Velvet Visions

Posted on by Diversions LA

Velveteria - Photo by Jack Burke

All Photos by Jack Burke

Los Angeles is home to a variety of one-of-a-kind museums and one of those is Velveteria, a kitschy, thrilling spot to take in all things velvet art. Previously located in Portland, Velveteria opened in Chinatown in 2013, the manifestation of a velvet art obsession and collection by Los Angeleno Carl Baldwin and his partner, Caren Anderson.

Velvet paintings may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but this all too easily disregarded art form includes some pretty powerful, richly dimensional stuff. The best pieces pull you into a plushy but realistic world. And it’s fun. How can anything painted on velvet not be fun?

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Photos by Jack Burke
Photos by Jack Burke

Yes, there are Velvet Elvises, Hugh Hefner in his red robe, the Three Stooges, and even LA’s iconic weatherman Dallas Raines. But there’s so much more. Some glow in the dark. Some are the stuff of small children’s nightmares. Some depict wildlife. Some are three dimensional in aspect. And some are significant artistically, such as velvet visions created by the “father of modern velvet painting,” Tahiti-based Edgar Leeteg. You’ll find found-art assemblages, the visage of Sgt. Joe Friday, and a Zen-poodle garden shrine to a very Blue Elvis.

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Photos by Jack Burke
Photos by Jack Burke

Chinatown is the perfect spot for this marvelous, strange, and captivating store-front museum – grab some dim sum before or after, or check out the vibrant gallery scene in Chung King Road. Just beware the demon monkey in Velveteria’s  restroom.

  • Genie Davis

Erika Lizée

Posted on by Diversions LA

Erika emanantions

The delicate beauty and underlying strength of the paintings, drawings, and installation pieces created by Erika Lizee take viewers into a detailed world of flora and fauna, of magical phenomena, of the journey between the stamen of a flower and the multitude of stars in the universe.

Lizee’s coupling of the minute and beautiful with the infinite and grand just won the artist 2nd place at a LA Municipal Art Gallery exhibition. Lizee explains that she’s “awed by the vast intricacies of world we live in.” Her awe is evident in the magical quality of her work that shifts from the detailed reality of a perfectly rendered flower to cellular vastness that may be the unfolding of life itself or of a single living organism. In the artist’s words “I seek to express the sense of wonder I experience contemplating the fluid nature of reality. I am interested in representing the relationship between the known and unknown, the visible and invisible, the tangible and intangible.”

Erika And yet things continue to unfold

The artist creates installations that work as journeys, drawing the viewer down mysterious paths on a pursuit of nature and rebirth. Her sculpted acrylics work to mesh shadow and light, recreating the magical feel of the Northern Wisconsin woods in which Lizee spent much of her childhood. “I have a particularly vivid memory of studying the unfurling coils of a fiddlehead fern, and finding the mystery and beauty of this event,” she relates.

It’s the coupling of mystery and beauty, of a vast wonder and precise detail, that the Chicago-born Lizee shapes for the viewer. With a BFA in Painting from the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and her MFA in Painting from California State University Northridge, Lizee is an Associate Professor of Art at Moorpark College and Director of the Moorpark College Art Gallery when she is not crafting her enigmatic, lush, and galvanizing works.

Erika Moving closer to solidity

Lizee’s drawings are perfectly nuanced graphite on paper, each more riveting and precise than the last. In “Moving Closer to Solidity,” two flowers, one light, one dark overlap. Sheer petals over solid, these flowers remind the viewer of lillies, orchids, the fecundity of spring. In “Clearly Visible,” three sprays of orchids are each wrapped inside cellophane. Are they isolated from each other and from us, or we from them? What do we see, in plain sight, but refuse to unwrap? What mysterious gifts await us that we package and contain, set aside and limit?

Lizee explains “Abstracted plant life emits ethereal and luminous forms that transcend our notions of natural phenomena. The viewer is often transported into a realm where pure essence radiates from bulbous pods and reaching petals, whispering a private invitation to the moment.”

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Her paintings continue such an invitation. In “Emanations,” a violet flower with grey and white circling ever outward from it, lights up this acrylic-on-canvas work. With “Connecting Breath,” white, purple, teal, and grey notes slip out with amorphous filaments born from a flower. Acrylic on linen, “Searching the Landscape of the Unknown” radiates an almost neon-quality brightness to white, blue, lavender, and brown filaments floating like smoke. It reads almost as if it were a detail taken and redefined from the artist’s larger, darker installation piece “…and yet, things continue to unfold.” This piece was a part of Lizee’s installation at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, created with acrylic on Duralar in shades of silvery blue , white, and light violet. The viewer wonders at what is unfolding here – the universe, a flower? Or perhaps both, all at once.

Like the lush flowers and filaments in Lizee’s work, the artist’s career is likewise unfolding, with exhibits scheduled for 2016 at the LAX, and at the 643 Project Space in Ventura. Lizee has recently exhibited at GALA Exhibits in Glendale, Calif., the JK Gallery in Los Angeles, and the FireHouse Gallery in Grants Pass, Ore., among may other locations. Lizee is currently exhibiting at Angels’ Ink Gallery in San Pedro, Calif. through September 25th, and at the BG Gallery in Santa Monica, opening on August 8th. She is also exhibiting at the LA Municipal Art Gallery Juried Exhibition through September 20th.

