SKATE AND *CREATE*
NOVEMBER 9, 2002 - EVAN HECOX ART OPENING
After a few hours of watching serious skate sessions and listening to punk rock, and evening of art and jazz sounded like a good idea. The next evening, The New Image Art Gallery in West Hollywood had a nice Evan Hecox show lined up with a bonus five-pack of artists from Frisco: Mark Gonzales, Keegan McHargue, Shay Nowick, and Chris Lindig, and A. Scooter Rudolph. Long Beach's own Ray Barbee Band was sheduled to play music.
Too bad there was a power outage on the block. Undaunted, we walked up the stairs, over the vacuum cleaner shop and toward the tiny rooms that served as galleries. The candles that lit the building's interior were pure horror movie material, but the old building with its tiny office-like rooms was from detective fiction.
The flickering light made it tough to see the art, but Gonzales had some really good stuff. His angels, skaters, bird-headed people, and headless horsemen were drawn with the same freedom and imagination that makes the Gonz a skate legend. One series of ball-point sketches on a long roll of industrial paper towel went for something 900 bones! Lindig's '70s-inspired images were pretty interesting, and Scooter's combinations of geometric shapes, contour drawings, and bold pastels were nice, too. The others got lost in the shade and crowed. Sorry about that.
Hecox's stuff was in a separate room, which was also lit by candles and a few flashlights that were held by the gallery staff. The illustrations and art on display were inspired by travels in Tokyo, and it was simple and good. From drunk businessmen to fish shops to pharmaceutical mascots, it was all there. I picked up a price sheet to see what the deal was with them, and some of the images were 200 bucks or less. Not bad!
Then a lady walked in and started yelling at the staff about how the price sheets were all gone. She snatched oneout of my hands and threw it on the ground as she lectured everyone how no sheets were to leave. I said that I wasn't done yet and she looked right through me as if she were pure evil. I cut out, but not before leaving a long note in the gallery's guestbook about how people who come out in the rain to squint at art in the dark should be treated better. I was glad that The Ray Barbee Band couldn't play due to the outage, because my buzz was killed.
