Day or night, the windows of her gallery provide a breathtaking view of Hollywood, to the west.
Even though the days will start growing shorter now that summer has begun, Opening Night still will be staged in the sunlight. Unfortunately.
Close Your Eyes and Imagine
For those of us with slightly romantic-adventurous minds, doesn’t the notion of visiting a pristine gallery early on a Saturday evening, in such a setting, appeal?
Ms. London is trying to bring clarity to a confused Los Angeles world run by four goofy men:
The cheating Mayor I Love Me Villaraigosa, by the headless, heedless Sheriff Boob Baca, by the District Attorney Steve (If You Have a Bribe, Call Me First) Cooley, and the serial liar City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, named as a tribute to the contents of his mind. Make it five if you want to add the least qualified public servant this side of Spike Jones, America’s Most Unadmired Admiral, LAUSD Supt. David (I Hope to Advance to the First Grade Next Year) Brewer.
I digress.
If you will forgive the excessive punnery, I appreciate the nature of Ms. London’s intense intellectual inquiries into nature.
The exhibit debuting on Saturday night is “REALization:Leaf Relief Landscapes.”
Let’s Climb Inside
Being an artist with a mind that refuses to stop churning, Ms. London was not content to merely label her exhibitions.
Thinking as a marketer, she played with the letters, capitalizing and italicizing some, for a most honorable reason, to attract attention.
In the tradition of President Truman, Ms. London’s gallery is merely known as “S B London.” Notice that she de-punctuates her name the same way as Harry S Truman. No periods, please.
For logicians in the audience, Ms. London’s exhibits are sequential.
Depicting Inner, Inner Meaning
In Ms. London’s words:
“‘REALization:Leaf Relief Landscapes’ expands upon a dialogue with a microscopic leaf pattern that began in the last exhibition, ‘TRANSformation: Nature Decoded,’where 18 18” x 18” light boxes illuminated a microscopic leaf pattern piece by piece.
“Organized as a mosaic, each light box contained a bit of the microscopic leaf pattern, and worked together to convey the larger tapestry.
“In ‘REALization:Leaf Relief Landscapes,’the microscopic leaf pattern now morphs into a series of cast cement reliefs where the pattern dimensionally takes form and projects out from the background.”
At the heart of Ms. London’s artistic gifts lies a commendable curiosity, a jet-propelled desire to discover nature down to its finest, most nearly undetectable point.
A Little Grass, Pal?
Remember when you used to lie in the grass in earlier days?
Lowering your vision to grass level, didn’t you ever zero in on a single blade, then fling open the doors to your bursting imagination?
His Silky Touch
The living journalist I studied the most in my earliest days was Red Smith, a stunningly distinguished sports columnist for the Herald-Tribune in New York.
Covering sports hardly connotes journalistic ability.
But Mr. Smith, dignified above all, elevated sportswriting to a plateau worthy of inspection by those in serious pursuit of life.
He elevated the 99 percent pedestrian level of sportswriting the way a sanitation truck driver dignifies his profession when he wears a pinstripe suit, powder-blue dress shirt and striped necktie to work each morning.
A Fit for Royalty
Mr. Smith loved horse racing, the sport of kings, more than the other sports combined.
He possessed the rare ability to draw an unsuspecting reader to a stool beside him before the reader realized he had been seduced.
Every April, a week before the Kentucky Derby, he would travel to bluegrass country.
Power of a Lexicon
From Mr. Smith’s mere but powerful words, you could feel the chill in your own bones on a mid-spring morning in rural Kentucky. You saw, you tasted the blueness of the cavernous sky.
You could hear the damp grass crunch beneath your shoes as Mr. Smith ambled into a spacious, ancient, darkened horse barn. Heat rises, and so does something else, Invited or not, the questionable barn smells wafted into your nostrils.
Subject, Please?
And then Red Smith struck. Spellbound you were. The stirring column that cradled you until the final line had, as its germination point, the tiniest incident — the untied shoe of an exercise boy, a horse’s gait, a barn regular’s ah-choo.
For all others in the universe, much less sportswriters, the happening was too small to note. On these kinds of colorful, elusive details, Mr. Smith built a legendary career.
Ms. London, meet Mr. Smith.
