Richard Diebenkorn's Masterful "Ocean Park" Series Is Presented

During the Summer of Love in the Ocean Park neighborhood bridging the L.A. coastal communities of Venice Beach and Santa Monica, a well-established middle-aged painter moved from one studio into another, better lit one. Physically, the shift was nominal, but it prompted Richard Diebenkorn to abandon his successful signature style of saturated Matisse-like depictions of seated women and tabletop detritus to embark on a radical new direction. It wasn’t the first time he had done this—but it was the last. The “Ocean Park” series was the artist’s big shift into pure abstraction. It would hold his attention for the remaining decades of his life (which ended in 1993) and represent one of the most acclaimed bodies of work in the history of 20th-century painting—lyrical drafting-table palimpsests; layer upon layer of incrementally reconfigured rectilinear lozenges of nuanced chroma; a squashed cubist armada endlessly jostling in a Pacific-hued harbor. Edward Hopper in Flatland, deprived of his magic hour shadows and intricate architectural scaffolding, but finding new life in crisp aerial origami topographies enclosing cloudy washes of muted complements. Stained glass permutations and combinations, dripping beauty. The Bomb.

Unlikely as it seems, Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series—ultimately comprising hundreds of paintings, drawings, collages, and prints created between 1967 and 1988—has never been the subject of a comprehensive museum exhibition until just now. “Richard Diebenkorn: the Ocean Park Series” seems to have been hovering in the Coming Attractions section of the Orange County Museum of Art’s schedule for half a decade.

Apart from the economic crisis, the major obstacle has been logistics—as curator Sarah Bancroft points out, “There are ‘Ocean Park’ works in over 45 museum collections in the U.S., but only two institutions own more than one of them.” More widely acknowledged than deeply understood, Diebenkorn’s magnum opus has been fragmented and scattered across the landscape. “The grand diaspora of major works,” opines Bancroft in the awesome, copiously illustrated catalogue, “has ensured that audiences rarely have the opportunity to view ‘Ocean Park’ works in their depth and their diversity of media.”

Audiences finally have their chance. “Richard Diebenkorn: the Ocean Park Series” debuted at the co-organizing Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth last September and arrived in Bancroft’s Newport Beach base of operations in late February. After May, it moves on to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., for the summer, which will give Americans one more chance to reassess their tippy canon.

The OCMA installation will be hard to beat—most of the museum’s half-dozen galleries are devoted to the exhibit and each of the large canvases is apportioned an expansive wall unto itself, a masterful curatorial decision that allows each work to unfold its architectonic structure into the nooks and crannies of the white cube (if ever there was an argument in favor of institutional white cubism, this show is it!) and initiates a complex four-way dialogue between the occupants of each room. The curious non-linear stylistic development of the “Ocean Park” series subverts the exhibition’s chronological sequencing, resulting in a larger, more complex—and somewhat arbitrary— version of these intimate arguments. Epic.

Two narrower galleries feature prints, collages, and smaller paintings, all remarkable in that they are lesser works only in size and dollar value. It is apparent that Diebenkorn put some effort into conquering the bugaboo of scale, and these miniatures—along with a sequence of painted cigar-box lids the artist presented to his friends, which anchor a wall in one of the larger galleries—more than hold their own in the company of the big boys: A small gouache on paper such as the atmospherically flesh-tinted Untitled #8, 1988, contains all the compositional intricacy and exquisite color of a similar gargantuan work, Ocean Park #83, 1975.

It took me some years to warm up to the pieces in Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series, and I came to them through his earlier work. At the time—the early 1980s—the “Ocean Park” works held center stage. It was the most visible and best received of his oeuvres. Its popularity and adherence to the still-powerful modernist obsessions with geometry and flatness in painting had all but pushed Diebenkorn’s earlier, gushy abstractions and contrarian figurative work into the wings. To me, the paintings seemed like so many impressionist envelopes and file folders scanned from above.

When I discovered the heavily impastoed, loosely gestural still lifes and luminous abstract patchworks of color from Diebenkorn’s previous incarnations, I was shocked (a not uncommon response I later found out) to realize that this was the same Diebenkorn whose serene and cerebral geometric abstractions seemed to owe more to Sol LeWitt than to Willem de Kooning.

