The People of Monticello Road: The Local

Sam (left) is a maven of the Charlottesville Art Scene; he occasionally tends bar at the Local. On this night I ran into my studio-mate Matt and his fiance Liz, making three of my favorite people in a room full of friends.

I’m just crazy about The Local. They get it right in so many ways.

The food is terrific, the staff is friendly, and the ambiance is nearly perfect. The main room is a former photography studio (bonus points for that!) and the bar integrates light tables from that former incarnation. They give your drink a strange bluish glow. There’s a big back terrace, a quiet upstairs, which is perfect for events, and then there’s the front balcony, which has a commanding view of the street (people-watching) and a distinctly New Orleans feeling—but with views of the mountains.

The name of the place derives from the strong preference for locally-sourced ingredients, which pepper the menu but the thing that I like best about the place is that it's a gathering place for the neighborhood. That’s a direct reflection of owner Adam Frazier, who is very active and supportive of the neighborhood community. Among many other things, The Local is a major sponsor of the Clark 5K, which I co-direct, and they’ve agreed to host this exhibition (Monticello Road) after it finishes at the Bridge, plus whatever additional events/readings/etc we wish to have.

The Local gives a lot to the community, but the neighborhood supports the restaurant with many regular customers. It’s a terrific and central place to meet, there’s plenty of room (even though it can be quite busy there), and I’m assured to run into someone I know there. Something about the place encourages dialog between strangers and I have made a habit of going there regularly in search of participants for this project—and I always leave knowing a few more people.

I had planned to dedicate this entry to the periodic musical gathering there, where I do much of my "research." Upon surveying the room, however, most everyone told me that it was crowded enough and that I should not spread the word. So I won’t say when it happens but I will say that it’s shockingly good.

The whole experience there is great—relaxing and well worth a trip. When you visit Monticello Road, stop in for a beer or a meal. It’s an essential part of the experience and one that will leave you completely satisfied.

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The People of Monticello Road is a weekly series of profiles that will run through the summer. Monticello Road is a photography and story-telling project about the people and places along a mile-long byway that is simultaneously humble and historic, home to many and a reflection of us all. There will be an exhibition and much more in the Spring of 2012.

Project Description | More Photos: Places | People

Dave Hickey Still Callin' It Like He Sees It

In this month's issue of Art in America, Dave Hickey laments that today's artists have lost their reverence for their deep-historical predecessors. Consequently, in his view, they have given up the best arrow in their quiver of ways to make sense of a perplexing world.

I don't have scientific data, nor do I pretend to be an expert on any artist except Yours Truly, but anecdotally I am often surprised at how little my contemporaries seem to know or care about what artists did before Duchamp--or even prior to this exact moment. I should amend that to say that I find young artists to be that way--more so than when I was coming up. Not surprising to see that in a market obsessed with the superficial veneer of originality and, like the rest of popular culture, stuck in a never-ending embrace of adolescence.

I think there’s also an element in consumer culture that wants to keep stirring the water up so we don’t see what’s underneath the surface. We’re now seeing the devastating consequences of this willful collective myopia in our shattered financial system. If folks had asked a few more questions on topic instead of constantly changing the subject perhaps we would be in better shape now. The mess we’re in cuts across the entire culture and artists have some culpability as well. Undoubtedly, a little more historical awareness would have helped.

Before you yell, "No, not me--I know my history," which is your right, please bear with me a little longer. And this is not about whether you agree with Hickey’s premise, it's about holding oneself accountable. And to put a dot on my take on his argument I would say that artists are, broadly speaking, somewhat less interested in history, but that changes with age. Everyone values experience more as they acquire more of it and look more to the past to help figure out the present. What’s really changed though is the age of the artists being awarded blue-chip status. When someone receives the highest accolades right out of school, there’s a real disincentive to push deeper. While that may be the situation for just a few artists, that group has received disproportionate attention and set the tone for the last decade. Let’s hope that is changing--it worked well in the "don't-ask-don't-tell" era but suddenly not so much.

Back to Dave Hickey. One of my most impression-making experiences as a working artist took place at the biennial International Sculpture conference, where he was keynote speaker. It was the immediate aftermath of the Columbine massacre and Hickey painted a picture of two young minds incapable of projecting the consequences of their deed—they could only see what would happen if they pulled the trigger by actually doing it. Hickey called it a Crisis of the Imagination and asked if, as stewards of the collective Imagination, artists were perhaps somehow falling short.

