Breaking the Rules and Marking Time

Mary Beth and I started off the day by going to the Dixon. Their current main exhibit features the works of Paul Wonner and William Theophilus Brown. I wasn't familiar with them before but their stuff was really good. They're a bit post-abstract expressionism. And their works start off more abstract (though with subjects) and get more explicitly figurative as they go along, though still with styles and techniques gleaned from abstract expressionism. They painted a long time and had some distinct periods, sometimes quite different (like Wonner's later baroque, semi-surreal still lifes, and Brown's completely abstract paint collages at the very end of his life). Anyway yeah, it was a really good exhibit. The two of them also were openly gay and a couple back in the fifties. There was also a small little exhibit on late Victorian Valentine postcards (the deerskin ones were interesting). The local wing has an exhibit that was really good featuring the works of Remy Miller and Joe Morzuch, both in a similar wheelhouse as the main exhibit where their work is representational but informed by abstraction (theirs were more differentiated where Remy was more nature, water, forest, streams but dissolved in something of an impressionistic blur, focusing on blobs of geometry and Joe was focused mostly on man-made objects with a kind of glitch style). They had both taught at MCA when it existed and are now elsewhere in the region. Also, I saw a note that my favorite Mary Cassatt in the permanent collection is on loan in Denmark right now.

After that Mary Beth and I swung by Kinko's so she could make copies. Then I went up to the Lamplighter to put up the flyer for the tribute show. This was a little after 5 so I'm expecting it to be pretty empty but I didn't realize it was an artists' market there. So there were lots of booths and stuff. Anyway, I go in and hang up the flyer and hear my name shouted out. So I look up and see Will (of Pressed). His wife Zoe had a booth with some art and I went over and talked to them for a little while, mostly about upcoming shows and bands and such. I got some tiny little paintings from Zoe to give to Mary Beth ("not your babe" and "no"). Later we ended the night by watching some Golden Girls and an especially goofy episode of Murder She Wrote. Oh, and at a point in the evening I finished reading Puttering About in a Small Land by Philip K. Dick and it was a bit bad. It started off where I thought it was going to be good (I've had diminishing returns with Dick I've read more recently where the quality of the writing was just detracting, some of them weren't his better works and I knew this one wasn't supposed to be either, so I was almost pleasantly surprised at first when the writing didn't seem to be bad), but then it eventually got mired down in awkward dialogue and tedium, also the story development ended up being not good either (it's one of his few non-sci-fi works, so I wasn't expecting anything crazy like that, but still, just wasn't good anyway).