Couwenberg Catalog ISSUU

A Ten-Year Evolution

University Art Gallery College of the Arts

California State University, Stanislaus

500 copies printed on the occasion of the exhibition

Alexander Couwenberg - A Ten-Year Evolution

November 7 - December 19, 2006

University Art Gallery

College of the Arts

California State University, Stanislaus

This exhibition and catalog have been funded by:

University Art Gallery, College of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus

Associated Students Instructionally Related Activities, California State University, Stanislaus

Copyright © 2007 California State University, Stanislaus

All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher.

University Art Gallery

College fo the Arts

California State University, Stanislaus

801 West Monte Vista Avenue

Turlock, CA 95382

Catalog Design: College of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus

Catalog Printing: Claremont Print and Copy, Claremont, CA

Catalog Photography: Steve Scudder and Smyth Johnson

ISBN: 0-9773967-9-7

Cover Image: Adore, 1999, 60”x48”, acrylic, oil, polyurethane on panel

Back Inside Cover Image: Portrait of the artist in his Los Angeles Studio, 2006

Back Cover: The artist working, 2006

Director’s Foreword

Alexander Couwenberg – A Ten-Year Evolution, represents a survey exhibition and catalog of a decade of work by one of Southern California’s leading abstract painters. The roots of Couwenberg’s work can be traced not only to the Hard-Edge painting of the 1960s, but also to the culture of Southern California as a whole. From early hot rods to current surf inspired movements, his interests have fed into Couwenberg’s highly innovative and exciting work giving it a vital and energising source. I have had the pleasure of seeing this work develop over this ten-year period and have always eagerly awaited new bodies of work to see the next innovations and changes.

Many colleagues have been instrumental in presenting this exhibition. I would like to thank Alexander Couwenberg for the opportunity to exhibit his astonishing work. Diana Daniels for her insightful introduction, Peter Frank for his brilliant essay, Steve Scudder for his excellent photography, the College of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus for the wonderful catalog design and Claremont Print and Copy for their expertise in printing this catalog.

A great amount of thanks is extended to the Instructionally Related Activities Program of California State University, Stanislaus as well as anonymous donors for the funding of the exhibition and catalog. Their support is greatly appreciated.

Dean De Cocker, Director

University Art Gallery

California State University, Stanislaus

Introducing Alex Couwenberg

Alex Couwenberg paints lush essays that revel upon the sensuous properties of materials. A protégé of Southern California abstractionist Karl Benjamin, Couwenberg engages in a dialogue on color, line, and shape. This conversation reduces form to an iconic distillation that references the arc of painting’s development over the last century. That such abstraction has not yet been exhausted is to many critics a surprise. How is it that a painting by Alex Couwenberg can so articulately invigorate our understanding and appreciation of abstraction?

Couwenberg’s turn to nonrepresentational painting was not realized in a vacuum. Born and raised in Southern California, Couwenberg is the inheritor of the vast array of cultural artifacts realized with far greater bravado, or peculiarity, here in California than in other regions of the U.S. Surf culture, Quonset huts, soaring cantilevered gas stations, and avocado kitchen appliances along with space-age optimism’s slide into a suburban malaise and after-school specials. As each decade evolves into the next these cultural values become equated with the fashions that define the period’s aesthetic experience.

Accordingly, the rhetoric that has sought to proclaim painting’s moral substance wafts in the air alongside mundane interactions and reactions to the tangible artifacts of culture. High-brow and low-brow expression meet, mix, and animate one another, and thus artists such as Couwenberg view the entire material and social range of the era, post-war America, without the rebellion, turmoil, or outmoded ideals that have long been the perogative of a dominant generation.

Enter into this wonderment the advent of a new mode of communication—the internet. The World Wide Web called for strong graphic content with bright colors and broad shapes to snare browsers’ attention while maximizing the initially limited design capabilities of the software that designers used to build the look of graphic content. Not only was the urgency created for talented artists able to exploit this new medium, but a new way of seeing was conceived. Whether fully aware or not of their plunge, artists, designers, and consumers once more fell in love with midcentury modernism.

The iconic strength of geometries so evident on glowing pc screens seems to have tickled our consciousness of flatness, medium, support, and optical effect once again. The investigation of the basic tenets of art—line, shape, and color—now stimulates artistic imagination with a reinvigorated respect for the iconic power of the graphic arts. Rather than throwing down their brushes and pots of paint, artists such as Alex Couwenberg are more than ever attracted to the immediacy of abstracted forms and the primacy of materials and painting processes.

