Artists

For the next 17 days, a remarkable sculpture will serve as a prominent emblem for the 1996 Olympic Games, which get underway Friday night with extravagant opening ceremonies. It's not the first work of art commissioned by an Olympic organizing committee in the last hundred years, since the ancient contest was revived for modern times; but it is certainly the first to be so prominent an emblem for the quadrennial event. It may also be the best.

Assembled for a lecture on "the nature of abstraction" at the Orange County Art Museum here, Robert Irwin's audience got rather more than it bargained for last week--a dense but engaging two-hour talk that ranged from a discussion of phenomenology to a wry recollection of hearing his first big show dissed by fellow artist Craig Kauffman.

If you were around in a time now faded, nostalgia is a painful thing. These photographs of the L.A. art scene in its toddling heyday are like honey and vinegar. The subject of a book and an exhibition, they picture artists around the now-legendary Ferus Gallery in West Hollywood, where they presented the beginnings of the most original art that ever happened in the city. The artists pictured were nobody then.

Say you wanted to shout at the top of your lungs about the malaise and apathy you believe are crippling American society. If you were a visual artist, you'd probably lust to deliver your statement in clear public view at the center of one of the nation's largest metropolises. You'd be sure to make the message as forthright and colorful as possible.

To promote local artists and art organizations, the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department is offering grants for the upcoming year. Applications for the Cultural Grants Program are available at all branches of the Los Angeles Public Library, the district offices of Los Angeles City Council members and at Cultural Affairs Department facilities.

Some artists' work begins not with canvas or clay but with fabric from which they create one-of-a-kind clothing. Visitors to the 30th annual Sawdust Festival in Laguna Beach (through Aug. 25) can find all kinds of art to wear, from hand-painted silk Hawaiian shirts to coats of antique damask linens. Here's a sampling of fashion made by four Laguna Beach artists who have booths at the festival. (Maps are at the gate, and dressing rooms are available.) * Booth No.

Hidden among the crisp green fields and polished villages in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, the "Blue Country" is partly a landscape of the imagination. Although less than an hour's drive south of Munich, it can only really be reached by traveling back nearly 90 years to a time when horses were more reliable than cars and a farmhouse could be rented for less than $2 a month.

Awise man once said that art makes us human, and if sculptor and painter Samuel Brantley had to pick a philosophy of life, that maxim would be it. Art, after all, has lifted him above his own brutal life, a strange journey that began in Virginia when he was 8, with his father killing his mother and his brother then killing his father, and culminated more recently in his own hard times after he lost the roof over his head.

Michael Brindley's dream is to eventually have his own studio where he can create surreal space-and-ocean paintings on canvas. Meanwhile, he is winning national recognition for his surfboard art, a dozen examples of which were on display Tuesday at the Newport Pier. The occasion was a photo shoot for Brindley's portfolio, but the work also drew a crowd of admiring tourists and surfers.