I think there comes a time in everyone’s life where we discover Salvador Dali and become The Biggest Fan of surrealist artwork.  At least, I remember when that happened to me. Seems I discovered Dali when all my friends discovered him. We loved him, bought posters of his work. I knew when I walked into a friend’s room and saw the “Persistence of Time” on the wall, we had something else in common.

Well, last week I wrote about a new exhibit in Walnut Creek of surrealist work. It features the work of Stanley “Mouse” Miller but also has the work of several other artists including El Gallo and, my favorite, Bill Sala of Castro Valley.

 Bill Sala’s work was the most Dali-esque of all the painters in the show. And they were so bright and crisp it was like you were looking at very disturbing photographs!

I suggest checking out this surrealism show if you happen to be in Walnut Creek. It is at Acanthus, 1661 Botelho, Ste. 100. Call 925-937-1151 for more info.

Man on the moon screen grab from “Dawn of the Space Age.”

My friend and fellow nerd Skot Croshere and I took the winding-road trip up the Oakland hills Wednesday night to check out a screening of Chabot Space and Science Center’snew full dome digital planetarium presentation “Dawn of the Space Age,” which debuts Friday, July 25.  I didn’t know what to expect and I didn’t know what to tell Skot about the film, which uses projectors to surround the audience with visual delights beyond what you see in a straight-forward theater.

I heard it was animated so thought it might be a goofy cartoon aimed toward Chabot’s kiddy contingent. In other words, I wasn’t sure what we were going to get out of it as old fuddy duddies.

So the lights in the planetarium dropped and Skot and I watched intently as the narrator explained the first space flight, that of the former U.S.S.R’s Sputnik 1 on Oct. 4 1957. This, the film says, is the birth of the space race between the Soviets and the U.S.

The 40-minute film then went on to explain the advances of U.S.S.R’s space program - and the U.S.’s eventual moves to catch up.

I have been to Chabot dozens of times and I know quite a bit about planets and stars and space exploration because of them, but I’ve always wanted to learn more about the “space race.” This film is a basic primer for people like me - people who know just a little and are fascinated with each additional piece of information they can absorb.

I felt for Laika the dog, the first animal in space, as the film explained that she died within hours of jettisoning from earth. I cheered inside as I saw computer-generated images of Yuri Gagarin on his trip as the first man in space. Gagarin is an all-around cool dude.

There were some “no way” moments in the film, like the explanation of Gagarin’s landing on Earth. And every time the film explained something that the Soviet’s did, the film appeared darker than when it was explaining what the Americans did. This is funny as the film is a production of Mirage 3D of the Netherlands.

I certainly enjoyed the parts of the movie that showed Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, as the film played the original dispatch of the quote “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”  I was surprised to see that astronauts later drove around the moon on some sort of space-age (and multi-million dollar) vehicle.

The film really seemed to take me where technology and cameras couldn’t go at the time of the events themselves. They couldn’t ride with the astronauts on the moon, they couldn’t go with Gagarin inside his capsule, they couldn’t film the U.S. Apollo 8 traveling around the moon on Christmas 1968. But I was there through this film.

The content is basic so it won’t really excite total space and politics geeks, who live for this stuff and know every date and movement during the space race. But the visuals are quite stunning on the 70-foot dome screen and for a basic viewer like me, it was quite educational.

“Dawn of the Space Age” will run daily throughout the summer and on weekends into the fall. A planetarium show is included with general admission to Chabot ($13 adult, $10 seniors and students, $9 youth).

Chabot Space and Science Center is at 10000 Skyline Blvd., Oakland. Call 510-336-7373 or visit www.chabotspace.org for more information.

Got an interesting press release earlier this week about Italian publisher FMR’s newest art book: “Michelangelo: La Dotta Mano,” of which it plans to produce ninety-nine worldwide and which sells at a cost of about $150,000 each.

