Ok, so it may be a little outside the smaller Bay Area, but Mark Growden is worth it! This accordion-squeezing, banjo-strumming, song-twisting hunk is playing free shows every Saturday in January at Infusions Tea Cafe in Sebastopol.

 When I first saw Mark Growden play at Cafe Van Kleef in Oakland many years ago, I went with my arms crossed, ready to be bored by yet another Bay Area hipster playing the accordion. I think it was exactly five seconds into his set when I started melting into my seat. His voice! His rhythm! His…everything!

I looked around me at the crowd gathered and literally everyone, men, women and others had also melted into their seats. I had to see Growden again.

I have since followed Growden to the Oakland Metro where I saw him play a duet with his son, 21 Grand, the Xenodrome, where he did a benefit. I downloaded some music of his MySpace site and teared up a little listening to him perform the music he composed for The Crucible’s Fire Odyssey last year.

Growden is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. His shows are usually packed and often hard to catch. To see him play in such a small venue as a tea shop will surely be special.

If you miss his weekend shows in Sebastopol, you can catch Growden playing at The Crucible’s 9th Anniversary Celebration HOT COUTURE: A Fusion of Fire & Fashion. Growden plays live Friday night only.

When Wanxin Zhang was a teenager, he stood in front of China’s famed terracotta warriors at the museum in Xian. He was stunned by the scope of the scene.

There were thousands of figures, in hundreds of poses, all created more than 2,000 years ago to guard the tomb of the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang, and protect his journey into eternity.

Zhang came to the United States in the early 1990s and now lives in San Francisco, where he earned an art degree and teaches at the Academy of Art University. But he never forgot the impact of the terracotta warriors. They inspired his own ceramic figures — with new identities and occupations.

His glazed and fired ceramic may look ancient, but the figures sport modern touches. One is titled “Mom,” another is “Made in California,” and one wars a Mohawk haircut.

A selection of Zhang’s works, several of them more than 6 feet tall, will go on display Sunday, Jan. 13 at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek. The exhibit, “Contemporary Warrior: Modern Day Tomb Soldiers” will continue through March 9.

In all, there will be 28 ceramic figures on display, nine of them at least 6 feet tall and the rest, though similar in style, 2-3 feet tall.

How well they bridge the gap between ancient and modern, and how different Zhang can make these figures, remains for gallery visitors to discover and decide.

The Bedford Gallery curator, Carrie Lederer, believes the figures speak to contemporary issues.

“Zhang’s noble figures are direct descendants from traditional ideals,” Lederer says. “They provide us with a modern-day platform to consider larger community principles. How do we define a hero? How do we teach concepts of honor? What does courage mean to us today in our contemporary world.”

The artist himself declares, “I am rebuilding these figures with the artistic language of soulfulness, spirituality and personality, and allowing them to stand in for modern man.”

The Bedford Gallery is located in the Lesher Center for the Arts, Civic Drive at Locust Street, Walnut Creek. It is open non-5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays and 6-8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. It is also open during performances at the Lesher Center.

Admission is $3 general, $2 for persons 17 and younger, free for children 12 and younger. Information, 925-295-1417, www.bedfordgallery.org.

A reception with the artist, featuring Chinese musicians and dancing dragons, will take place 3-5 p.m. on the opening day, Jan. 13. Admission is $3.

A touring exhibit of the original terracotta warriors can be seen May 18-Oct. 12, 2008, at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif.

Some of my most vivid childhood art memories have to do with animation…as in Walt Disney films. My twin brother and I were reared on Saturday afternoon matinees of “Pinocchio,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Peter Pan,” and “Fantasia” that our mom or uncle would take us to at the now-defunct Sunvalley movie theater in Concord.

It wasn’t the story lines that enthralled me as much as the visuals. From the dark and dramatic backgrounds of “Fantasia” (“Night on Bald Mountain” anyone?) to the melting psychedelia of a tipsy Dumbo’s pink-elephant soaked dreams, Disney animation was like no other.

That’s why I’m heading to San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum to catch “The Art and Flair of Mary Blair.”

The retrospective exhibition focuses on the work of Mary Blair who’s lauded for being one of the first women to work as a Disney concept artist and for a dynamic visual style that gave many a Disney film bursts of eye-popping color. The show includes early watercolor paintings, commercial illustrations, fine art, children’s book illustrations and the artist’s personal ephemera.

Here’s a still from “Cinderella.”

A concept sketch from “Alice in Wonderland”:

And finally, a whimsical illustration for Baker’s Chocolate.

The show runs 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays through March 18 at the Cartoon Art Museum, 655 Mission St., San Francisco. 415-227-8666. www.cartoonart.org.

“Seen” is not going on vacation, but I sure am. I am going rock climbing in Joshua Tree with a good friend, as I do every year. Jennifer and Robert will take care of you until I come back.

If you read my travel story about my trip, which will be in the papers next month, and find you really, really want to go to the Palm Springs / Joshua Tree area there is one bit of art you may be happy to know lives in Palm Springs. Ladies and gentlemen, I present you with a “seen” you may remember if you were at Burning Man in 2003.

