California dreamin' (of the past)

"A FRAME concept"
upcoming holiday + dining!

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The upcoming holidays are around the corner! The feeling of fall in California has me thinking of new places I'm hoping to explore. There is something nostalgic about the holidays, and perhaps this is the reason I have become obsessed with A FRAME archiitecture lately. It reminds me of family trips to the Ozarks in the South.

Back to the present: day-tripping California style, from the Sierras to L.A. Dining, Food, and the warmth of a cabin's fire. Perhaps an A FRAME holiday is in store this year!

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Alighiero Boetti, ladder and chair, A-frame.... "Alighiero Boetti 1940 – 1994 was an Italian conceptual artist, considered to be a member of the art movement, Arte Povera. Boetti's work was typified by his notion of 'twinning', leading him to add 'e' (and) between his names, 'stimulating a dialectic exchange between these two selves'."

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A-Frame, a new restaurant in Culver City, Los Angeles.

"A-Frame is a place that came from the feeling I used to get when cracking crabs on Redondo Beach Pier as a youth. The salt air, the cement benches. Newspapers and wooden mallets. Family and friends. The kind of food that you wanted to eat then and there is re-imagined here and now. Eat with your hands, reach across the table, lick your plates clean and share food with some strangers. " -Papi Chulo

"Triangular and tee-pee shaped homes date back to the dawn of time, but architectAndrew Geller turned an old idea into a revolutionary concept in 1957 when he built an "A-frame" house in Long Island, New York.

Named for the distinctive shape of its roofline, Geller's design won international attention when it was featured in the New York Times.

Soon, thousands of A-frame homes were built around the world.text ( via here.)

Idyllreek A-Frame Vacation Cabin is located at the very end of scenic Boulder Drive in Idyllwild, California. This Idyllwild Vacation Rental is nestled in the cool woods of Southern California’s San Jacinto mountains, Idyllcreek is the perfect Idyllwild Vcation Cabin for your next mountain retreat.

Idyllcreek is an original 1960’s A-frame cabin that is every bit as charming and serene as it looks.

more here....

"Starting in the 1950s, the A frame cabin was the most popular vacation home type and a national phenomenon. It dotted ski slopes from Stowe Vermont to Squaw Valley, California and was a common sight in resort communities and forests and on back roads in between.

The steep slope of the A-frame roof is designed to help heavy snow to slide to the ground, instead of remaining on top of the house and weighing it down. In winter time we do have up to 16 feet of snow at Far Meadow and this made it very logical that we decided to look into ‘rediscovering’ the A frame design and gave it a modern spin. FAR MEADOW is our 20 acre parcel situated within the Sierra National Forest at an elevation of 7000 feet.

14 miles above Bass Lake on the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway, this property is surrounded by amazing meadows, secret swimming holes and miles and miles of undiscovered hiking trails. Your own private Yosemite without the crowds."

image via Sunset magazine.

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California dreamin'
"A-FRAME concept"
upcoming holiday + dining!

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the dense fog
of the california coast
in the fall is intoxicating.
(hyper sun in shy November)

aka "the dense decorator"

the dense fog
of the california coast
in the fall is intoxicating.
(hyper sun in shy November)

aka "the dense decorator"



1. Dagobert Peche, lamp, circa1915
2. Mari Eastman, Moonscape with Fo-Dog 2010 Flashe, oilstick, ink, White-out, spray-paint, acrylic, glitter on canvas with painted canvas fringe, via Cherry Martin
3. Lecia Dole-Recio, new work at Richard Telles now!





Dagobert Peche was born 1887 in St.Michael, Salzburg. After studying Architecture in Vienna at Ohmann Peche turned to interior design, or one can call it in
a better way to "mise en scéne" of entire rooms.

The heritage of secessionist surface decoration and the example of artists from the Viennese School of Applied Arts (Kunstgewerbeschule) are clearly visible. 1911 Peche got acquainted with Josef Hoffmann, he worked for the firms of Johann Backhausen, Philipp Haas, Wiener Keramik, Viennese porcellain manufacture, Josef Böck. Peches concepts present the glaring opposite to the reduced forms of Hoffmann.


With his "female decoration of rooms" Peche creates his specific way of interior design that can be described as "public intimacy".









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Rachel Lachowicz
vs
Craig Kauffman

C A L I F O R N I A

"Rachel Lachowicz is known for turning her witty eye on the masculine-centric world of Modernism and for making radical incursions into the canon of art history by reconfiguring famous works. She falls under a multitude of headings: feminist, appropriationist, post minimalist, conceptual artist, and conceptual sculptor."








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“California was never ashamed of being a new society."

- Richard Armstrong,
director of Guggenheim Museum

Rachel Lachowicz
vs
Craig Kauffman

"Mr. Kauffman’s early paintings were critical in defining this new style. Mr. Plagens called them “the first evidence of a Los Angeles sensibility.”

