Press Release

Michael Deyermond is an angst ridden, tragic-love, soul searching poet with a fatalism tempered by irony, wit, and a gut-wrenching sense of dark comedy. His first exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery in 2015 featured an old wooden rowboat on a giant pile of sand in the middle of the gallery. The humble vessel was painted with the words, "I still believe California can save me". The poet’s aspirations, belief in a promise, and literal survival were on the line. He followed up in subsequent exhibitions with hand-built wooden benches carved with aphorisms like, "I sat here and wondered why the very edge is always exactly where I sit". The wood he used for these benches was reclaimed from fallen windmills at ranch in Arizona, clearly a reference to Don Quixote jousting with himself. A couple years later, coming close to death from health issues in Italy, he began making obelisks and wooden trophies, perhaps symbolic of the heroic effort to continue. His self-comparison to writers like Jack London and Jack Kerouac, who lived large, drank, and died young is reflected in his word paintings," Bye Bye Jack London" and "I should have died young", both of which are included in his new exhibition, “The Trouble Cup.””

For this exhibition, Michael Deyermond wrote,

in the sand holding hands
on the beach where elephant seals
come to do all the things we imagined for us
we made our california lover's pact
the world as we created it or die trying

on that day of sand and water and lawlessness
i gave my heart to you to the poetry of california
you made me your hero and all the days since
i have loved you like tragedy

Coincidentally, Ned Evans’ new exhibition, "Water Bound" was also inspired by a near death experience. Hospitalized during the pandemic for sepsis, Evans dreamt of the ocean and heard voices telling him to make these “goofy, naïve works about water.” A life-long surfer, he moved from the San Fernando Valley to Laguna Beach in the late 60s and enrolled at UC Irvine when LA legends Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Larry Bell and Craig Kauffman were teaching there. As Jamie Brisick has written, Ned was “originally known as a formalist, abstract painter of serious rigor” and it took him “many years before he could allow himself to make work so close to his heart.” Early in his career Ned thought, “You can’t be a surfer. You’ve got to be serious.” But like other artists in LA’s Finish Fetish and Light and Space group, the ability to blend materials and sensibilities of life in the ocean with life in the studio, led to artistic inventions now considered original to California art. Ned’s resin sculptures of drips and pools are a unique and suggestively figurative extension of Peter Alexander’s cubes, while his H20 paintings of simple striped, and patterned seascapes are playful, and fresh, with a flat, abstracted realism not unlike Milton Avery. As Brisick concludes in his essay on Evans, “the work exudes freedom. It curves, twists, splashes, shapeshifts. It gives the feeling of being in flux,” certainly like the ocean he has spent his life in.