William Carleton, Counselor @ Law

Christopher Martin Hoff

Sometimes, walking around Seattle, I snap photos of construction sites, wondering how the late plein air painter, Christopher Martin Hoff, might have framed the scene.

My framings, on screen, are always wrong. The eye in my head distorts proportions, gives significance to meaningful details and squeezes or stretches what's in the peripheries, according to some hierarchy of attention I consistently fail to map to two dimensions.

Hoff's frames are always right. Whether grand, of a vista, or telescoping from a disadvantaged angle as at right, as from under the shadow of the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

What's unique about his work is more than framing, of course.

I don't know if Hoff was a great painter, but he was very much an original, in the sense that you can always immediately recognize his hand. Earnestness is the first thing you see. Then I think it's the perpetual wetness of everything he renders.

Here's (what I think is) a photograph by Lars Tunbjork, taken in a different decade than Hoff's work and using a different vocabulary of the street.

This photo borrows its motion from a Mondrian or Calder-like play of geometric shapes that shimmer and cascade, mostly on a flat plane. The chromatic brightness of the palette seems to go hand in hand with such an aesthetic.

The contrast with Hoff makes me think that Hoff was more interested in seeing the space between things, in the volume of relationships, almost as though he were illuminating the empty dark matter than binds everything in outerspace.

A pint of Guinness, and the next thing you know...

At a Cornell alumni event at the Seattle Art Museum last night, I took a guided tour of a new show there, paintings from the Kenwood House in England.

Apparently, the palace or manor or stately pile that houses the collection is getting a new roof, and so the collection has been allowed to travel.

What makes the collection most interesting to me is how it was pulled together, beginning in the late 19th Century, by an enterprising member of the Guinness family who had the savvy to buy out his two brothers and then quintuple the value of the business before taking it public in 1886 (I'm recalling this from a placard in the exhibition space).

Kimerly Rorschach, the new Director of the Seattle Art Museum, told us that Edward Cecil Guinness set out to collect the finest paintings money could buy, competing in that effort with Henry Clay Frick (benefactor of the Frick collection in New York) J. Pierpont Morgan (benefactor of the Morgan Library in New York) and Henry Edwards Huntington (benefactor of the Huntington Library in California).

The perspective reminds me of something Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Director of the Frye Art Museum, said on a recent tour of the Nicolai Fechin show now there. She was speaking of how much Fechin's work, early in his career in Russia, was in demand among collectors in the United States. In a period of a few years straddling the Russian revolution of 1917, Fechin could not paint fast enough to meet American demand. (Interesting technology side note about Fechin: at least once, he had a photograph taken of a new painting in Russia, sent the photo rather than the painting to America, and closed a sale of the work based on the buyer's assessment of the picture rather than the painting itself. A virtual sale that predates web commerce!)

Don't worry about the paintings. The ones that are really good have lives of their own that transcend the stories of their provenance and transfer. But I do find it fascinating, this impulse to use wealth to build collections of paintings.

Photo from Wikipedia.

Bus stop installation

I'm waiting for a bus this morning. Buses on Sunday morning are half an hour apart, at best, and it's windy. At least it's not raining.

To pass the time, I'm contemplating this art object, or talisman, tied to the bus stop pole.

Here's the bus! Gotta go.

Arty Seattle

A few years ago, when Scott Lawrimore closed his big, industrial Lawrimore Project space on Airport Way South and moved his gallery to a closet storefront in Pioneer Square, I tried not to express my disappointment.

"Maybe it's not the recession," I told myself. "Maybe it's time to go minimal with the exhibitions and disperse the huge, opening weekend gatherings."

I can now admit Seattle lost something when Scott closed the epicenter of the Seattle arts scene at the edge of the International District.

I can admit that now, because there is a new epicenter at the Frye Art Museum on First Hill, and it has two catalysts, both bold, earnest and ambitious: Jo-Anne Birnie Danzke, the Director of the Frye; and the aforementioned Scott Lawrimore, who has joined the museum as Deputy Director.

You might have foreseen this dream team forming when the two collaborated together with Isaac Layman for last year's transformative show at the Frye, Paradise. I might have foreseen this, but I had previously believed two bolts of lighning couldn't strike the same spot concurrently.

And yet it has happened. Seattle seems so much more cosmopolitan, seen from a civically reclaimed First Hill.

Opening tonight at the Frye Art Museum: Nicolai Fechin; Chamber Music; and 36 Chambers.

Ed Koch reading Shakespeare

The most surprising and most sensitive reading ever of Shakespeare's sonnet that begins, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments," was read in 2011 by former New York City Mayor Ed Koch for Garrison Keillor's radio show.

Here's a recording. The snippet begins with some banter between Keillor and Koch.

"A man doesn't go into politics to become beloved," Keillor said. But Koch was beloved, and is.

Here's a YouTube video of the same reading, though I think it's better to just listen to the audio.

Source: A Prairie Home Companion.

Resale royalties for visual artists

The US Copyright Office is calling for public comment on the question of whether federal copyright law should be changed to provide that painters and sculptors retain a financial interest in the resale of their works.

Here's one example of how the resale royalty might apply: artist sells a painting, either directly or through a gallery, to a collector for $1000; some years later, the collector, through an auction house, sells that same painting to another collector for $100,000; at a resale royalty rate of 7%, the artist would be entitled to $7000.

The Copyright Office has studied the question before. Twenty years ago it published a report which recommended against establishing a federal resale royalty.

Though a resale royalty, or droit de suite, is common in Europe, the purposes for copyright in America are sufficiently different, and restraints on alienation of property are so disfavored, the Copyright Office reasoned, that the US Congress should consider other means of protecting visual artists.

One such alternative listed in the 1992 report: a royalty payable by a gallery or museum on the public exhibition of an artist's work. This makes more sense to me, as it taxes or attaches to something other than the work itself as an object; presumably a public exhibition royalty could be implemented by clarifying or amplifying the display right already inherent in copyright, and needn't do violence to the first sale doctrine.

I'm not sure what's driving the Copyright Office's attention back to the subject, though it appears there are two bills in the current (soon to disband) Congress proposing to establish a resale royalty.

Photo is of Thomas Doughty's painting, "In the Catskills."

John Chamberlain sculptures outside the Seagram Building

Here are three photos I took last Wednesday evening on the plaza of the Seagram Building in Manhattan. They are of sculptures by John Chamberlain. I took others and you can see the full set here on Flickr.

The works are hard to describe. They do an odd thing with scale, because at some level they read like colored aluminum foil, wrapped over cardboard tubes or perhaps playdoh extruded from one of those playdoh presses you had as a kid. That is to say, they evoke associations with household objects, toys and kitchen tools.

But if you focus less on the material and more on the shapes, particularly as the shapes shift as you walk among them on the plaza, they seem somehow organic, acquatic.

I'll bet they look very different during the day. They probably relate to the Seagram Building differently, too, in daylight.