Spring 2 (View From the Cobblestone School Playground)

oil on canvas

24" x 20"

I really like this purple house sitting beyond the green.

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The paint gets very thick when I paint over old paintings. It reminds me of the Californian painter Jess as well as passages of heavily layered gouache (opaque watercolor) in the paintings of African-American artist Horace Pippin (1888 - 1946). There isn't a lot of air in Jess' paintings; they seem locked in, constructed of bumpy jigsaw pieces. Many of Pippin's paintings depict the bleak interiors of African-American homes he experienced in his lifetime. He frequently used flat shapes but his space is often airy however stark the scene. What I am talking about is very physical. I am beginning to work on clay reliefs which naturally connect to this idea. They will appear here if I am able to pull it off.

My physical and airy painting, Spring 2 (View from the Cobblestone School Playground), is exuberant. It is the moment when all of Rochester is altered into collective cheer at the sight of green. The grass is green first, which means the leaves are soon to follow. Old buildings that looked dingy under gray skies now sparkle in the sun. It has the excitement of Dippin' Dots (frozen tiny balls of ice cream that look like Styrofoam pellets) at the amusement park. Although totally artifice as the loud circles proclaim, it generates strong feeling. The form of the landscape is changed to mirror emotion.

I think the dots can sometimes be like a kind of collecting, think bottle caps, stamps, buttons. When I was a girl my passion was stickers. For years my allowance went to magical eye-candy that I loved to organize (this zeal for page layout may have served me well in many graphic design scenarios, but has recently intensely resurfaced through an innocent-looking recipe organizer given to me by a friend). I collected until adolescence, at which time I promptly gave them all, numbering in the thousands, to a woman with two daughters younger than me. It was an impractical past-time as a well-meaning aunt expressed, "All it is is a shiny piece of paper," a quote I remember from over twenty-five years ago. Blasphemy! She didn't understand the brain buzz (play Zynga's Scramble if you want a taste), the visual information I could process, finding comparisons and contrasts in shape, color, scale, texture, and sometimes even scent (scratch and sniffs were prizes given by my teachers). It is one kind of intelligence, which I often use to explain why the math section of my brain is the size of a raisin. Some kids were practicing piano, others dance or baseball, while my independent investigations of paper and design were in preparation to create this Dippin' Dots picture for you. Yum.