I’m no art critic, I’m just a guy with an undergraduate degree in sculpture who thinks about art a lot. And, after thinking about art for several decades, I’m not much closer to understanding it than I was when I started out, in fact, I may know less now than I did 40 years ago.

The thing is, I’ve been thinking that understanding it is not all that important.

Whether you’re talking about old or new art, a connection between the art and the audience seems as important as it is difficult to achieve. Art doesn’t always speak in an understandable language, and maybe the audience isn’t always very good at listening.

But even though experiencing art can sometimes seem like trying to understand an inside joke, I would not argue for art to have the goal of being knowable and obvious to everyone. If that were the case, we’d see a lot more Norman Rockwells, paintings in Benjamin Moore colors and big eye paintings on velvet (some of that doesn’t sound so bad, actually).

One thing that is appealing to me about Myron Helfgott’s work in this show is that it seems to me that this work will be accessible to a wide spectrum of people, without resorting to communication by a low common denominator of  visual language. The work contains some popular cultural imagery but skewers normal context in the way things are conceived, assembled and presented.

It is also quite personal without explaining too much. There are a lot of ways “into” the work. And once you’re there, maybe you don’t really know any more than you did before, but you are having fun not knowing. You notice that people in the gallery are paying more attention to the work than to the wine at times, and a lot of them are laughing, right along with the artist.

It helps that the work looks very, very casual and transitory on the surface – wrinkled paper prints attached loosely to wooden structures. But then, you notice that the underlying structures are very tightly mitered, purposeful things. And then, just as you think the “meaning” of these craftsman-like structures has been handed to you by the artist, you realize they are made of cheap plywood and you laugh because this time the joke’s on you.

The exhibit includes a wide range of things – On the first floor level, there are large freestanding structures, rectangular hung pictures, and looping audio tracks played from small audio players mounted very obviously as part of some of the objects. On the lower level of the gallery there is another experience altogether.

On the lower level, Myron has strewn obituaries he collected between 1992 – 2012 across the floor, leaving just enough room between them so that visitors can walk between them. This room also has a looping audio track playing music and dialogue. I didn’t have time to look at many of these, but they mostly seemed to be obits of artists, some famous, some locally famous. The arrangement of the rooms is ironic, almost like the upstairs is the cathedral and the basement is the crypt. Wonder if he thought about it that way? Nah – it’s probably just my imagination.

I’m looking forward to going back to this show again when I have time. I’d like to read more of these obituaries.

If you want to go, I can’t seem to find a website for the gallery, but here is all the info via VCU Arts: http://vcusculpturealumninews.tumblr.com/post/15907648963/myron-helfgott-prof-emeritus

Also, I’ll apologize for the image quality in this post. I didn’t take my real camera to the show with me and all these pics were shot with the I-Phone.

Posted this from my phone yesterday, after having breakfast at one of our favorite places at Virginia Beach – The Belvedere Hotel Coffee Shop (http://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g58277-d874451-Reviews-Belvedere_Coffee_Shop-Virginia_Beach_Virginia.html).

“What Happen to Neptune” is an infamous quote from a trip to the beach a long time ago, when we discovered that the Neptune statue at Willoughby Spit had been removed. This photo is of the new Neptune statue on the boardwalk at Virginia Beach. The picture was taken with the “Picture Show” I-phone app (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pictureshow/id324243655?mt=8) and colorized, mirrored, and generally psycedelisized using “Picture Show” effects, then posted to the internet right there from the boardwalk.

Her friends call her Weezie.

She showed up at the house 2-1/2 years ago and decided to stay.

She walks me twice a day.

Sometime she takes me to the river at sunset.

The local porn shop is being converted into a taco stand. Meanwhile, the juxtaposition of the advertising messages is kind of marvelous.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 5,600 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Charlie’s Antiques entrance is off the road a bit, so be looking for it as you pass through Toano.

If you like shopping, you might like Charlie’s Antiques, in Toano, Virginia. If you don’t like shopping, you might LOVE Charlie’s Antiques. My shopping tends to be for raw materials, equipment or tools. I mostly shop online. When I have to appear in person, I’m not shopping, I’m buying… I usually know what I want ahead of time and go to the store and buy it. Done! Christmas throws a monkey wrench into the equation. I always think I’ll get it done ahead of schedule, but I always end up waiting until the last week, mostly because I have a hard time figuring out what to buy for the people on my gift list. Then I start to run out of time, and it’s too late to have online orders shipped, so I usually end up wandering the aisles of stores trying to get ideas right up to the last minute.