Diebenkorn had something of a charmed career, especially for an artist so inextricably identified with the West Coast. After winding down World War II by doing various artsy chores for the marines, he landed a yearlong painting sabbatical grant after his first semester as a student at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art institute), and he lit out for the East Coast. After a year in Woodstock, New York, he returned to a CSFA faculty position and began producing the work that would establish him as one of the most gifted practitioners of the West Coast iteration of Abstract Expressionism. After a highly productive graduate school stint in New Mexico (the Albuquerque period—itself the subject of an acclaimed traveling exhibit in 2007), Diebenkorn spent a year teaching at the University of Illinois (the Urbana period) before settling in Berkeley.

Throughout these travels, Diebenkorn was perfecting an extraordinarily robust abstract visual vocabulary, synthesizing historical influences as various as Matisse, Cézanne, Arshile Gorky, Joan Miró, Hopper, and Piero della Francesca and contemporary influences from Mark Rothko and Franz Kline to fellow Bay Area painters and friends, Elmer Bischoff and David Park, as well as popular and industrial visual affinities, ranging from Krazy Kat comics to aerial photography. The resulting amalgam is an intensive exploration of landscape-inspired shape, line, and color unrivalled in its virtuosity—except perhaps by the work of Willem de Kooning.

Like de Kooning, Diebenkorn shocked his supporters in the mid ’50s by abruptly and emphatically embracing figuration, joining Bischoff and Park in what became known as the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Overnight his loose, complex planar compositions dissolved into perspectival landscapes, then interiors and still lifes, and finally they began to be populated by people—usually women, especially his wife, Phyllis.

This heretical turn was greeted with dismay by Abstract Expressionism’s coterie of true believers: Diebenkorn was a backslider, a reactionary, a sellout. Problem was, by 1955, when he made the switch, Ab-Ex had already become the prevailing orthodoxy, and Diebenkorn was comfortably ensconced in its canon. With Pop art still just a twinkle in Eduardo Paolozzi’s eye, it was in fact a courageous— possibly foolhardy—leap into the unknown.

But Diebenkorn’s luck held, and his representational work eventually brought him an entirely new audience on top of the one that was actually able to discern his undiminished formal chops, now operating under the thin veil of narrative. The images were not putting the carefully honed, abstract painterly techniques at the service of pictorial storytelling, but rather allowing the paintings’ formal elements to rearrange themselves around the psychological gravity fields of identifiable figures. Bay Area figuration was a feat of legerdemain that led many a diehard abstractionist to reconsider what was actually going on across the history of painting.

Without a cutting-edge theoretical mechanism behind them, though, the Bay Area figs were generally perceived as retreating from the inevitable Modernist juggernaut into what many, after Duchamp, disparaged as “retinal art.”

This iPhone 4S Battery Case Also Projects An Interactive Infrared Keyboard On Any Surface

Texting on the iPhone’s 3.7-inch touchscreen is about as good as you can expect, but wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to fit a full-size keyboard in there for good measure?

Celluon thinks there’s a way to do just that with the Prodigy, a Juice Pack style battery case for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4s with one interesting trick up its sleeve: it can project an interactive infrared keyboard onto any flat surface.

In theory, this means effortless typing as long as you can prop your iPhone up on a table or desk. The reality, though? Stick to texting.

We stopped by the Celluon booth in the iLounge pavilion to get a quick hands-on with the Prodigy, their latest prototype, which they hope to start shipping in the next three months. It’s good that they have time, because the whole shebang is not ready for prime time.

There are both conceptual and functional problems with Prodigy in our brief time with it. For one thing, while the case is as svelte as other battery cases, it’s a great deal longer thanks to the infrared projecting beam and attached camera, which tries to extrapolate where your finger is when it cuts through the beam and what key you meant to hit.

The problem is the Prodigy isn’t very good at telling what key you’re trying to type. It’s a frustrating experience, which reps from Celluon tried to just hand-wave away as a learning experience, but even they seemed scarcely much better at typing anything of length on their product.

And the issue isn’t just one of it being a prototype, because Celluon has another product already on the market called the Magic Cube that does the same thing for iPad and scarcely functions any better.

So what do we have here? As a concept, the Prodigy is intriguing, but the actuality sort of stinks. Given that Celluon thinks the Prodigy will cost $189.95 when it is finally released — which is at least $110 more than most battery cases — it’s hard to imagine this being the next step into the future of smartphone typing.

Sports photographer gains world of exposure

It was the fall of 1996 and Bob Sibilia was the sports editor at the Martinez News-Gazette. But this story isn’t about Sibilia; it is about Tod Fierner, who still currently works with the Martinez News-Gazette.

