Carolyn Russo’s photograph of a McDonnell F-4S is part of the “In Plane View” exhibit at JWA (Photo: Courtesy of John Wayne Airport)

JOHN WAYNE AIRPORT — The “Flight of Ideas” art installation noiselessly crowds the airspace above the baggage carousels at the new Terminal C here.

This is where the old Terminal B garage stood before construction crews razed it to clear the way for Terminal C — the main piece of John Wayne Airport’s $543-million improvement and renovation program — which opened in mid-November.

In assorted sizes, shapes and colors, the sculpture’s 21 individual pieces together resemble a flock of flying mechanical birds. They seem to float in the air as they dangle from a 100-foot truss suspended from the terminal’s barrel vault ceiling. Their bodies are made of aluminum, and their colorful wings and tail fins are plexiglass cutouts imprinted with sections of actual FAA aeronautical charts.

The sculpture in Terminal C (one of three contiguous terminals housed in the Thomas F. Riley Terminal building) is a milestone for JWA. It is the county-run airport’s first acquisition of a work of art.

… Continue reading JWA art program soars to new heights

Photographer Gina Genis created a giant American flag made up of individual portraits she took of people who told her about life in this economy. (Photo courtesy of Gina Genis)

Elyssa Houchen smiled faintly as she faced the camera.

“I’m 17,” she wrote in her response to the photographer’s question. “My dad couldn’t make enough money to keep my mother married to him. She left. I now live with my dad, older sister and 3 room mates.

“I’ve had a second job for the past 6 months and have been finishing my senior year of high school. I’m still coping.”

Houchen, a Huntington Beach resident, was one of 245 people who posed individually for Gina Genis’ lens after walking into the Huntington Beach Art Center back in March and April.

… Continue Reading ‘Economy Portraits’ artist to sign copies of book at HB Art Center

Scott Valenzuela in front of his "Metamorphosis" exhibit at the OMC Gallery for Contemporary Art in Huntington Beach (Independent photo by Kevin Chang)

The artist and gallery owner met at a coffee shop two and a half years ago.

In 2009, Rolf Goellnitz, co-proprietor of the OMC Contemporary Art Gallery in Huntington Beach, was stopping by the Peet’s Coffee & Tea at the Bella Terra shopping center near his gallery when he spotted Scott Valenzuela at work.

Valenzuela wasn’t working at Peet’s as a barista. The Westminster-based painter was busy with his art. He regularly works at that coffee shop on his paintings and drawings.

Yet Valenzuela’s art didn’t immediately impress Goellnitz, a plain-speaking German immigrant and advertising artistic director who co-founded the gallery in Düsseldorf in 1999 with his American wife, RoxAnn Madera.

“I said, ‘If you prove that you are an artist, then you get a show in my gallery,’” Goellnitz recalled.

… Continue Reading On the path to his own style

Laguna College of Art and Design student Heather Patton works on a project in her studio at the school. Patton will showcase her work at Kevin Shoaf’s Bluebird Gallery as part of 14 LCAD students who will display their artwork in local galleries for upcoming Dec 1st Artwalk. (Coastline Pilot photo by Don Leach)

The December installment of the First Thursdays Art Walk will mark a milestone for Robin Fuld, a professor at the Laguna College of Art & Design and its career services director.

Thursday’s Art Walk will be the 10th anniversary of a mentorship that she fostered between LCAD and Laguna Beach art galleries.

… Continue Reading Showing their stuff

Photo by Joe Woolhead (Courtesy of National September 11 Memorial & Museum)

All I could hear was the sound of perpetually falling water.

I stood recently in the shadow of the Freedom Tower under construction, and faced one of the two parapets with names of the dead etched in bronze. Not even the rattle of jackhammers in the background could interrupt this moment for me.

I was gazing down at a square hole in the ground from which the second of the twin towers had soared. The memorial parapet framed the footprint of the 110-story building formerly known as 2 World Trade Center, or the south tower.

… Continue Reading Return to the twin towers

At 11 stories wide and three stories tall, the world’s largest photograph has returned to its Orange County birthplace for the first time in five years.

In 2006, a team of six photographers collaborated on the Great Picture project. They turned an F-18 hangar at the former Marine Corps Air Station El Toro — known nowadays as the Orange County Great Park — into a pinhole camera.

An exhibition telling the story of the many steps in the photo’s creation as part of the park’s Legacy Project — an ambitious artistic effort to document El Toro’s transition from an air base into a public park through photographs, film and sounds — opens this weekend at the Great Park in Irvine. The public can attend an opening reception from 7 to 9 p.m. Saturday at the Great Park Gallery.

… Continue Reading Great Picture returns to O.C. birthplace

Stephen Sondheim

COSTA MESA — The Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa on Saturday was filled for “Stephen Sondheim: In Conversation.” There was only one problem — Sondheim wasn’t there.

The Broadway legend was unable to travel to Orange County due to snow storms in the New York area.

As a result, ticket holders were given a free, bonus concert starring Tony award-winning performers Christine Ebersole and Brian Stokes Mitchell. Both singers agreed to perform the Sondheim songs previously planned for the evening along with additional songs from Broadway and the Great American Songbook.

… Continue Reading Sondheim snowed out but the show goes on

I should have slept soundly, but my body and mind hadn’t yet absorbed a new reality: My beloved St. Louis Cardinals, an imperfect but tenacious bunch who embodied the spirit of team play, overcame a Mt. Everest of adversity in the 2011 season and won it all.

By winning Game 7 of the World Series, they engraved another notch in their record as the National League’s most successful franchise and the sport’s second most successful one behind the New York Yankees since World Series play began in 1903.

Yet overnight, as Oct. 28 turned into Oct. 29, two questions kept gnawing away in my slumbering consciousness: Did they win or lose? And who would they have to play next?

… Continue Reading World View: My beloved Cards deal from the top of the deck

Lebowski Fest poster art (courtesy of Bill Green Studios)

COSTA MESA — Where else could the Lebowski Fest have started but in a bowling alley?

The movement that hero worships His Dudeness and All Things Dude took root 10 years ago, not in the Golden State but in the Bluegrass State.

In October 2001, Lebowski Fest co-founder Scott Schuffitt invited his former classmate and longtime friend, Bill Green, to a bowling party in their hometown of Louisville, Ky. It was themed around “The Big Lebowski,” the 1998 cult-classic comedy by the Coen Brothers. Green was both an avid bowler and a fan of the Coens’ films.

Schuffitt expected 40 to 50 people to show up at his party that night, but 150 came.

… Continue Reading The Dude Abides at OCC, man

Two films dealing with war and politics in the tinderbox of the Middle East are coming to Newport-Mesa for one-night special screenings.

The city of Costa Mesa on Friday night will host a screening of “Patrol Base Jaker” at the Triangle Square Cinemas. The documentary, directed by David Scantling, follows the Camp Pendleton-based 1st Battalion, 5th Marines — otherwise known as the “1/5″ — during a 2009-10 deployment to Afghanistan.

The group is the city’s adopted military unit.

And on Wednesday night, the Chabad Jewish Center of Newport Beach will screen “Killing Kasztner,” a historical documentary directed by Gaylen Ross.

Her film tells the story of a Hungarian Jew, Rezsö Kasztner, who became a controversial figure in Israeli politics in the 1950s, because of his World War II role in striking a deal with Adolf Eichmann and the Nazi high command in occupied Budapest to spare 1,684 Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust.

After their films’ respective screenings, the two filmmakers will appear separately for live discussions with local audiences.

… Continue Reading Two films, two wars