Christina Waters

Through April 30 catch the vibrant coastal landscapes on exhibition at the new Davenport Gallery.

Works by Ray Ginghofer, Peter Loftus (shown here), Brian Rounds, Frank Galuszka and Claire Thorson help to create technical expressionist synergy. The rich colorwork of the landscapes played lively counterpoint to large-scale experimental black and white images by photographer Steve Laufer.

After the opening reception last week, we went next door to the Roadhouse (still haunted by the sweet ghost of the New Davenport Cash Store) and enjoyed some excellent salmon.

Curated by bronze sculptor Steve Rudzinski, the current Davenport Gallery show provides a great excuse to cruise up Highway One and savor the mustard in bloom along the north coast.

Shiva Paintstiks are the designer version of largescale crayons for professional artists. Think of oil paints in stick form and you’re there. Thing is, they require some practice to really achieve a good result. That’s where Andy Lenz comes in. Longtime local artist and paintstik maestro, Lenz will provide a free, in-store demo of these intriguing art tools, this Saturday, April 24, from 1-3pm, at (I think you probably already know where) - at Lenz Arts, 142 River Street.

Here’s an example (l.) of how compelling paintstick artwork can look from the hand of a master. This is part of the on-going oeuvre of Philadelphia artist Susan Moore, most of whose output for the past decade has been created using oil stick techniques.

Paintings by Frank Galuszka, Ray Ginghofer, Peter Loftus and Erika Perloff, among others, will be showcased at the Wind & Weather show at Davenport Gallery, through the end of the month.

The exhibition features leading specialists of plein air landscape paintings. (Shown here, Galuszka’s Cove, Davenport, 24 x 36 inches, oil on canvas.)

Don’t miss the Artist’s Reception, this Saturday, April 17 from 5-8pm.

Davenport Gallery is located at 450 Hwy 1, next door to the Davenport Roadhouse.

If there’s a stringed instrument that David Lindley hasn’t mastered, it doesn’t exist. The former lead guitarist for Jackson Browne, whose soaring riffs burned their way through most of the classics of Browne’s golden age  - and beyond, into the eclectic world music excesses of El Rayo-X - will team up with dobro maestro Bob Brozman this Saturday, at the Rio Theater, for some blistering string theory.

Lindley’s virtuosity with the string repertoire of Asia, Egypt, the Caribbean, Uzbekestan, Latin America, the American south, and on and on, has made him a legend among ethnomusicologists as well as rock groupies who want it all. The show should be amazing.

Amazing.

Rio Theater - still holding down the center of Soquel Avenue on the eastside of Santa Cruz. Contact Snazzy Productions for ticket info. But just be there. The show this Saturday starts at 7:30pm - Gold Circle $40adv/general $25.

Dynamic maestra Nicole Paiement dazzled packed houses in San Francisco last weekend with a series of ingenious performances of Wozzeck, Alban Berg’s stormy psychological opera blending surrealism and modernist atonality.

Paiement and company worked with a newly-adapted score for chamber orchestra, a move that created greater intimacy of sound. The audience felt drawn into the harrowing story portrayed in the jewelbox Yerba Buena theater. Berg’s great opera of class anger and cultural schizophrenia — created in the years just after the Great War — was given a riveting (more…)

Ceramic artist Jenny Morten makes porcelain objects so appealing, to the eye and the hand, that they manage to shape-shift across the border between sculpture and functionality.

Ablaze with subtle hues of the ocean and shore, her bowls, vases and gleaming hand-thrown items make sensational gifts. You will want to claim some for your very own, too. These pieces are extremely seductive — I own several pieces myself, and intend to own even more.

Original hand-crafted artwork. Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing that enlightened Santas like to deal with.

Jenny Morten’s Mar Monte Studio is open on Saturdays 2pm – 5pm, through December 19th.

168 Mar Monte Avenue, La Selva Beach - 831/688-5173

Nicole Paiement conducts the UCSC Orchestra and Choir in three performances of the Baroque masterwork by Mozart. The Requiem will be performed in the Recital Hall, Friday Nov. 20 at 7:30 pm, Saturday Nov 21 at 7:30 pm and Sunday Nov 22 at 2:00 pm. $24 general, $20 senior, $10 student.

The Requiem is considered one of the treasures of the choral repertoire and offers celestial quartets, thundering fugues and some of the most operatic Latin ever devised. There is not one ounce of flab or down-time in this soaring collaboration of choir and orchestra. And there’s not a bad seat in this acoustically-gifted hall.

For ticket information see the website, or call the UCSC Performing Arts Ticket Office @ 831/459-2159.

Two of my favorite artists’ visits in October happened 600 miles apart.

The new, enigmatic Blurred Landscapes large-scale photo montages by Sara Friedlander — created, cunningly manipulated, and ultimately altered by painted overlays, lingered long in my imagination.

These pieces have the impact of a childhood dream. To see them, is to have an immediate sense of recognition. And yet, Friedlander weaves images from geographically far-flung regions — images from Japan might be edited into a forest in the Czech Republic — in order to create these eerily soothing dreamscapes. After being printed, re-organized, and printed again on heavy archival paper, the images are then enhanced with oil and acrylic paint detailing. So the Landscapes are at once multiple-generational assemblages, and yet one-of-a-kind originals.

The best news is that Friedlander’s Landscapes are now lining the walls of old Lulu’s on Pacific Ave. so if you missed seeing these impressive pieces during Open Studios, you can feast on them over a morning macchiato.

or….“Bolts from the Blue” - a series of startling and provocative insights from ur-mathematician Ralph Abraham, shaped into a free, public talk this coming Wednesday, November 4, @ 7pm at the UCSC Music Recital Hall.

Abraham — a pioneer of chaos theory research, UCSC emeritus, and close personal friend of the late, great Terrance McKenna — offers some pithy remarks about the history of mathematics as it butts up against art, music, fractals and the space-time you-know-what. For everyone who fears numbers but is too chicken to admit it - Abraham will demystify much, if not all (and he promises to do it without one single equation!).

Be there, or be squared.

It must have been tough living in the shadow of Richard Wagner, but that’s just what powered the career of Richard Strauss, who like his contemporary Gustav Mahler, spent many a sleepless night wondering just how to channel Wagner’s mojo.

Just after the turn of the century Strauss unveiled his voluptuous version of Oscar Wilde’s naughty Salomé, and promptly had his opera banned in most world capitals the minute it hit the stage. As Wilde/Strauss have it, there was much more to Salomé’s desire than simply a baptismal tantrum. She was fatally obsessed with having the Baptist, in God’s way. And as enacted by pliant German soprano Nadja Michael, Salomé was a sensuous handful.

The San Francisco Opera’s current production of Salomé uses set design as well as dramatic motivation to heighten the sexual tension among John the Baptist (sung by a bare-chested Greer Grimsley), the lusting Herod (more…)