Stan Edmondson has been working in clay his entire life. He has known or personally assisted key figures in Southern California ceramics like John Mason, Michael and Magdalena Frimkess, Jun Kaneko, and Peter Voulkos. His sprawling studio, with its kilns and sculpture garden, is embedded in a historic Pasadena neighborhood. This is the arena where Edmondson’s artistic will collaborates with the elements of earth and fire in what he calls a dance, in which the clay leads. Often working large in scale, he says, “When I think I am in control of the process, I’m reminded of the order of things. Sometimes the clay chooses not to dance, and other times I try to stay out of the way as much as possible. It often calls for a whack with a 2x4, a splash of glaze, a dive into uncertainty, and a prayer to the unknown.” Regularly staying up all night long with a fiery kiln, he recognizes that he is part of an elemental process that has occupied humankind for millennia. Alchemy for Idiots will include wall reliefs, sculptures, vessels, plates, and other ceramic forms, all installed on various levels of cinder blocks and paving stones.

With a wink and a nod to the legal concept of ‘attractive nuisance’ (a landowner may be held liable if a child is attracted to something on his property and becomes injured), Lou Beach’s exhibition of new collages is titled, An Attractive New Sense, suggesting that art may be appealing, but should be approached with caution. His witty and provocative work can be compared to the robust oddities of Hannah Höch, the incisive critiques of John Heartfield, and the curious fantasies of Joseph Cornell, though he sites Ernie Kovacs as his main inspiration. The son of Polish parents displaced by World War II, Beach (born Andrzej Lubicz) came to the US at the age of four, and grew up in Rochester, NY. He travelled to California in 1968, began studying the Surrealists, and started making collages from LIFE Magazines. In the mid-‘70s, he lived in Boston, where he refined his technique, and had his first solo exhibition at the Boston Center for the Arts. He then returned to LA, where he built a long career as an illustrator creating record album covers and art for magazines and newspapers. For the last ten years Beach has focused on his collages, which art critic Peter Frank described as “sweetly uproarious orgasms of juxtaposition.”

French-born painter and part-time LA resident, Pierre Picot, makes landscape and archeologically-inspired motifs that possess both the gusto and the subtlety of calligraphy, as well as the raw grit of Philip Guston. His raggy-jaggy lines of craggy mountains and teetering classical vases combine in surreal tableaux, like a flattened de Chirico stage. They are open fields of space where the artistic mind composes symbolic elements. He quotes Francis Picabia, “Our head is round to allow our thoughts to change direction.” In fact, he describes his artistic process as allowing instinct to organize the unknown. The “confusion, the mind-boggling and exalted complexity of the world, gets into the mix with varying degrees of importance, presence and dominance, and I am faced with the results…my instinct becomes its own form of the inevitable.” Landscape Yo-Yo is Pierre Picot’s third solo exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery.