SAN DIEGO ARTISTS FIND GREENER PASTURES IN L.A. : For Many, S.D.’s New and Lively Downtown Art Scene Is Case of Too Little, Too Late

“When a 5th Avenue street crazy hit me with a piece of pipe, I really hit rock bottom. I knew I had to move to L.A.”

That pushed painter Richard Sigmund out of San Diego to Los Angeles. He had come here in 1978 to be an artist. Three years later, he left with an accumulation of grievances.

The lack of financial support was his most serious complaint. He found very few collectors in San Diego, perhaps three, and had never sold a canvas here for more than $300. Yet within days after his arrival in Los Angeles, he sold a large painting out of his studio for $4,500.

In San Diego, “there were crowds at our openings but no sales,” Sigmund said. “I didn’t have money for food.”

The situation has changed considerably since Sigmund’s departure. An art district has taken shape in downtown San Diego. The incentive, artists say, has been reasonable rents--at least more so than in other parts of the city, such as Hillcrest.

Artists need studios, nonprofit organizations need exhibition spaces and dealers need galleries. They have found them in the area bounded by Island Street, Broadway and 4th and 9th avenues. Pioneers were artists like Gary Ghirardi and Jay Johnson, non-traditional or alternative organizations like Sushi and Installation, and art dealers like Michael Dunsford, Patty Aande and Mark Quint.

A lively downtown “art scene” has developed in San Diego in response to the presence of both establishments and personalities. Hundreds of people may turn out for the openings of artists’ exhibitions in commercial galleries. Visits from “gallery goers” are regular, and art-interest groups from out of town now come to San Diego for weekend tours. The local press is covering visual arts activities more broadly and intensively than ever before. Businesses such as the San Diego Standard Brands Paint and Home Decorating Center sponsor exhibitions on their premises.

Local museums also have recently begun to acknowledge the presence of artists who merit their attention--the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art with its “A San Diego Exhibition: Forty-Two Emerging Artists” a year ago, and the San Diego Museum of Art with its coming exhibition of works by Theodor Geisel, creator of the Dr. Seuss books for children.

And a social center, a new coffee house called Java, aimed at a clientele with visual arts interests, opened Monday at 9th Avenue and G Street.

Despite this activity and effervescence, however, many artists continue to leave San Diego for what they perceive as more congenial environments--especially Los Angeles. For some the scene here has developed too late. For others it is still inadequate. For still others it is only partially satisfying.

Art dealers Aande and Quint as well as Bob Bush, director of Installation, and Lynn Schuette, founder-director of Sushi, agree that the cohesiveness of the downtown art scene appears to be one of its strengths. But they say it is cohesive because it is so marginally successful that all components feel the necessity to be mutually supportive.

They stress the need for more cooperation. The departure of artists over a period of time, they feel, weakens the vitality of San Diego as an art center as surely as the departure of a major athletic team would weaken the sports scene or the relocation of a major business would weaken the economy.

As Aande said: “It’s real drastic when anyone significant leaves. It’s like breaking a bonding thread. There’s nothing concrete about it, but it’s a loss that’s felt emotionally in the art community. A link gets dropped, and we all feel it.”

The most grievous complaint of art refugees is indifference in the community; a lack of collectors, who provide financial wherewithal for artists to survive, and an absence of opportunities for artists to exhibit their works in San Diego galleries and museums, which validate what they are doing.

An early fugitive, one of the area’s most famous sons, was by coincidence the subject of ARTnews magazine’s January cover story. John Baldessari, a native of National City and an alumnus of then-San Diego State College (now San Diego State University), enjoys an international reputation for having been one of the first artists to borrow popular imagery from television, films and advertising for presentation in a fine-art context.

He left San Diego in 1970--after having survived here with the “imported culture” of books and journals and regular weekend trips to Los Angeles to visit its galleries. He feels that he could not have achieved the eminence he now has if he had remained.

“I gave it everything I had to stay there,” Baldessari said in an interview. “It was like spitting against the wind in San Diego. There’s more payoff in Los Angeles for the energy expended.”

Richard Sigmund also gave San Diego everything he had before fleeing. The Philadelphia native, now 34, settled here in a loft space on 5th Avenue. He quickly became known as much for his energetic efforts to create an art scene in downtown San Diego as for his remarkable paintings replicating San Diego’s street surfaces.

The gregarious Sigmund “networked” with the community and received the support he needed from colleagues such as Gary Ghirardi, Tom Driscoll and Richard Allen Morris, all veteran artists in San Diego. With several of them, he started a gallery known by its address on 5th Avenue, “552.” But the city closed it because the building did not meet earthquake standards.

