San Diego Reader

Last Light: San Diego Representational Painters

19990826 (San Diego Reader August 26, 1999)

Part One

When I point at and say, I like that painting, the one suffused with sulphury light, the golden warm of San Diego’s presunset hour, the painter, William Glen Crooks, replies, “Oh, yes, that one. Now that was a California moment.”

That is Portico. It’s a four- by six-foot painting that depicts the semi-shabby, four-door entrance to an apartment house, built in the Craftsman style. Its four doors, side-by-side, are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 in italics. Each door has latticed windows at the top and each has its own character: 1 is opened, 2 has a wreath and a bamboo curtain behind the windows, 3’s green window curtain is drawn, and 4 picks up the glare of a near-setting sun. Doors 2 and 4 sport floor mats of different sizes; several rectangular mailboxes are off to the left and a potted plant on a curved leg stand is on the right. Across the entire golden-to-yellow surface—or is it that the surface is being goldened by the sun?—courses a modulating, glaring light.

28266u 0 (San Diego Reader January 7, 1999)

As an undergraduate, I studied the literature of England and America and fell in love with the charge of rhythmic language, the Anglo-Saxon drum of verse, the symphonic progress of prose. Entering graduate school many years and a few professions later, I hoped to rekindle that love. But I succumbed, like every other student I knew, to the doctrinaire theories of feminism, historicism, and Marxism, the great critical isms of the time, which tested the novels and poems I had so admired. These isms and the professors who intoned the jargon of literary theory so befuddled my mind, I was certain I’d never get out of academia.

THOMAS LARSON