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They’ve done gone let me jury again

A few months back, I was asked to co-jury (along with LBCC gallery director Michael Daniel) the annual Palos Verdes Library District art show (download .pdf program here). It’s the type of show that anyone can enter, where the role of the jurors is simply to award prizes to the artists, as casual and easy as a jurying gig can be, really. The coolest thing about the gig was that I would get to be involved with the Peninsula Center Library, which was the library that I grew up visiting as a child.

The jurying was on Friday and the show opened yesterday. I will say that there were some really outstanding entries that it was a pleasure to recognize. Coming to a consensus with Mike was easy - we had many of the same ideas about who to award prizes to, and we added a 2nd honorable mention, awarding prizes to five artists in total. Like the Works on Paper exhibition I juried for Long Beach Arts earlier this year, it ended up being a lot of fun. It’s really great to be able to let artists know that you appreciate their work.

We chose a really minimal ink on vellum drawing by Deborah Laurin to receive first place, for her piece Looking at the Grid and it was the source of some discussion amongst the conservative crowd. The piece was exceptionally well done and presented, and it was the kind of work that provides low-key, lasting visual pleasure. Second place went to a oil painting, Duarte Ghetto, by Hao Li. Li made great use of light and a limited colour palette to capture his subject, and didn’t carry the painting too far into realism, which is a mistake that many amateur painters make - often for their whole careers. Third went to Fisherman’s Cove: XXV, a coloured pencil drawing by Sherry Ford. It’s an illustration of three conch shell varieties - she’s been doing hundreds of these drawings, at 100% scale (they’re tiny), complete with their scientific labeling. I’m a sucker for that sort of thing, and hers were really well executed.

We gave two honorable mentions. One went to Susan Stott, for her piece House on a Hill, which is sort of a minimal “house shape” sitting on top of a series of dome like hills. Once again, great example of an artist staying away from realism to capture the feeling of the painting. It had great brushwork, too. The other went to Bruce Burr, who seems to exclusively paint and draw cars. It was a great realistic painting of the front end of a Rolls with a terrier sitting in front of it. Not the most stimulating subject matter to me, but the work was exceptionally skillful, especially all of the chrome and reflective details on the car.

Return to the Palos Verdes Library

It’s weird working with the PVLD. I grew up in that library, I remember plowing through whole sections of books. I could probably navigate around the pre-remodel library blindfolded. I’ve got mixed feelings about Palos Verdes, in general. On one hand it’s a place I hold dear because of the geography and the people who I have lifelong connections to because of growing up there. On the other, it serves as a constant reminder of financial crisis that led to the loss of my childhood home and the bullshit I went through in high school. I find it tremendously humorous that I’ve gone from being the subject immense derision to being an “arbiter of culture” in Palos Verdes.

I miss the old library. It was filled with memories - kids books, pouring over the illustrations in the reference section, researches on architecture, a chocolate easter egg melting in my pocket during storytime (I was very confused about the nature of Easter for a long time, I only knew that it had something to do with getting a ton of chocolate, and as a Jew I wasn’t in on the action). My friends and I got into a fair amount of mischief in the old library, nothing to serious, but just enough to make me feel like I know a secret. I now realise that the old library was where I fell in love with Brutalism, and cast concrete in general. All of my bunker and ziggurat fantasies date back to the building, especially the hollow cast concrete shapes of the interior ceiling.

Myrna Shiras

In the offices of the library there are two very strange paintings. They have an amateur or folk art look, and they are extremely dated in terms of their style. They definitely exist somewhat in kitsch territory. Because they were in the children’s section when I was a child, I have profound memories of them, especially the painting below, which you should clickify to see at maximum, as the thumbnail doesn’t begin to show the detail of the piece. I don’t have a lot of deep feeling for the top painting, but the image does a much better job at showing the style of her work.

Sorry about the glare, but the combination of low light and the amount of gloss on the painting made it really hard to shoot - I’ll probably return to the library to shoot it again in the near future. Basically it’s a painting of a strange nighttime processional in a forest. It’s surreal and it used to hang in the children’s section. I’m magnetised by the imagery in this painting, it’s surreal in a way that arouses everything that’s good and sacred about the secrets and mysteries that night brings. Perhaps because it’s done in a style which has no art world relevance, I can see the story. It’s like hearing someone’s description of a strange dream and actually feeling what they’re feeling.

One of the societal trends I’ve noticed is that artwork and imagery that’s intended for children has become more mundane and “reality oriented”. I think television has a lot to do with that, but that’s a whole rant unto itself. When I was a boy (enter up-a-hill/in-the-snow/onion-on-my-belt anecdote here), the books and movies I remember had less to do with reality and more to do with fantasy. Not fantasy in a “dragons and elves” way, but fantasy in a fantastic way. Maybe it’s because I read so much as a child that I wandered into territory that kids weren’t supposed to and it had an effect on me. Childhood was a world when the barrier between dream and waking life was very thin - so thin that things and feelings very easily passed through from one to the other. It was a scary and thrilling time when anything could happen and forces much larger than yourself were in definite play. Today, as an adult, that barrier is thicker in general, but weak in places - things still get through.

The library staff were exceptionally helpful in pointing me towards the artist - Myrna Shiras, a former Library Board trustee. They had no contact info on her, though, so other than her identity, I couldn’t find out more. I think they removed it from the children’s section as it might be kind of scary and because it appears so outdated.

Coincidentally, I was talking with Angles Gate Board Member Rae Wyman later on Friday and she knows, and in fact is almost neighbors with Myrna. She confirmed my suspicion that Myrna was the wife of David Shiras, my 5th grand science and social studies teacher - 5th grade was a very, very important point in my life - possibly the time at which I most aggressively defined who I was and was not going to be. David didn’t leave much impression on me as a teacher, but I remember him being very “science teachery”. He was sort of absent minded, and I remember that all kinds of mischief was gotten into in his class. There was one incident where several of the “held back” (In Palos Verdes there are always students who couldn’t keep up with the high academic standards and were held back, usually becoming oversized bullies or jocks, and prone to cruelty) students put a small amount of pencil shavings in his coffee, which he then drank while the whole class watched tensely. The other thing I remember about Mr. Shiras was that he once came to my house (I think it was a year or two after I had his class) to sell my family a set of encyclopedias, World Book, I think.

Rae told me a bit about Myrna, and promised to see if she could find some way for me to contact her. She told me that Myrna was a “staggeringly great beauty” which intrigues the hell out of me because she is married to David, my apparently boring 5th grade science teacher, and that she did paint quite a bit, and those paintings were on the surreal side. So now I’m determined to meet and interview Myrna, as I want to get to the bottom of this mystery. So more on Myrna later, hopefully with more images.