During a recent inventory count in the bar where I work, I was surprised to see my boss taking sips from various juice bottles in order to determine their contents. He later revealed to me that he is colorblind.

This revelation that someone I interact closely with every day literally does not see the world the same way I do made me question some things, the least of which concerned who should count bar juices from now on. I realized that in my role as someone who writes about art I have taken for granted that my experience of color is the same, or nearly the same as everyone else’s. I wonder now in what other ways people experience art differently than I do. Do we all see shading the same way? Do we see shapes the same? Are some of us blind to levels of meaning the way my boss cannot see levels of color?

Consider the inspired work of Peter Lewis. The color palette conjures a mixture of psychedelia and the colors of the flags of Africa, evoking in me feelings of mind-expansion, rebellion, and human interconnectedness.

(Head Creator, oil on canvas. To see more of Peter lewis’ work, visit the Tikkun Art Gallery.)

Ultimately I would love to be able to produce art which helps people respect and connect with the natural world in a more realistic way. To make them aware of their dependence on it and the way their choices and actions affect it. It’s not something to fear, or to control, or to endure while we wait for some Great Hereafter – it’s the only home we’ll ever know, and we’re doing our best to wreck it for our kids.–David Bygott

Did you realize the giraffe antelope has the ability to stand upright on its hind legs?

Did you know there was any such thing as a giraffe antelope?

Chances are you didn’t. And chances are there won’t be much longer. The giraffe antelope is one of thousands of species that have existed for millennia on the African continent that are being threatened by human folly.

Thankfully, for we billions who have not yet had the chance to contemplate their beauty or their importance, Artist/Zoologist David Bygott has been working diligently for more than three decades photographing and sketching the giraffe antelope and the rest of Africa’s disappearing animal companions.

Recently in an effort to expand further his means of self-expression, Bygott began participating in digital photography manipulation contests on a website called Freaking News in which artists compete to create doctored images relating to current events.

A frequent winner, Bygott uses the Freaking News forum to express his sensitivities toward consumerism, vanity and the other unsustainable human values which threaten the animal diaspora.

“I wanted to speak to the lie that we can all wear the right thing or buy the right thing and then we can be American. They said, ‘This is what an American eats and this is what an American looks like.’ I wanted to insert stories about people who don’t fit in or can’t fit in.” – Beverly Naidus to Tikkun Daily, September 2009

Today, on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision to end limits on corporate campaign spending, we check back in with Beverly Naidus, a culture-jamming artist we profiled in September 2009.

Beverly’s work commandeers the imagery of corporate marketing campaigns, adding provocative text and altering the imagery in an effort to compel viewers to address the ways they are manipulated by advertising.

(To view more of Beverly Naidus’s new work, visit the Tikkun Art Gallery.)

“If there is one place that never sleeps, it’s the dump. Being the final output of society, it constantly has to keep up with our waste.” — Erik Otto

Just south of America’s littlest big city, across the highway from where the 49ers play, a raucous city of refuse rages 24 hours a day, fed by a never-ending river of San Francisco’s garbage.

This is Recology, also known as the San Francisco dump.

Recology is on the front line of an effort by the city of San Francisco to achieve a state of garbage transcendentalism known as “Waste Zero” (nothing wasted, nothing buried, nothing burned). One innovative approach they have taken is to create an artist residency.

Artists are given studio space at the dump and given free reign to scour the landscape collecting whatever is useful to them in their process of creating artwork crafted from materials scavenged from San Francisco’s waste stream. Since 1990, 79 artists have participated in the program, transforming a generation’s trash into treasure.

The two current artists in residency, Erik Otto and Christina Mazza, will show their work this weekend at the Dump’s studio at 503 Tunnel Avenue in San Francisco.

During the residency, Christina Mazza photographed the many piles of raw materials she collected at the dump and posted them on her blog. One of those photos inspired Mazza’s wall mural of shredded packing paper (below).

“I hope that there is a change in consciousness, but how could it ever be claimed that it came from me? Any change will do, even if it just pisses the person off! That could be a beginning to something great. Right?” — John Neilson

It is the gift and the burden of each of us to live the life we are given. If during the course of that life it happens that we become an artist, then the whole world is blessed. Because an artist not only lives each day, but also sings it, writes it, paints it, documents it, offering a unique and precious perspective from which the wise may learn and heal.

When Sharon Siskin founded Positive Art in 1988, she built a foundation from which a generation of HIV+ artists have been sharing their point of view with a world hungry for understanding.

By providing classes and materials, studio space, grant facilitation, and a sense of community to artists living with HIV/AIDS, Positive Art has enabled powerful images and sentiments to be brought forth into the culture, empowering expression from artful souls uniquely qualified to communicate about fear, loss, and rebirth.

