Meeting Barbara Mendes

Detail of Barbara Mendes artwork, including depiction of a cityscape

My friend Aubrey has been telling me for a few months that I should drop by his building and check out the new art gallery there. He mentioned that the artist showing her work at the gallery was a comic book artist who knew Robert Crumb. He told me her name, but I didn’t recognize it.

Yesterday I finally made it down to Barbara Mendes‘ art gallery – called the SoRo Art Center Gallery and located at 2709 S. Robertson Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90034 – on the west side of Robertson between Pico and Venice. It’s easy to spot because there are great mural paintings all over the outside of the building, and even a public art installation hanging from the adjacent street trees. 

Some Recommended 2011 Pieces

I got inspired by Alissa Walker’s recent piece highlighting her top ten stories from 2011… so I figured I’d curate some of my 2011 output. Drive up some web hits here and there! Here are ten pieces from 2011 that I am proud of… and they’re so all over the board that I can’t imagine anyone out there reading this would actually like all this stuff.

These are from various places where I blog – here, L.A. Creek Freak, CicLAvia, Eco-Village, L.A. Streetsblog, and my art blog Handmade Ransom Notes. Yah – a lot of it is insider rants that only a hard-ass bicycling urban creek freak like me would really want to read.

Drawing of my mom - 1987

1. Remembering my mom, Margaret Gerhardt Linton, who died on July 31st 2011. I wrote about her in a few different places… but perhaps most memorable are the following: a three part piece about her home and my sketches of her in the hospital.

For a broader biographic sketch of mom, read this and/or follow the links here. I miss her a lot… especially around the holidays and the turning of the new year. She made me who I am in myriad ways. I am glad that I’ve been writing about her and posting others recollections… so I can keep her memory fresh.

2. Some of my best pieces are really long complaining indignant rants… one of my favorite rants was about the city of Los Angeles’ unnecessary project to tear out the historic 1929 North Spring Street Bridge. The project as initially proposed was, in my opinion hugely awful… then, through a many-year community activism campaign the project has been trimmed back to just awful.