Beer With a Painter

“Go ahead; you can write whatever you want about me,” Jonas Wood says. “Everyone knows I’m a stoner,” he adds, since beer has been mostly displaced by California’s drug of choice during my Los Angeles series of interviews.

Hank Pitcher met me when I arrived in Santa Barbara, and as we made our first drive along the beach, he explained that it was one of the rare places with a south-facing coastline, which affects the light, surf, and feel of the area.

Researching the work and career of Ed Moses prior to our visit was like uncovering a trove of stylistic experimentation with abstract painting, and a whole segment of West Coast art history.

LOS ANGELES — I visited Lecia-Dole Recio in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she lives on a quiet curving street at the top of a hill, close to Dodger Stadium.

I have known Gregory Botts for about twenty years. Early on, I remember being captivated by the guerilla action he and his wife, fellow painter Jenny Hankwitz, took in the early 1990s: planting sunflowers in the meridian of Houston Street in SoHo.