Says Siskin,

When I teach art in educational institutions, I often tell my beginning art students that every mark that they make is a physical record of what they were doing or feeling in their life at that moment.

The process and the art object are about making meaning, both privately and publicly.

That search for meaning is evident in John Neilson’s blood paintings, works created using infected human blood as a medium.

(My Bloody Self, John Neilson, mixed media and blood. To see more work by the artists of Positive Art, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery.)

“I am only too relieved to see my work going to hang on other walls – with its departure I shed my responsibility.”

–Evelyn Williams

So often we dwell on the calamities of our world without imagining a better way forward. The purpose of this Tikkun art gallery is to seek out artwork that presents a hopeful and positive vision of this life while still conveying a sense of intellect and awareness of the ways our world and our nature cause suffering and grief. We are not trying to be quaint. We believe that there is a real possibility the world can be, and is being, transformed for the better, every day, by art.

It is lovely that this, our last post of 2009, examines the work of Evelyn Williams. Evelyn fits in particularly well with our mission statement at Tikkun.

Her painting “I Went to the Garden of Love” (below) speaks to the depth of human tenderness, transcending irrelevant, barbaric notions of gender and sexuality bias and presenting instead an alternative vision of compassion, humility and true love.

(To see more of Evelyn William’s work, visit the Tikkun Art Gallery.)

Says Evelyn,

I don’t believe there are any boundaries to love. This painting was inspired by William Blake. The figures are not confused by the restrictions normally occurring between men and women, but only through a feeling of fondest love where nothing is asked and nothing is expected.

“My hopes were that the viewer would just take a minute or two to find out who these people were.” -Kai Klaassen

I love it when I am given the chance to examine carefully the face of a true hero – the eyes, the laugh lines, the stress creases of someone known for being brave, accomplished, influential or wise.

I also love pie.

How wonderful to indulge two passions at once.

On a recent trip to Mission Pie, a local “farm to table” café in my neighborhood in San Francisco, I had the pleasure, over a slice of walnut pie, of admiring Kai Klaassen’s recent portraits of lunchroom employees of the San Francisco United School District.

Memories flooded back to me at the sight of their iconic uniforms and the good humor and quiet dignity emanating from their eyes.

(To see more of Kai Klaassen’s lunchroom portraits, visit the Tikkun Art Gallery.)

Says Klaassen,

When I look at all the drawings together and see the smiling workers with their hairnets on I think they are a symbol of America’s promise. The promise that, in 1946 when Harry Truman signed the program into law in an attempt to keep children from going hungry, we were as a country concerned with giving every kid a chance to realize their full potential by providing food and an education to all.

“I love beautiful things and beautiful artwork so my first goal is to create that in my own way.” – Kim Keever

The feeling I have when I view one of Kim Keever’s photographs is one of serenity and astonishment at the richness of earth’s wilderness. Then I realize Keever’s process and serenity turns to irony, that a manufactured landscape has made me feel so heart-warmed.

The nature scenes in Keever’s photographs are constructed by Keever inside of a 200-gallon tank in his studio in New York City. He fills the tank with water, submerging the miniature landscape. Then, illuminating the scene with colored lights from outside the tank, Keever adds paint to the water, creating a temporary, vibrant, colorful, dynamic environment that he quickly photographs.

(To see more of Kim Keever’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery.)

I feel a little like I am visiting the zoo. Like the manufactured realms built for elephants and tigers in the heart of many cities, Keever creates enclosed, controlled nature spaces for humans to look at. They can enjoy them in relative calm and detachment even though they have failed to protect such spaces in the wild.

“Fifteen years ago, I couldn’t convince people there was a water problem. Now things are different in a good way in that people are more aware that there is a problem, and in a bad way in that the problem is so much more dire.” — Jackie Brookner

Jackie Brookner is a revolutionary among revolutionaries.

All environmental art is inherently revolutionary in that it challenges viewers directly to rethink the ways they interact with nature and to take ownership, for better or worse, of the ways they affect and alter the ecosystem.

Brookner’s Biosculptures–living works of art whose porous surfaces are inhabited by carefully selected organisms whose job it is in nature to clean and filter the toxins out of aquatic ecosystems–raise the bar by presenting that challenge not only to viewers but to the environment itself.

(To see more of Jackie Brookner’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery.)

Biosculptures inhabit a community’s nature space, and often the built environment, becoming a living part of the larger ecosystem. They need no witness to establish their relevance. They are active members of their environment. Through their example they teach the simple, complimentary lessons of self-reliance and interdependence. They are inspirational not only because of their exquisite form but because of their transformational function.