  • Genie Davis

Red Pipe Gallery: Albert Vitela

Posted on by Diversions LA
Photo by Jack Burke
Photo by Jack Burke

At Chinatown’s Red Pipe Gallery Albert Vitela’s “New Works” exhibition revealed the Los Angeles native’s work as a sweeping panoply of color; abstract depictions of historical events, religious figures, and celebrities. Worlds expressed in fragments of motion-filled color, Vitela combines memories and history in a combination of pop art and abstract expressionism.

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All Photos by Jack Burke
All Photos by Jack Burke

Curated by art critic Mat Gleason, Vitela’s show is about history, anger, war, peace, resolution, and beauty. His belief is that beauty itself cannot exist without awareness, and that peace can become a natural outgrowth of this awareness. He seeks mystical, surreal moments from concrete events ranging from World War II to battles between Samurai, all of which exist for Vitela beyond conventional time constraints.

Vitela has a strong concept in mind when he paints. “My goal is to enrich humanity through my work. I want to create an environment that leads to world peace. You look at television news and you see warfare, you see crime, you see situations such as Watergate. I meditate on all these things. On warfare and peace, the beauty and the ugliness. And then I meld them together.” He finds himself inspired by both current and historical events, and views them as of one piece.

Vitela’s art uses an Impressionist’s color palette in his abstract approach. His samurai in “Kojiro Vs. Musashi, Ganryujima Japan” are cast in striking yellow and blue, his angels’ skin is salmon pink. “I’m looking to create in my art, in my meditation, a beautiful future for the human race. If we do what we say, if we want what we see, that’s emblematic of both war and peace. We can go either way. My paintings express that.”

A talented emerging artist, Vitela works from his own dreams to create vibrant dreamscapes of figures from history and modern life.

  • Genie Davis

Award Winner: Susan Melly

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Susan Melly with Scott Canty - Taking First Place at
Susan Melly with Scott Canty – Taking First Place at “Art Fusion” – Photo by Jack Burke

The dynamic artist Susan Melly is hot off two award wins: she took first place at Gallery H at Phantom Galleries “Art Fusion” exhibition, for “Window Dressing,” a work that is an intrinsic part of her “Mother Machine” series; and she received honorable mention at LA Artcore for her piece “Fertile Crescent.”

Melly’s work is all about the feminine, and female objectification. This is not a hearts and flower world. Rather it’s all about identity, sexuality, power, and yes, industrial machines. The artist was inspired by a discovery of dress patterns and industrial-age sewing machines that were a part of her mother’s estate. Her recent work combines tissue paper dress patterns into images that explore both real and symbolic relationships between women and industry. She uses loosely drawn, even impressionistic images on top of the precise and detailed pattern designs. The clothing industry itself, with its fashion designs and women’s clothing styles, as well as the act of creating fashion through sewing, and the sewing industry itself, are her subjects. Melly uses the history, politics, and literal shapes of that industry to explore a variety of metaphors for a changing society. Antique industrial sewing machines with their attractive, even artistic external decorations symbolize Melly’s strong mother: in her work they’re powerful yet beautiful, tough, yet outwardly decorous. These machines and their continued ability to function decades later is a rich and impressive metaphor for the strength of the women who operated them.

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Her piece “Fits Her to a Tea” uses a female mannequin’s bust covered with these precise dress pattern cutouts. The patterns are adorned with impressionistic colored art paper collages and embroidery – including a tea cup – and the inclusion of actual tea bags and a tea set.

This piece is a collaboration with another 825 Gallery artist,  Chuka Susan Chesney. The Gallery randomly assigned pairs of artists to collaborate, with often dazzling results. Here, the colorful collages and  stitching Chesney created serve as a strong counterpoint to Melly’s work.

This mixed media piece is wonderfully evocative, of the practical woman who uses those tea bags, the rich interior life she holds – the drawings – and the measured, designed, and carefully restricted borders of her life as revealed by the dress pattern cut outs.

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In “Tension Adjustment,” this stunning painting features a beautiful woman curled up in an almost-fetal position inside the dominant image of a sewing machine.

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“Fertile Crescent” neatly combines a woman who could be an Egyptian Princess overlaying most of a mannequin’s face, with a crescent of dress pattern slashing a curve across her visage. Her neck, body, and the arm that holds her head and torso aloft, are covered with the tissue paper dress patterns.

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Part of the solo show “Mother Machine” held at Gallery 825 in April 2015, Melly’s mixed media paintings and sculptures shape the female form with the same provocative mixture of ornate embellishments as on the old-fashioned industrial sewing machines, as well as imbuing them with those machines’ strength. The vintage mannequins themselves provide a certain gravitas, and the dress patterns present an interesting dichotomy. The fragile tissue paper evokes male notions of female delicacy, while the rigidity of the lines and construction suggests a binding up of the female spirit. By drawing on these patterns, adorning them in a variety of ways, Melly appears to be opening a whole new world of expression for these figures, while still celebrating their strength and durability.

In 2015, along with her award winning exhibition at Phantom Galleries H and LA Art Core, and her solo show at Gallery 825, Melly has shown at Palm Springs’ Gallery 446, Las Laguna Gallery, in Laguna Beach, and the Foundry Art Center in St. Charles, Missouri among other locations.

  • Genie Davis