Two more restaurant paintings

Here are two more restaurant paintings, one just completed, the other from last year. Both are 22 x 30, acrylic on paper.

First, just completed...

And from last year...

After shooting these it became painfully obvious I needed a new process for shooting photos of art.

Fort Worth Guitar Guild Music Festival at the Modern

We went to the first concert of the 2009 Fort Worth Guitar Guild Music Festival at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Tonight's performance featured Elliot Frank playing pieces by J. S. Bach,  Isaac Albeniz, Agustin Barrios and contemporary composer Andrew Zohn. The second half of the program featured Guitar Guild founder and Festival organizer Mitch Werverka, who played pieces by Guiliani and contemporary composers Jorge Ritter Navarro and Ernesto Garcia de Leon.

What a great concert. More music at the Modern on Thursday, July 30 when Marko Feri performs, and Saturday, August 1 when Richard Todd and Jeffery McFadden and Andrew Zohn are on stage. Check the Fort Worth Guitar Guild Music Festival site for more information. All performances are at 8 PM. Admission to the two remaining concerts is $20.

There are also Master Classes being offered in conjunction with the Festival. Check the Guitar Guild website or stop by Ft Worth Orchestral Hall on Trail Lake Drive, Wednesday through Friday, 9 AM to 3:30 PM.

The Guitar Guild has also, for the last eleven years, sponsored a recital series at the Fort Worth Public Library, featuring young performers from the area. I've gone to quite a few of these -- well worth the trip. Admission to these is free. Note: if you've gone to these in the past, this year they will be held at the FW Central Library downtown rather than at the Southwest Regional Library.

Updates -- and Twitter!

I figured out how to make it a little easier to update blog entries, so hopefully I'll be updating this site more often. I've also set up a Twitter account, which you can see at http://twitter.com/RalphArt (be aware that "RalphArt" is case sensitive).

In the next day or two I'll try and post some photos of some paintings I've finished this year.

New restaurant painting

I've been working on a series of (for lack of a better term) restaurant paintings: people in restaurants, sitting around the table. I finished another yesterday and thought I'd post it. This is Dorothy and Ed at Caro's.

Acrylic on rag paper, approximately 22 x 30 inches.

Arts Goggle

I'm ashamed to say, despite living in the Mid-South neighborhood (Fairmount, to be exact), I've not fully immersed myself in the twice-yearly Arts Goggle. Oh, I always manage to hit one or two places, but that's about it.

I hereby pledge to more fully support this noble and egalitarian endeavor.

Part of the problem is that Arts Goggle always coincides with Gallery Night weekend and I don't usually have the energy to do both. This year's Gallery Night I only managed to hit 3 places out of the 3 or so dozen that had activities. Next Spring, I plan to take off half a day on that Friday so as to have the time to get into the swing of things. Some habits are good things.

One interesting outcome of this year's Gallery Night was that I tentatively agreed to do an exhibition for next Fall's Goggle. This means some serious time spent in the studio. Of course a lot can happen between then and now, but at the very least, this will encourage me to spend (more) time in the studio.

More to come as I start the process of putting together a body of new work.

Fall Gallery Night 2008

Dorothy and I hit Arts Google and Gallery Night this weekend and as usual I had a great time catching up with old friends, though the evening tends to remind me that my art career is currently in remission.

Impressions:

Bill Campbell's gallery continues to the most consistently classy place in town - we started our journey from there on Saturday. Crowded as all get out as always (Bill's place is always hopping). Robert McAn's Identity Theory is the current downstairs show. McAn's pieces are made of shredded bits of his personal life: old mail, bills, and the like. Despite the obvious commentary on the push and pull of privacy issues and the proliferation of our personal information in the information age, the pieces have an intriguingly physical aspect to them: they are interesting and attractive objects.

The Fort Worth Community Art Center may well be the best thing to happen to the Fort Worth art scene. It is a street bazaar: there are always at least half a dozen exhibitions going on at once. You may hate one and find the one in the next room absolutely captivating. My personal faves: Ann Ekstrom's tight hyper-real compositions (to call them 'still-lifes' doesn't do them justice), Nancy Lamb's glossy post-photographic depictions of people enjoying night life, and Ron Tomlinson's always astonishingly virtuoso paintings of (there's no other way to say this) random shit.

Artspace111, just east of downtown, has turned into one of the best spaces for contemporary art in Fort Worth. The industrial vibe suits it, and now that it is a commercial venture (rather than an artist's coop), they've cleaned up some of the rough edges. The sculpture garden and outside patio is a small bit of perfection in this downtown spot. Featured artist Ed Blackburn's current work continues and extends his neo-pop approach with an overtly political subtext.

Final thought: Arts Google, a Southside arts event, gets bigger every year. I only managed to get to 2 places Friday, but next year I'm going commit to fully explore this new phenomena.