Velvet painting's stature in the art world is akin to that of creamed corn in the province of fine cuisine.
Although artists have been putting paint to fuzzy fabric since the 14th century, velvet painting's reputation is understandably weighed down by the volume of curio Elvises and crying clowns sold inexpensively at the Mexican border alongside porcelain burros and ashtrays shaped like Texas.
Curator Christina Ochoa, who organized the show "Contemporary Velvet Painting," which opened Saturday at the Patricia Correia Gallery, hopes to return some respectability to the maligned medium. "It's become this passion of mine," she says. As in all art forms, she says, there is good and bad. Canvas doesn't inevitably grow impressionistic flowers, velvet doesn't have to be a backdrop to canine poker.
There's nary an Elvis among the 28 pieces in the show. Among the seven artists represented are Sandow Birk and Claudia Parducci, whose reputations lend credibility to the form, Ochoa says. But they aren't the first fine artists to use velvet canvases. Edgar Leeteg, known as the father of velvet painting, created more than 1,000 works from 1933 to 1953, Ochoa says. (Also called the American Gauguin, he's best known for his paintings of Tahitian women.) Later, Peter Alexander and Julian Schnabel did notable work on velvet, a highly unforgiving medium in which dry-brush application is the norm.
Ochoa, the gallery and visual arts director at Self-Help Graphics & Art in East Los Angeles, was first drawn to the medium by Birk's painting "L.A. Drive By." She began to research velvet art, and in 2002 organized a group show called "Black Velvet Kruise," presented at the Self-Help gallery and in Tijuana.
Birk, best known for his contemporized Dante's Inferno and paintings of a fictitious war between Los Angeles and San Francisco, has five pieces in this show. He works mostly in other media, but his first solo exhibitions in the late 1980s were velvet paintings.
A few years out of the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, he was painting images inspired by a four-year surfing expedition through Latin America. "It occurred to me that if I was going to paint pictures of Latin America, maybe I should paint them in a Latin American sort of way. To me, that was Mexican velvet painting."
He was working at the Earl McGrath Gallery at the time, painting walls, hammering nails, answering the telephone. He hounded McGrath for a show of his velvets. "He said, 'That's ridiculous. Yeah, I'll give you a show someday.' Then he winked," Birk recalls.
