What's my online?

Well, toss me a cassette tape and call me a Luddite. Seems I left out the Internet when I wrote my April 7 cover story about the ways fledgling artists break into the business these days.

True, they do walk the walk, pounding on gallery doors carrying slick portfolios and polka-dot business cards and glittery PR grins. “Please, sir, just one solo exhibit?”

But reader Lile Elam gently reminded me (via a technology called "electronic mail") that there’s also this newfangled invention called the World Wide Web that many artists use to get their work into the fabled “out there.”

Elam may be a mite biased, as she runs a website called Art on the Net (Art.Net) where artists curate their own on-line galleries. Still, her point is well taken. Art.Net has been live from her Palo Alto home office since 1994 and includes painters, poets, sculptors, video artists, etc. Links include the Peninsula Sculptors' Guild, New Zealand Artists and the Room of Israeli Artists.

Elam says the artists get valuable exposure and learn from each other how to market themselves. Although the site isn't commercial, art collectors contact the artists directly to make purchases, without a gallery middleman. "The artists themselves are in control of their own works and spaces," she says.

That's happening all over the web today, of course. Do a search for "online galleries" and you'll be up for days. Brand-new artists are muscling in side-by-side with established longtimers.

So maybe the modern challenge isn't getting your work out there; it's getting someone, somehow to notice you in the growing crowd.

Pictured: "Snail," an oil painting by Lile Elam

Wanted: Three Airline Seats

“Teeth Needed” is the best email subject line ever. Maybe it’s a personal ad from someone with low standards. Or a very short list of job requirements (apparently there is an opening for a vampire somewhere). Snicker.

Actually, it’s from an email I got last year from the Bay Area Theatre Bums mailing list. Like many of my theater cohorts, I signed up to hear about auditions and ticket offers. I didn’t expect to be so entertained by the emails from folks seeking props and furniture for their shows.

The aforementioned email was from a San Mateo theater group that was putting on a play called “Tainted Justice” and needed a set of dentures for an exhibit in a trial scene. I wonder if they found them (and if they washed them before they gave them back).

Some of my other favorite subject lines: “Desperately Seeking Suit of Armor,” “SFFCT seeks a realistic bear costume and a ghostlight,” and “Wanted: Three Airline Seats.”

My heart went out to the poor director of a recent production of “Death of a Salesman” who needed not only a Formica-topped kitchen table, a vanity dressing table with mirror, and an antique tape recorder, but also a football helmet, a football, shoulder guards and pants -- from 1945-1950.

Anyone got a good story about a struggle to find a prop?

Arthur on the go

When artist Arthur Krakower called to tell me about his new solo exhibit, I hope he didn’t mind that I told him he sounded like my grandfather.

I meant it as a compliment. There was the same intent kindness in his voice, and the same twist of New York (he said “be-caws” instead of “be-cuz”).

He didn’t seem to mind. He probably gets the grandfather thing a lot. After all, the Atherton artist became the oldest graduate of the California College of the Arts when he earned his master’s degree at the age of 80 in 2001.

Ever prolific, Arthur has come out with “Tears of Joy,” a new series of oil paintings and monotypes, which he’s showing at the CPF Gallery (also a framing store) in San Francisco through May 26. Then he's off to Italy to capture villages and people; he expects those creations will be part of his September exhibit in Palo Alto at Smith Andersen Editions.

“Painting keeps you young,” Arthur told me. “You’re constantly looking at new ideas.”

For more about Arthur, check out a sweet story that ran a few years back in our sister paper The Almanac (written by my dear friend Andrea Gemmet -- not that I’m biased).

Pictured: "Aunt Jean at Long Beach," a 2003 oil on wood by Arthur Krakower.

How they lived

I admit I hadn't heard of the photographer Manuel Gomez Miralles before I wrote this week's cover story. Absolutely my loss.

Quite the trailblazer, he was. Miralles (1886-1965) was among the first professional photographers in Costa Rica, says Alejandra Chaverri, who's restoring his work.

For years, his home base was his studio in the capital city of San Jose. But he seemed to be everywhere in the early 1900s, shooting elegant buildings, child coffee-pickers, oxcarts, chicken-sellers, jungles, students in school uniforms.