Fierner and Sibilia were at an Oakland Raiders game, there first year back from Los Angeles, when Fierner was talking to Sibilia’s girlfriend. She introduced Fierner to Sibilia, and asked Fierner if he wanted to do game coverage with photos. Fierner kindly accepted the offer even though he had no prior camera experience, or even a camera to take pictures with.

Fierner met with Sibilia the following week and told him to go to the game and shoot some pictures, with a camera that Sibilia had lent Fierner. If Sibilia liked the pictures Fierner would have a gig with the gazette, if not he would have had some exposure to the real world of sports photography.

Fierner went to the Raiders game the following week and snapped some shots, brought them back to the Gazette and Sibilia. Sibilia liked the photos Fierner had taken and took him on as his apprentice. “Bob was a wartime photo journalist, he didn’t want to do all the photos for sports, that’s where I came in,” said Tod Fierner.

Fierner worked with Sibilia for a year before he bought his first camera, and after another year Sibilia left the gazette, but Fierner stayed. “When Bob left I stayed, I kept shooting pictures for the gazette, whether it be professional sports or Alhambra or College Park, I was shooting sports,” said Fierner.

To this day Fierner has still never taken a photography class, or a journalism class. “It’s all trial and error, everything I’ve done,” said Fierner. The trial and error has worked in his favor.

Currently, Fierner is currently employed by, St. Mary’s college in Moraga. He is their photographer for all of their collegiate sports. “I expanded, marketed myself and my work and got in contact with St. Mary’s, to be where I am today,” said Fierner.

Fierner has been many places throughout his photographic career, including two super bowls, a Sweet 16 appearance with St. Mary’s, countless 49ers and Raiders games. College games from San Jose State, California Berkeley, Stanford, and Oregon. Fierner was also at an NFL Alumni golf tournament back in 2008 before the Super Bowl in Glendale, Arizona, where he was the only photographer at the event. “It was cool, we had eight police escorts around the bus I was in,” said Fierner. “When I got out all the fans were like who is this?”

Fierner has been shooting NFL games since 1996 with the Oakland Raiders, and 2005 when he finally got in with the San Francisco 49ers. At the Raiders game Fierner also has special duties that include taking pictures of Ice Cube, a long time Raiders fan. “I’ve been shooting for Ice Cube for three years, every time he’s at the coliseum,” said Fierner. “Cube is a cool guy, he is not who you think he would be.”

Fierner has met a lot of famous people while working, “Magic Johnson was probably the coolest person, he is very personable, he asks about you, how your doing, he gets to know you,” said Fierner. Fierner met Johnson while working a Raiders game in 2010.

Fierner has also met athletes like Reggie Jackson, Mike Ditka, Tim Lincecum, Barry Zito, Mark Mulder, Warren Sapp and Ladanian Tomlinson. All of whom asked to get their photo’s taken. “I met Tim at a Giants game, he was pitching and came into the dugout and saw me taking pictures, he asked if I had any good ones, which I thought was odd because pitchers are usually quiet when they are working that day, but I showed him some of the pictures and he told me to hook him up,” said Fierner.

Because of the work Fierner does he has been requested to travel to other side of the country on occasion, “I went to Providence, Rhode Island with St. Mary’s basketball team for the 2010 NCAA tournament,” said Fierner.

Fierner has shot almost every sport from baseball to volleyball, “I went to Wrigley Field in Chicago to shoot a Cubs game that was cool,” said Fierner. “I never take my work for granted though, everyday is probably the coolest day when your watching sports.”

Cool indeed, but some sports are difficult, I asked Fierner which sport was the most difficult, “Volleyball,” said Fierner. “You never know where the ball is going.”

I asked Tod which guys he thought through his lens looked like they were going to be studs at the next level, “When Ryan Leaf was as Washington, I could have swore he was going to make it big,” said Fierner. “I also thought Kyle Boller was going to be something big when he was at Cal and Atari Kellen, I saw him in high school.”

I also asked Tod if there was ever a moment he got too close to the action, “In San Francisco, I was covering a 49ers game, I was on the sidelines and I got run over by the special teams unit,” said Fierner. “They blocked the punt, and I got run over.”

Fierner has also had some opportunities to shoot other things besides sports, “I was invited to the Play Boy Mansion once to shoot a party, but I cancelled because St. Mary’s was going to the WCC Tournament in Vegas,” said Fierner. “My wife doesn’t believe me that I ever had the chance, but I did.”

Fierner currently has four cameras, all Cannon and all digital, “It’s a long way from my first camera, which was a classic filmstrip Cannon,” said Fierner.

