SSUR - Scion Gallery

 Planet of the Apes...

 The real life action figures... Planet of the Apes guy

His found objects... and caviar because he's Russian and a baller!

My friend the artist Russel and his son.

CHRIS BRACEY_Guy Hepner Gallery

Chris Bracey has been the Neon Man for 37 years creating iconic artpieces for David LaChappelle, Martin Creed and others.

AL JACKSON - Al Jackson Gallery

Al Jackson in front of his Mohammed Ali portrait.

DAVID SMITH - Cube and Anarchy

This was an opening at LACMA.
All I can say about the art is that it looked really dated and 80's and maybe the only thing redeeming about it is that it was made in the 60's. So the artist was perhaps ahead of his time then but it just was not eye candy to me.I really did not enjoy the art at all therefore I do not recommend it. In fact, the people watching was infinitely better than the art.This woman was wearing these really cool quirky pants and she let me take a photo. Unfortunately I have not mastered the art of a good fashion blog photo. I'll work on it!

LUKE CHUEH

Great show at a small gallery in Culver City.
This kind of work is right up my alley. His minimal paintings of bears were great and the sculpture phenomenal but most of all I liked the interactive part.

He had very basic drawings of his bear with markers in 3 colors. You can make your own and most people did! There was a wall of them. Some were great and some not so great but over all it was great seeing everyone's interpretation of the bear.
Here is the 1 that I did.

Jeff Koons - Paintings at the Gagosian Los Angeles

Like any good art, the more you look at it the more you see.

This is the case with this show. At first glance I found these pieces visually stimulating in size and color but that's about it! So I walked quickly past them eager to get to the wine and cheese.
Ok now back to the "ART". I walked past each piece trying really hard to see something. To get a grasp on anything recognizable. Am I the only person that does this? I know it's abstract art but I always try to find "something".
Anyways, we walked through the whole exhibition downstairs and I could swear that if I squint I see an image but can not make out what it is. So we wonder upstairs and start to walk through all these pieces... Hey! I think I see something! It looks like a tree. I'm probably making it up. So I step farther from the painting and squint harder... Yup! It's a landscape. So excited to have figured this out. Makes me feel like I know art! At least today I did.

Well there was so much more to these pieces then meets the eye. If you get really close up on these paintings you see pretty close to digital perfection in them. Figures! These are all done digitally which takes away from how complicated they seem. They are photographic images made up of dots. Very pixel-like. Then on top of that there are brush strokes... Completely random.

Then we go downstairs again to have a third look at what I was squinting at. Still can't see a recognizable image. So I take out my iphone to take a photo and there it is! The distance the camera makes to the painting makes it suddenly, surprisingly, and delightfully recognizable! It's a figure of a naked woman. I feel so excited to make this discovery. So excited in fact that I walk around showing strangers the image in my iphone. They are excited too.

We later have a speaker that talks a little bit about Koon's work. It turns out that all of these pieces are painstakingly hand done. NOT DIGITAL. It seems impossible. There are numerous circles with layered colors. And the brush strokes. These look so randomly drawn on top of the dots. But they aren't. If it makes any sense at all, they are paintings of brush strokes... not actual brush strokes. And just to make it even more ridiculously painstaking, none of the paint is ever overlapped. This means that something that looks so random had to be carbon copied in painting it. Does this make any sense?
You just have to go and see it yourself. Stand real close and see the layering, or "unlayering" of the paint. It creates so much depth. Then stand back and see it become an image.
You can see his inspiration in Lichtenstein... dots duh! And then you also see images of the past... some of the brush strokes resemble the Venus of Willendorf. A complete abstraction of it but still so recognizable.
This man is a genius!!! No joke!
For 2-3 million you can own one.
I was sold! I'll take two.