Mr. Kauffman’s later work blazed splashier trails, as he experimented with the effects of light on works that were painterly yet three-dimensional. “The true power of what he did was his incorporation and then redirection of light inside sculpture,” said Mr. Armstrong, who was the curator of a show of Mr. Kauffman’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1987.

“Many of them glowed,” he said. “Others were translucent. Even the supposedly opaque had a noteworthy shimmering quality to them.”

taken from here...

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California living
Woodside , CA 1961

John Kapel (via Reform Gallery)
and the October issue of C Magazine


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"What counts for me is the things you look at on a daily basis"
-John Kapel

California Homes. John Kapel's home in this month's California Stlye Magazine... Here...,
and Leslie Williamson's new book.
















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Early California

2 books
by Dave Hampton
here...

my book
shelves!







The Seeger Studio
1957-1962

"The early career of Dick Seeger, influential artist, craftsman and gallerist is re-examined fifty years later. Known for his innovative approach to plastics as an art medium (often for architectural application), Seeger became an important figure in Scottsdale’s mid-century art and architecture community but until now his story has gone untold. 28 pages of vintage photographs and original documents provide a glimpse of his work, his remarkable gallery and his associates, Paolo Soleri and Lloyd Kiva New in particular. A sense of Scottsdale at the time emerges, when young lions of desert modernism like Charles Loloma, Ray Graves, Ben Goo, Kiva and Soleri first walked its streets."

















Pouring Metal in the South Bay
Dave Hampton


"During the turbulent era of the 1960s, forces from the world of fine art, the American crafts movement and higher education converged in the San Francisco Bay Area making it the epicenter of an artist-foundry movement that swept the country. At San Jose State a group of graduate students became the first in that area to build their own cooperative studio-foundries from scratch and master the process of casting their own sculpture in bronze and other metals. Pouring molten metal became a direct means of creative expression under the artists’ control. Holt Murray, Daryle Webb, Peter Teneau, Richard Mills, Stephen Daly and Thomas Lynn made everything from jewelry and furniture to giant figurative sculpture and architectural elements over the course of an historic decade. They contributed to a nationwide reinterpretation of art casting and the nature of art and craft in general. Pouring Metal in the South Bay (Art Investigations Volume Two) shares their story for the first time with amazing period photographs and detailed narrative."




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Dave Hampton:
"Collector, researcher, and artist representative, Hampton is involved in the study of mid-century art, craft and architecture from California and the Southwest - particularly communities of artists in San Diego, Long Beach, the Bay Area, Arizona, New Mexico and Hawaii. He has launched an Art Investigations Series in order to share stories of influential but relatively obscure artists, their work, and the scenes they created. "


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more info
at Objects USA
here.

J. B. Blunk

an
education
in wood.

(go see this!)

At Blum and Poe, here
organized by Gerard O’Brien
of Reform Gallery.
here..


"It is hard to know where to place Blunk as a craftsman.
Though he has achieved his primary success as a woodworker, he has also created an extensive body of work in clay, carved stone and cast bronze and has even made jewelry and weavings. Furthermore, he tends to blur the categories of furniture and non-functional sculpture as if they weren’t there. For Blunk, the issue of art status does not come up; he works without a conception of such a fixed category. His attitude towards such issues is reminiscent of the Japanese indifference towards distinction between art and craft."

J.B. Blunk
March 12 – May 15, 2010
Opening Reception: Friday, March 12, 6-8pm

“My way of working, the core of all my sculpture, is a theme, the soul the piece. Sometimes it is evoked by the material, sometimes it is an idea or concept in my own mind. It is always present, regardless of the material, size or scale of what will be the finished piece... Since I principally use a chainsaw to do this, it is a process that moves quickly. At times the cutting away and forming happen so fast it is almost unconscious… I suppose one could say I enter into a relationship with the material I am using and as in all relationships, there are opportunities for surprise.”







"The artist personally built his home and studio in Inverness, CA, on land gifted to him by surrealist painter Gordon Onslow-Ford in return for his exceptional work on Ford’s own home. The structures are masterpieces in their own right, and now are home to the J.B. Blunk Artist’s Residency, supported by the Lucid Art Foundation. In his practice, he sculpted mostly from centuries-old cypress and redwood, with stumps often larger than twenty feet in diameter. The artist would study the grain, or burl of a wood piece for days or weeks, and then without the use of sketches or maquettes work reductively on the form. His signature style of using various chainsaws and hand tools came to be greatly influential to contemporary sculpture and woodworking."






taken form press release...

George Van Tassel

Integratron : based on the design of Moses' Tabernacle, the writings of Nikola Tesla, and telepathic directions from extraterrestrials

In the midst of a career in aerospace, Van Tassel effectively dropped out. In 1947, he leased four square miles of desert from the federal government and built an "Interplanetary Airport" and a tiny restaurant, famous for his wife's apple pie, near fabled Giant Rock, a seven-story-high boulder that has since split in two.

Van Tassel claimed to have been visited by aliens in 1952, and thousands began making pilgrimages to his "Spacecraft Conventions" in the desert. He said the aliens had imparted information regarding time travel and rejuvenation.

more here
and
here