Joe Ceballos contemplates final changes to one of his paintings.
STUDIO VISIT | JOE CEBALLOS
When did you first begin to draw?
I have early memories of drawing and getting encouragement to make art in fifth grade. We would draw portraits of composers while listening to their music. It was in Mr. Bucy’s class at Madison Elementary School in San Gabriel.
Was it a big decision to pursue art in college?
It was certainly one that took a few years to arrive at. After high school, I worked in customer service jobs while I hopped around to several community colleges in the L.A. area, taking the maximum number of figure drawing classes allowed at each school. Typically that meant I would stay for two or three semesters before moving on. The portfolio I built in these classes led to my getting a job teaching drawing and painting at a private group of art schools in L.A. and Orange County. Outside of teaching, I continued to develop my own drawing and painting skills. By the time I made the decision to go back to school to get my degree, it was clear my career would be in art. I decided to apply to ArtCenter in Pasadena.
How did you end up going to ArtCenter?
I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, east of L.A., and ArtCenter was a very well known and respected local school with an international reputation. A close friend of my brother studied there and highly recommended it. In addition to teaching after community college, I was taking figure drawing workshops and courses with instructors who were ArtCenter alumni, so I got a real sense of what my future could look like after graduating.
And you were recruited by Lucasfilm upon graduation?
In my senior year, George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic came to ArtCenter to review portfolios. I didn’t have a whole lot of technical work to show — meaning computer graphics — but I had tons of drawings and paintings that focused on realism. I honestly didn’t think I had a chance. I just wasn’t sure how my traditional skills would be useful in their digital world. A couple of months later, they reached out and made arrangements for me to fly up for an interview. I was told they were interested in my “painter’s eye” — and that I could learn the software involved. I moved to San Francisco and started the job about a month after that meeting.
And what was the job?
As a matte painter, my job was to digitally create realistic environments for film. A matte painting serves as an artistic backdrop, or set. Whether depicting a landscape, structure or interior, its purpose is to seamlessly blend with the footage. As technology advanced, digital painting and 3D modeling have revolutionized matte painting, enabling the creation of fantastical, or futuristic, or historically accurate locales. I worked on “Pirates of the Carribean,” “Mission Impossible” and two Harry Potter films at ILM, among others.
And you were slipping out of the office at lunch to sneak in a few minutes of painting.
Yes! It was a great way to break up all the time we spent making digital art in front of the computer. Our offices were in the Presidio in San Francisco, so I was surrounded by the wonders of the natural world. Painting was a good way to study and understand the real world — a key factor in creating believable places for feature films.
Has there been conflict between your day job and your artistic desires?
Not artistically, although finding time to paint was initially tough. The day job fed my personal art and vice versa. For me, the fundamentals — art and design, as well as storytelling — are much the same. The only difference is the tools being used.
The work I do in film and gaming relies heavily on technology. The images and moving pictures I create have to tell a very direct story, which demands special attention to how things are designed: how a composition is framed, where the viewer’s eye lands, the lighting and color — they all play major roles in communicating the mood and feeling of the story being told. Even the abstract shapes of things can influence our perception. These are all things I’ve learned through my years of working as a visual artist in the entertainment industry that have spilled over to my own personal fine art. My traditional painting has informed my ability to create a believable image on screen. Painting from life and outdoors has helped me learn how light, color and atmosphere all play out in nature. Studying the nuances of our world through the practice of painting has been a crucial part of my ability to bring computer-generated graphics to life.
At some point you left Lucasfilm, which seemed to be a dream job.
Yes, I left Lucasfilm and joined a startup company. The idea of starting something new and being a part of that from day one was an exciting and challenging opportunity. The type of work we set out to do was also going to be a chance to expand beyond the film work I was already doing. Projects like designing an opening video for a Kenny Chesney, illustrating a book cover for the “Ready Player One” concert tour and contributing to a Winter Olympics commercial are just a few examples of the types of projects we worked on. This was all in addition to continuing our work on blockbuster films such as “Thor,” “Iron Man,” “The Revenant” and “Elysium,” among many others. It was a nice creative buffet. After nearly 15 years at the startup and 40 film credits, I was ready to take on new challenges and broaden my skills, so I made the shift into interactive media two years ago.
And how do you describe your day job now?
The kind of work I’m doing now involves the latest technology in spatial computing and augmented reality. This enables an artist to bring what was once only visible on a screen into the real world. It’s a place where pixels and atoms can interact. This is all due to advancements in machine learning and computer vision. It’s a very interesting and pioneering space to be a part of.
Are you finding time to paint?