Alex Couwenberg is more conscious of this cultural current than most. At the encouragement of his family, Couwenberg, who enjoyed art in high school, became serious about his interest in 1990. He attended Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design and earned his M.F.A. at Claremont Graduate School. His education was both practical and academic. The practical allowed Couwenberg to support himself as a freelance designer. His entire range of experience— from his suburban upbringing to a catalogue of past and present advertising imagery to an appreciation for the discipline of artists such as Karl Benjamin, Roland Reiss, David Amico, and John Millei—was waiting to inform his mature vision.

Couwenberg’s compositions are architectural in structure. The presence of the grid is clear, but its dominance sublimated by shifting forms adrift on color fields. There is the sophisticated blending of color and design offered in homage to modernist ad copy, interior décor, and fine art precedents. A nod to Los Angeles popular culture also strikes a chord, imbued in the sporty lines inspired by hot rod detailing—an expression of movement, speed, and “masculinity”—that energetically connect the modish shapes. His abstractions are serious and informed, but also unabashedly playful, showing that there is much to investigate in the intersection of the graphic arts with painting.

And Couwenberg is clearly drawn to painting. His materials are unexpected in their variety, ranging from Mylar to acrylic and even melted wax. Surfaces are sanded down to reveal weathered effects inspired by dilapidated buildings in the So Cal environment surrounding him. Matte finishes contrast with the slick effects offered by acrylic dragged across Mylar’s resistant surface. Distressed surfaces are juxtaposed with the highly polished, providing textural richness that evokes freeform association.

In many of Couwenberg’s paintings there is the evocative pulse of growth that brings to mind the late abstractions of Arthur Dove, while the quadrants of his grids, flat as aerial photographs of the landscape, speak to the enduring influence of Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series. Couwenberg, however, strives for tonal harmonies that slyly tap into a collective memory of avocado, chocolate, mushroom, and cream mod-inspired palettes with orange striping, red stencil-perfect lines, and shifting blue highlights. The artist’s preoccupation with surface is an expression of his regard for process.

Participating in a wider return to process by artists in California and beyond, Couwenberg also establishes that painting is a skill, studied and nurtured. Abstraction is not merely a gestalt release, but an engagement with the act of applying pigment to canvas. It is also an intellectual give and take from which compositions evolve. Such abstractions may be physically beautiful, but are not mere decoration. While the immediacy of the artist’s individual experience is no longer the question, the gut reaction of the viewer is more important than ever. Individual exploration is the spirit of the times, and Couwenberg’s ambiguous recessed spaces and flattened planes engage our desire to join him on this journey of discovery.

Diana Daniels Assistant Curator Crocker Art Museum

A Ten-Year Evolution: Alexander Couwenberg Composes Himself

Over the past decade, as he has refined his painterly practice, Alex Couwenberg has maintained his balancing act between two kinds of composition, visual composition – the disposition of forms on a plane – and material composition – the substances used to comprise those forms. Couwenberg’s concern – his “obsession,” as he calls it – with process drives his practice; but he has always offset this concern with an equally keen interest in shape and color. Just as his involvement with process links him with his late- and post-modern predecessors, from the abstract expressionists of the 1950s to the post-minimalist painters and even the performance artists of the ‘70s and `80s, Couwenberg’s purely formal interests evince the heritage of earlier predecessors, specifically the abstract painters of the early 20th century – and their direct inheritors, the “hardedge” geometric artists of the 1960s.

In his latest work, in fact, Couwenberg fairly embraces the tradition of geometric art that courses through the last century. Partially of Dutch extraction, the painter has always had a predilection for the clarity and rectitude we associate with painters such as Mondrian. But Couwenberg’s palette, vivid as it is, has not been limited to Mondrian’s formula of primaries; rather, the young American painter has acknowledged the aesthetically and emotionally affective power of color; the example of Van Gogh looms, of course, but so does the yet more complicated example of de Kooning, a Dutch immigrant to these shores whose sensibility became a touchstone of American painting. Furthermore, in its intricate interplay of large and small, regular and irregular forms, all created from the interplay of traditional (e.g. oil) and new (e.g. enamel) medium, Couwenberg’s previous work echoes the bumptious, sinewy lines and forms for which de Kooning’s work, early and late alike, is so well known.

