Art Show, Reading, & Reception: Borderlands, Jan 17

I have an art show coming up, running from Jan 17 to March 15, 2014. A lot of the paintings were done for my new SF novel The Big Aha.

The show will also include three or four of Vernon Head’s table-top deco-style assemblagist California Funk sculptures.

We’ll have an opening reception, reading, and guided tour of the exhibition from 5:30 until 7:30 or so. This will be on Friday, January 17, at Borderlands Books Cafe on 870 Valencia Street in the Mission district of San Francisco, with a few free snacks provided. This party is for the public, and it’s a thank you reception for my Big Aha Kickstarter supporters.

We’ll mingle, and around 6 or 6:30, I’ll do a short reading from the novel, then give the “guided tour” of the paintings, explaining their roles in the book, and then hang out some more. We’ll be selling hardback and paperback copies of The Big Aha, plus paintings, prints, and the latest edition of my art book, Better Worlds.

For more about my paintings, see my paintings page.

I’m maintaining a public Facebook event page for the show as well. You can find a map and more comments here.

By way of getting my final prep done, I just finished one more painting.

“Frog Man,” oil on canvas, January, 2014, 20” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

This particular painting started out as a horizontal “landscape mode” canvas of a Monet-style scene with trees and cliff or a sky…made up of vertical daubs of paint left over from my painting before this one, “Woman With Jellyfish”.

I let the landscape dry for two weeks, then had the idea of turning the picture to a vertical “portrait mode” orientation, and now the horizontal daubs were water. I started thinking about Fremont Lake near Pinedale, Wyoming, where I’d recently been cross-country skiing with daughter Isabel and her husband.

But this is, of course, a summer painting. On a quick inspiration, I painted in the head and webbed hands of a “frog man.” He looks friendly, but I don’t think I’d jump into the water with him.