The 264-page book aims to “celebrate the legacy of Renaissance artist Michelangelo Buonarroti” through the work of Italian art photographer Aurelio Amendola. The book’s cover is a bas-relief reproduction of Michelangelo’s “Madonna della Scala,” hand carved from marble gleaned from the same quarry Michelangelo is said to have used and the paper, which has been created specifically for the project, bears “the special ‘Michelangelo’ watermark.”

There’s a great New York Times story from May with details about the publication, the launch party and a quote from FMR chairman Marilena Ferrari calling the book “a work of art in itself.”

Earlier today I was reading a conversation between sculptor Lawrence Weiner and librarian and publisher Judith Hoffberg about artists books and artist’s catalogs. This book seems to blur the line between both and got me thinking about the relationships between books, art and their audience.

Weiner contends that books are meant to be accessible and “found” and therein lies much of their value. It’s doubtful many people will ever find “Michelangelo: La Dotta Mano” in any bookshop or virtual bookseller, much less leaf through a copy.

The publisher’s have however donated a copy to the Prado Museum in Spain. A flight to Madrid, hotel, meals, and tickets to the Prado to catch a glimpse of the book (encased in glass, of course) should they ever decide to display it? A bargain-basement steal compared to the asking price.

This coming Aug. 2 and 3 is a boon for Bank of America customers and art lovers as several Northern California museums will be letting card holders in free.

Dubbed “Museums on Us,” the event is actually happening in 70 museums across the country. Locally, check out Chihuly at the de Young Museum in San Francisco; hear slave narratives at the Museum of the African Diaspora and/ or check out the Bay Area Now 5 exhibit at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

If you are a Bank of America customer and are willing to burn some gas, I suggest visiting the San Jose Museum of Art, which is also on the list for free entry that weekend. Their show “Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon” is pretty cool as is the rest of their collection. Really, this museum is a gem. Another San Jose institution, the Tech Museum of Innovation (which I have heard mixed reviews of), is also letting bank customers in free.

This is how it works: If you have a Bank of America card you flash it at those participating museums and you get in free. It’s one card per person so maybe this is a good time to hang out with all of your fellow Bank of America friends!

Cool note: This promotion is happening the first weekend of every month until April 2009. So if you plan on going on vacation somewhere in the U.S. on one of those dates and have a BofA card, check to see if you can get in free!

Ian “Constant Change” Canwright (on the right in the photo) called me recently to let me know of a Speak the Music event this Thursday at La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley. It’s a beatboxing and spoken word night featuring Butterscotch, Soulati and Infinite from Felonious among others.

I wrote about Canwright and his beatboxing friends last month as they took over a Telegraph Avenue corner and beatboxed their way into people’s minds to get them to, perhaps, come to the annual Vowel Movement Beatboxing Championships.

I was not able to go to the event. It was my cousin’s engagement party that night, but I heard it sold out. Canwright knew I couldn’t come to it so he invited me to the Thursday show.

I can’t wait to go. Tickets are just $8 and support Speak the Music, which is Canwright’s dream. I am particularly looking forward to hearing Chris “Syzygy” Judkinsagain. The sounds he makes are just incredible and I keep on listening to his “Sick Noize” on MySpace and I am constantly blown away.

Anyway, this should be a good show. Learn more about it here.

There’s still a little bit of time to catch photographer Larisa Shaterian’s exhibit at Berkeley’s Photolab Gallery - but not much.

“Introductions: Portraits of Palestinians from the Nablus and Jenin Regions,” a series of silver gelatin prints, stems from a project the third year New York University student recently began with journalism student Mohammed Farraj. Their goal is to introduce viewers to Palestinians through images and words.

Here’s an image from the show:

“Um Ahmed, 2008″

I’ve been meaning to catch this show for some time as I’m really drawn to portraiture and black & white photography. Better get there soon…it closes July 12.

Visit 9 a.m.-6 p.m. through Friday, 10:30 to 2:30 p.m. Saturday. 510-644-1400, www.photolaboratory.com.

 The exhibit showcases 50 paintings including still-lifes, portraits of friends and family, archival photographs and a selection of Kahlo’s enigmatic self-portraits.