We can describe de Kooning’s example in this context as “complicated” not only because of the Rotterdam-born painter’s dual acculturation, but because of the fact that, in the early 21st century, he appears to us Americans, one of the models of abstract painting. However direct or indirect de Kooning’s influence has been on Couwenberg, it has profoundly impacted how we view abstraction. De Kooning’s gestural expansiveness has suffused throughout abstract painting, especially in America; as clear and finely honed as Couwenberg’s art has been, it owes its breadth and its lush palette in part to his abstract expressionist forebear’s.

Couwenberg himself was born in southern California and has lived nowhere else. He professes a relationship notably closer to the “hard-edge” painters who historically succeeded de Kooning’s generation than to that generation itself. Among those geometric painters who emerged at the end of the 1950s, of course, were New York artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella; but the tendency’s presence was no less marked, and appeared no later, in southern California. Indeed, it was only a few miles from Couwenberg’s birthplace – and a few yards from his graduate studio – that the first exhibition of “hard-edge” painting, “Four Abstract Classicists,” had been formulated in 1959. The work of Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, Karl Benjamin, and John McLaughlin – and other “abstract classicists” such as Helen Lundeberg and Jules Engel – has served ever since as a beacon for Los Angeles-area abstractionists, encouraging a spare and lucid formal vocabulary, a brilliant range of color, and a bold approach to new as well as traditional media. Couwenberg (who is personally close to Benjamin) willfully manifests all these characteristics, and sees himself as an inheritor and perpetuator of this recent but distinct tradition.

The eccentricities that enliven Couwenberg’s painterly formulae, even the relatively rectilinear formulae that characterize his latest work, derive from the same extra-artistic sources that have spurred many other southern California artists. He dotes on the detailing (especially the pinstriping) and high finish associated with the customizing of those two quintessentially Southland modes of transport, the car and the surfboard. (Not incidentally, Couwenberg is an accomplished surfer.) We might deduce that his work capitalizes not only on these techniques of surface finishing, but on the speed and grace such techniques are designed to exteriorize and amplify. Just as the high gloss and reflectivity of a latex finish infer the easy and rapid passage of a vehicle through

its course, so does it emphasize the smooth visual kinesis of Couwenberg’s forms – the forms in his earlier work that slide and burgeon against one another (as in Feitelson and Kelly – and, in a different manner, de Kooning) and that now seem to pass like films or windows across each other’s planes (as in McLaughlin – and, not dissimilarly, Mondrian).

Couwenberg’s technique, as he attests, may gratify his working method, but from our vantage it finally serves to underscore, to make fully visible, the sense of light and motion the paintings convey to us. The composition of the paintings’ materials thus substantiates the composition of the paintings’ forms, at once binding them and getting them moving. The resulting “composed compositions” seem to be perfectly balanced and yet in a state of flux, their orbs and bubbles, panes and panels apparently only captured at a moment of particular poise. Couwenberg’s is a delicately choreographed dance of shapes, everything on point, ready for the next note of music, as it were. The paintings (and works on paper – which are not studies for the paintings, but “paintings” in their own right) can also be regarded as tenuous balancing acts between great and tiny forms that are themselves inanimate, but on which gravity is acting with furious insistence. Like desert rocks about to avalanche, huge boulders are held in place by the merest of pebbles – which on second glance seem part of those very boulders.

The result, then, of Couwenberg’s compositions of compositions is a remarkably tense but remarkably resolved composure. We see in these paintings the imminence of change, but – despite all the dramatic asymmetry – not of cataclysm. The change inferred by these painterly structures takes place in geologic or cosmic, not meteorologic or human, time. In this, Couwenberg’s art inheres another characteristic of the southern California ethos, the meditative serenity (if not quite the quality of meditation itself) associated with east Asian religion-philosophies. Here, too, the examples of McLaughlin and Feitelson, and de Kooning and Mondrian, affirm Couwenberg’s own aesthetic. Like them, he finds in the radiant present the inevitability of change, and thus the beauty of the fleeting moment. It could be the moment of a tubular wave or the glint off a passing hot rod, and it is certainly the moment in the studio when the artist is in perfect sync with his work; but it is our moment, too, the moment in which we see the composition as it de- and re-composes.

