Artist David Hockney is both the guiding spirit and social connector behind a smartly engaging exhibition, British Invasion, now on view at MOAH: The Lancaster Museum of Art and History. Featuring the works of 25 British-born artists, the exhibition feels like the work of a cross-cultural autonomous collective. What the artists have in common is simply that they all came to California, perhaps for reasons similar to David Hockney’s. “I was drawn towards California, which I didn’t know,” Hockney once told an interviewer, “because I sensed the place would excite me. No doubt it had a lot to do with sex.”

Speaking of sex, America’s embrace of the original British Invasion of the mid-1960s had quite a bit to do with that as well...

The British Invasion, a cultural phenomenon that brought British rock across the Atlantic to a generation of music-hungry American teenagers, came to a climax on February 9th, 1964. That evening at 8PM an estimated 73 million Americans gathered in front of their mostly black and white TV sets to watch The Beatles perform five songs. The group’s sheer magnetism—a blend of Continental sex appeal, youthful insouciance and lyric musicality—was potent enough to make America’s patriarchs nervous. The job Elvis had started by shaking his hips—of teaching American teenagers how to shake loose another layer of Puritanical reserve—was being finished by British musicians.

“A lot of people’s fathers had wanted to turn us off,” Paul Mc Cartney later wrote of the Sullivan performance: “They told their kids, ‘Don’t be fooled, they’re wearing wigs.’” Despite their father’s warnings, young Americans went bonkers over The Beatles—soon followed by The Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, The Animals and The Who—who were the vanguard of a host of “London Swingers” that helped integrate countercultural lifestyles and points of view into the American mainstream. Most Americans were understandably grateful.

The sense of affection has endured—perhaps even grown stronger—over the past five decades. When Pappy and Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace, a popular Mojave Desert roadhouse, announced last month on Twitter that Paul McCartney (now 74) would be making an appearance, nearly 1,000 people promptly lined up on the dusty desert road hoping to score a $50.00 ticket. Many ended up listening outside, while a lucky group of 300 that included artist David Hockney, squeezed inside to hear McCartney rock his way through a 19 song set and a triple encore.

It’s poignant to think of Hockney and McCartney, two prime movers of British-American popular culture, sharing a few hours together at a bar in the California desert, such long way—both literally and metaphorically—from the verdant countryside once painted by John Constable. Perhaps this sense of exoticism and distance is the reason why Hockney (and other British artists and cultural figures) have taken such an interest in the Antelope Valley and other California desert regions.

The Mojave desert held a special appeal for the author Christopher Isherwood, a pioneering British expat. He liked its “weird vegetation and immense vistas“ and wrote admiringly of “...this untamed, undomesticated, aloof, prehistoric landscape which relentlessly reminds the traveller of his human condition and the circumstances of his tenure upon the earth.” And it was Isherwood who served as a friend and mentor to David Hockney after his arrival in Los Angeles in January of 1964—just a month before The Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show—telling him: "Oh David, we've so much in common; we love California, we love American boys, and we're both from the north of England."

As soon as Hockney set up a studio in Los Angeles—where he has lived on and off since his arrival—he became a “must visit” art world connector for Brits and others. His set of video stills, 112 L.A. Visitors records those who stopped by in one period between 1990 and 1991. Some of those portrayed stayed in California and became part of the ongoing cultural hybridization that the MOAH’s exhibition documents.

Getting back to the MOAH’s exhibition and taking it in, It can be challenging to decide precisely what remains “British” in the works of these expats and semi-expats. Many have definitely morphed into Californians, perhaps because some seem to have absorbed a dose of American “forwardness” that has eroded the culturally imposed reserve they might display at home. Still, despite having traded duck ponds for swimming pools and wool sweaters for brightly-hued bathing suits, the artists in this exhibition have retained an admirable depth of cultural sophistication.

Characterizing the artists whose works are on view at MOAH—in general terms—as being both principled and eccentric seems about right. They tend towards being informed, witty and a bit jaundiced, just as you might expect. British Invasion is a large show, filling two floors and 20,000 square feet, but hopefully a sampling of a few notable works will help bring home that point.

