The amazing new SF Jazz Center, hurtling toward a January 2013 completion date, will not   only house a terrific performance space but also three murals by Sandow Birk and his partner, Elyse Pignolet.  Birk likes to do more than one of a kind.  He translated and illustrated Dante’s Divine Comedy; he is completing a translation of the Qur’an that takes the form of over 300 paintings illustrating the sura (chapters) of the book (each image contains text and image together).  And he did an impressive spin on romantic landscape painting with his Prisonation series, a set of 32 oil paintings, one for each California prison, that mimic the romanticism of earlier painters but always include disturbing reminders of the incarceratory function of the remote regions of the state, usually in the form of distant glimpses of these 2001-like monoliths, though in some cases they all but dominate the painting.

The murals for the Jazz Center have a lighter touch.  Done on tile and painted and fired in Southern California then shipped north, the 2500 or so tiles tell the story of jazz in America. They have a light, airy feel to them.  They allude to famous clubs, performers and eras.  The third mural, which Sandow threw in as an extra enticement during the bidding process, will be in the area of the dressing rooms and is the most humorous of them all: people anxiously wait to see if they will get to Heaven, but those who ascend find only the instruments absent from jazz (harps, violins, and so on) while those who descend to hell find themselves in jazz heaven, which joy and pleasure in every moment.  A wry work that performers will certainly enjoy as they head out for the stage.

Arnold works on canvases from large to small to elaborate a theme.  In the show at the Catharine Clark Gallery from Nov. 2012 to Jan 2013, he presents a variety of paintings that revolve mainly around mining operations, small operations by a few people that could be from the 19th century.  They have a haunting quality.  Even with people in the images, something seems missing, some sense of purpose, goal, context. The absence of a horizon is a technical means to this end: we feel flattened against the earth–and the mines that penetrate it–without a way to get our bearings in a larger world.  Using a limited palette mostly of earth tones, Arnold constantly implies what’s not seen: agency, aspiration, human connection, companionship, society.   These men, none more so than the half visible bones of a man who apparently perished at one of these anonymous mine sites, have no one to turn to, no one to relate to, no one to come home to, and the shafts that penetrate from the canvas inward have a vertiginous quality, as if the painting harbored a lacuna within itself. The bottoms of the shafts are sheer blackness, nothingness, somewhere far below.  It is not entirely surprising that Kenneth Baker in the S.F. Chonicle should see one painting, “Small Time Operation,” as reminiscent of Courbet’s “L’origine du monde,” with its shockingly frank depiction of female genitalia. Not at all erotic but disturbing, haunting, pointing to a mystery that Courbet, like Arnold and his small band of miners seem bent on confronting, if not understanding.