Peter Frank

Los Angeles

December 2006

I M A G E S

“White with White Circles,” 1996

60” x 60”

acrylic, oil, and polyurethane on panel collection of Lisa and Karl Pedersen, Los Angeles, CA

“Troublemaker,” 2001 66” x 60” acrylic and polyurethane on canvas courtesy of Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, CA

“Rush, 26,” 2004 24” x 24” acrylic and mylar on canvas courtesy of Markel Fine Arts, NY

“Goliath,” 2005 60” x 34” acrylic and mylar on canvas collection of Barbara Kerwin, Los Angeles, CA

CA

2006 installation

University Art Gallery

California State University, Stanislaus

Artist Statement

My paintings are a product of my obsession over process. Applying paint to a surface and the experiences and techniques that occur in creating an image are the purest form of motivation. The inspiration for my work is an appreciation for the paint, pinstriping, and finish associated with hot rod and car culture. Mid-century design, Geometric and Hard-Edge Abstraction and a love of craft and technique fuel the work as well. The paintings diagram the process of paint application and the interpretation of how these influences manifest themselves, in the form of color, shape, texture and space. Each painting becomes an experience of constantly juxtaposing elements and forms within a composition attempting to arrive at a relationship between balance, tension, and harmony. The ideas of geometry and the placement of forms within a picture plane are crucial in the picture making process, and expose themselves in the form of Hard-Edge compositions that suggest a complete and precise control of both medium and image. I am heavily influenced by history and the figures associated with Geometric and Hard-Edge Abstraction. Being conscious of what I bring to the table, and how these actions speak in a voice that contributes to the dialogue of contemporary painting are both extremely important parts of my work as an artist.

Alexander Couwenberg 2006

Alexander J. Couwenberg

b. 1967, Upland, CA

Education

1997 MFA, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, CA

1995 BFA, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA

Solo Exhibitions

2007 “New Paintings,” Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA

“New Paintings,” d.e.n. Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA

“New Paintings,” Gilman Contemporary, Ketchum, ID

2006 “New Paintings,” Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA

“Black Labeled,” Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, CA

“Alex Couwenberg: a ten year evolution,” Cal State Stanislaus, University Gallery, Turlock, CA

2005 “de Stad,” Markel Fine Arts, New York, NY

“Metropolitan”, 455 Market Street Lobby Gallery, San Francisco, CA

“tussenruimte”, Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2004 “Primo,” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2003 “New Paintings,” Gensler, San Francisco, CA

“Paintings; a seven year survey,” Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA

2002 “New Paintings,” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2001 “New Paintings,” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

1999 “New Paintings,” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

1997 “The Hot Rod Series,” East Gallery, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, CA

1996 “New Paintings,” Dillingham/Caples Gallery, Claremont, CA

Selected Group Exhibitions

2007 “Off The Grid,” William Turner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

“Inagural Show,” Gilman Contemporary, Ketchum, ID

“Summer Group Show,” Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA “Inland Emperors,” DBA256 Gallery, Pomona, CA

“Ebb & Flow,” EastWest Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA

“Decade, A Retrospective,” Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, CA

“Out of Line,” Cal State Stanislaus, University Gallery, Turlock, CA

“Grey Scale,” Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA

“Art Auction = Stimulus,” Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA

“Let There Be Light,” Phantom Galleries, Los Angeles, CA

“Flow: Fine Lines on Water,” Frank Pictures Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2006 “Aligning With Abstract Los Angeles,” d.e.n. Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA

“Landscape Perspectives,” Art + Industry, Palm Springs, CA

“Summer Abstraction,” Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA

“Monotype,” d.e.n. Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA

“2nd Gwang Hwa Moon International Arts Festival,” Sejong Center, Seoul, Korea

“Flow: Fine Lines on Water,” Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA

“Flow: Fine Lines on Water,” Lisa Coscino Gallery, Pacific Grove, CA

“Recent Acquisitions,” Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA

“Border Crossing,” Sopa Fine Arts, British Columbia, Canada

“Out of Line,” Parks Exhibition Center, Idyllwild Arts Academy, Idyllwild, CA

2005 “Inaugural Exhibition,” Sopa Fine Arts, British Columbia, Canada

“A Common Thread,” Soho Myriad, Atlanta, GA

“Out of Line,” Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA

“Out of Line,” Brandstater Gallery, La Sierra University, Riverside, CA

“Abstract Los Angeles”, Louisiana Tech University Galleries, Ruston, LA

“Art Auction 11”, Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA

“Theories: LA Paint,” Post, Los Angeles, CA

“Venice Art Walk”, Venice, CA

“Monothon, 2005,” Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA

2004 “Luster,” Gensler, San Francisco, CA

“Abstract Work from the Permanent Collection,” Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA

“Continental Divide: LA/NYC,” Planet Thailand, Brooklyn, NY

“Abstract Los Angeles,” Soho Myriad, Atlanta, GA

“20th Anniversary Exhibition,” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2003 “No Chaser; Straight Ahead Abstract Painting,” Post, Los Angeles, CA

