Author Archives: Amanda Moret

Marianne Williams | Citizen LA

Beneath the humdrum hiccup of her worn city streets, and above hills of fantastical billboards that nearly block any vestige of the sky, Los Angeles speaks. For Jay Brockman, Los Angeles is a subject and a verb as his cityscape paintings reveal his obsession with Sunset Boulevard: a curiosity that sends him driving around Hollywood photographing street scenes from his car. A concrete jungle with no public transportation, LA was designed especially for the motorist. Brockman’s sight seeing expeditions reveal what is most mystifying about LA: for a city built on chance, it’s design is fully realized and made with the intention of being photographed. Whatever message is being uttered beneath our feet, it is the call of the Sirens for Brockman.

The child-like wonderment that consumes him, imparts nostalgia onto his audience. Brockman suggests his work comments on a collective experience about what it means to live in LA. “It’s weird,” he says, “but a picture of LA brings people in LA together.” Hollywood Boulevard, Vine, and Sunset Boulevard are common cityscape subjects, however, it’s not just the nostalgia of work inspired by familiar city streets, rather it is Brockman’s skillful handling of perception and flatness that make his work reflect the way we see LA. From a distance Brockman’s cityscapes appear photo-realistic, almost like a silkscreen rendered from his digital photographs. Upon closer inspection the viewer can identify the hand of the artist through the integrity of the lose brush strokes. Brockman insists on making his work visually compelling by flattening the space, as he explains, “I like the illusion that happens. I see it and I play with that and I definitely like the hand to be a part of my painting because it shows a human being was there. Like the whole painting is my temperament.”

No one walks in LA and appropriately neither does Brockman, who previously lived in NYC. By photographing various parts of the city including Rose and Main, the Capital Records building that spells “Hollywood” in Morse code, and Hollywood Boulevard, Brockman accumulates references for his cityscapes. “I’m my own movie director,” he explains with a grin. Never one to pull over, Brockman points and shoots while driving in traffic. “Other times,” he adds, “I have people drive and I scream Left! Right! Slow down! Go! They’re honking!” Traffic is an integral part of Brockman’s process and also appears in nearly every piece of work. Often times the headlight of a single car twinkles and nearly blinds the viewer, or cars are speeding out of frame and appear as a single streak of black.

Despite the threat of living in perpetual rush hour, Brockman seeks solace following the ebb and flow of Sunset Boulevard, also the name of the 1950 noir classic directed by Billy Wilder. “I didn’t really even get the whole idea of Sunset Boulevard,” he admits. “The sun actually does set. The way the city is set up, there are points in time it’s blinding going down that road, but I don’t know if it was the idea of Hollywood and Sunset Boulevard, but for me Sunset is like a river and it starts from one end to other and it meanders.”

The Sunset on Sunset series, of which there are now sixty pieces and counting, is an aesthetic collision between the slick noir sensibility of Edward Hopper and urban reportage chasing sunsets. Brockman’s group show “Context and Construct” opens on March 28 at Lawrence Asher Gallery and marks his return to painting after a two- year hiatus.

The desire to capture a LA sunset requires a keen sense of timing, being at the exact place where one can actually see the sun. Sunsets are a site most often unseen by many Angelinos as they often occur while we’re shuffling from our offices to our cars. Trying to contain a sunset in seems almost impossible. Laughing he retorts, “Yeah, it’s true.” The sun “is a cyclical thing that keeps us in tune. The sunset itself is an indicator; either some people are going to relax or other people are going to work. It’s part of our inner dialogue.”

In his frequent visits to Sunset Boulevard, Brockman recognizes the juxtaposition between the landmarks and the billboards. Places like Carneys, the now vacant Tower Records, the Standard and House of Blues exchange a dialogue because they are landmarks etched into our cultural consciousness. The real conversation exists between the billboards, Brockman explains they “create their own dialogue in itself,” a message that we don’t often acknowledge but has nonetheless overwhelmed the urban landscape.

The cityscapes resist identification with a precise painterly trajectory; they’re neither entirely Impressionist or photographic, nor do they mimic the works of David Hockney and Ed Ruscha. Brockman’s works are as subtle and sophisticated as the city he loves to paint. Although there are many artists living in LA, not all of them chose the city as their subject. Brockman suggests that there never “really was an heir apparent,” someone who could identify with LA. However “all artists in LA, wherever they are and whatever they do, just reflect back and are intense reflectors at times.”

Like many of us, Jay Brockman battles his love/hate relationship with LA as he confesses, “there’s something about it that calls you back.” Perhaps LA is built upon the ephemeral ideals and construction reminds us that the city is as fleeting as we are. LA is quickly disappearing from something real into a space more and more unreal. As T.S. Eliot wrote “you cannot say or guess, you know only a heap of broken images.” Brockman’s cityscapes mend our fragmentary vision of the city into one that is ever more elusive.