Yes, I’m painting more now than ever. My current work has afforded me a greater work-life balance, which gives me more time to paint. It’s almost a daily practice. This has allowed me to be more intentional with my subject matter and visual language. On the days I don’t paint, I’m most likely sketching and working on studies for new work. I’m also able to spend more time with my family. My wife is an artist as well — we met when we were both teaching art in Southern California. We have an almost 10-year-old boy who has a bottomless well of imagination and produces more art than anyone I’ve ever met! A perfect vacation for me is spending time at home with them in our Eichler in Marin County and making art all day.
How does your family background influence your art?
Growing up on the east side of Los Angeles, I was exposed to a lot of great Latino artists making work that really hits home and tells the story of our community. My parents migrated to the U.S. in their early 20s. Not really knowing the language, they were brave enough to come to this country for the opportunity to create a better life for themselves and their family. I am a first generation Mexican-American who had parents willing to work hard for their dreams. Because of them, I was born in California and have had the privilege of living in two beautiful and diverse cities. My father has always said that California welcomed him, and for that I will forever be grateful. I’m not sure that my work is saying anything that’s a direct commentary about the Latino experience. To me it’s more about living in the moment and trying to capture a small sliver of my time.
So you’ve lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and you paint both. Do you have a preference?
Tough one. L.A. will always be home, but the Bay Area has been a really nice place to settle into. Both cities offer their own stories and history, but also have many things in common. To me, the Bay Area sometimes feels like a condensed L.A. They both offer such a variety in terms of culture and art. They both are welcoming to people from around the world. San Francisco, with its innovations in tech, and Los Angeles, with its history in film and music, offer an artist so much inspiration.
I like to think that the two cities are closer to each other than some might think. To me, it’s all California. Having the privilege of living in these two places has been a major influence on my art.
What do Northern California and Southern California bring to your art that’s the same? And what’s different?
The atmosphere is certainly different, which influences the palette to a degree. I look for patterns that I find interesting. Both places have their own geography and architectural identity. I would describe S.F. as more vertical and stacking vs. L.A.’s more horizontal and sprawling environment.
The vistas I select to paint are snapshots of moments that encompass familiar qualities of L.A. or S.F. A certain time of day or weather pattern, a particular vanishing point, or an unusual angle that captures the essence of the location and triggers a memory or mood is what I’m after. I like to draw the viewer in with a first impression based on a strong composition of shapes and color. I hope that first read then compels them to connect with their own experiences of a place. One of the things I enjoy most is hearing the stories people tell me about how they personally relate to the paintings I create.
I look for beauty in our everyday existence — not just in those iconic S.F./L.A. panoramas, but also on a street corner or while stuck in freeway traffic. We are surrounded by magic in both cities.
William and Louise out on the town on a Saturday night.
A MEMORY | THOMAS REYNOLDS
One finds friends and forms families of many kinds, especially when you’ve settled far from home.
We claim right at the top of many wonderful people we’ve known through the gallery our friendship with William and Louise. They are a couple of sparklers, she 91, he 88. For most of the last two decades they’ve had a standing date on Saturday night, sometimes in one of the city’s grand hotel dining rooms, often a home-cooked feast at Louise’s place. Occasionally we’ve been invited along.
On our refrigerator door hangs this note:
Any Saturday night you find yourselves free, come with Bill to eat with me. Permanent invitation to one or both. xoxo, Louise
It’s like having a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Treats from Louise’s kitchen came not only on Saturday nights. Rarely passed a week that Louise didn’t leave a care package at the front door. Sometimes it held a jar of apricot jam she’d made, or a new batch of chutney, or a jar of bacon grease. Sometimes it offered up fresh-baked cheese wafers or — my favorite — lemon squares. If B.K. was out of town, there might be lentil soup, “so you won’t go hungry.” And always a chatty note, love and kisses, xoxo, Louise.
Holidays we shared together, usually at our house, usually with a lemon meringue pie from Louise. Christmas and Easter for sure, and sometimes Mother’s Day and birthdays, too. Louise said the great thing about adopted families like ours was that they didn’t come with all the baggage of actually being related to each other.
Louise fell and broke her hip a few months ago. She didn’t make it for Easter this year. So after I took William home, I went by to drop off an Easter basket. She was in bed, dozing, the Sunday paper at her side. She stirred, and we talked a little. Then she turned and looked directly in my eyes. “Cousin Tom,” she always called me, “I’m dying now.”
I stayed a few more minutes. It was time to leave. “Before you go,” Louise said, “look over in that closet, on the floor on the right. Take a jar of apricot jam.”
Charles Campbell’s desk from the Louvre Frame Shop.
CHARLES CAMPBELL got an early gift for his 109th birthday today: the rolltop desk he used after he opened the Louvre Frame Shop in 1947, before it spawned his legendary gallery in North Beach in 1972.
The desk was a gift from one of the self-described Louvrettes, Jude Sargent, who was a gilder at the shop. Sargent claimed the desk when the Louvre closed and has lived with it ever since — until he sent an email in early December.