“Group Show,” Dolby/Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, CA

”Black and White,” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

“New Paintings,” Soho Myriad, Atlanta, GA

“Venice Art Walk,” Venice, CA

“Art Auction 10,” Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA

2002 “California Dream,” Il Museo I Magli di Sarezzo, Brescia, Italy

“Summer Group Show,” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

“Sam Maloof and Friends,” dA Center for the Arts, Pomona, CA

2001 “New American Paintings Group Show,” OSP Gallery/Open Studio Press, Boston, MA

“Homage: Roland Reiss,” Claremont Graduate School alumni show, dA Center for the Arts, Pomona, CA

“Art Auction 9,” Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA

“Monothon, 2001,” Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA

“Sequence,” Mt. San Antonio College Art Gallery, Walnut, CA

2000 “Art 2000: Applauding Revolutionary Talent,” Millard Sheets Gallery, Pomona, CA

1999 “Faculty Exhibition,” Mt. San Antonio College Art Gallery, Walnut, CA

“Faculty Exhibition,” Chaffey College, Ontario Museum of Art, Ontario, CA

1998 “Six Gallery Artist,” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

“Synchronicity,” Mt. San Antonio College Art Gallery, Walnut, CA

“Contemporary Works of the Ruth Bachofner Gallery,” Antelope Valley College, Lancaster, CA

1997 “Convergent Abstraction,” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

“L.A. Emerging,” Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, GA

“Art Auction 6,” Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA

“3 Weeks in L.A.,” Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

“Recent Paintings,” Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, GA

“Fringe of the Fringe,” dA Gallery Benefit Art Auction, dA Center for the Arts, Pomona, CA

1996 “42.2 - CGS to Paradiso,” Gallery Paradiso, Newport Beach, CA

“Painting and Sculpture,” Art Center Alumni Show, Thousand Oaks Municipal Art Gallery, Thousand Oaks, CA

1995 “Raw Data,” East Gallery, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, CA

1994 “Recent Work,” Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA

“Youth Culture,” Lava Room, Costa Mesa, CA

Selected Public Collections

California State University, Stanislaus, Turlock, CA

Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA

Georgia Tech University, Atlanta, GA

Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA

Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA

Selected Corporate Collections

Apax Partners, Menlo Park, CA

Balboa Bay Club, Newport Beach, CA

Baoa Resort, China

Bellagio Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, NV

Claiborn and Barksdail, Atlanta, GA

Filmore Heritage Center, San Francisco, CA

Fletcher Jones Mercedes Benz, Newport Beach, CA

Genentech, San Francisco, CA

Hotel Commonwealth, Boston, MA

Bank Julius Baer, Los Angeles, CA

Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, NV

Mandarin Hotel, New York, NY

McKenna, Long, & Aldridge, Atlanta, GA

Metropolitan Hotel, New York, NY

MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, NV

Mohegan Sun Casino, Uncasville, Conn

Museum Towers @ Centennial Hill, Atlanta, GA

Neiman Marcus Collection, Beverly Hills, CA / San Francisco, CA

Nishiumeda, Tokyo, Japan

Nordstrom, Honolulu, HI & Detroit, MI

Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, Menlo Park, CA

Our Lucaya Resort, Grand Bahama Island

Red Rock Resort, Las Vegas, NV

Riverhorse Investment, Los Angeles, CA

Roll International, Los Angeles, CA

Suncal Inc., Irvine, CA

Verisign, San Francisco, CA

Selected Private Collections

Ruth and Herman Bachofner, Beverly Hills, CA

Karl Benjamin, Claremont, CA

Peter Blake, Newport Beach, CA

Martin Brest, Pacific Palisades, CA

Katherine T. Carter, New York

Antonella and Marco Casentini, Milan, Italy

Lisa Chadwick, San Francisco, CA

Billie Crockford, Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, UK

Evelyne Canus, Basel, Switzerland

Wes Dahlberg, Los Angeles, CA

Diana Daniels, Sacramento, CA

Dean DeCocker. Turlock, CA

Peter Frank, Los Angeles, CA

Jimi Gleason, Costa Mesa, CA

Mat Gleason, Los Angeles, CA

Jodi and Shannon Haddad, Aliso Viejo, CA

Scott Hall, Atlanta, GA

Sarah Hall, Atlanta, GA

Laila Abdul Jawad and Abdul Aziz, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Bernard Jazzar, Los Angeles, CA

