General comment: Los Angeles works to revitalize the old downtown by, among other things, offering art galleries favorable terms to set up shop. About a dozen establishments have taken up the gauntlet and opened in the past year, enduring less-than-ideal circumstances, pretty much off the media radars, in an urban center that bustles by day and clears to near desolation at night. On the second Thursday of every month, the galleries stay open for the Downtown Art Walk, holding court along with several decent restaurants, utilitarian bars catering to career imbibers, corner stores, miscellaneous other marginal venues, and a smattering of society's misfits aimlessly wandering the carless streets. Most everything else is locked up tight.

The sum total of the above equals a semi-surreal adventure of an evening at the tender unpublicized core of one of the world's great cities. My Art Walk guides were Coagula Art Journal publisher, Mat Gleason, and the magazine's moneyman, Michael Salerno, also an accomplished artist in his own right. I can assure you that without them, this page would be blank. No more than fifty (and I'm being generous) intrepid artsters scurried about, ourselves included. I had my digital, I got the goods, and here you go...

Gallery 727: Heroin Row - Large Paintings and Installations by Gronk.

Comment: One night show; two big abstracts. It's over. You missed it.