FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Garry Booth
Email: phoneboothgallery@gmail.com
GROUP EXHIBITION: ALMOST BLUE
Kind of blue, blue skies ahead, having the blues, true blue — is any other color positioned so close to the middle of the road? The feelings blue connote are neither desperate nor euphoric; instead, they’re often wavering between good and bad, unobtrusive but always ubiquitous. “Almost Blue,” a group exhibition at Phone Booth Gallery, will read into the ubiquitous color blue and suss out its nuances and meanings. The exhibition officially opens February 25th, with a reception from 7-10 P.M. This all-ages event will take place at Phone Booth Gallery’s exhibition space, 2533 East Broadway, Long Beach, CA 90803. “Almost Blue” will remain on view through March 31, 2012 both at the exhibition space and on www.phoneboothgallery.com.
“I started painting in blue when I learned of Casagemas’s death,” Picasso said, referring to the suicide of a friend as his famous Blue Period’s inciting incident. Sadness and loss were, according to him, a fair reason to use just the one color, and sadness occurs in Almost Blue, too, like in the ephemeral, grayish mountains painted by Yevgeniya Miikhailik or David Owen’s penetrating portrait of Muddy Waters. Then there’s the ambivalence of a drawing like Mr. Frivolous’ A Load of Blueming Nonsense, which shows a big-eyed girl with an bluish lily in her hair surrounded by text that tries to find significance in random instances of color (does mean anything to eat a blueberry under a blue sky?).
Moses Black finds spirituality in a blue that is speckled with spots that look like stars, and the deep night blue background makes Rod Luff’s sensual portrait feel like fantasy. But blue also is just a color, a primary on the color wheel that’s often used to “cool down” a composition, which is how it works in Robert Pokorny’s delightfully abstract portrait studies and in John P. Wales’ far less abstract painting of an angst-filled superhero riding in on a rocket.
That colors have personalities and effects may be age-old knowledge, but that doesn’t make it an any less compelling or constant. Almost Blue invites you to spend some time thinking about what blue is and it feels.
Exhibiting Artists Include: Alex Gardner, Arlene Booth, Bryan Schnelle, David Owen, Famous When Dead, Garry Booth, Harry Diaz, Jenny Cotterill, John P. Wales, JoKa, Jonathan Baker, Kevin Bannister, Mariya Suzuki, Mark Michelon, Moses Black, Mr. Frivolous, Nick Comparone, Nicole Goux, Rod Luff, Robert Pokorny, Ryan Milner, Scott Flanders, {ths}, Yevgeniya Mikhailik, and more!