Citizen LA | Citizen LA

It is altogether possible that Daniel Peacock watched the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States on a 1955 RCA TX 500 model television. A vintage tube that looks as though it broadcast’s live from a fish tank. Or maybe he decided to ditch the murky black and white transmissions of the RCA to watch a live feed from his computer that normally streams old time radio broadcasts that flood his studio. However, the former seems a more romantic and fitting gesture for this writer. The technological anomaly of watching a new President take the oath of office on a television that was first popular when Dwight D. Eisenhower wasn’t even considered a political relic, reflects Peacock’s own sensitivity of the past and his desire to make time honored images feel new again.

As part of an ensemble of 20 fellow Lowbrow artists, Peacock’s participated in Obama’s Campaign for Change and created works especially for the campaign. A pencil drawing on an 8.5×11 piece of paper depicts an Obama Lincoln hybrid, a mish-mash technique implemented in many of Peacock’s paintings. Lincoln’s tall and skinny top hat cannot conceal Obama’s trademark floppy ears. Abe/Barack’s slender bearded face and parted lips can barely hold a cigarette that bubbles rather than fumes tobacco. When reminiscing about the drawing a smile makes a part in Peacock’s lips as he explains that, “it was Lincoln with the big ears and the cigarette, almost Napoleonic, just sitting there. Very regal, very Lincoln-esque.” Handwritten above the figure reads, “Vote” with the “o” replaced by a heart. While this interview took place, President-Elect Barack Obama rode on the back of a train from Illinois to Washington D.C. just as Abraham Lincoln had done nearly 150 years ago.

His humble abode is a tranquil and isolated guesthouse hidden from the street in a South Pasadena neighborhood that also doubles as his studio. Several paintings from his upcoming show line the windowsill while the rest are discretely filed upright in between a small couch and a cabinet filled with personal treasures. A wall shelf boasting a partially solved Rubik’s cube, the casing of a transistor radio, “Thing 1” from Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat, a 1920’s Mickey Mouse reissue stuffed animal that sits upright in the corner, a John Lennon “Yellow Submarine” action figure, and a picture with guitar legend Les Paul. The cabinet “supports” Peacock when he paints, as he works with his back against the objects and the incoming light. He looks at the cabinet and reflects that the objects are, “a mish-mash of important things and cherished things.” Peacock pauses and seems to take a mental inventory of each object situated in its exact place. The cabinet houses “photos and knick-knacks,” he explains. But the shelf is really much more than that, “it’s Daniel Peacock’s ‘trifecta of influence.’” The influence of 1930’s Mickey Mouse cartoons are immediately recognized in his canvases as the early Disney cartoons were confined to a linear aesthetic, one that Peacock has embraced. “Oh wow, that’s interesting,” he remarks surprised by the connection between a child hood favorite and his current works.

Peacock’s upcoming show Creation opens on February 6 at La Luz de Jesus Gallery, the brainchild of art collector Billy Shire. Peacock’s first solo show with Shire Everything but the Kitchen Synck was in 2005. Unsure of precisely how many works the show would include Peacock laughs, “I always overshoot or undershoot. Usually, it’s at least a baker’s dozen plus a half-bunch more in there.”

Peacock himself is a character, as illuminating and unpredictable, as the creations in his paintings. When describing his works he creates a dialogue for the narrative, imagining voices for his character’s that range in all registers. The voices illuminate an already quirky and whimsical cast of characters. Peacock’s arsenal of subjects are critters from an alternate dimension, friendly, hybrids, animals of different species co-existing fuzzy-wuzzy forget-me-nots, that are neither here nor there, rather go-betweens of a natural and utterly fantastical world. Peacock’s body of work vividly captures the imaginative spirit of a young boy who embraces the religion of Dr. Seuss. “I’m always going for trickery” he responds with a smile, “or a multi-dimensional thing. It might be a private joke that just never translates, you know? I’ve always thought that the impression of the work is rarely aligned with the intention of it—even people who create things can’t always define the intention.” The playful amalgamation of characters and are harnessed by the viewer’s arsenal of pop culture references like the innocence of early Mickey Mouse cartoons and the zany nature of Dr. Seuss. Regardless of our ability to understand exactly what the characters are meant to reference, they are figments of the artist’s belief. Peacock insists on the power of belief declaring that “When you believe in it, it’s alive somewhere. And if it’s alive in your mind it’s alive.”

Enlivening the past and re-imagining it in the present is a notion reflected in Peacock’s desire to paint on yellowed pages of nickel and dime books purchased from the library and old newspapers. One of his favorite papers from 1935 is framed and doubles as a table for a vintage typewriter and the RCA set. We read the text together, upside down because the glass is too heavy to move. “Look at that. This is from 1935!” he exclaims with a high- pitched inflection, similar to the tone he uses to animate the characters from his canvases. As his eyes scan the paper, the barrier of time and space disappear for Peacock and he begins to see similarities between 1935 and 2009. “There’s such an essence of stuff we hear about being so urgent and special but this stuff goes on forever, you know what I mean?” In Daniel Peacock’s studio, the past is never really past; it’s just on hold and waits patiently to be re-activated.

2009 is the year of something new. Dubbed the year of “Creation” the ritual of naming each year is a way for Peacock to chronicle his own artistic evolution. Sitting outside on his patio as the afternoon sun slowly slips away, Peacock looks around with a sense of contentment. “I made this happen because I believed it, and it happened. And I thought this is the beginning of belief.”