Sometimes it helps when people have gift lists, even though it feels like cheating – like having someone give you the answers to a test. This year, I decided to try to get my wife a gift she had on her Christmas list for several years. The only problem was that I had lost the list! What I recalled was that she wanted some “onyx eggs” from this place called Charlie’s Antiques, about an hour away, in Toano, Virginia. I really don’t know why she wanted “onyx eggs,” but I really wanted to make the effort, since this had been on the list for a number of years.

Charlie’s has several bins of marble eggs and spheres

So I loaded Louisa Ferncliff (our dog) into the truck and headed out there two days before Christmas. I didn’t find “onyx” eggs, but they had several thousand “marble” eggs, and I bought 6 or 7 of them. This only took 10 minutes, but I ended up spending over three hours walking around the store and the grounds in amusement and amazement, looking at the mash up of artwork, sculpture and rocks that were for sale.

I suppose rocks are about as antique as you can get, and this place has a huge variety

My visit to Charlie’s was well timed, because I’ve been reading a survey of world art history recently. So my brain was already a big collage of information about different styles and periods in art history when I arrived. I assume the sculptures and yard art at Charlie’s are copies or stylistic imitations. But many of these are made of good materials, and who knows, some may even be good art. The thing that was so much fun was to see all these styles mashed up together and in such quantities. …Six stone buddhas surrounding a bronze porpoise over here…a Mayan god next to a Greek statue over there.

This is your one stop shop for cast metal chickens in quantity and Greek inspired statues.

The outdoor displays can keep you busy for hours

While I could’ve spent all day walking around outside, there are treasures indoors, too. I was particularly impressed with some wood carvings I found inside:

This deeply carved relief was about eight feet long, and while it was not especially impressive for it’s content, I couldn’t help but marvel at the detailing.

This freestanding piece was also impressive for the deep and detailed carving.

When I arrived at Charlie’s Antiques, the owners were sitting on an outdoor bench in the sun, taking a break. I had a chance to speak with them briefly, and they were very welcoming and helpful. They seemed happy doing what they were doing, and apparently have been at it for more than three decades. I asked permission to take pictures, which they freely granted, mentioning that photography classes often come to the site as part of their field work.

With a bright sun and no cloud cover, I didn’t have the best day for photography. In many of these images, I applied high dynamic range and color saturation effects in post processing to a greater degree than I might ordinarily. The subject matter lends itself to the fantastic and surreal, so the heavy use of effects seems appropriate, and helps a lot to overcome the less than ideal lighting of the day.

If you are interested in Charlie’s Antiques, they have a pretty good website: http://www.charliesantiques-va.com/

…and a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Charlies-Antiques/113054155435313

By the way… The marble eggs were well received on Christmas morning, even though I found out that what she really wanted was “jade fruit.” Oh well, I guess I’ll have to head back to Charlie’s soon, probably right before Valentine’s Day.

December 1st is here, and I’m just finishing up some portfolio images from the summer. In the chill of this December morning, it’s almost hard to imagine how hot it was last July – 104 degrees in the back yard, maybe 112 in the shop, where I was busy welding and spray painting the aluminum railings and cabinets for the exhibit pictured here. This was supposed to be an easy project, and I can only blame myself (and the weather) for how difficult it became.

This work was done for the Catholic Diocese of Richmond, to commemorate the work of catholic priests and nuns during the U.S. Civil War for the sesquicentennial remembrance of that painful history. The exhibit, titled “Thy Will Be Done, Catholic Chaplains and the Daughters of Charity in Civil War Richmond,” is housed in the crypt below the sanctuary at the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, in downtown Richmond.

I put a lot of myself into my museum projects, even though my name rarely appears in any credit line or recognition panel. But designing and building these exhibits is how most of my life time is spent, and I want the end product to be as good as it can be. So when a client comes to me with a limited idea and a limited budget, sometimes I have to take it farther, even at my own expense.

Within the first two minutes of setting foot into this space for the first time, I had the idea for how to develop the exhibit. The back-lit columns covered with fabric graphic panels punctuating the curved space were not on the client’s agenda, but they loved the idea when presented with it and it just had to be done. Trying to fit an expanded scope of work into a short production schedule meant canceling fishing trips, camping, concerts and other fun things I had in mind for the summer. In the end, though, and viewed from the comfortable distance of a cool December day, it was all worth it.