General comment: Summer is a pause in the art world, the "established" art world, that is-- particularly those bastions of creativity-meets-commerce on lower Geary. Time for our haute aestheticians, our arbiters of taste, our vendors of visuals, to relax, take it easy, go on vacation, strategize for fall, and work on those tan lines. But wait... the body still twitches... it has a pulse! You just have to know where to find it. So c'mon along-- yes, you-- and let's see if we can catch a rare glimpse of that elusive commodity: Good Art.

Dolby Chadwick Gallery: Gary Edward Blum and Michael Pauker.

Blum paints big paintings where the canvas serves not only as the finished art, but also as the working surface as well as the palette. So you have these little stand-alone paintings, usually trompe l'oeils in the upper centers of the canvases, surrounded by large areas of raw work space which is neatly incorporated into the compositions. You see the painting and the process on the same canvas, so finely painted as to survive very up-close scrutiny, but their ability to engage on a long term basis seems open to debate. Pauker makes collages mainly out of old letters and postage stamps, also very well done, but once again, one wonders whether the love affair will last. So much for the art. The big news is that the martini guy's got some hot new rims, and the sax guy on the fire escape is as mellow as a melon in the hot valley sun.