As art groups go, the Huntington Beach Art League is gigantic, currently with more than 250 members. So this year’s show at the HB Central Library is a blockbuster in size and diversity. Awards and ribbons are given in six categories – oil and acrylics (more acrylics now than oils), mixed media (anything goes), watercolor (largest group), pastel and drawing (mostly pastel, drawing is passé), sculpture (smallest number of works), photography (the reality stuff), digital photography (processed anything goes). Sadly, as in my case, no categories or ribbons for abstract art. I overheard someone say that religious art and abstracts should be excluded as an affront to esthetics.
My favorite piece in the show is a nose-on close-up of a bulldog, an oversized sleeping hulk ready to slip off the canvas. Alas again, it won no prizes. But I had the opportunity to talk with the artist, who is an HBAL member and a long time nude model for all the local colleges and universities. She confessed to me that she did the work from a photograph, which is an unforgivable sin to life drawing models. The judges must have known that bulldogs do not pose nose-on.
You may suspect that this review is biased by my concern for the non-awarded artworks, especially for my own abstract. However, for a library show where public taste is a deciding factor, I have to agree that tradition and standards like depictions of small children and landscapes with barns deserve to be awarded, and these are in accordance with community demographics, taste and propriety. Thus, this show is a must-see at the library level and is inoffensive to no one.
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