SAN FRANCISCO — The weekend section of The Chronicle featured a single color photograph of a painting by Monroe Hodder. I no longer needed

coffee. Seeing it gave me all the energy I required. Too bad it was 6 in the morning and too early to head to the gallery to see the works in person. By 11, I was on the bus heading, as it turns out, the absolute wrong direct. Easily corrected. In no time I was on Geary Street, the home of too many galleries.

The building at 49 Geary Street has galleries on four floors, so I made lots of discoveries. But first to the paintings at Ellins Eagles -Smith Gallery on the fifth floor and the Hodders that drew me to the address in the first place.  This work absolutely glows. Trust me, my photographs don’t begin to do them justice.  You’ll actually get a better feel for the luminosity and energy if you click on Hodder’s name and go right to her website. She’s been doing these stripey paintings since at least 2007, but these new paintings still seem full of exploration.

One floor down I was knocked out by the crazy imaginary beasts, faces, and leg-sprouting globe of Heather Wilcoxon in the Jack Fischer Gallery. The child-like inventiveness of the pieces, including a wall of what looked like refrigerator art, had me thinking “outsider,” although Wilcoxon has a master’s in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Ex-Metallica bass player Jason Newsted had a couple of pieces at the Micaëla Gallery that really grabbed me. I confess, I had no idea he was connected to Metallica until I tried to find a webpage for him. Anyone else see a little Basquiat in these?  At least in the blue painting? Sorry for the shadows in these photos. It really takes something from them.

For something completely different I stopped in at Brian Gross Fine Art to look at these very intense paintings by Teo González. I was surprised when the women in the gallery called these minimalist, since minimalism usually seems so, well, minimal. So, OK, maybe I don’t really know what the word means. It conjures up  paintings with maybe two colors,  one of which is the blue the artist uses to draw a line down the canvas.

Anyway, no art tomorrow. I head to Palo Alto at the crack of dawn for a freelance writing conference.

 

Jason Newsted