“The forms in my work are derivative of nightmares I had when I was a child. My fodder is junk mail, litter, waste, and nightmares. My job is to transform these things into art.” — Aurora Robson

When something terrible happens, it might someday somehow be transformed into something less terrible — this is the personal belief to which I most stubbornly cling.

This isn’t idealism. It’s alchemy, the transformation of something of no value or little value into something useful, something beautiful.

Honeybees are alchemists. Sewage plant workers are alchemists. Anyone who has ever picked up litter, watered a seed, raised a child, started a business, or strung words together into a meaningful sentence is an alchemist.

It is in that core of my basic optimistic nature, in that tiny place where I believe alchemy is true, that I am beholden to the creations of artist Aurora Robson.

Robson’s dynamic, flowing installations and sculptures are constructed from discarded plastic bottles reclaimed from the wastebasket of America’s streets.

(To see more of Aurora Robson’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery.)

“Life’s beauty is magnificent as it hangs at the edge of death, insisting upon its relevance.” – Ran Ortner

The sea is not art. It is utilitarian and free. It exists with or without us. Although it can be (and is being) altered by human activity, it has no need for us to comprehend it. It will be here after we are gone in whatever manifestation it can muster.

A painting of the sea is different. It is a monument. It is representative. Like any painting, it holds its own meaning beyond the nature of its subject. There are reasons to view a painting of the sea besides just wanting to look at waves.

Open Water No. 24, a painting of the sea by Ran Ortner recently won the $250,000 grand prize at Art Prize, the world’s most lucrative competitive art show.

(To see more of Ran Ortner’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery.)

“I feel that it’s irresponsible to beat the drums of revolution if you’re only half-informed.” — Christopher Reiger

A small sample of the images of the natural world, or rather the destruction of the natural world, gracing the walls of art spaces today feel like warnings being shouted in hopes that disaster might yet be averted. But so many others appear to reflect cynicism and celebration of cruelty’s surprising beauty, merely revealing how aesthetically interesting it can be to explore the narrative of impending ecological destruction and the doomed existence of animal and plant life. It is a bother to me that I cannot usually decide which is which, or how to feel about either.

The recent work of Christopher Reiger is an exception. Reiger’s paintings feature imagery of beasts and flora intermixed with symbols of technology, science, industrialization, and human presence. Although emanating a potent awareness of the state of affairs of our embattled ecosystem, his work feels less like a condemnation than an invitation to a deeper understanding of humanity’s community with nature.

(“Without Maps Or Manifest,” 2009, watercolor, gouache, sumi ink and marker on arches paper)

Visit Tikkun Daily’s Art Gallery for more of Christopher Reiger’s work.

“To me, art is a commitment to asking questions and proposing alternatives to the status quo. Art should be integrated into life. It is empowering to work with your hands, to understand how elements of your surroundings fit together, and to try to use resources more wisely. That opportunity should be more public than elite.” — Alison Wilder

The immediate response I feel to Alison Wilder’s work is one of play. A warehouse full of massive, soft, bright, colorful objects made of reclaimed fabric, metal, and wood. Immense fabric balls large enough to crawl inside. Transmogrifying conflagrations of strangeness and delight hanging from the ceiling and climbing the walls.

(To see more of Alison’s work, visit the Tikkun Art Gallery.)

It seems intended to inspire happiness and experimentation.

“At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” — Harold Rosenberg, art critic, who coined the term “Action Painting” in 1952 (later called Abstract Expressionism).

Standing barefoot atop a long, white strip of paper laid out on the ground, the artist holds a mop-sized paintbrush dipped in black paint. She quiets her mind, remembering everything and then letting it go, her whole life, the entirety of existence. She surrenders to the moment. She lowers brush to paper and makes her mark, a single, swift, dynamic black stroke across the length of the massive page. Finally trading the black brush for red she lashes out again, a single shriek of red amidst the vivacious black, a splatter of blood upon the earth.

“With thoughtfulness. And, when relevant, with joy.” — Nancy Katz (on how she hopes viewers respond to her work)

Nancy Katz is a textile artist whose creations hang in museums in Israel, Oakland, and Berkeley. She is famous for her breathtaking chuppot, Ark curtains, and torah covers, and she is a world-renowned maker of tallitot. Visit Tikkun Daily’s art gallery to see some of these beautiful pieces of art.

Tallitot are prayer shawls, traditionally worn on the shoulders or over the head, adorned with 613 knots, a reminder of the 613 commandments making up the code of Jewish law.

