Over 11 years and 570 episodes, John Rabe and Team Off-Ramp scoured SoCal for the people, places, and ideas whose stories needed to be told, and the show became a love-letter to Los Angeles. Now, John is sharing selections from the Off-Ramp vault to help you explore this imperfect paradise.
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UPDATE: Karl Benjamin died July 26, 2012, at the age of 86.
Pacific Standard Time is the huge art project that tells the story of Southern California's rightful place as a leader in Modern Art. One of the featured post-war trailblazers is Karl Benjamin, who lives in Claremont and who painted in what came to be called the Hard Edge style.
Hard Edge sounds harsh, but Benjamin's works are riots of colors getting along very well; it's just the borders between them that are hard. One art critic, Dave Hickey, wrote "I can think of no other artist whose paintings exude the joy and pleasure of being an artist with more intensity than Karl Benjamin."
Off-Ramp host John Rabe talked with Karl Benjamin at the Orange County Museum of Art's "Birth of the Cool" exhibit in 2007, where he learned he wasn't just a painter, but an enlightened teacher, too.