SFX: Music—70’s soft rock, as if coming from a transistor radio. Ice cubes

NARRATOR:

There’s something so familiar about this scene. A backyard barbeque, your cousin hanging out on the deck, holding a beer.

SFX: Ice clinking in a cooler, sizzle of barbeque, a woman’s voice telling a banal story, laughter

BECHTLE:

“Hold it.”

SFX: the shutter click and wind of an SLR film camera

NARRATOR:

Don’t we all have a pile of family snapshots just like this? So why make a painting out of something so….ordinary? Here’s the artist, Robert Bechtle:

BECHTLE:

In the Watsonville Olympia painting, you know, it literally was a snapshot but…

SFX: sprinkler goes off

NARRATOR (interrupting abruptly):

Hang on hang on. Did you hear the title? He called it Watsonville Olympia. Here’s a little art history aside from our curator, Caitlin Haskell:

CAITLIN HASKELL:

Olympia has all sorts of art historical references. You know, Manet’s Olympia, Cezanne has an Olympia. That sort of a beautiful, you know, young woman as well. In Manet’s Olympia there’s a very direct confrontation confrontation of gaze, looking right out at the viewer. But the Olympia here, I’ve been told is the beer brand that she’s drinking. (laughs)

SFX: Beer opens

NARRATOR:

Anyway, back to the artist —

SFX: backyard barbeque fade back up

BECHTLE:

It literally was a snapshot, but ya know, it was photographed very consciously with the figure in the center, and with the suburban patio furniture figuring very largely in its composition. The photograph, with its sense of that particular instant that just happens to be frozen, you know, in time.

NARRATOR:

Like those flowers on the chair. They are so 1977.

BECHTLE:

And the sense of time that a painting has, which is that sense of: Things are always like this. That it’s both a frozen moment, and at the same time, It’s eternally the same.

“Hold it.” Click.”

SFX: the click and advance of a 1970s SLR camera