Art inspired by the Great Recession has yet to make a cultural impact, so this impresses: One of Alex Scheafer’s burning Chase Bank paintings fronts this months Artillery, the West Coast art mag that-unlike NYC-based Artforum and Art in America- is actually readable. We regularly run into Scheafer as he pounds tall boys and paints during Downtown LA Artwalk in his corner of the Hive Gallery. Swell guy if not all that ambitious a painter; we’re glad to see he’s swirling the cadmium flames and three months since   making the LA Times front page, still running with  his fifteen earned after cops rolled up on his en- plein-air-painting ass outside a Chase bank in Van Nuys. Searched his home too, which hasn’t happened to a single banker.

 ”How much, like 25 bucks? Sweet! I’m getting this” an overly excited Chris Namon,  babbled to us, inexplicably waving an idol of some kind at our head. “This is TIGHT! Its Bonnie..Bonaparte, and he’s awesome and I’m getting it.” Seems after emptying his ubiquitous flask and pounding the last of the cocktails poured in the piazza of the J. Paul Getty Museum, LegmanLA’s music editor-at-large, who tagged along as a carbon emission cutting third wheel on a recent date (on the free parking day) got all consumerist, spotting a nicely crafted figurine of Napoleon in the Getty’s gift shop.

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The undervalued painter ERIC FISCHL will give a lecture “How Painting Died” at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn on December 3. The Legman would be there in a heartbeat but…

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