Boom! Ft. Lauderdale

24" x 18"

oil on panel

I went to Ft. Lauderdale with two friends recently to celebrate my birthday. I visited my very cool brother there and we all went out to Boom! In fact, we went to Boom! two nights in a row and had a great time. A gay dance club and bar, it is very popular and shares a spot in a strip mall with several other gay owned stores including "GayMart", "Bottoms and Tops", and "Georgie's Alibi". The text in the painting, "I like you just the way you are" comes from the Timbaland song, "The Way I Are." It also is a reference to my song with my husband, the oldie-but-goodie, "Just the Way You are" by Billy Joel. The club has an atmosphere where anyone is welcome. I am sure that club-goers have their own list of preferences, and nothing is completely simple, but overall it is a place where anyone can come as they are. My husband couldn't make it but was happily in support of my fun.

The main negative about Boom! and other clubs in Ft. Lauderdale is that smoking is permitted (note the haziness in the painting). Between the smoke machines for the ambiance and the overcrowded room filled with lit cigarettes, I returned home to have the worst asthma episode of my life, lasting over a week and a half. I'll spare you the details except to say that I had the energy of an eighty year old. I didn't drink a thing all weekend, so all the bad feeling was from smoke alone. Sadly, I can't return to Boom!. We did duck out periodically to Georgie's Alibi next door which is non-smoking. We caught our breath to music videos while sitting in the lounge, enjoying the music better than the sometimes too techno Boom!.

There is a great club in Rochester where it is non-smoking (although they do feel the need to use the smoke machine). Tilt is less of a meat market with more eye-candy. It offers straight and gay nights and has a reputation for great drag shows. The fun is not over.

Painting notes:

The figures in the painting are similar to those by artist Marsden Hartley, who incidentally was gay.
Wikipedia entry here.

Butterfly Self-Portrait

24" x 18"

oil on panel

It's a little goofy looking, I know, but that's me. Bright-eyed and smiling, my intense gaze is optimistic. What I am looking at is unseeable to the viewer and perhaps to me as well; I think I am looking towards what lay ahead. Butterflies frame my gaze, fly out of my head, and seem to be with me inside and out.

Butterflies are associated with nervousness and the body - butterflies in the stomach - as well as transformation. The movement they make, all that fluttering and quivering, makes them such a perfect metaphor for tremulous feelings. When I want to do something that is good for me but it involves stepping outside of my comfort zone, I try to make myself do it even if I am afraid. At the same time, I am careful not to take on too much in order to avoid being overwhelmed. In looking for internet sites relating to learning something new everyday, I found some fun things. Learning is related to total wellness and I think the balance of mind, body, and soul is very important for happiness.

Stylistically, Butterfly Self-Portrait, is related to the work of Abstract Expressionist Willem DeKooning. DeKooning's paintings of women took off from the cubist portraits of women Picasso did, but added supreme fluidity, and guts to a planar framework. They are tough and often ugly. Virtuosic, visceral, honest, and a "to hell with what anyone thinks" attitude make them favorites of many. There are also a lot of people who are put off by their aggressiveness. The attitude of stupidity the degree of fragmentation of the women raised the question of misogeny (many of Picasso's portraits of women seem to mock them, like the portrait of Dora Maar, Weeping Woman). I have also heard it said that DeKooning may have been painting about a difficult relationship with his mother.

In my painting, I kept the almost charicaturesque quality of these other paintings (it's a willingness to laugh at myself), but backed it with my sincere positive outlook. The painting is fluid and airy for those butterflies. I am not decked out in fancy clothes (or any for that matter) as it is all about taking a look at myself to see the essence of what makes me go. My fortune cookie this week read, "Accept yourself as you are." I do, but I don't like being bored, so...

Learn something new every day:

SharpBrains.com

Lifehack.org

Braingle.com "Brain Teasers, Riddles, Trivia, Brain Exercises, Games, Forums and more..."

Clouds and Stones

12" x 16"

oil on panel

We have a lot of rocks in our yard. We're not very good gardeners and my husband has become preoccupied with getting the rocks out of the way of the lawn mower and starting a stone wall. He has a particular fascination with ones without mortar. My grandfather, a construction worker, also loved stone walls. He admired the craftsmanship and the combination of natural beauty and the work of the hands. Their is a human scale to such walls, as well as evidence of care, time, and planning, like embroidery.

In this painting, the clouds take the form of a series of rings. Their unity as a line and forms of individual units echo the stones. One reading of the foreground can be water surrounding the rocks, but waves don't lap at their edges. More likely from the information painted they are strung in the air, like weighty party decorations. Clouds and stones are elevated to the celestial, common, belonging, important. The clouds seem like white halos to the stones.

Green and White-Blue

12" x 16"

oil on panel

Imagine you are on a plane. You see rectangular fields of green; the plane tilts and you see clouds, atmosphere, a bit of blue, all framed through the plane window. I am not literally describing this scene in Green and White-Blue, but this kind of experience informed it. I enjoy the intensity of the tangible green, the luminosity of the white, and the appearance of the edge of blue. An odd thing is that it seems taller than its 12". It is both lively and peaceful, expansive, hopeful. Even though it is geometric in design, the edges are all about substances interacting and it is connected to the landscape tradition that celebrates nature as majestic and larger than ourselves. One such nineteeth century American painter is Frederic Church who painted this color centric picture of Niagara Falls.

Here is a painting by Brice Marden, which seems to be a contemporary relative of mine.

I mentioned an article by Mark Bittman from The New York Times last week. He has just begun his own blog through the paper which can be found here. It looks really good; he's posting a daily recipe and there is going to be some discussion of food politics. Don't be scared about the politics; it doesn't seem to cut-throat as one of the recipes up is for fried chicken. Excuse the vegetarian pun; I get it from my husband.

Another note on my last post, my friend, Sharon, recommends the book Food Politics by Marion Nestle, "She has a great discussion about the formation of the Government’s food pyramid and how the dairy and meat industries lobbied heavily to inflate those daily requirement, with little or no medical research to back it up. It’s a fascinating read, if a little dry- if your local library has it I’d recommend picking it up."