Not Photography

Green Jay by Charley Harper

One of the many, many things I’m enjoying about working on 20×200 is the opportunity to expand my curatorial interests more broadly into paintings, prints, drawings and illustration. People are always surprised when I do a painting show - like, say, Amy Ross’s awesome show that’s opening tomorrow - because they think of the gallery as being exclusively focused on photography. For good reason, of course - photography is probably 90% of my inventory and all the activities related to Hey, Hot Shot! amplify my photocentricness. (That is not a word, ok. You know what I mean.)

There are a lot of reasons why I feel at ease with photo and have not done a lot with other media, and those reasons are all fodder for another sure-to-be fascinating post. My recent immersion in painting, drawing + illustration has been really energizing; for better or worse, I tend to enjoy getting thrown in the deep end with no swimming lessons.

Grand Canyon by Charley Harper

I just came across modernist Charley Harper’s delightful prints and lithos over on Print & Pattern (always good for amazing stylish colorful everything). Now I’m jonesing for one of the vintage serigraphs that are for sale at Treadway Gallery. The two I’ve posted here land smack in the center of the venn diagram of both my current and ongoing obsessions: Midcentury! Birds! (God, I love birds.) Road trips! (I wrote a big long post about my upcoming trip to Santa Fe in the wee hours of this morning and it seems to have disappeared into the ether… must be trouble with the server move. Off to investigate.) Here’s that post I was talking about.

Also, check out a cool Flickr set from a previous exhibit of Harper’s work at the Todd Oldham store in Soho. Also, there is a book that I want too: The Illustrated Life.