Yes, it is a picture of the Temple of Gravity at Burning Man. Well, the temple is now at We Care Spa, a high-class day spa whose owners don’t really mind if you stop by and take a look (or have a climb!) as long as you are quiet and respectful of their guests.

If you have never been to Burning Man, this piece is still a treat. It is and 80-ton, open-air dome made of steel and granite by Zachary Coffin. My travel buddy has never been to Burning Man before but he loved climbing the rocks!

Well, not really. But I do have Gunther von Hagens’ “Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies” on my desk at work and each time I eat lunch at my desk I stare at it. Let me tell you, it’s strange eating beef teriyaki and looking at plastinated bodies. You feel sort of like a brain-eating zombie.

Not that I don’t love the exhibit “Body Worlds 2 & The Three Pound Gem” on now at the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation. I saw the exhibit a few months ago and did a piece for the newspaper and our multimedia producer Karim Amara did a wonderful video of the exhibit.

Von Hagens’ work has been copied time and time again, but seeing his actual “Body Worlds” exhibits are like nothing else. The first show I saw was at a museum L.A. The buzz surrounding “Body Worlds” was loud as the L.A. show was the first American engagement of this often controversial work.

I was blown away. I like science, anatomy and biology, but I am not a student of those disciplines. Instead, I was fascinated by the way the real, preserved human bodies were positioned to show certain muscles, bone structure and the like. To me, it was art. To many, it’s a science exhibit. To some, it’s both.

The reason I am mentioning “Body Worlds 2 & The Three-Pound Gem” is because it is closing Jan. 26, 2008. I don’t know when the Bay Area will have von Hagens’ work in its backyard again, so I suggest you go see it.

The Tech Museum of Innovation is at 201 South Market St., San Jose. Tickets to see “Body Worlds 2″ and the rest of the museum are $22 for adults, $18.50 for students and seniors and $15 for children under 18. Tickets should be reserved in advance.
Call (408) 294-TECH for more information.

“You need a Joseph Cornell box over your fireplace,” my friend Jerry said after we’d drifted through the artist’s exhibit, “Navigating the Imagination,” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Why, yes. Of course. And they look so easy, the shadow boxes framing arrangements of everything from clay pipes to photos of birds to watch faces to restaurant menus.

But Cornell, who practically invented an art form from the basement of his house in Queens, New York, was a genius. (The street he lived on, by the way, was Utopia Parkway.)

Cornell was born in 1903 and scoured New York City for his material and inspiration, which he collected in boxes with such labels as “Glasses” and “Durer” and “Tinfoil” and “Sea Shells.”

He reflected a number of trends from the early part of the 20th century, but he was 64 years old before he finally received major recognition in the art world.

There’s nothing precious about Cornell’s collages and boxes — they’re not cute craft projects from a magazine. He hasn’t simply cleared off a workroom table, as we might, and arranged the items in a frame.

Everything means something to him, even if it’s a mystery to us. Inspecting the 170 works in the galleries at the Museum of Modern Art is like searching for clues to American life.

A quote from one of Cornell’s favorite literary works, Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” introduces the exhibit and marks the route: “Now, Voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find.”

Buying a Joseph Cornell box to put over my fireplace would cost tens of thousands of dollars. Reproducing one would miss the point — that every detail of his work is deeply personal.

Maybe I’ve already got a good start, even if it’s spread out, not in a box.

There’s a 19th century clock decorated with a frieze of some classical battle to which I’ve added, on a ledge, a tiny figure of a middle-aged shopper from an architectural model. There are drawings of temples in Kyoto by San Francisco architect Ira Kurlander, and Arts and Crafts bowls discovered on trips to Massachusetts and Vermont. There’s a postcard photo of the original “butterfly chair” designed in 1938.

There are also three small collages made from 19th century newspaper clippings and illustrations and vintage wallpaper borders made by my friend Robert Warner, a former Oakland resident who’s now an artist in New York. Maybe I’ll leave things as they are — after all, it was Warner who introduced me to the magic and mystery of Joseph Cornell in the first place.

There’s going to be an art party for a good cause this weekend, but let me fill you in briefly on the background:

There once was a time where, at Ocean Beach, you could light a fire just about darn near anywhere. Well, not anymore. The National Park Service announced a ban on the activity in 2006 because the ashes, the nails from the pallets and other detritus caused a big mess.

Bummed by the ban and bolstered by more than 3,000 letters and e-mails from confirmed fire-lovers, the Ocean Beach Foundation, Burners Without Borders and Surfrider convinced The National Park Service to allow artists to create fire pits for public use at the beach.

So the people who made these beautiful metal fire pits are having a fund-raising party Dec. 15.  There will be music, food, fire and fun. Well, at least they promise such.

Donation to get in is $5 to $500 and 100 percent of the proceeds will go to producing more fire pits for Ocean Beach. Learn more here!!!

The party is at the Hunters Point art space The Box Shop, 10 Hunters Point Blvd., in San Francisco.

Have fun!

