pink foam

amy's visit to LA

due to a spontaneous visit from amy this week, we did some art exploring in LA. here are the highlights:

1. Helios House which we drove by when we got lost looking for downtown LA on the corner of Olympic and Robertson. When i got home i did some googling to discover that this is actually a BP funded "green" gas station intended to, i quote, "move up a notch on the greencurve". As far as I can tell, a green gas station is an ordinary gas station but that is built with recycled and sustainable materials, with efficient lighting, filters installed to catch any possible gas spills before they hit the ground water, and solar panels on the roof for good measure. So there you go. The architects were Office dA with Johnston Marklee. 

2. The Grilled Cheese Truck we discovered in a downtown parking lot of food trucks was more enjoyable than any of the art we saw as part of the downtown los angeles art walk on thursday. our top pick was the double cream brie with sliced pears and honey and added smoked turkey (and i thought joe and i were adventurous doing grilled cheese with jam...)

3. art- i can't speak for amy, but my personal art favorites of what we saw were the intricately cut out photograph works by Soo Kim (first image) at angles gallery and the work by Jeff colson (second image) up at ace gallery beverly hills. other not pictured noteables: fabric and ceramic hybrids at acme ceramic show (not sure who the artist was, it was a group show) and the organic/synthetic, human/non human looking paintings by a recent claremont graduate, justin bower also at ace.

thanks to amy for her hours of driving in traffic and having an amazing attitude the entire time. 

my adventure

uncle dominique, a dancer and marcel

its been good to be back in long beach. we have restarted our goal of a weekly art outing in the new year and visited the norton simon museum in pasadena on saturday. our favorites of the visit were edgar degas, john cage and paul cezanne. ( Joe was also really interested in the pond in the sculpture garden outside, looking for fish probably. )

after the museum, we had a nice lunch in old pasadena and headed to claremont so i could see joe's installation and a new alki painting he started.

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back to the studio

joe has been busy. check out his new website here and a big thanks to stephen for helping set it up.