“I am aware that several of my tallitot are worn by non-Jews who are drawn to them for reasons they are unable to articulate,” says Katz.”People wear tallitot in settings where nurturing a personal relationship with the Divine is the intention.”

“Answers are limiting.” — Lanell Dike

Years into a successful career as a fundraiser, Lanell Dike informed the people in her life that she was leaving her job to live on her savings and create art. Having no formal training as an artist, Lanell sought advice from experts on how to make a living in her new career.

“I was meeting with an art consultant, and I took a class about how to sell your art,” she says. “Neither of those experiences resonated with how I wanted to live my life.”

The art consultant advised Lanell to create limited editions of her work. Here’s how Lanell describes her reaction to his advice:

It’s hard for artists to make a living on art, so one of the ways artists have done that is to use limited editions. We are constantly placing limits on ourselves and on each other. We are so focused on scarcity as a reality more so than abundance.

When you look at money, it doesn’t really exist. It exists in our mind and as a concept, but when you look at this piece of paper, it only has value because you and I agree that it has meaning. I don’t want to create the illusion of limitation for something that is technically unlimited. We play so many psychological games on each other in the global marketplace just to make money. I’d rather not do that.

“How Do We Live in this World”, Lanell Dike

“I am not sure I would call my work revolutionary. I think I would call it transformational. I do believe that if openly perceived it can unlock new ways of seeing and being to the viewer.” — Helena Tiainen

In Finland, in the long winter months in the part of the country that lies above the Arctic Circle, the sun does not rise at all for weeks on end.

It is during this time of extreme darkness each November that Finland’s capital city of Helsinki is transformed by the festival of Valon Voimat, “Forces of Light.”

For more than a week artists converge on Helsinki, filling the city’s urban spaces with light-filled installations, glowing, mechanical sculptures, fire-ridden street performances and imaginative, luminous creations of all sorts, bringing the city temporarily aglow.

Valon Voimat challenges the Zen kōan that it is impossible to study the darkness by switching on a light.

Helsinki-born artist Helena Tiainen is no stranger to the contradictions raised each dark November by Valon Voimat.

Through the intuitive paintings and drawings she creates, Tiainen shines a light on the darkness of her viewers’ preconceptions by challenging them to “not take things for granted, to question perception and push the boundaries of what might be.”

“Freedom of Speech” by Helena Tiainen. To see more of Helena’s work, visit the Tikkun art gallery.

“We need some more visions about how in the light of impending disaster we can still strive for a better reality. I am neither a scientist nor an engineer. I am simply an artist. My job as a visionary is not only to focus on what is feasible today, but instead to imagine further, more ideal possibilities, and to inspire people to aim higher.” — Mona Caron

In 2006, the San Francisco Bay Guardian commissioned San Francisco muralist Mona Caron to illustrate the section headings of their annual “Best of the Bay” issue, where the editors ask readers to go online and vote for the best the city has to offer. Best Laundromat. Best karate school. Best art gallery. Best breakfast.

(To see the rest of Mona Caron’s Utopian San Francisco Series from The Bay Guardian’s Best of the Bay 2006, visit Tikkun Daily’s art gallery.)

Imagining the best that San Francisco could be was nothing new for Caron, who was already well known in the Bay Area for creating large-scale, utopian public paintings, often featuring optimistic imagery of the future of the city. For example, in Caron’s mural at the intersection of 15^th and Church Street she portrays a historical timeline of the street beginning on one end with an image of the early days of San Francisco and ending with a glimmering, futuristic vision of what the street may someday become.

“Advertising can be seen as a trope. Its multiple metaphors can sell you ecstasy, joy, something else besides the actual product.” –Beverly Naidus

Click on the picture to explore Beverly Naidus' series "What Kinda Name Is That?"

The work of artist Beverly Naidus takes many forms. She is an accomplished site-specific installation artist and painter. But it is her work in a medium referred to as “culture-jamming” that has brought her to our attention at Tikkun. Editor’s Note: to see more of Naidus’ work, visit Tikkun Daily’s art gallery, which is currently featuring Naidus’ series “What Kinda Name Is That?”

In Naidus’ words, “Culture Jamming is an aesthetic which transforms an image from popular culture, in this case an advertisement, so that it breaks the trance of the image; acts as an antidote to that trope.”

A trope is something akin to a metaphor. In Naidus’ view that is advertising’s essential nature. An advertisement is a thing that means another thing.

In her series “What kind of name is that?” Naidus manipulates mid-20^th Century advertising imagery by photo-altering the images then adding original text from a narrative she created from her own experience as the progeny of immigrants.

“One of the things that interested me in particular about the images in these advertisements was that they weren’t only about a particular product that a consumer might wish to purchase. They had to do with what being an American is.