Night Lights - Wendy Goldberg

It isn't easy to do 'night art.' Rembrandt, perhaps, set the standard in the iconic masterpiece The Night Watch, when he evoked a dark complicated scene splashed here and there by torchlight. These days you don't find many artists who choose to set their work in the night hours. No doubt it's harder now than it was in Rembrandt's day, as we live in a time when artificial light is so pervasive that few of us know what dark really means. So consider the art of Wendy Goldberg, an artist from Fairfax in Marin County whose velvety medium is pastel on paper. Her landscapes, many as local as she is, come with a fresh, sometimes startling difference of vision, especially when she tackles the night. Shapes of trees or buildings form themselves out of shadows, dark against dark, speaking the truth of how our eyes work at night. Bright lights against the dark spark the same warm, bittersweet feeling as a lit window in a strange town. There is a rich evening color, a purple-blue just before the sky fades to black, that has always given me a sharp pang of pleasure, and there it is, one of her signature colors. The long rectangular work shown here is a new piece, done on a cold windy hill in San Rafael just before dawn. Like good poetry it suggests and cajoles rather than states a solid fact; as you watch the sky seems to shift from dark into the explosive colors of dawn. Watch for Wendy's work in local shows and open studios. Her website is http://www.wendygoldbergart.com/

Witnessing a Miracle

There are a number of great art shows right now in San Francisco, including Martin Puryear at SFMOMA, but it's hard to beat "Afghanistan; Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul" at the Asian Art Museum. Not only is the work on display breathtakingly beautiful and deeply fascinating as an intimate glimpse of the long ago and far away, but the show itself is a true miracle out of a battered world. The pieces on display are from four sites in Afghanistan and date for the most part from the early centuries of the common era, soon after Alexander made his mark there, when the Silk Road was at the height of vigorous trade among widespread nations, including China, Egypt, India, Rome, and the West. For countless centuries Afghanistan was a rich and important land (evidence of trade with Mesopotamia dates to about 4000 bce) - elaborately worked gold testifies to a wealthy, sophisticated culture whose Nomadic strains helped insure a splendid display of jewelry and burial goods. The heroes behind this exhibition are ordinary Afghans who risked their lives during the Soviet and Taliban years, keeping goods hidden where they could not be stolen or destroyed. In 2003, with the removal of the Taliban, priceless examples of a heritage that belongs to all humankind were discovered intact in a bank vault in Kabul. This amazing show is at the Asian Art Museum until January 25.

A local favorite

Richard Diebenkorn was one of those artists, all too rare, who simply was not capable of making a mistake. His paintings and drawings are full of smudges, paint-overs, and changes; his process of trial and error is always on full display but inevitably, the more he did the better it always got. Diebenkorn died in Berkeley in 1993. He was well known in California but less so with the rest of the country until a major retrospective in the late 90's raised his profile, including a very well-received showing at the Whitney Museum in New York. I saw a small show of his works this weekend at his alma mater Stanford University and, as always, was knocked out by everything I saw, even the tossed-off birthday card sketches he made for his son. The works on display belong to his lifelong friend Cary Stanton (they met as fellow Stanford freshmen), and reflect a lot of lovely, personal moments on Santa Cruz Island off the coast near Santa Barbara, a place which is or was largely owned by the Stanton family. Diebenkorn was as at home with abstraction as figuration, with black and white value as with rich color, and with watercolor, pencil, charcoal, ink, and oils.