It turns out I will do anything to keep from going to the gym.

It turns out I will do anything to keep from going to the gym.

Even go look at art.

If you need to avoid anything this month, you’re in luck, because there are some great shows out there.

I actually started out going to the post office (the holiday stamps are out!), and I had every intention of going right to the gym after I got back. However, I remembered Fay Jones was showing at Grover/Thurston this month. I have quite a soft spot for Fay Jones, she curated me into my very first art show, it was in Bellingham and that is all I remember about it, except that she chose my dear friend and wine drinking partner Carolyn Zick to win that show. I feel like alot of what Fay has been doing lately has been by the book for her, dutifully painting sailors dancing with women in polka-dotted dresses. This body of work, however, is beautifully nuanced and chock full of narrative content. A friend of mine told me he went to the opening, and his companion said to him: "I want to go, these paintings make me feel stupid." (ed note: no comment.) Jones usually paints on paper, but in the larger pieces she uses some specific Japanese paper (of course I didn't write down the name) that is the color of parchment. This buttery golden color is a great unifying factor behind the brushy sumi ink and acrylic. You can see where she restates features and moves things around as collage pieces, only to paint them out in the end. The top corners of the drawings are pierced through many times, recording her taking the painting up and down as she worked on it. All this evidence of touching the paintings gives them a melancholy--it gives it human characteristics. They are fragile and resilient all at once.

I also want to encourage you to go to Pacini Lubel, there are two very nice shows there. In the first gallery is the ever more noteable Adrian Arleo. Often skill in a medium can overshadow emotional depth, or the message is not serviced by the facility with the material -- in other words, people are often craftsmen or story tellers, but rarely both; Arleo's figures convey novels, while rarely dipping into the melodramatic, and are hugely skilled. In the back gallery at Pachini Lubel, Eric Bashor's pallet-knifed oil on linen is also on the must see list.

Now get out there you knuckleheads.