Evelyn Morris at her home in Newport Beach (Daily Pilot photo by Scott Smeltzer)

Life has a way of coming around full circle.

Switching on the car radio as I drove in the St. Patrick’s Day rain, I overheard an NPR report about a newly restored “Napoleon,” the 1927 silent film masterpiece by French filmmaker Abel Gance, which was coming to a screen in the Bay Area.

When the reporter noted that Francis Ford Coppola presented his own restored version of this cinematic epic in 1981, and how, at the end of the screening, Coppola telephoned the nonagenarian Gance in Paris to converse with him from the stage, I recalled a memory frozen deep in my past.

My late mother and father were in the audience that day at Radio City Music Hall.

France has been on my mind lately. As I listened to the reporter wrapping up, it struck me that I had South Coast Repertory veteran actor Hal Landon Jr. to thank for unwittingly triggering a chain of recent events connected to my mother’s homeland.

… Continue Reading World View: ‘Mille mercis!’

Darrell Ebert, a professor at Golden West College, oversees the new exhibit of prints by New Mexico artists at the Golden West College’s Fine Arts Gallery (HB Independent photo by Scott Smeltzer)

Professor Darrell Ebert was thrilled.

“This is probably one of the highest-level shows that you could find in an educational gallery,” he said.

Now in his 43rd year at Golden West College, Ebert teaches sculpture, painting, two- and three-dimensional design classes, and curates the campus’ Fine Arts Gallery.

“The intensity and level of quality of work is so high,” he said, covered in a paint-spatted smock as he gestured to the gallery. “It’s so professional.”

Golden West just opened a new art show, “Pressing the Limits,” which showcases 40 prints made by a quartet of New Mexico-based artists: Michael Costello, Willis F. Lee, Jennifer Lynch and Mitchell Marti.

On Friday morning, Costello will come to the Huntington Beach campus to take part in a discussion about the pieces in the show. The event will occur in the gallery from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m., and will be free and open to the public, as is the exhibition.

… Continue reading New show pushes boundaries of printmaking

Donald Margulies (photo by Ethan Hill)

The acclaimed American playwright Donald Margulies will be in Orange County for the Friday night opening of South Coast Repertory’s revival of “Sight Unseen,” his SCR-commissioned play that earned him the first of three Pulitzer Prize nominations for Drama.

On Saturday afternoon, following his appearance at SCR, Margulies will go to Chapman University in Orange to give a free talk about writing for both the stage and screen, SCR officials announced in a news release.

“Sight Unseen” premiered at the Costa Mesa venue in 1991, earning Margulies an off-Broadway OBIE Award after the production went to New York, as well as a finalist nod for the 1992 Pulitzer.

… Continue Reading Giant of contemporary stage returns to O.C.

Malcolm Warner, the new executive director of Laguna Art Museum. (COASTLINE PILOT PHOTO BY DON LEACH)

Starting Sunday, Laguna Art Museum visitors will pay $5 less for tickets across the board.

The unveiling of the museum’s spring 2012 exhibitions then will officially coincide with a revamped ticketing and hours of operation policy instituted by Malcolm Warner, who took over Jan. 3 as LAM’s new executive director.

LAM will charge $7 for general admission, and instead of operating from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, the museum will close to the public on Wednesdays. LAM will keep those same hours on weekend days as well as on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays.

But the museum also will stay open till 9 p.m. every Thursday — not just on the first Thursday of the month, when Laguna Beach’s First Thursdays Art Walk happens.

… Continue reading “New era begins at Laguna Art Museum”

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.