David Eddington, who lives and paints in Venice and who has been in the U.S. since 2000, is a recovering realist who is showing a cycle of four large acrylic paintings on the theme of the four seasons. Alternating between very specific representational elements—for example, the skulls and bones of his “Summer”—and the more stylized, spontaneously brushed imagery of his settings, Eddington seems quite comfortable letting his rational and intuitive inclinations collide with each other. The calligraphic, stained acrylic brushstrokes of his “Winter” could have been made by Helen Frankenthaler, but the stark human pelvis that stands in the foreground transforms the scene into an idiosyncratic “vanitas.”

Max Presneill, a London-born artist who is the Director/Curator of the Torrance Art Museum, is represented by three abstract paintings that demonstrate the conceptual underpinnings of his work. His working methods—which involve removing, covering and negating—result in a matrix of seemingly casual marks, stains and strokes that evidence the artist’s activist thought processes. Presneill’s canvases embody a paradox: they simultaneously move towards meaning while remaining insistently abstract. To be too specific, they seem to suggest, would be to moralize (or appear authoritative) and that is to be studiously avoided.

There is perhaps a similar reticence in the painting/collages of Trevor Norris, which bring together linear abstraction with snippets of text taken from the artist’s written recollections of childhood memories. It’s as if Norris wants to tell us about himself, but not over-burden us: he has retained his proper British manners.

Kate Savage—born in Sussex, England, and raised between the Hudson Valley and Greenwich Village, New York by two visual artists—is represented by a portrait and related headdress from her Ageless series. Interested in “cultural extensions and their symbolic baggage” Savage’s works have their deep roots in the British sense of class distinction which she has brought forward to morph into a more contemporary set of concerns with female identity and personal psychology.

Strikingly similar concerns—the re-framing of artifacts relating to women’s experience in past culture—animate the “metaphysical surgery” depicted in Sarah Danay’s Tourniquet. Danay’s work manages to be, among other things, grim, poignant and graceful.

Jon Measures—an artist, graphic designer, illustrator and educator—has provided British Invasion with a tour de force: It Is What It Is. An assemblage of forward-thrusting collage paintings that are vitalized by a distinctive graphic energy, It Is What It Is combines digitally edited photos layered and tweaked into collages of life in Los Angeles: Measures describes his process as “ a hybrid between painting, photography, digital art and collage.” There is considerable ambivalence in Measure’s view of his adopted home town and its unsustainable modes of life.

As the title of Measure’s grouping suggests, there is wisdom in just accepting Southern California for what it is, while remaining conscious that it’s vitality is a kind of beautiful/awful mirage that is sprawling and crawling towards the desert.

Making the drive out to the MOAH in Lancaster to see British Invasion will reinforce that point beautifully.

British Invasion

November 19, 2016 - January 22, 2017

Artists:

Shiva Aliabadi, Phil Argent, Derek Boshier, Jane Callister, Sarah Danays, David Eddington, Colin Gray, Andrew Hall, David Hockney, Caroline Jones, Jeremy Kidd, Siobhan McClure, Jon Measures, Nathaniel Mellors, Graham Moore, Trevor Norris, Rhea O’Neill, Max Presneill, Kate Savage, James Scott, Gordon Senior, Dave Smith, Roni Stretch, Philip Vaughn and Eleanor Wood,

British Invasion will be on display from November 19 to January 22.

For more information: http://www.lancastermoah.org/british-invasion

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The most recent issue of the magazine Guernica features an essay-letter written to “my fellow teachers” by Nell Boeschenstein, who teaches writing at Sweet Briar College. Boeschenstein reports that on the Wednesday morning after the election of Donald Trump she pondered a choice: “Did I walk into class today and say, ‘I know we’re all tired and feeling sensitive today, now let’s turn to page 46 and pick up where we left off’ or did I walk in and say, ‘There’s an elephant in the room that we’ve got to discuss?’”

You pretty much know what she will end up doing when she prefaces option #1 (“let’s turn to page 46”)with a verbal arm around the shoulder: “I know we’re all tired and feeling  sensitive today.” With all that sensitivity in the air, how could she justify business as usual? Page 46 will have to wait; discussing the elephant — Donald Trump — is obviously the only way to go. The path to that choice is smoothed by the first person plural “we’re” (“We’re ... feeling sensitive”) which creates a fellowship by claiming a knowledge she couldn’t possibly have. She can’t know what her students are feeling unless she was assuming, as she obviously was, that they would be feeling exactly what she felt. After invoking the fellow feeling she has rhetorically manufactured, she announces her decision: “I did the only thing I could do: I was honest... and told my students how I felt... I asked if they wanted to talk about it. They were silent.”

