Cutter Smith of Sacramento wants to know if his "A smart dog knows his own tail" is original.

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  EX LOVERS

I think of you both night and day,
But what I think I will not say.
And if you should ever think of me,
Don't tell me what your thoughts might be.
It seems our love has gone astray,
And let's just hope it stays that way.
Rick Lyttle 5/11/04

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  THE NEWSLETTER

No 2, Volume I of the newsletter for this site went out by e-mail to a select list. If you want to join these happy subscribers, just send me you name and e-mail address.
here

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  ¶ 9:05 AM

  MORE NONSENSE

Sammy was spanked for saying there was a camel in the kitchen cooking spaghetti
When it was actually a giraffe recently arrived from the Serengeti.
Sammy sulked for days after his terrible gaff,
Which amused everyone except, of course, the giraffe.
Moral: Animals have feelings, too.
Rick Lyttle 5/11/04

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  AT THE GALLERIES

Through this month and into June, three artists are making Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station well worth a visit. Joe Patton Barr's colorful, large format photos made with a pinhole camera, guest artist Peet Cocke's mixed media work, and Susan Sasso's small, photo-enhanced paintings are all both visually and mentally stimulating.

Cocke is here as a guest artist, and his large pieces occupy the gallery's Project Space He is a full-time art teacher at Cuesta College in San Louis Obisbo, and as you might guess, has produced the true "head" pieces currently on display. The mixed media drawings mostly in grays and blacks, were made with concern for our threatened environment. They are designed to make you think. Each piece, however, has such strong composition and such fine graphic quality that it could stand by itself, political messages aside.

There's a good deal of text in many of these pieces, but they don't fall to the level of poster art, which they easily might in the hands of a less skillful artists.

Well toward the other end of the artistic spectrum, are Sasso's miniature landscapes, which in their own way, make an equally strong appeal for the environment. These are all based on views close to her Olema home, all obviously precious to her, and all clearly created with tender care.

The process is simple. She takes a picture, runs it into her computer and then prints it on archival, rag paper. Next, she enhances the image with colored pencil, oil pastels, or water-based crayon. Most are square format, no more than three by three inches, and they gain power from their small size. The collection, incidently, fits the gallery's little "annex" perfectly.

Unlike Cocke's work, Sasso's leaves the viewer optimistic. "I hope people have as much fun looking at them as I had doing them," she says.

Inverness artist Joe Patton Barr's colorful photos also carry the strong spirit of fun, due in great measure, I think, to their experimental nature. Some nine years ago, as he explains, he was too broke to invest in a camera, so he made one. This turned out to be the old-fashioned pin-hole camera that some of us remember from our youth. (All right, very few of us are old enough.) In this case, however, the film he used was modern, color stuff, not the grainy, black and white stuff of MY youth.

He gave his primitive box a very small aperture which provided plenty of time to tinker with lighting, background, and filters between exposures. Each of his big prints, they are as large as 3 by 4 feet, was built from several exposures. In some cases there would be as many as five exposures of the same image with the whole process of background, filter and lighting changes between exposure taking up to 45 minutes.

Barr a new gallery member and obvious asset to the group, concentrates in this show on the human figure and on flowers, and the results are stunning. All prints have a soft-edged dreaminess, but they retain simple, strong compositions. Barr said that using a pin-hole camera forced him to think about what makes a good photo. He concluded that the key elements were composition and color. I'd say, that he's made that very clear in his gallery inaugural.

The show continues through June 13. The gallery, at 11101 Highway One, is open from 11 to 5 every day but Tuesday.

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  ¶ 3:29 PM