Some events or sports Fierner would like to do in the future are, a boxing match, UFC fights, a World Series and the Olympics.

Fierner’s work has even been seen on the other side of the world in Australia, “I’ve had some pictures in the Aussie newspapers because of the Australian guys on St. Mary’s,” said Tod Fierner. “Everything I do today would not be possible without the Gazette.”

He was innovative on store front

When the architect Peter Bohlin arrived for his first meeting with Steve Jobs, he wore a tie. "Steve laughed, and I never wore a tie again," Bohlin recalled.

Thus began a collaboration that has extended from Pixar's headquarters, completed in 2001, to more than 30 Apple Stores (and counting) around the globe, all designed by Bohlin and a team of architects from Bohlin Cywinski Jackson led by Karl Backus - and Jobs himself.

"The best clients, to my mind, don't say that whatever you do is fine," Bohlin said last week, a few days after Jobs' death. "They're intertwined in the process. When I look back, it's hard to remember who had what thought when. That's the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house."

Just as Jobs transformed the notion of the personal computer and the cellphone, he left an indelible stamp on architecture, especially the retail kind, traditionally a backwater of the profession.

"No one in commercial architecture has ever channelled a product into architecture for a client the way Peter did for Apple," said James Timberlake, a founding partner of Kieran-Timberlake, who is now designing the new American embassy in London.

"Most commercial architecture is under-detailed, under-edited and underbudgeted. It's gross and ugly, and most of it is an eyesore on the American landscape."

The work of Bohlin and his colleagues for Apple, by contrast, is sleek, transparent, inviting, technologically advanced - and expensive.

In many ways, the retail architecture is simply the largest box in which an Apple product is wrapped, and Jobs was famously attentive to every detail in an Apple product's presentation and customer experience.

The extensive use of glass in structures like Apple's cube on Fifth Avenue in New York, its cylinder in the Pudong district of Shanghai or its soaring market hall on the Upper West Side of Manhattan have become so distinctive that Apple is seeking to patent the glass elements.

Bohlin's firm has won 42 awards for its work for Apple, and Bohlin himself was awarded the American Institute of Architects' gold medal in 2010.

In their years working together, Jobs and Bohlin, who is 74, appeared to have achieved a rare chemistry. Jobs was "a very public person," Timberlake observed. "That's in contrast to Peter. He's not a Frank Lloyd Wright or a Philip Johnson.

He doesn't sweep into a room and take over. You go to a design meeting, and it's more like a fireside chat." Backus, who lives in California and focuses full time on Apple work, said the team learned early on to approach Jobs with alternatives. "He liked to be presented with options and would often make very insightful suggestions," Backus recalled. "We all enjoyed the collaboration."

The notion of glass as Apple's signature architectural statement first appeared in the staircase in the company's New York store in So-Ho, housed in a historic building."We had a two-story space, which is a great challenge to get people to go up or down," Bohlin said.

"So we thought of glass. Steve loved the glass stair way idea. He got it. You make magic. We made these stairs that were quite ethereal." Just as Jobs obsessed over Apple products, he pushed Bohlin to make the glass structures ever more refined and pure."We got James O'Callaghan involved.

He's brilliant, a British structural engineer with offices in New York and London," Bohlin said. "Now we're cantilevering the stairs from top to bottom." In the newest Apple store, in Hamburg, Germany, the stairs float in space, attached only at the top and bottom. The fittings are embedded in the glass, "so you get this magical sleek profile when you look up the wall." Bohlin said.

"This is the kind of detail Steve wanted," he added. "We've been driving for this, doing more and more with less and less. This has been a vision of architecture since earlier in the last century.

Modernism, some people would argue, is doing more with less. Steve wanted us to push the edge of technology, but it had to be comfortable for people. Sometimes that idea got lost in modernism. It's an interesting challenge, how to marry the two."

Qvoid Offers A Deep And Universal Puzzling Experience

Qvoid ($1.99) by Gavina Games is a must have puzzle game for the iPhone and iPad.

This universal offering comes with massive depth, an easy learning curve, and 96 levels of pure, neuron pumping action. Qvoid will test your puzzling abilities to the limit, but always with a cubed smile.

Qvoid is most similar to the classic Sokoban style of gameplay, though it has progressed far beyond that original concept.

Players are asked to rotate a cube about a grid, collecting colors along the cube’s white faces. Those colors must then be carried to a corresponding spot elsewhere on the board. When two like colors are combined, they vanish, leaving behind a blank square and a free pass to the next puzzle.