“Moses (Moises),” 1945

I visited early in the morning. By early afternoon, the specially-ticketed line snaked all the way down to the first floor. Once in, one of the first things I noticed was the absolute precision of Kahlo’s work.

“Self Portrait (Autorretrato,)” 1930

Looking at the balanced and carefully considered compositions, the first word that came to mind was “controlled.” Noticing the smooth surfaces, I thought about Renaissance painters who wouldn’t dream of breaking the illusion of reality with a visible brushstroke. And I thought about Surrealists like Salvador Dali and Max Ernst who painted their fantasies with technical bravado and exacting realism.

No matter what sort of fantastic scenario she devised for herself — surrounded by her spider monkeys or literally split in half — Kahlo retained a steely, probing gaze, her chin always lifted.

“Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (Autorretrato con collar de espinas y colibri,)” 1940

 Another stunner: her paintings are incredibly small! One self-portrait is slightly bigger than a thumbprint. Looking at reproductions, I always thought of her work as monumental. True, a handful of paintings reach several feet tall but most hover around a foot or two. The effect, which may be frustrating in a packed gallery, serves as a siren call.

“The Frame,” circa 1937-1938

Kahlo often extended her paintings beyond the canvas onto the frame which makes her work almost sculptural. For the first time I noticed the stab marks in the frame of “Unos Cuantos Piquetitos” which she painted after reading a news story about a particularly shocking crime. There’s also a bejeweled self-portrait surrounded by sea shells. I never realized Kahlo painted on so many different surfaces - metal, wood, Masonite, cardboard, glass - in addition to canvas. It’s all quite a feat when you consider she most often painted in bed, flat on her back, encased in a plaster cast.

“The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (El Suicidio of Dorothy Hale,)” 1939

There’s one particular painting that really got me - one I’ve seen in books and sort of passed by. Look for the tondo (circular painting) of a truncated female torso. Against a highly-textured surface, it recalls a volcano, cadmium red pigment exploding like lava from the left breast. It seemed a very raw, gut-level expression of the tremendous physical and emotional pain the artist might have felt.

If this all seems a little macabre, well, it is. But it helps to keep in mind the culture that Kahlo came from - one that pokes fun at things like death as a way to cope with it’s inevitability. She was a big fan of early Catholic art with its visions of suffering saints and martyrs. She used her painful circumstances to create beauty. I may flinch before some of her canvases but I recognize the universal themes in her paintings - life, death, pain, joy, nature - and the need to love and be loved.

“Frieda and Diego Rivera,” 1931

Make sure to spend some time in the final gallery which is full of photographs, some taken by the most famous photographers of the day and others intimate family snapshots. As my mom who accompanied me to the show said, “They give me an idea of the real life person behind the paintings.”

“Frida on a boat, Xochimilco, Mexico City,” circa 1930, photographer unknown.

Read a review by Fine Arts critic Robert Taylor here. Click here for a timeline of Kahlo’s life. And click here to get advance tickets for the show.

Alameda sculptor Feng Jin e-mailed me to tell me about his show at the Alameda museum, opening this weekend. It is called “Symphony of Chinese Calligraphy and Sculpture.”

Jin has partnered with Taiwanese calligrapher Mei Chu Chang to present this show, open now until July 30.

Chang is an accomplished traditional calligrapher and has even presented some of his work to the Vatican. He breaks from the traditional calligraphic field in this show, presenting a “picto-calligraphy” style that appeals to Western sensibilities.

Jin uses metal sculpture to represent traditional calligraphic characters and other Asian script. Feng Jin even applies the rules and methods of calligraphic writings into metal fabrication, such as correct stroke order, proper balance and rhythm of characters.

I am a big fan of metal sculpture and I appreciate how difficult it is to make a metal piece that is graceful. I meandered through Jin’s Web site and saw enormous amounts of beauty and grace in his work. I can’t wait to see this show!

The Alameda Museum is at 2324 Alameda Ave., right off Park Street.