Dean De Cocker – Extended Orders

Loretta and Victor Kaufman, Malibu, CA

2006 Installation

Barbara Kerwin, Los Angeles, CA

University Art Gallery

Robert Kingston, Altadena, CA

School of Fine and Performing Arts

Pamela Lauesen and George Goad, North Hollywood, CA

California State University, Stanislaus Turlock, CA

Beverly and Sam Maloof, Alta Loma, CA

Sue Mitchell, Riverside, CA

Donna and Michael Napper, Culver City, CA

Roland Reiss, Los Angeles, CA

Paula and Russell Rogers, Atlanta, GA

Camille Sanders and Tom Powell, Riverside, CA

Steve Schmidt, Long Beach, CA

Mr. and Mrs. Schoenfeld, Southampton, NY

Erica and Nathan Sevilla, New York, NY

Maria Sharapova, Los Angeles, CA

Sue and Rich Simonin, Riverside, CA

Holly Tempo, Los Angeles, CA

Wayne Thomas, La Jolla, CA

Francine Travers, Beverly Hills, CA

Jane and Bill Wells, Santa Ynez, CA

Jeff Widman, Hermosa Beach, CA

Alison Williams, Pacific Palisades, CA

Patrick Wilson, Los Angeles, CA

Bibliography

Jit, Fong Chin, SqueezeOC, “Grey Matters”, Walsh, Daniella, Orange County Register, “Shades of Gray”, January 14, 2007

Carasso, Roberta, Laguna News Post, “Artwaves” January 4, 2007

Walsh, Daniella, Riviera Magazine, “The Radar Art” January, 2007

Rupe, Cynthia, SqueezeOC, Picks of the Week, January 4, 2007

Mckenna, John Page, Palm Springs Life, Winter/Spring 2007

Melrod, George, Art Ltd., “Culver City: Chelsea West?” October, 2006

Cripps, Mick, Lifescapes, “Artist Profile,” September, 2006

Allen, Bobbie, Coastline Pilot, “Seven Abstractionists for summer,” July 6, 2006

Frank, Peter, LA Weekly, “Art Pick of the Week,” October 2005

Muckenfuss, Mark, Press Enterprise, Riverside Museum Monothon Event, September, 2005

Simou, Alexandra, New York Sun, January 26, 2005

Kugelman, Kerry, Art Circles, fall 2004

Cullum, Jerry, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Review, August 29, 2004

Gilbert, Debora, Greenline, March, 2004

Gleason, Mat, Artscene, February, 2004

Frank, Peter, LA Weekly, “Art pick of the week,” February, 2004

Novick, La Rue, Daily Bulletin, February, 2004

Litz, Paige, Los Angeles Times, “Going Beneath the Surface,” October 10, 2003

Moyle, Andrew, 210 Magazine, October, 2003

Nelson, Harold, Director, Long Beach Museum of Art, Statement, 2002

Alfred, E. Anne, Asst. Director, Riverside Museum of Art, Statement, 2002

Dennison, Lisa, New American Paintings, vol. 37, 2001-02

Roth, Charlene, Artweek, “Alexander Couwenberg at Ruth Bachofner Gallery,” March, 2001

Frank, Peter, LA Weekly, “Art pick of the week,” January, 2001

Johnstone, Mark, “ART 2000: Applauding Revolutionary Talent”, Millard Sheets Gallery Catalog

Visiting Artist / Lecturer

Paintings Edge, Idyllwild Arts Academy, Idyllwild, CA

Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA

Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA

Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA

California State University Stanislaus, Turlock, CA

Idyllwild Arts Academy, Idyllwild, CA

Millard Sheets Gallery, Pomona, CA

Acknowledgements

California State University, Stanislaus

Dr. Hamid Shirvani, President

Dr. William Covino, Provost/Vice President of Academic Affairs

Dr. Stephen Thomas, Acting Dean, College of the Arts

Ms. Rebecca Phillips Abbott, Interim Vice President for University Advancement

Gordon Senior, Chair, Department of Art

University Art Gallery Staff and Support

Dean De Cocker, Director

Lauris Conrad, Administrative Support Assistant

Bob Varin, Equipment Technician

The Artist Wishes to Thank:

Andi Campognone, Dean De Cocker, Gordon Senior, Peter Frank, Diana Daniels, Steve Scudder, Cooper Johnson, Smyth Johnson, Nani Couwenberg, and Maile Couwenberg.