelters. Again, she will  create her figures drawn in charcoal in the same styles as in Part One and Part Two, but adding an additional element of pottery to her mixed media work.

“I think of Sanctuary as more than another art show. It’s also more than a social justice communication – though it has both of those qualities. I intend it to combine world-building and traditional art to create an encompassing experience for a visitor. I would like audiences to consider it innovative in a way that’s different from the way innovation is often conceived – as mostly technological. This is about the impact.”

It is indeed an impactful show. One cannot help but admire both the people she has created, the lives she has opened for viewers to experience and feel, as well as the skill, strength and passion of the art itself.

Currently, Douglas is involved deeply in creating Sanctuary Part Three. She says she is working on it every day. “Most of the tents and their inhabitants are now complete as is another 36-foot mural, this time a realistic landscape.” She notes that Part Three is around twice the size of Part Two, and similarly will feature free-standing hand-crafted structures that extend onto the gallery floor, with the show extending over two rooms, with the second large room serving as a simulated clinic. “That’s where I will be raising funds for Doctors Without Borders, thus completing the outreach into the real world.”

She will explore that idea more when the time comes. For now, the time requires – and I cannot use that word too strongly – viewers to more beyond the pandemic itself, and take in the inspiring, riveting, and richly moving work that is Sanctuary Two at TAG.

“When all three parts are assembled together as planned at TAG Gallery in 2021, the cumulative effect should be as devastating as it is immersive, leading viewers into a vital and multi-faceted experience,” Douglas says.

Sanctuary Part Two will be shown at TAG Gallery October 6 to October 31st by appointment; look for the online video link to come as well. Sanctuary One will run at LAAA October 30 through December 4th.

If you missed the virtual walk-through of Sanctuary Two earlier in October, look for LA Art Documents video available on YouTube towards the end of the month.

  • Genie Davis; photos: Pam Douglas, TAG Gallery, Shoebox PR

The World is Burning: Susan Lizotte Tells Us through Art

Posted on by Diversions LA

Susan Lizotte is on fire. Her recent landscape paintings that present LA at the edge of apocalypse not only offer images of chaos and climate change, but burn with both beauty and ferocity. Viewed at Start-Up LA in February, her series Los Angeles: A Different Narrative, contains paintings both ominous and graceful, unsettling cautionary tales. 

The events she depicts are visionary – whether they had literally occurred in the moment she painted them, they go beyond the merely imagined to a bolder place of warning; offering a message of stark, raw beauty along with the terror of the possible.

Time has proven their portent. Smoke wafts across a Beverly Hills street; threatens the iconic Chris Burden light sculpture at LACMA, roars behind the Hollywood sign. In one image, an overturned car burns; in another, a lamppost oozes like a snake from the heat.

Rooted in recognizable locations, the looming disasters are visceral and immediate; road signs to a future we should’ve seen, but have instead ignored, as we teeter on beautiful disaster. 

Coupled with her Spring Map series, Lizotte has created richly rewarding work that paint an eerily accurate direction for these times. Her current map work, layered and almost ghostly, continues and expands upon and builds upon ideas from an earlier body of map work  first viewed in 2017.

Lizotte says of her latest maps that she is exploring abuse of power, control, image making, and mercury poisoning, among other ideas. Fecund and floral, the lands are also broken. Some resemble a confetti patchwork that could be geographic, representations of disease statistics, representations of a divided land, as with her map of America above.

They evoke the corruption of power and greed that virulently affects the globe today, just as much as it did in the 15th century world that Lizotte has meticulously researched to shape a number of them. The images serve as both treasure hunt and treatise, a deep, soul-aching knowledge revealingly spread out in evocative grids and symbols. 

She describes the series as born from both her “thoughts and dreams;” noting that these paintings are inspired by the quarantine of Covid-19. 

As such, they are a means to juxtapose the 14th century plague with the 21st century pandemic. Using Renaissance maps to speak to the spread of today’s epidemic feels fitting indeed as a way of finding our place in a new and unknown world. 

Lizotte reveals that the geography of these old maps is inaccurate, which is one reason the images feel strange and unsettling. “I’m using this inaccuracy deliberately to convey confusion and disorientation.

 The very inaccuracy of the maps add to a sense of inchoate unease. Splashes of pink and emerald lie like broken jewels against a pale background; symbols of power and borders drawn dismember the natural world. Her Mappa Mundi, above, was inspired, Lizotte says, by Martin Waldseemuller’s 1507 map of the globe which was the first map that included America. She used 12 canvasses, and shaped the same exact measurements of the original from 18 24-inch squares. There are fire-breathing dragons, falling plains, and cast off broken flowers; the debris of the world colliding.

In both her current and earlier (above) body of map work, her vivid palette compels, creating a sense of urgency in the images that evokes both ruin and loveliness. 

They serve as elegy to both past and future, a vivid and thought-provoking testimony to human existence. That existence is always linked to the natural world, one not subject to  development and borders.

Rather, nature – our own and that of the earth itself – needs no boundaries, just healing. Lizotte’s work gives viewers the visual language to understand and explore just that.

  • Genie Davis; photos courtesy of the artist