Now I don’t doubt that Boeschenstein was being honest in one way: she was honestly expressing her distress at the result of the election. But she was being dishonest with respect to the performance of her professional responsibilities. I’m willing to bet that when she was interviewed for her position, no one asked, “Can we count on you to set aside the lesson plan of the day and give over your class time to a discussion of your feelings about the political landscape?” Indeed, had she indicated that she would prioritize her political convictions over and against a consideration of a scheduled class’s subject matter, the hiring committee would have had second thoughts. After all, what she is trained and paid to do is teach writing. The only “honest” choice — it shouldn’t even have been a question — was to say “Let’s turn to page 46 and pick up where we left off.” Had she said that she would have reaffirmed her students’ understanding of what it means to participate in an academic conversation: it means mastering academic materials and learning academic skills. Distress (or, for that matter, happiness) at the outcome of an election is not an appropriate driver of classroom discussion, although of course one can imagine other contexts — town hall meetings, noon-time rallies, late-night bull sessions ― in which the expression of political sentiments would be expected and exactly on point.

Once Boeschenstein decided on the direction she would take, things got worse. It turned out that all of her students were not feeling what she was feeling because some of them were Trump supporters. Not allowing the silence that followed her question “Do you want to talk about it?” to stand, she subjected the wayward students to a barrage of questions: “Why did you give Trump a pass on the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, and the environment? Why do you forgive this man’s rejection of the fundamental values on which we agree? Please explain this to me.” Or, in other words, justify to me what you did in the ballot-box (supposedly a private place protected in its privacy by the laws of the land); make me understand why you acted so badly.

“I could not get a straight answer,” Boeschenstein complains. How about that? A bunch of 18-year-olds find themselves harangued by the authority figure from whom they expect instruction and are unable to respond to her hectoring with calmly reasoned replies. What’s wrong with them? Boeschenstein knows what’s wrong. They’re just not thinking clearly — she calls their Trump support “inexplicable” — and so, after 75 minutes of asking and re-asking the same question “in as many different rhetorical iterations as I could invent,” she sends them out with marching orders: “If you don’t want Trump to speak for you, don’t let him. It is imperative that you stand up against his language of bigotry.” Not only is she putting her students on the spot when they thought they had come to learn something; she is also telling them how they should act when they exit the classroom and move into spaces supposedly not under her authority.

Boeschenstein knows that her performance that day goes against the “general rule of thumb for us teachers... not to say what is right or what is wrong, but to teach our students to think critically.” But she invokes the “these-are-not-ordinary-times” rationale and regrets only that she hadn’t set aside “test preparation and dates to memorize and topic sentences to hone” earlier: “Had I been brave enough to start this conversation in September, I wonder whether some of my Trump-supporting students might have chosen otherwise at the ballot box on Tuesday.” That is to say, had I engaged in political indoctrination from the beginning of the semester instead of merely doing my job, my students might have done the right thing on November 8. The rest of us, however, can learn from her failure to act in time and take up the real work ― of saving the world from Donald Trump — right away: “Don’t defer the conversation any longer. If we do, more bucks will be bound for our desks that we cannot afford to watch pile up”.  

And people wonder why so many take a dim view of what goes on in our college classrooms.

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A painting by Norman Rockwell was moved in the Oval Office for the first meeting between President Obama and Mr. Trump so it would hang over Mr. Trump’s shoulder. In the painting the torch of the Statue of Liberty is being repaired by five men, one of whom is an African-American. All of them are precariously roped to her flame.

Who moved the painting and why? It is clearly too small for that space; a larger landscape painting had hung there previously. Originally the Rockwell painting was displayed to the right of President Obama’s desk and the expansive window, over a Frederick Remington sculpture, The Bronco Buster.

What is the meaning of this gesture? Most of my grandfather Norman Rockwell’s paintings are about tolerance, unity and the inherent goodness and resilience of the human spirit. The reflection of that vision and the profound presence of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the bust below, by African-American sculptor Charles Alston, speak volumes without saying a word. Perhaps they are able to say what Obama could not in these circumstances of necessary protocol.

Rockwell “snuck” in the man in the bright red shirt (which draws attention to him) with noticeably darker skin. My grandfather occasionally did this to skirt The Saturday Evening Post’s policy of only painting people of ethnicity in subservient roles to whites. And here they are working together to repair our Lady’s torch. My grandfather left out the rest of liberty to focus on her strong arm outstretched to the sky, proclaiming the light of freedom to everyone, especially immigrants. The ornate protective fence around the flame is the painting’s most delicate detail.