Sigmund found support in the San Diego press as both artist and gallery organizer but indifference from the museums, including the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, an important institution for a young artist.

“They didn’t know we existed,” he said. “They had no clue as to what was going on downtown. Today I can see things from a museum’s point of view. They’re like units in an international network, and local artists can be a problem. But the La Jolla museum was like our goal. It was our vision of the art world. And it was inaccessible.”

“Now I have a painting in the collection,” he added, grinning. It was a gift from a trustee of the museum and his wife, major supporters of Southern California artists and residents of Beverly Hills--not San Diego.

Sigmund was a critical figure in the development of a cohesive visual arts culture in San Diego. Although he moved on, he acknowledged a debt to this city.

“I’ve kept up my connections with San Diego,” he said. “I got my start there. It was a testing ground. It gave me a place to work at the time and an opportunity to start an alternative space. I met my wife there. I learned how to live in San Diego. But I had to move on. Collectors make the real difference for an artist--that and competition on a higher level in the art world.”

Since his departure, Sigmund has had exhibitions at the Quint Gallery in San Diego and at various galleries in Los Angeles, including the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art. Today, a major solo exhibition of his recent paintings opens at the respected Koplin Gallery in West Hollywood. And next January, his paintings will be exhibited at the Galerie Fazade in Paris.

Just around the corner from Richard and Tasha Sigmund in Los Angeles’ old downtown industrial area live Brad and Kathy Durham, more recent refugees from San Diego.

Brad Durham came to San Diego State University to finish the education he had begun in Northern California, but he became as discouraged here as he had been there. For a year he made art in his studio on Kettner Boulevard while supporting himself and his wife by working in a factory. He exhibited here, won prizes and even sold 30 works--hybrids of sculpture and painting--to San Diego collectors.

Despite Durham’s success, 18 months ago the couple moved to Los Angeles and settled in handsome, combined studio-living quarters. He had not been able to find adequate, inexpensive studio space in San Diego. He also had not found an art network or support system that satisfied him. “In San Diego good connections triumph,” he said. “I don’t know that good work does.”

Durham complained forcefully about what he calls the “disbelief system” of local institutions. He believes that, through their indifference to artists who live here, San Diego museums convince them that what they do is not worthwhile. Curators do not visit their studios and directors show no interest in exhibiting their works, so artists stop struggling to make art, he says.

Durham points to what he calls the “cowboy mentality” of San Diegans, an attitude of indifference to everything beyond one’s own interests, a narrowness of vision, a lack of community spirit and of inquisitiveness, a “strutting through life looking straight ahead and shooting down anything that doesn’t fit.”

On the other hand, Durham said, “Because there’s no support there’s also no trap as there is in L.A. There’s a freedom to be committed to one’s profession rather than to a community-approved attitude, or even to the community.

“In San Diego, artists assume you’ll move to L.A. if you’re serious about being an artist.”

Sculptor Rod Baer agrees. Baer, whose works were recently included in the “Young American Artists IV” exhibition at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Gallery, also moved on to move up.

Baer came here in 1969 to escape Los Angeles and enjoy San Diego’s surfing culture. But when he got serious about art, he sacrificed that culture. He studied in the graduate art program at SDSU and completed his studies at the Claremont Graduate School.

In San Diego, he exhibited widely and enjoyed the support of collectors, but in 1981 he decided to leave: “It was a question of giving up art and keeping San Diego or keeping my art and giving up San Diego.”

Baer is still excited about his move to Los Angeles. “It was incredible to go from struggle to support. I make my works to communicate, but San Diego didn’t give me an audience,” he said. “I knew I had to leave when I started stashing things away for a different audience. The hardest part was leaving friends. I gained strength from struggling here that I used in encountering adversity in L.A.”

An alternative to tearing up roots is commuting.

Martha Alf, a major but fugitive presence in San Diego’s art world, is probably the city’s senior commuting artist. She and her husband regularly depart on Friday evenings for their Venice residence, where they stay connected to the Los Angeles art network. A figure of national importance, she is much respected for mysterious paintings and drawings that are ostensibly traditional still lifes but contemporary abstractions as well.

Alf is of the generation of Baldessari, the mid-’50s, but she has the yearnings of younger artists to move to Los Angeles with its highly developed art scene and intense art dialogue. Edward Alf’s work as a psychologist keeps them rooted here, however.

Regular visits to Los Angeles, a trip to New York and Washington, and independent study of women artists were decisive influences in her development, but they also alienated Martha Alf from San Diego.

“San Diego artists were supposed to stay as they were, like housewives,” she said. “It seemed like a conspiracy to keep us from changing. Talking about art was regarded as something almost evil. Our opportunities for exhibiting were limited to the Art Guild, the Del Mar Fair and the Jewish Community Center.”