You could hear a pin drop in that room and a lot of people were shaking their heads. I, on the other hand, was jumping out of my skin and wanting to high-five my neighbors. There was hearty discussion at the cocktail party and dinner that followed, which was, of course the speaker’s intent. The room pretty much agreed that Americans are an unimaginative lot, but my fellows generally did not appreciate being called to task (even in the most vague and collective way) for Harris and Klebold’s heinous action. Even imagining that Hickey was way off base, as one could also do on the question of art-historical awareness, the implicit challenge in his assertion was useful motivation.

It isn’t comfortable to be challenged but we can only do great things if we set ambitious goals. Heaven knows that Hickey has a very expansive definition of the cultural legacy and for him to feel that culture is being dumbed-down is a pretty frightful charge. Whether or not it’s true, I for one am glad to see one of my favorite writers still issuing manifestos, still caring enough to say, "you can do better."

Asher Durand: Tree Portraitist

Image: Asher Durand, Nature Study: Rocks and Trees
in the Catskills (NY Historical Society)
Ironically enough, I couldn't catch the Asher Durand show at the Brooklyn Museum because I was in the Catskills at the time studying the very trees and waterfalls the 19th Century master so lovingly painted.

So it was with great relief that I managed to slip into the Smithsonian Museum of American Art to see the show in Washington, the day before it closed.

In some circles today, Durand is better known for his associations than for his work (witness the fact that the exhibition is organized around his portrait of the more-revered Thomas Cole). In his day however, he was a chef d'ecole, a motivating force for landscape painting and one of the best-known artists of his generation.

It's true that Durand had first-rate chops as a portraitist, apparently painting a dozen presidential portraits. What excites me, though, is that he brings a portraitist's incisive gaze into the landscape, treating plant life and the earth itself as specifically as he can. Though Romantic in temperament, there are none of the generalizations and aesthetic ellipses one usually sees in American Rontanticism. His paintings are not about God or Manifest Destiny, but about the land and trees themselves--and the artist who painted them.

The work lets us each determine its meaning on our own and does not editorialize beyond making evident the artist's love for his subject matter. And yet these are not nature studies either--they're full of emotional weight because they cause the viewer to reflect back inward and our own baggage comes tumbling out.

Durand's spiritual reflections on Nature opened the door for people like me, who use imagery from the natural world to reflect on the Human Condition without resorting to baroque moralizing. Nature is not some agent of God bent on wrecking us, nor is it some unattainable Acadia. It's right there in front of us; it's us.


Love Knot. Charcoal on paper 28 x 40 2007. [more]
I had not seen the above painting prior to visiting Platte Clove,
but my debt to Asher Durand is obvious.

The Commonplace Made Strange:Edward Hopper at the National Gallery

The Nighthawks contains everything you need to know about Edward Hopper and this very comprehensive exhibition is the only Hopper show you'll need to see.
(Image: Art Institute of Chicago)

Edward Hopper was a reluctant icon, retiring, etc. Don’t mistake his shyness for lack of ambition. He had one eye turned toward posterity at all times, but he was modest and hard-working, an artist who regular Americans could relate to. He was a consummate artists’ painter: "I can’t think of any artist who doesn’t like his work," comments Eric Fischl in the excellent documentary that accompanies this triumphant—but never triumphalist—exhibition. His work was rigorously composed, his colors painstaking developed through complimentary layering and juxtaposition, very sound from a technical perspective.

His work speaks of the unspoken, the unmentioned awkward silences that sometimes between descend between people. No one is looking at each other and their silences are as deep as the waters off the Maine coast. His couples are are always in distress and I wonder about his marriage. Isolation, alienation, estrangement are Great Themes of the 20th Century and he really nailed them. I will observe, however, that when you spend time with the work, it becomes apparent that much of the work is about solitude, as opposed to alienation. And in an urban setting, solitude is desirable.

Speaking of urbanism, he was a great champion of the urban landscape. No one could paint a brick wall like Hopper. In fact, his brick walls had more dynamism and depth than his skies or ocean deeps. He was uninterested in the natural world to the point of total dismissal. Those fact that was particularly striking after having just seen the Turner retrospective next door. He was all about light on walls, marquees, translucent window treatments, and—especially the windows themselves, often darkened, like the scary hollow eyes of so many of the people who dwell in his world.

Show Info

Reviews:

NY Times

The New Yorker

Washington Post

Washington City Paper