In times of great upheaval, Norman Rockwell’s art and the words and actions of Martin Luther King, Jr. not only continue to resonate, but they remind us of the values and lifted vision that have always made our country great, no matter what strife or turmoil we may have to face.

Thank you to whomever moved that painting. I got the message. Hopefully others will as well.

The painting was donated by Steven Spielberg to the White House collection in 1994. It has hung in the Oval Office during the last three administrations, watching over Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama.

The question is: will it remain there now?

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1. I have to be an expert. I've often called myself the reluctant blogger. I wrote a memoir about divorce and while I was writing it, I decided to post the first chapter on a website for divorced moms. In less than 24 hours my chapter, now called a blog, was syndicated to Australia and Germany and within a few days had gotten nearly 4,000 likes and close to 600 comments. Despite this, I'm not an expert on divorce (nor do I want to be) but I was an expert in MY divorce. I was the only person who experienced it the way I did, and that made me the only one who could tell that story.



2. There's no value in it. How do you place a value on connecting with someone? Or a value on building trust with a client? Or how about a value on how you feel when you express yourself in a way that you've been wanting to?



3. No one cares. I honestly thought that my story was cliche and that no one would want to read another story of betrayal and divorce. But my story has now been viewed more than 33,000 times on the internet. So you never know who will care, and really, if you reach one person, isn't that worth it?

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My weapon of choice when it comes to photography is Lightroom, but for this post, I'm going to start with the assumption that you have the more widely used Photoshop, inexpensive software like Affinity Photo or even the free GIMP.

I'll define "easiest techniques" as something that can be accomplished within a minute or so. So if anything below seems complicated, stick with me and give it a try; you might be pleasantly surprised to discover how easy it is.

We're also not going to be touching various effects filters you have on your phone, nor the many Actions you can get with Photoshop. While some of them can be impressive, these aren't really "techniques" you can learn from and re-use.

Here then are my top 10. (Unless otherwise indicated, all pictures below are taken by me).

1. Straighten the horizon.

This is probably my number one beef with many landscape and architecture photographs I come across. Unless there is an artistic reason to do so, a slanted horizon is about the surest sign of sloppy editing.

What's the best way to straighten the horizon? Look for something in your image that should be either perfectly horizontal (like the shoreline or a sidewalk) or vertical (lamp post, building). Use the Rotate tool, available in all photo editing apps (including the one on your phone) using that object as a point of reference.

Here's an example of a before and after (the after is rotated by just one degree and also cropped, see tip 2):

Not every image you take is going to be perfectly framed. Take a critical look and decide what the focus of your image should be; then crop it to give that part of the image the prominence it deserves.

Here's one, for example, of a model getting body-painted for a shoot. Pretty model, yes, but a pretty average image.

Crop in tight on her face, though, and (with a few color tweaks) the image holds a lot more interest.

Here's another image I took just a couple of days ago with my phone camera while at my neighborhood park.

I love the sunset glow in the skies, but I'd really like your eye to go to the sun peeking through the cage on the baseball field. The cars in the foreground and house rooftops in the back, though, are elements that detract from the image. Also, the horizon cuts my picture in half (read up on the Rule of Thirds to learn why this makes for boring images).

So here I've cropped it to bring the key focus of my image into the bottom third of my grid.

This is a great technique that will raise the level of many of your pictures. In this particular case, I'm not done yet; see below.

3. Use Levels and Curves.

Stay with me now, don't let the jargon throw you. This is easier than you might think.

Does it seem like most pictures you take tend to be somewhat flat and lifeless? It's time you discovered Levels and Curves. This is something I use for pretty much every image I work on.

Start with Levels (in Photoshop, use Command-L to bring up the palette). That hilly graph you see is called a Histogram. At the base of that histogram are three sliders - black, grey and white.

Drag the black slider to the left edge of the histogram and the white slider to the right edge. What this does is it boosts the lighter areas and deepens the darker areas, often significantly improving the overall contrast.

You can take this one step further by using Curves, which also improves contrast, but offers more control over individual parts of the image. To bring up this palette, hit Command-M, and you will see a diagonal line across a graph.

