ART : Pair Hoping Their Work Goes Beyond Its Commercial Appeal

How commercial can an artist’s intentions be before he sacrifices his ambitions to be accepted as “serious?”

That question lingers over a show by Brad Howe and Craig French, two 28-year-old Laguna Beach natives, at the Diane Nelson Gallery in Laguna Beach through Jan. 3.

The men described their work in recent interviews with suc adjectives as uplifting and positive and spoke with pride about how they think these qualities helped them sell much of their work during the current exhibition. Howe’s work, especially, could strike a viewer as highly derivative. Howe makes mobiles whose smoothly finished metallic surfaces have pastel, surf-culture colors and blandly decorative shapes; some evoke the work of Alexander Calder so closely that they would have to be called imitations.

He also does three-dimensional wall-hangings, reliefs in painted metal. Attempting a counterpoint of swirling projections and sculpted space, they mimic the famous wall pieces by Frank Stella but on a far less epic, less distinctive scale.

Craig French works in neon, and the result (perhaps due to the store-front associations of neon itself) seems to aspire to nothing beyond sheer likability, whether the artist bends tubes of multicolored light around the headlights of a Volkswagen bug or fashions a large, arching fish out of lines of multihued light, a sort of Technicolor Charlie the Tuna.

Both Howe and French seem skilled enough at shaping, painting and polishing the metals and hard acrylics they use. And it is not hard to imagine how some people might buy these pieces as brightly shimmering additions for certain types of homes.

The artists unapologetically acknowledged that the commercial appeal of their work was one strong reason for making it. Howe said he has sold extensively at exhibitions in “fine galleries” in Brazil, a country where he developed connections as a foreign exchange student.

With pride, he said the work often ends up in restaurants and Howe noted that his Volkswagen piece was featured on a television program. Both men said they have commercial representation in Los Angeles and sell nearly everything they make--at prices ranging between $2,000 and $5,000 at the Nelson Gallery.

But the two added that they want to be critically accepted as serious artists and wondered aloud how far their current approaches would take them toward that goal.

“I was in a gallery in Brazil once and overheard somebody who was looking at my work refer to it as sub-Calder,” said Howe, the tone of his voice completely neutral. “It bothered me a little at first, but I didn’t really care. I don’t think it’s sub-Calder. I think it’s very good Howe.”

Still, he admits the influences of Calder, Stella and others and says he wants to go on to find a more distinctly personal style. “I have a devil and an angel in my head,” Howe said. “The devil tells me my work should be commercial and sell. The angel says, ‘Hey, where’s your integrity.’ I have to deal with that.” French said his favorite piece in the show is an unusually discreet wall-sculpture of three triangular shapes outlined in tubes that hold a pinkish, neon shimmer.

Unlike most of French’s pieces, “Shades of Gray,” as it is called, does not call attention to itself, and the interplay of light and shape is alluring. But, French noted, “Shades of Gray” was not selling. “See what happens if a piece is not commercial?” he said. “I think that ‘Shades of Gray’ is more and more the direction that I’m going in. That has me nervous. It is a risk.”

That risk, one senses, is one that French and Howe will take together if they take it at all. Howe and French have been close friends since they met in Laguna Beach at age 13. They played junior high school football together, discovered their artistic ambitions together in industrial shop courses, steadily influenced each other’s art and share a house in Baldwin Park with Howe’s girlfriend and French’s wife. Howe is the son of a builder, French of an architect. Their fathers influenced them to seek an aesthetic that they both describe as “architectural.”

“I just think a lot of so-called ‘serious art’ is static and boring,” French said. “A lot of people don’t want to have interaction with it. I think art can have a positive value and still be serious.”

The pair agreed that Laguna Beach galleries had acquired a reputation for commerciality and said their ambivalence about the kind of work they want to do extended to the town where they are showing it.

“That is true about Laguna Beach,” Howe said. “Laguna Beach has been very commercial, but where it is going and where it has been are two different things--I think it is going to change. This gallery is trying to recruit interesting artists. . . . Things can change.”

“I love Laguna and I identify with it,” said French. “I know there is that stereotype about Laguna Beach and we are taking a risk by showing there, but it’s where we’re from.”