The game makes this difficult just about every way it can: Colored faces cannot be placed against a black square, nor can black squares (which are left after a match is made) be placed facedown either. And just when you think it’s safe to go back in the water, the game throws moving tiles, numbered squares, and color mixing into the equation. It’s a wicked concept, and one that’s split across all 96 handmade levels, with each requiring a higher level of cerebral concentration than the next. All in all, there’s easily 12 hours worth of gameplay hidden within Qvoid’s walls; potentially more, if you’re puzzle dumb like me.

In fact, with so much quality content, it’s hard to find Qvoid’s downside. The game is a whole dollar above the 99 cent sweet spot, but considering the number of levels offered, the developers can hardly be faulted. Not to mention Qvoid’s absolutely gorgeous graphics.

And they are gorgeous, trust us. Everything about the game’s look feels alive and springy, from the menus right down to the cube’s facial expressions. The developers have created a puzzling world that’s both challenging and good looking, a feat that immediately puts Qvoid above its competitors.

Qvoid also comes with Game Center integration, meaning players can enjoy global leader boards, as well as some (stiffly earned) achievements. The value of the leader board is debatable, however, as it’s simply a tally of players’ collected stars. Considering there’s a finite number of stars available in-game, the reasoning behind this bit of online stat-tracking is questionable at best.

The achievements, however, will require a large amount of effort on the player’s part. That likely comes as a boon for those requiring a truly masochistic puzzling experience on the iPhone. In fact, that may be Qvoid’s only real fault: The game can be hair-tearingly difficult at times.

Depending on the level, players may spend several minutes or several days deciphering a puzzle. The game’s learning curve is excellent, spacing out discovery with difficulty at exactly the right places. This means that no matter how hard the puzzle, the answer is within your grasp. Just try not to throw the iPhone against a wall, please.

At the end of the day, Qvoid offers one of the best puzzling experiences available for iOS. The game provides deep gameplay, more puzzles than one can shake a stick at, and graphics that feel right at home on the Retina display. All in all, it’s a $1.99 gem, and an absolute steal. If you’re a fan of puzzle games, get this app.

Does it Work Wednesday: Baby Bullet

Makers of the popular Magic Bullet now have a system you can use to make your own baby food.  It's supposed to be cost-effective and a healthier way to feed your child because you know the ingredients going into their first foods, but Does it Work?

"It says it's better than any food processor. When I run out of food, I can just make it here rather than run to the store," said Jerri Carr, a mother from Jackson.

Jerri is one of several dozen parents asking me to try the Baby Bullet before they buy it. After all, it's $80. Her little four-month-old Bryson just started eating solids. Jerri's ready to try her own hand at making those meals herself and for cheaper costs than the jars she normally buys in the store.

First, we slice up a banana, add the recommended water and get right to pureeing.

"Looks pretty good!"

The Baby Bullet system comes with six storage cups. We pour the banana puree in, then set the dial to today's date, so Jerri knows when to feed it by. Most fresh food lasts about three days. That's where the batch tray comes in. You can make a whole month's worth of food, if you wanted to, and then freeze it in cups or ice cube trays like the ones provided in the system.

We feed Bryson the banana puree, and he really likes it! Jerri likes the freshness. We can see a big difference in color between the puree we made and the store-bought bananas.

Now onto something chunkier and harder to puree like sweet potatoes.

We steam and peel the potato, then quarter it for easier blending. Makers of the Baby Bullet recommend we try the "pulsing" technique.

In a matter of seconds, we have pureed sweet potatoes...make that a lot of sweet potatoes.

In fact, I paid $1 for one sweet potato and made a dozen servings. Jerri paid $1 for just two meals of the store-brand. Baby Bullet hits the bulls-eye for value, that's for sure.

"Tripled it almost."

Meantime, Bryson tastes sweet potatoes for the very first time, just for us.

"He acts like he likes them. I think so."

Still, Jerri admits it's hard to cough up the initial $80 for the Baby Bullet system.

"The price is still high."

If you have your own food processor and ice cube trays, you can easily do this at home, too. Still, the recipe book and guide do the thinking for you....it's all easy to follow.

The Baby Bullet hits the mark, leaving us smiling, too, with a B+ on this Does it Work test.

Shop around for this product online, as you can find it for many different prices.  Also, it comes with a blade you can use to mill your own grain cereal.  It's also recommended to NOT let the motor run for more than a minute.  Also, you want to use small pieces for easier pureeing.