To keep this tutorial simple, all you do is reshape that line into a slight 'S' curve. Do this by clicking on the line to create two points -- one near the bottom third and the other in the top third, and then dragging them out just a touch to form an S shape.

Here's just how big a change Levels and Curves can deliver to your image:

The original (after cropping):

After using Levels:

After using Curves:

4. Eliminate or Reduce Noise.

I'll start by saying that there are many superior ways of reducing excessive grain or noise in an image. Since these are supposed to be quick, one-minute tips, try this:

In Photoshop, go to Filter > Noise > Despeckle, or to Filter > Noise > Reduce Noise. The second tool offers more control than the first.

Here's my image above after using Despeckle.

5. Remove dust spots and blemishes.

It's easy to get rid of dust spots on your images or unsightly zits on your subject's face. Photoshop's Spot Healing Brush is built just for that.

To access it, find the brush in the tool palette (or keep hitting Shift-J till it shows up, it looks like a little Band-Aid strip). Adjust the brush size so it just about covers the area you want to fix, and click on it. Poof, the spot is gone.

Here's a before and after from a stock image I had. Fixing all those spots took me less than thirty seconds (and yes, I timed it).

6. Remove Distractions.

How often do you see this: a fine photograph of an architectural landmark, ruined by a lamppost that you couldn't avoid getting into the frame. Or a piece of trash that you didn't previously notice in the grass. Your image would be better without them, but how do you get rid of these?

Photoshop has a couple of tools built just for this: the Patch tool and the Content Aware Move tool. As in the tip above, hit Shift-J until the tool you want shows up; then select the offending element by drawing loosely around it and move it out. Photoshop does the rest. If it's a large-ish element, you might want to work using smaller selections.

This one's not the greatest image, but good enough to demonstrate the Before, how to select, and the After when using the Patch tool.

7. Make it Black & White.

Sometimes a photo might appear just really boring. There's very little you can do to rescue it from the reject pile. But wait! Before you do that, try converting it to B&W and playing with the Levels and Curves as explained in Tip 3. You might be surprised at the number of images that somehow seem to get transformed when you do this.

Here's one that I took in Washington DC a couple of years ago. Nothing to write home about, right?

Use the trick I mentioned above, though, and it's something that could just have come out of some old photo archives.

8. Fix those red eyes.

I couldn't find any red-eye shots in my image library, but this one from Wikipedia is perfect for this tip. Here's the original image.

From the toolbar in Photoshop, access the Red Eye Tool (or hit Shift-J until you see it come up), and drag from the top left corner of the eye to the bottom right. That's it. This is literally a five-second fix.

9. Dodge, Burn and Sponge

This is especially useful for images that can do with some color saturation or desaturation in small areas - boosting the color in a bowl of fruit on a dining table for example, or to reduce the color in an over-saturated neon jersey.

You'll find all three in the same area of the toolbar (hit Shift-O repeatedly till the one you want shows up).

In this before and after, for example, you can see how using Dodge and Sponge to saturate the foreground elements, while using Burn on the rest, helps to focus your eye on the primary subject and creates separation from the background.

10. Sharpen your image.

Sharpening of an image should always be left for the very end. It sounds counter-intuitive, but the tool best suited for this is called Unsharp Mask. Look for it under Filter > Sharpen.

Pretty much every image can benefit from sharpening, and the palette sliders give you a lot of control on just how much (or how little) you want to do this.

Here's one example of a shot I took from inside a wigwam. Here's the before:

And here's the after:

• Retouching: What are the best self-governing image editing & retouching companies?


• Photo Editing: How do I make a person look like a statue in Photoshop?


• Tips and Hacks for Photography: How can I improve my photography skills?

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KAIROS...in TROGIR

As usual, the Greeks were ahead of us in thinking and speaking about such conundrums. Where we use one word to describe a whole range of things, they had the good sense to use different words to mark distinctions in reality and in experience. For example, they had three different words for the experience of love -- eros for possessive love, philia for friendly love, and agape for sacrificial love. Not surprisingly, the Greeks had two words for marking the differences between the experiences of time -- 

CHRONOS AND KAIROS.

Trogir is a precious and consistent part of world heritage. But don't just look for stone.  Look for the mysterious spirit in the stones. Look for all those architects, builders, artists, patrons -- for all those stories hidden in the history of stone.

...into creativity...

...mirroring your LATTICE LEAP into the THIRD.

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-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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