A New Direction For My Art, by Gill Miller

As I mentioned in my most recent blog, my art was recently critiqued by Los Angeles art critic, Peter Frank. To be quite honest,  I was a little bit nervous about what he might say about my art. And even though I had just finished with a year-long, monthly art critique group with members of The Los Angeles Art Association where your art is put under scrutiny, his perspective carried a unique amount of weight. Don't get me wrong, I am an artist who paints what he sees and feels, and not what I think even Peter Frank would like. But nonetheless, here I was, along with the members of the critique group, and Peter, looking at my art while I was on the hot seat. 

But it was an experience that many artists dream about, to receive serious feedback about their art from a respected critic. One of the things that Peter suggested is that I paint on a horizontal canvas, which I had never done, as opposed to a square or vertical one. He said he thought the perspective would be more appropriate for what I paint. And then he demonstrated it with one of the vertical paintings that he was critiquing. And he was right. It worked much better. Even though sometimes when I paint on a vertical canvas and then rotate it around to see how it would look, it never occurred to me to paint that way. Maybe that seems strange, I don't know. Perhaps that's just the way I naturally see the world.
Next Week - I will talk about my progress into my first horizontal canvas. Hopefully, I will be finished with it.

Kazumi Nakamura's exhibition at Blum & Poe

Review

Gloppy abandon meets elegant restraint at Blum & Poe's Kazumi Nakamura exhibition

An installation view of Kazumi Nakamura's exhibition at Blum & Poe.
(Kazumi Nakamura / Blum & Poe)

Sharon Mizota

Although he’s been painting since the 1980s, this is Kazumi Nakamura’s first solo exhibition in the U.S.
Kudos to Blum & Poe for its commitment to showing Japanese art in L.A. Upstairs is an excellent, whimsical exhibition of Japanese ceramics. Go see that too.
Nakamura’s show opens with bombast: “Hermitage 11” is a huge, black-and-white, diagonal grid that vibrates against your eyeballs so hard it might induce vertigo. It is surrounded by three other elegant, geometric abstractions, in restrained palettes of black, white, red and gold.
Then in the corner is what might be their ugly stepcousin, a roughly painted, riotously colored agglomeration of verticals and chevrons, also geometric, but barely so. It’s hard to believe it’s by the same artist.

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Yet as the show unfolds, it becomes clear that the two styles feed off of each other. In the lusciously watermelon-colored “Mt. Hafu IV,” thick, slapdash diagonals limn a rough network of zigzags. In the same room, “Moraine II” features a decorous web of flat, gold lines interrupted by verticals that create subtle misalignments.
It’s as if the joyous fury of the former has pushed its more disciplined relation off-kilter while the austere geometries of the latter have pulled its neighbor into its tidy orbit. Gloppy abandon rubs up against elegant restraint and the result is a deliciously tender balance.
Blum & Poe, 2727 S. La Cienega Blvd., (310) 836-2062, through Oct. 24. Closed Sundays and Mondays. www.blumandpoe.com

Creating A New Logo For Yourself Is Not Easy

Creating a serious new logo for yourself is a lot more difficult than creating one for a client, I recently discovered. You have a different perspective whereby you are constantly second-guessing your ideas about yourself and what you want your brand to look like. With a client, you are looking at them from the outside with a perspective that is more objective, rather than subjective as when you are looking at your own brand. When you look inward at yourself, you are bringing with it a lot of baggage. It's like when someone asks you to self-assess and you can't think of anything to say. I realized that I needed some outside perspectives on what I was trying to create for myself. Yes, maybe I should have hired someone to create a logo for me, however, the creative side of me couldn't resist the challenge. The final logo I think works well, and it reflects my style of art with the round and angular shapes and how they play off of each other. The larger challenge with my initials is the obvious reference to a well known automotive behemoth whose brand has been around for 100 years or more. 

The Anatomy of a Painting by Gill Miller

The painting The Key of Life is fairly well developed here, and at this time however I was unsure of the red block at top. I'm a fan of combining red and orange in the right context. This seemed a little too color saturated.