I am writing because I am downsizing the contents of my home, and one of the pieces of furniture that I am letting go is a small oak roll-top desk from the Louvre that was the business desk that Charles was using when Nancy bought the frame shop from him. It stayed with the frame shop, and because I was very fond of it, when the Louvre closed I was allowed to take it home with me, where I have enjoyed it for many years. Now it is time for me to let it go.
It is a sweet desk, made in Mexico (by Leonardo Garcia in Parral, Chihuahua, according to the mark under the drawer), and I thought it would be nice for it to go to someone who could appreciate the provenance (as it were).
As it happens, Charles and Glenna Campbell’s longtime home is being maintained as something of a shrine that hosts art lovers and peacemakers from around the globe. Now Charlie’s first base of business in the art world will become part of the menagerie.
Says his former Louvre colleague Jude Sargent: “I’m thrilled! This seems like the best possible destination for the desk.”
THERE HAVE BEEN three homes on the magisterial 23.5-acre bluff overlooking East Beach in Santa Barbara.
It was called Booth’s Point when George Booth built a Victorian there in the 1880s. In 1903 the William Miller Graham family used their Oklahoma oil fortune to construct a lavish new Italianate mansion they called Villa Bellosguardo. In 1923 the Graham home was bought by Senator W.A. Clark, the Montana Copper King, and later torn down and rebuilt in the 1930s as a French chateau for Anna and Huguette Clark.
The Clarks last visited in 1953. Their summer home remained dark, but meticulously maintained, for 70 years before it finally began to reopen to visitors last year. In her will, Huguette Clark left Bellosguardo — “beautiful overlook” in Italian — to a public foundation to become a center for the arts, a mission still in its early stages. But now the public can visit Bellosguardo in small groups of 10. To get on the email list, sign up at bellosguardo.org.
MICHAEL SCHWAB is one of the nation’s preeminent graphic artists. His striking images of national parks and Amtrak trains, among many other subjects, have become iconic.
Now Schwab and the Thomas Reynolds Gallery have teamed up to present a series of his images of California’s wine regions. The signed digital prints on archival paper are 15.5 x 38 inches, available for $600 each, plus $20 shipping. To order, email the gallery.
FOR MOST OF the world, “Napa Valley” is shorthand for all California wines, in the same way that Hollywood means American movies. It’s home to some of California’s grandest wineries.
OF ALL CALIFORNIA’S wine regions, Sonoma may be the easiest to fall in love with. In part, Sonoma has the advantage of sheer size. At more than 1,500 square miles, it’s as big as Rhode Island, and those square miles manage to encompass all the best things about the entire state.
SAY LAKE COUNTY to most Northern Californians and they will think waterskiing on Clear Lake and very hot summers. Will they think wine? Probably not. This is a mistake.
IT SEEMS ALMOST unfair that Monterey County should produce high-quality wines. It already has, in Point Lobos and Big Sur, the most stunningly gorgeous coast in the world. It has Carmel’s carefully rustic charm. It has marine science in the Monterey Bay Aquarium, plus Steinbeck’s novels and Robinson Jeffers’ poems. Why does it even need grapes? But grapes it has, and today Monterey County is a wine powerhouse.
EVERY ROAD INTO Santa Barbara’s wine country is beautiful, but maybe the most beautiful of all is Highway 154, which climbs north over the San Marcos Pass from the city of Santa Barbara. The highway crests, and there below you spreads the valley green, walled on three sides by mountais, and stretching mistily west to the Pacific.
THERE’S BEEN WINEMAKING in Mexico since before California vintners could say “new French oak.” But it wasn’t until about 30 years ago that a special little valley in northern Baja California — just 90 miles south of San Diego — began growing grapes capable of producing great wine. Now the Guadalupe Valley, which angles northeast from Ensenada, is becoming a bona fide wine country.
— Text from California Wine Country, published by Sunset Books, with images by Michael Schwab.
The adage that San Francisco is in a state of perpetual freefall has become clickbait as of late — but a new exhibition reminds us that SF is as resilient as it is beguiling.
San Francisco exists as a bastion for so many who left their homes to find a semblance of community; of kinship; to be in a community that celebrates themselves and what it means to live a good life on this entropic space rock. The Covid-19 pandemic forever changed our ideas of not only home but how we move about our daily lives.
The past three years have seen the media fixated on SF’s “mass exodus” and the decline of its downtown; the “doom loop,” if you will. But as we’ve waxed in countless tones and textures before: San Francisco’s problems aren’t unique — they exist in every large American metro to some degree.
But what is uniquely San Francisco is the city’s indefensible amounts of beauty. How it carries itself through seasons. The way SF elicits you to walk everywhere, bike everywhere else, and ditch your car keys for a Clipper card.