Detail of a ‘Wahoo’ by John Colle Rogers / photo by Ralf Burgert

I think it happened with me just recently when I started to sing “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Instead of frolicking in the ‘Autumn mist,’ Puff was frolicking in ‘awesomeness’ in a land called Honah Lee.

I am talking about the misinterpretation of songs, which is what inspired Oakland artist John Colle Rogers’ most recent work, “Wahoos” now at Oakland’s 21 Grand through Dec. 16.

According to an email from Rogers, Wahoos is a misinterpretation of a line from the song “There Won’t Be No Country Music (There Won’t Be No Rock and Roll)” by 70s country music phenomenon C.W. McCall. The song is a very dark, banjo-heavy environmental warning song and for years Rogers had a vivid image in his mind about this misinterpreted line: “…and you’ll see all the Wahoos flying through the great polluted sky.”

Well, the song was actually “wild goose,” Rogers says, though Wahoos stuck with him. So he made a trio of Wahoos.

Rogers’ work, the most recent of which opened during Oakland’s First Fridays Art Murmer,  is usually dark.   The California College of  the Arts (when it was CCAC) grad, who is now teaching at the college, works in dioramas and conceptual pieces that usually tell stories about war or conflict of some sort. An accomplished blacksmith and metalworker, Rogers hasn’t an all-steel show in years. ‘Wahoos’ details Rogers’ talent in the craft.

Detail of a ‘Wahoo’ by John Colle Rogers / photo by Ralf Burgert

So, to me, Rogers’ Wahoos look like rockets. Well, rocketbirds. Ok, rocketbirds with the body of a banjo. He tells me the wingspan of his Wahoos are 19-feet and the banjo body was modeled after a banjo owned by a distant family member.

Me with jumping kid under a Wahoo / photo by Ralf Burgert

Anyway, they’re neat to look at. I think of some strange future where these things would be flying around and I grow a little concerned. Luckily, they are just part of Rogers’ very active imagination.

When the organizers of “The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama” asked the spiritual leader of Tibet if it would be O.K. to create an art exhibit centered around himself, the Dalai Lama responded with a question.

“Why me? Why not Mohandas Gandhi or Mother Teresa?”

Lucky for us, The Committee of 100 for Tibet and The Dalai Lama Foundation were able to convince the spiritual leader to give his blessing to the project after explaining that the purpose was to show through art the Dalai Lama’s message of peace.

The organizers then invited more than 88 artists from 30 countries to create works of art or to contribute existing artworks that reflect in some way a message of peace. They also created an educational component meant to teach high schoolers and middle school students about peace and ethics.

The visual exhibit, divided into 10 sections addressing such themes as “Tibet,” “Empathy and Compassion,” “Spirituality and Globalization” and “Path to Peace”, is currently on display at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

One of my favorite pieces among the many paintings, photographs, installations, videos and mixed media sculptures is Lewis de Soto’s “Paranirvana.”

What first appears to be a 25-foot long monument depicting the physical death of Buddha is really an inflated sculpture with the artist’s face projected on the Buddha’s head. The accompanying wall text explains de Soto’s sculpture as a meditation on the question “How will I face my own death?”

Here’s Gabriela Morawetz’s “Regarde”:

And here’s a film still from Bill Viola’s “Tristan and Isolde”:

Also look for Long Bin Chen’s “World Buddha Head Project” in which the artist used recycled Manhattan telephone books to construct a profile of the Buddha, Andy Cao’s giant string of prayer beads (which you’re encouraged to touch), a musical composition and sand mandala-inspired installation by Ryuichi Sakamoto and a thangka selected by the Dalai Lama from his personal collection.

Catch “The Missing Peace” through March 16, 2008 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St., San Francisco. 415-321-1307, www.ybca.org.

So, where can you see a flaming Santa, seven-foot elves and a pair of “flamedeer”?

Where else but Oakland’s The Crucible’s annual Holiday Gifty event!

If you’ve never been to The Crucible before, shame on you. It is a wonderfully welcoming place where people from all over come and learn the fine arts of blacksmithing, glass-blowing, neon and other crafts. They host classes for kids, too.

If you’re not into learnin’ stuff, you can always visit The Crucible during their twice-annual fund-raising events and see magnificent performances such as their last one, the Fire Odyssey or flaming fire ballets and fire operas. If you missed those, you can check out the upcoming flaming fund-raising event, the Hot Couture: A Fusion of Fire & Fashion   show happening in January.

Whoops! Here I was, talking about the holiday sale and I got all excited about everything else The Crucible does. Can you blame me?

Anyway, the Holiday Gifty Art Sale and Show is a family event, like most events at The Crucible, and will feature not only nice wares for sale but demonstrations of glass blowing, metal casting, and blacksmithing from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day,  a visit from Santa at 1 p.m. each day and hands-on activities for adults and kids from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day. And admission is free (you know how I like that word)!  A portion of proceeds from sales are donated by the artists to help fund The Crucible’s arts education programs.

The show and sale will be from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Dec. 15 and 16 at The Crucible’s warehouse, 1260 Seventh Street, Oakland. The Crucible is also two blocks from the West Oakland BART station, where weekend parking is free.