Alf temporarily moved to Los Angeles in the late 1960s and completed a master’s degree in fine arts at UCLA in 1970. Her life and connections there were decisive for her future as an artist.

“If I hadn’t lived there, I wouldn’t have experienced what L.A. has to offer,” she said. “Establishing myself as an artist there was a step to establishing myself as an artist in New York. By being in L.A., I got into several national shows that I couldn’t have gotten into being in San Diego. And showing makes your art stronger. It forces you to do more, to face up to an additional challenge. L.A. offers a different level of competition, and people will pay more for art there too.”

Three younger commuting artists, all coincidentally represented in last year’s “San Diego Exhibition” at the La Jolla museum and all employees of SDSU, regard the San Diego connection with varying degrees of interest and enthusiasm.

Abstract painter Richard Baker, who is represented by the prestigious Cirrus Gallery in Los Angeles, would move to Los Angeles full-time if it were feasible, but he makes his living teaching in the SDSU art department.

“I am definitely an L.A. artist,” Baker said.

He advised Brad Durham to move to Los Angeles to pursue a career in art. As for himself, he said, “living here part time is like a vacation from L.A., and vice-versa. San Diego is quiet, sleepy, comfortable. L.A. is more invigorating and closer to what my life’s about. It’s not just love of a big city, but it has the material that I need for what’s most vital to my life, more so than San Diego.”

Other than employment, what keeps him here? “People I care about,” Baker said. “I’m fond of San Diego for its people. It’s easier to get to know people in San Diego than L.A. Downtown here has more impact as a rallying place where you can meet other artists at gallery openings.”

Printmaker-photographer-painter Walt Cotten and painter Gillian Theobald are, of all the artists queried, most positive in their attitudes toward San Diego as a part-time base.

Cotten arrived here in the fall of 1978 to teach at SDSU after having lived in Seattle for four years. But at Christmastime in 1982, he moved to Los Angeles and considered himself “a resident of Los Angeles who worked in San Diego.”

“Now,” he said, “I feel more like a man with dual citizenship, and I’d like to keep it that way too. One has to make a living, but San Diego means more than that to me. I want a full life here with friends and shows.”

Cotten works intensely as a teacher three days a week, then works equally intensely as an artist in Los Angeles for four days.

“L.A is my studio time. I don’t go to openings as often as I should to connect with other artists,” he said. “It’s not inertia on my part, but my studio time is precious.”

“I don’t have a beef about San Diego,” he added. “I left before things started to happen like Mark (Quint) and Patty (Aande) opening galleries. And I didn’t think it would be possible to show at the La Jolla museum before last spring. It usually showed artists who had reputations other places. It brought information from Europe and New York but little even from L.A. But something’s changed all for the better here, and a negative comparison with L.A. is not justified.”

Cotten is comfortable as a migrant artist and teacher. “I want to have both San Diego and L.A., and I still want to show in Seattle,” he said. “Is that greedy?”

Like Cotten, Gillian Theobald is comfortable with her commuting life, four days in San Diego, three in Los Angeles. Going to downtown Los Angeles where she has her studio is like going to a “war zone,” she observes. “There’s nothing like it here. The street people are really desperate, and theft is something you just live with.”

The La Jolla native received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art at SDSU, where she now manages the art supplies store “Art Etc.” Her salary goes to rents and the expenses of commuting, which she sees extending indefinitely into the future.

“It’s worth it,” Theobald said, smiling. “It’s difficult to put into words why. Just looking out on the city is a charge.”

Other than its general ambiance, what draws her to Los Angeles? “I think there’s a more critical eye up there. And there’s an excitement from seeing other artists’ work.”

Theobald exhibits her bleak imaginary landscapes in Los Angeles at the Cirrus Gallery. It was only after having “cracked L.A.,” however, that she received an opportunity to exhibit in her hometown--at the Patty Aande Gallery.

Theobald speaks of her San Diego-Los Angeles commute as a “weekly energy shift. It would be just one more shift to New York,” which is her goal.

Roy McMakin, a resident of San Diego since 1978, made that shift last fall, without, however, first experiencing life in Los Angeles.

The artist, who was also included in the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art’s “San Diego Exhibition,” makes deliberately awkward pieces of furniture as three-dimensional works of art to “initiate discourse about what objects are.”

Having moved to New York, he found it difficult to make art because of the fierceness of the competition. Nevertheless, he has found it a bracing environment that compels a kind of self-evaluation that is not occasioned here.

Temporarily, he plans to be a commuter, all the way to New York, making his art here, where he can concentrate on it, and making his career there. “Being in New York helps me be more articulate and look at what I do here more critically,” McMakin said.