I worked on this canvas for almost six weeks, finally changing the red to this creamy off-white and adding these two Greek Keyish shapes. This is where the title of the painting, The Key of Life came from.

Hollywood: L.A.’s Next Art Frontier

By Alexandra Pechman Posted 12/10/14 10:00 am

In October 2013, Esther Kim Varet, director of the Venice Beach–based gallery Various Small Fires, placed a bid on 812 North Highland Avenue in Hollywood, a more than 5,000-square-foot lot containing a temple-like Art Deco edifice. The listing had gone up the night before, and Kim placed one of the first offers—by that afternoon, there were seven others bidders.
“It’s a landgrab right now,” Varet said of the situation in Hollywood. Over the last few years, the neighborhood has established itself as a gallery district with North Highland Avenue recast as its main drag. Regen Projects claims to have spearheaded the eastward shift in 2012, when the business moved just blocks from Overduin & Co. and Michael Kohn Gallery, and was soon followed by new venues like Hannah Hoffman. Within the last year alone, a number of emerging galleries have migrated closer to the Hollywood Hills; David Kordansky moved nearby in September, Various Small Fires opened on Highland in October, and LAXART will officially open again in January 2015 on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Regen Projects, the pioneering gallery that opened in Hollywood in 2012.
CHRISTOPHER NORMAN/COURTESY REGEN PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES

Former recording studios, karate-stunt training centers, and film-production offices now serve as ideal spaces for high-end galleries: business tax breaks and better access to both collectors in nearby upscale neighborhoods like Beverly Hills and artists living in the city’s eastern enclaves make Hollywood a convenient hub. And, Varet added, “It’s so freaking cheap.”
Varet’s move represents a shift for younger galleries away from their former critical mass in Venice. Once associated with the Light and Space artists, Venice has experienced a revival over the last 25 years that has created some of the city’s highest rents: Varet sold her former building to a movie star, and noted that Google had just moved its headquarters nearby.“It’s like SoHo is now: all the people moving in there now are tech people,” Varet said. “And Culver City is more like what happened to Chelsea,” she added, referring to what is still arguably L.A.’s main gallery district.Lauri Firstenberg, founder of LAXART, has left behind her Culver City gallery on La Cienega and will debut her new space in the former home of Radio Recorders, the studio where acts from Billie Holiday to Elvis to Jimi Hendrix recorded. The move, Firstenberg said, was motivated by a need for more space and a freestanding building. Downtown warehouses required too much overhaul.“The city has changed, locationally as well as in terms of galleries growing,” Firstenberg said. “And so has our role and place in the city.” Hollywood, she said, seemed more central.“Everyone’s like, Culver City is over,” Firstenberg said, though she doesn’t agree, adding, “There are so many amazing anchors there.”Jeff Poe, whose Blum & Poe gallery has been based in L.A. since 1994, bought a Culver City building in 2003 but believes the recent purchases are more significant because of the increasing emphasis on buying property in Los Angeles.“In the past,” he said, “the only gallery that really bought a building was Margo Leavin,” which closed its West Hollywood location in 2012. But now people are laying down more permanent roots in other neighborhoods.Car culture makes moving through L.A.’s gallery scene much different from moving through New York’s, where Blum & Poe also has a space. The drive from Culver City to Hollywood, Poe said, is about the same distance as the drive from the Upper East Side to Chelsea, and he predicts the freeway-less expanse between Culver City and Hollywood will become “the through line” of L.A.’s arts district, with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art right in the center.There’s a potential for a lot of driving, something that Varet considered when she was looking for a new building.“I really wanted to find a gas station or a car wash because that’s perfect for L.A.,” she said. But, ironically, it “turns out those are really difficult to find.”A version of this story originally appeared in the December 2014 issue of ARTnews on page 50 under the title “Hollywood: L.A.’s Next Frontier.”

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Southern California Artist Gill Miller Paints Outdoors

Artist Gill Miller spray paints his art outdoors in Southern California. 

Needing fresh air to paint, fortunately for him the climate allows him to paint year round.