CHICAGO READER 1989 : ART FACTS: a vanishing architecture, an obsolete dream

In the month of June, Chicagoans don't think about southern California. Palm trees, cloudless skies, and a reliable sun don't beckon us the way they do during the stone gray days of winter. So it must have been in the months of March or April, when there was no sign of the sun, that some of our pale and grouchy predecessors decided to join the westward trek in the first decades of this century. "We sold them the sun," said one early Los Angeles developer, "and threw in the land."

On that semi-arid California land these developers built tidy box-like, single family houses made of wood or stucco, with small front porches and cosy interiors that would keep you cool in the day's heat and snug against the chilly desert night. The basic design came from pattern books and took the name from a dwelling indigenous to India - a bangala - later adapted by the British and called a bungalow. The hospitable California weather meant basements and furnace pipes could be eliminated, making bungalow building an inexpensive proposition. By the 1920s, the first version of "California Dreamin'" was on the charts:

In the land of the bungalow Away from the ice and snow Away from the cold To the land of the gold Away where the poppies grow Away to the setting sun To the home of the orange blossom To the land of milk and honey Where it does not take much money To own a bungalow

For about $1,000 any shivering midwesterner could own 360 days (give or take a few) of sunshine, and, for good measure, a tiny piece of the Golden State.

In March of 1973, during a particularly hideous winter, I packed my bags and went to Los Angeles. There I first saw the work of artist John Padgett. He was painting pictures of houses- bungalows, in fact. Their numbers on the streets of Los Angeles were rapidly diminishing because, by then, the sun was cheap and the land increasingly dear. Multi-unit stucco boxes had made serious dents in the bungalow neighborhoods to accommodate the millions of newcomers during the '50s and '60s. By the '70s the popular California dream was no longer about owning a comfortable and inexpensive home, but about driving Porches and living in a megabuck house with a hot tub.

Padgett picked up the drift of this rerouted dream in his pictures, choosing bungalows wedged between apartment buildings, surrounded by street signs, billboards, and telephone poles, or butted against a widened thoroughfare. He depicted these modest, disappearing dwellings in the humble and fugitive medium of watercolor and framed them with weather-worn scraps of wood. His technique is clean and sharp - almost hardeged - and the houses appear bleached and flattened by the peculiar quality of southern California light and monochromatic sky. In the exacting details of flower pots, window sashes, and shadowy porches, you feel the dignity of the ordinary and a definite urge to go inside and look around.

The ordinary as a subject of art was new and flourishing in the late '60s and '70s and the artistic merits of realism and photorealism against those of abstract painting were hotly debated. Padgett, a graduate of The Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, learned how to draw and make things look real. His own talents and the ideas of that moment produced a body· of work that, from a distance of fifteen years, make the debate seem irrelevant. There is technical mastery and conceptual depth in these paintings of a vanishing architecture and an obsolete dream that time has only enhanced.

John Padgett's California houses are on exhibition at Quinlan Gallery in a show entitled "Habitations/Mind, Memory, Spirit." Also featured are watercolor works by Chicago architect Walter Netsch and small-scale constructions of paper and wood by Ohio artist Toi Unkavatanapong. Opening reception: Sunday, June 12, 3 - 6PM at Quinlan Gallery, 1906 W. Halsted St. (312) 281-9299. The show continues through July 6.