Main Gallery, Robert Ginder:

Santa Monica, CA---Lora Schlesinger Gallery is pleased to exhibit recent paintings by former California artist, Robert Ginder. The show opens December 6 at the Bergamot Station Arts Complex and runs through January 17th 2009.

Although Ginder lives in New York, California still saturates his imagery. He paints portrait-like jewels of the region's characteristic stucco houses with Spanish tile roofs in oil on arched and rectangular wood panels. The homes focus on the California vernacular architecture or bungalow-style homes he grew up seeing. His work is a meditation on the material world…a modern scene painted carefully on panel with oil paint and a gold leaf background, reminiscent of the 14th century style, reflecting timelessness and time spent.

In all of Ginder's subjects chosen, there is an element of age, and a use of earlier painting styles to create a venerable artifact with an intimacy that is gilded---literally---“by an aura of the spiritual…bridging the sentimental and the conceptual.”

Michael Michaud: Mae West

Lora Schlesinger Gallery is pleased to exhibit new work by California photographer, Michael Gregg Michaud.

Mae West became a motion picture legend during the Depression. At the time of her greatest popularity, John Mason Brown wrote in The Saturday Evening Post, “Sex itself is for her a cartoon which she delights in animating.” She threw convention to the wind, challenged the morals of the day, and with her quick wit, broad mannerisms and wildly exaggerated figure, distracted the American public from the doldrums of anxiety and despair. Her curvaceous form became an icon, and she immortalized the hour-glass figure. Broadway director and critic Harold Clurman wrote in 1930, “She knows America's preoccupation with sex and the embarrassment that covers their fear of it. She gives her public what it wants: a glittering facsimile of what it craves and, through laughter, a means of keeping itself free of what it fears.”

With one hand firmly on her hip and the other primping her blond curls, Mae West represented the promise of good times ahead. Beginning in the 1930's, her figure was reproduced as a “chalk doll”, which became a popular prize at carnival games. These so-called “Carnival Dolls” were made of plaster of paris using a mould, and individually hand-painted. Several companies located on the West Coast produced these “Carnival Dolls”. One of the largest manufacturers was located in Venice, California and called the Venice Doll Company. Several artists designed the many different moulds representing the figure of Mae West, including William Rainwater, J. T. Griffins, and June Yates Jenkins of Venice, California. Seventy years later, Mae West Carnival Dolls not only invoke a sense of nostalgia, but still represent the promise of fun. Mae West said it best, “It's better to be looked over, than overlooked.”

The opening reception for the artists is December 9 from 5:00-7:00 p.m. The gallery is located in the Bergamot Station Arts Center, 2525 Michigan Avenue, T3, Santa Monica. For additional information call (310) 828-1133 or email: hs.fineart@verizon.net

GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday – Saturday 10-5:30 pm

CONTACT: Lora Schlesinger & Leslie Reed