TV theme show

Stuart Gold’s father was not interested in repairing the family’s television sets—even though by trade, he was a television repairman. But watching the fuzzy and distorted screens as a kid in the 1950s and ’60s left a mark on young Gold, and so he began making prints, drawings and paintings of those pixilated moments in a series that began in the late ’70s.

Gold’s fascination with this TV theme has endured over the decades, and this month, the Grass Valley-based artist’s solo show at Blue Moon Gallery displays work he created from 2011 to 2013, and it’s some of the best of his series. His paintings of the “split seconds when the image is disrupted” are mesmerizing, because their lack of expected visual clarity lends insight to the process of perception.

Gold said that “interrupted or maladjusted commercial TV images, purposefully or randomly frozen, could be a remarkable source of imagery,” and with the way he composes these moments, they certainly are.