About Berkeley Bowl West Art

The Berkeley Bowl West

Art Commission

Ross Drago

In 1998 I was commissioned to make ceramic tiles on the Shattuck Avenue outside wall of the Berkeley Bowl Marketplace.  As a painter, I worked with the ceramist Mary Tewksbury to make the nine large ceramic placards that were set into the walls of the Berkeley Bowl.  The Shattuck Avenue Berkeley Bowl was designed by the architect David Trachtenberg. It was David, my friend for many years, who introduced me to Glenn Yasuda, Berkeley Bowl creator . If you drive down Shattuck passing the Berkeley Bowl, you may have seen the tiles.  I was surprised when I recently received a phone call from Glenn Yasuda.  The message asked me to call him back.

Nine of the eleven ceramic tiles:16″ x 19″ Shattuck Avenue Wall (Exterior East Wall)

I had unnerving visions of graffiti covering my ceramic tiles.  I got my courage back and gave Glenn a return call. He wanted me to meet him and take a look at the new, nearly finished Berkeley Bowl West on Heinz Street to see what kind of art work I could come up with for the new supermarket.

We met at the site. We put on hard hats from the construction shanty, and began walking toward the enormous structure.  Half way across the parking lot, however, he stopped, and slowly waved his arms toward the building, as if pushing a heavy weight. This gesture let me know that I should just go and have a look and get back to him.  I smiled and nodded and went ahead, avoiding active pallet machines and workers, all in hard hats.  Once inside I saw what could have been the Goodyear blimp hangar. The space was huge.

My eyes went above to the great surrounding soffits, vertical walls that surrounded the great space but began some twenty-five feet above the floor and went upward to the ceiling another sixteen feet.  The overhead walls could not have been hungrier for large works of art.

As it turned out, I had spent the last twenty years developing an art form that was designed to cover an airport wall, or a small hallway. I called it Module Art.  Over the years I had made canvases whose sides were all the same length or a divisible of one another, so that they could be bolted together.  The canvases were hexagons, triangles, pentagons, octagons and squares.  The geometry of the canvas shapes gave a sense of intellect, mathematical precision, while the free and energetic way I had developed of painting on the geometric shapes, in what I called an energy symbol language, celebrated the opposite feeling; sensuality, playfulness, the path of least resistance.

Module Art was literally made for just such a space as Berkeley Bowl West provided. My studio was small, but the project was enormous.  I paced off the building and estimated the height of the overhead walls, how the paintings would look when lighted by the north light skylights.  I then went back to the Energy Art Studio which I had founded and Directed  for the past twenty years, and began a set of drawings to make my proposal to the Yasuda family and to the building’s architect Mr. Kava.

The style of painting energy symbols and simultaneously painting realistically or impressionistically could be applied to any subject on earth, and the subject that I was to work with was already the most beautiful in the world. It was fruit and vegetables, fish and dry goods, all the forms and colors contained in a marketplace, and I wanted to include the farms and people who worked to get the food to the table.  I also wanted to include the refrigerator door being opened at midnight revealing an answer to the age old question, “What’s is there to eat?”.  I began making photos and videos of the existing Berkeley Bowl produce, fish, oranges, apples, grains, potatoes, and all of the more exotic shapes and forms that resemble undersea creatures in the tropics.  The style of painting that I had developed involved using paint as a transparency.  I believe that this is the most accurate way of painting living things, especially fruit and vegetables, trees and landscape imagery, anything but manmade objects, because nature herself paints in transparency layers, and manmade objects are most often opaque.  The images of plants and animals were beautiful in themselves and it would be an exciting challenge to paint them in such a way that they were energy symbols one moment and then realistic forms in another. I love the balance point— equilibrium, between a thing being pure energy and the physical form.   Furthermore, the Berkeley Bowl had a fabulous collection of produce that could not be found in a typical supermarket, exotic fruit and vegetables with amazing shapes and dazzling colors.

I tried to make my paintings as delicious as the subjects they were reflecting.  The next time you are at Berkeley Bowl West, take a moment to stop shopping in the produce section in back and tilt your head upward just a few degrees so you can see for yourself. Also, go into the dining room, all the way to the back, and re-arrange the co-creative module art painting. I made these paintings for people to enjoy.  Hopefully this art reminds us, in the excitement of shopping in such a fabulous store, that all of this food has a context. The context for the groceries is the universe itself, something that almost aches with the pleasure of giving, and gives us almost impossible to believe objects of beauty on a daily basis.  As an Italian-American artist, I tried to say to our eyes, “Manga, Manga!”

If you haven’t already done so, please view the videos in this BLOG, on the front of the home page. They will show you some of the Berkeley Bowl West art, and what interactive module art is all about. If you want to visit my studio, please use the contact information below.

Ross Drago
Energy Art Studio
(510) 420 1713
e-mail: rdrago@energyart.com