French-born painter and part-time LA resident Pierre Picot makes landscape drawings on paper that possess both the gusto and the subtlety of calligraphy. His swirly whooshes of wind and raggy-jaggy lines of craggy mountains articulate an onomatopoeia of marks. Raw, gestural and gritty, a pile of Pierre Picot’s rocks has the animated oddness of Philip Guston’s lugubrious shoes. Picot’s art-making process is like Neil Young’s, who said, “If you’re trying to catch a rabbit, you don’t wait right by the hole…There’s nothing about music that should be ‘working on it.’” (link) Picot says, “The piece just sits there, waiting to be noticed while I am trying not to do so, then I quickly see it at a glance, totally by chance, almost as an afterthought…then it will show its face, reveal itself, indicate what the new gesture will be.”

With his chosen moniker, Roast Hoggmann firmly places himself among the anthropomorphic creatures that populate his world. The hog, a stand-in for the artist, reappears at various ages, from a child learning about mortality, to a skull abandoned by a riverside. A diverse group of characters occupy this stage- a yeti tiredly mows his lawn in Los Angeles heat, a vase happily looks up at the flowers it holds, and a bull apologizes for his son in a china shop. As Hoggmann notes, "Humor is a powerful tool, a universal language, that hits the gut directly.” He increases this empathetic connection by building up the paintings so that the characters have one step in our physical world and one within that of the frame. Painted windows are glossy, succulent leaves are slick, and hair is bristly. As he layers paint, he sculpts and cuts it, adding and subtracting until each element finds its natural place in space. The vulnerable figures are built up until they seem almost touchable, inviting us to share in their humorous and sweetly sad predicaments.

White on White
A Group Show

Nancy Monk
Dominic Terlizzi
Woods Davy
Stan Edmondson
Mark Posey
Ernst Scheidegger
Randy West