You feel as though he's tried to capture every slice of daily life in the urban and rural landscapes of Costa Rica, from natives of the Talamanca area toting hemp to brassed-up soldiers in the city of Heredia to milkmen with their gleaming metal cans.

Armed with his camera, he also joined the ranks of the press, covering political campaigns and the 1910 earthquake in the city of Cartago, a disaster that killed 1,750 people.

It must be something to know you are leaving behind not only images of great beauty but documents that will soon become historic -- future people will look to them to see how you and your compatriots lived.

Pictured: Manuel Gomez Miralles, captured in 1924 by an unknown photographer.

Local by the bay

If an actor's progress can be measured by the number of seats in the theater, Palo Alto native Carrie Madsen is doing pretty darn well.

As a youngster she took the stage at the Palo Alto Children's Theatre, which seats just under 200. After college she came back to Palo Alto, where she choreographs at the children's theater and performs up and down the Peninsula. Now she's got the lead in "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" at Broadway By the Bay, which uses the 1,600-seat San Mateo Center for the Performing Arts.

Carrie plays Millie, an Oregon Territory gal who gets hitched only to discover that her fella's brothers are part of the package. Have fun keeping that bathroom shiny, toots.

"Seven Brides" is not my favorite show (it's not exactly at the forefront of the women's movement), but the dancing can be fabulous. And these performers will certainly have the room to leap.

Pictured: Carrie Madsen as Millie with a plethora of brothers. Photo by David Allen.

My veggie valentine

How often do you get to follow a work of art from an idea popping into an artist's head, to watching a hand and a brush and a sketchpad doing their intricate dance (sometimes a Viennese waltz, sometimes the Running Man), to holding the finished product in your hand?

(Sudden internal query: Am I showing my age by mentioning the Running Man? Am I the only one who remembers that fine, fine creation?)

Anyway. I recently interviewed a group of artists who meet in a Mountain View apartment to paint greeting cards. Artist Jayme George, who has a fondness for carrots, decided to go with a Valentine's Day theme. I watched her painting a pink hair bow on the girl carrot's head and chatting away, sometimes seeking advice from her fellow artists. It looked like fun, like a writer's group. Only with artists.

After my story ran in the Feb. 3 Weekly, the artists sent me a thank-you note -- in Jayme's hot-off-the-presses new Valentine's Day card. I felt like I had been there since the beginning. Now I can tell everyone I am a true insider.

The artists, who call their card line Ella and Monk, are planning a spring show with other local artists at the Treasure gift shop at 151 Main St. in Los Altos from April 3-24. Call (650) 948-9900.

Pictured: "Young Veggie Love" by Jayme George.

The cello can bellow

The cello may be mellow, but you would not believe how much Natalie Haas can make it jump and jive. One of two young musician sisters from Menlo Park, Natalie has led a fast-paced touring life since graduating from Juilliard last year. She lives in New York City now but will be back in the Bay Area for a gig in Saratoga on March 26.

While classically trained, Natalie is on a mission to show that the cello can take off as a rhythmic fixture in Scottish dance music. She’s sold me. When she pairs up with Scottish fiddler Alasdair Fraser, the two are on fire, trading harmonies and melodies, flying far above us mortals. (Listen to a sample below.)

I interviewed Natalie and her sister, Brittany, a fiddler with a love for “old-time” folk tunes, a few years back for The Almanac and enjoyed seeing the two of them play together. You’d never know a Southern Appalachian folk song or a Norwegian hat dance could have such infectious energy. I would have danced along, but I didn’t have a hat.

Brittany is now a freshman at Princeton studying ecology and evolutionary biology, but still making time for fiddling gigs -- and learning how to play the Indian tabla drum, her mother, Barbara, tells me: “She’s kind of like a kid in a candy store sampling everything.”

Natalie’s gig is at 7:30 p.m. this Sunday at the Carriage House Theatre at the Montalvo Arts Center. Event info is here.

Media in this post:

Listen to Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas playing an excerpt from “St. Kilda Wedding/Brose and Butter” from their CD “Fire and Grace.” (.mp3 file, 33 sec.)