All of these peculiarities are on full display at the intersection of 17th and Harrison streets inside the 2121 Art Space.
For the month of August, the aforenoted culture hun has joined forces with the Thomas Reynolds Gallery to present San Francisco: Still Beautiful, an exhibition of cityscape paintings of San Francisco by artist Veerakeat Tongpaiboon. Included in the exhibition are two dozen recent paintings featuring scenes of San Francisco — each piece of art founded on Tongpaiboon’s three-plus decades in San Francisco.
Tongpaiboon’s style exists in a canon of creativity all to itself. He manages to create mesmeric dreamscapes that blur into the background, yet invite exceptional detail and investigations into the precision of each brush struck.
Tongpaiboon’s proclivity for urban living is apparent — “I like speed, I like buildings, I like cars,” he says. “The energy of the streets of San Francisco continues to inspire me.” His current display is a celebration of his life in San Francisco — a visual love letter to his years spent watching time pass in SF.
Slowly strolling through San Francisco: Still Beautiful is an exercise in stillness, gratitude and wonder. You’d be hard-pressed to not fawn and fall even deeper in love with SF by the time you exit.
2121 ART SPACE joins forces with the Thomas Reynolds Gallery for the month of August to present “San Francisco: Still Beautiful,” an exhibition of cityscape paintings by San Francisco artist Veerakeat Tongpaiboon.
“Wielding a loaded brush, Tongpaiboon attacks his canvases boldly, favoring intense colors and skewed perspectives,” writes Southwest Artist magazine. Says the artist: “I like speed, I like buildings, I like cars. The energy of the streets of San Francisco continues to inspire me.” A native of Thailand, Tongpaiboon has been painting since he was 10 years old, winning major international competitions even as a teenager. In 1992 he came to San Francisco and earned his MFA degree at the Academy of Art. He has been a full time painter since, with work in collections throughout the U.S. and abroad.
This exhibition marks a return to San Francisco of the Thomas Reynolds Gallery, a fixture on Fillmore Street for 25 years before relocating to Santa Barbara in 2020.
Veerakeat Tongpaiboon with recent San Francisco cityscape paintings.
IN 1952, while studying for their master’s degrees in art, Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown met at the University of California, Berkeley.
After graduating, they found studio space on Berkeley’s Shattuck Avenue, a building they shared with Richard Diebenkorn, David Park and Elmer Bischoff, among others, who met there for drawing sessions. From this creative association came the movement that became known as Bay Area Figuration (or the Bay Area Figurative Movement) in which recognizable subject matter and the gestural bravura of Abstract Expressionism co-existed.
It was the first contemporary artistic movement that achieved recognition in the United States and abroad that originated in California.
I first met Paul Wonner and Bill Brown in the early 2000s at the San Francisco home of the gallerist Charles Campbell and his artist wife, Glenna.
I particularly enjoyed watching Bill and Paul look at their own paintings, which hung in the Campbells’ Potrero Hill home. Charlie and Glenna had a wonderful collection, which included their Bay Area Figurative associates, including Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, Joan Brown, Manuel Neri, Elmer Bischoff, Wayne Thiebaud and Nathan Oliveira. There was something about the way that Bill and Paul studied their own paintings that seemed as if they were discovering them for the first time.
Once when I was with Paul and Charlie in the living room, among a Neri plaster and paintings by Frank Auerbach and Thiebaud, Paul was staring intently at one of his own paintings, his 1961 Nude with Indian Rug. I was anticipating his disapproval when he said, “This may be my best painting.” Charlie was so excited that he went over to the kitchen, asked Glenna and Bill to join us, and made Paul repeat the remark. Whether the wine had already gotten to him, I do not know, as Paul made too many fine paintings in my estimation to call any one of them his best. However, there was in his comment an excitement about engaging with a work from another era. We all enjoyed a hearty toast to the sentiment.
John Singer Sargent | Court of the Myrtles, Alhambra (1879)
IF YOU’RE IN San Francisco in the coming weeks, you’ll surely want to make a visit to the stately Legion of Honor museum near Land’s End to see the “Sargent & Spain” exhibition. It presents the work of John Singer Sargent inspired by his travels in Spain and tells the story of his embrace of Spanish culture.
Sargent’s seven trips to Spain, taken between 1879 and 1912, fueled his imagination and influenced his artistic growth throughout his life. Born in Florence, Italy, to American parents who were travel enthusiasts, Sargent (1856–1925) journeyed extensively from his homes in London and Paris in search of subjects. His resulting body of work, including paintings inspired by Spanish art, architecture, gardens, people and traditions, encompassed far more than the society portraits for which he is best known.
This exhibition — which includes oils, watercolors, drawings and more — reveals Sargent’s affinity for Spain and his approach to depicting the rich subject matter he encountered there.
Art Matters 