iPad Project 3-31-11

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Purple Mountain

9" x 12", oil on panel PRIVATE COLLECTION

Artists come from fields other than fine arts. Chicago chef Grant Achatz is one of them. Dedicated to his work, he exemplifies inventiveness in the food he creates at his restaurant, Alinea. He is known for creating special machines and techniques for synthesizing foods and scents never before paired. He received the James Beard foundation award for outstanding chef in 2008.

Achatz has a new book out co-written with Nick Kokonas:

Life, on the Line: A Chef's Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat (Gotham Books, $27.50). In this autobiography he tells his story of being diagnosed with tongue cancer and risking his life in refusing the recommended treatment of removing his tongue. He lost his sense of taste for a period of a year, continuing to work at his restaurant with nausea. He raises the bar for all of us, artists or not.

Purple Mountain's idea is the heroic self. The mountain is a stand in for a strong person; full, solid, richly painted in large, layered strokes. In painting it I think of the slow process of making oneself from the inside out. It can take a long time.

iPad Project 3-27-11

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Pink Hydrangea

24" x 24", oil on panel

I enjoy painting every dot. They are each a gift to someone else (the viewer) like sharing a piece of gum. I paint them for my own enjoyment, satisfaction, and centering first. They are reduced/concentrated elements of calm even when bouncy. They are complete in themselves, in their own location, suspended alone while part of a group like individuals in society.

Pink Hydrangea is a follow-up to Blue Hydrangea. Rather than a mandala type circular arrangement, it is a diffused square field. The globe form of the flowers is less accentuated in favor of the all over, hovering field. Quadrants advance and recede as do individual dots, activating the eye. Check out my Hydrangea oil pastels, too.

I'd like to draw your attention to the paintings and relief sculpture of Ian Tornay on view at the Bowery Gallery, New York City through March 26th. The press release for the show is as follows:

Ian Tornay paints lush, green landscapes in rural northeastern Pennsylvania and in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. In views of farms and rivers, Tornay paints with energetic brushwork that leads from foreground to sky in uninterrupted rhythms. He focuses our attention on the connections and fluid interplay of the elements: clouds, trees, fields and farm buildings.

For this show, his sixth at the Bowery Gallery, Tornay also presents a series of still lives. In these works, he contemplates the symbolism of each object and the different realms they belong to. Domestic objects, tools and pure geometric elements share the tabletop stage surrounded by dark, theatrical backgrounds. In these elemental compositions, he draws contrasts between permanence and decay, opacity and transparency, organic and man made objects.

Tornay also includes relief sculptures carved in wood. Each piece is carved from a single piece of wood that has been cut apart and rearranged. The jigsaw puzzle arrangements emphasize the connectedness of different objects with each other and with their tabletop environments.

Originally from New York, Ian Tornay lives in Philadelphia and teaches art and interior design at the Delaware College of Art and Design in Wilmington, DE. He was educated as an architect at the Cooper Union, NYC before receiving an MFA in painting from Queens College, NYC. His work has been reviewed in the Philadelphia Inquirer and in The New Republic.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm. Please contact the gallery for more information or tornayian@gmail.com

iPad Project 3-19-11

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The River

9" x 12", oil on panel

Just in case you were missing the hard-core dots...

I like the different ways of looking at this - the sensation of falling, rising, a field (area), strata, aerial, the blue melding in with the green in planes. Concepts relating to possible readings include levels of social position and individuals within larger society, strata of meaning, and parallel layers of geological deposits. You can just take it and run with it.

I recently viewed an excellent interview with painter Philip Guston on YouTube made by the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. A statement he made regarding the generation of ideas as multiple pathways resonates with me not only in painting but especially with my current iPad Project:

"Nothing is ever solved in painting; it's a continuous chain that sometimes doesn't go in one line, goes in a serpentine line or in crooked paths, detours which have to be investigated. I felt like an explorer who almost got to the top of Mount Everest and somehow stopped just short and remembered and thought 'maybe I forgot some gear, forgot some equipment' but in going down to recover this equipment I took side paths that looked exciting, full of possibilities."

- Philip Guston

Here's to going off the path which is maybe the right path.

iPad Project 3-12-11

iPad Project 3-11-11

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Over the House and Home Together

both 12" x 9" oil on panel

Over the House is inspired by the current housing crisis in the U.S. A stormy tree hangs over a diminished house like a black cloud, compressing it as do the flanking trees. A blue sky and reflecting sunlight provide sanctity.

Home Together depicts two houses side-by-side, quietly radiating their own colors, touching like people cuddling on a couch. It is about sharing a journey (a road), a relationship, a home together while retaining individuality.

Rembrandt had his own financial crisis. He is made more real to us when we learn he had creditors after him* and he subsequently tried to sign as much of his wealth as possible over to his son, Titus, before it was seized. Rembrandt's experiences correlate with today's short sales and foreclosures. All his property was sold and his house went on the auction block. A shoemaker and a silk seller bought it, dividing it in half by knocking down the gallery Rembrandt built. This happened in 1658, the same year he painted his weighty and so human self-portrait in the Frick Collection.* Go see it and the exhibition “Rembrandt and His School: Masterworks from the Frick and Lugt Collections” , on view through May 15, 1 East 70th Street, Manhattan, (212) 288-0700, frick.org.

*Holland Cotter NY Times , 2009 Rembrandt article.

**Information gathered from Rembrandt's Eyes, by Simon Schama.

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