Fall V, & Fall VI

both are 20" x 16", oil on panel

While tending to my show I took time to go to the MoMA to see Van Gogh, and the Colors of the Night, up through January 9th. His blues bite like dark chocolate, luscious with an edge. For the first time ever I stared at a painting (The Sower) so intently that my eyes began burning and my nose started running. I love the timelessness of art or the timefullness of it, that a painting made over a hundred years ago can enter my immediate experience and make me feel so much. Van Gogh layered strokes, weaving color, making land/light/substance, yet still of that paste, passionately applied. So much sensation, so much meaning was packed into that material.

I recently saw the BBC production about the paintings of the child artist, Marla Olmstead, from Binghamton, NY. The director of the gallery representing her, Anthony Brunelli, is a photo-realist painter who admitted to not fully appreciating the work of famous abstract artists such as Jackson Pollock. It is funny to me that he could appreciate Marla's but not the critically acclaimed artists, commenting that their fame was mostly due to marketing.

The absence of a recognizable subject is often a stumbling block for many viewers and often they will try to pull out forms like looking for pictures in clouds thinking they have unlocked the big mystery. A buyer of Marla's work observing a brushstroke of rectangular blue paint, insisted she had painted a picture of a door. I have to tell you that this line of thinking makes painters' eyes roll.

While I'm not about to claim that Marla's work is on par with Van Gogh and Pollock (I have never seen it in real life), my point is that people responded to her work because of its clarity, spontaneity, and evident joy in handling the material. This can be said of all three artists, Van Gogh using the form of a landscape and Pollock using color, viscosity, scale, speed, etc.

I have worked in both manners, abstract and figurative, and often find myself with a foot in each. I believe have made a comfortable synthesis. Not verbose (despite this blog!), I like the way abstraction conveys the essence of something. This week I met an older woman who would like to take watercolor classes but is afraid her tremor from her medication would interfere. She didn't want to work on something for a long time and then make a mistake, ruining it. I told her that there are other ways of working with watercolor, that it can be fluid and not so tight. The images of what she thought watercolor paintings should look like held her back and I don' t think she could see another way.

Artists become visionary when they can see beyond the cliches. Like all children, Marla is too young to know about the cliches and that may be where the freshness comes in her work. It is why Picasso said artists should draw like children. When she is older she will become more self-conscious. If she pursues painting, she will have to learn to unlearn, i.e. learn to see for herself. That is why painting can be so hard. That is why we celebrate the achievements of mature artists.

Reception

The opening reception for Images of Optimism, my current show at the Bowery Gallery in New York was a lot of fun; thank you to all who attended. I made sure not to over-hang the show and felt good about the work. You can take a virtual tour here beginning at the entrance.




After the opening I went to the cd release party for my cool brother-in-law, musician Andreas Sahar. I love his new cd, Crossing Over, & he is so passionate that to me he seems like a musical Van Gogh. He's in ITunes if you'd like to look him up.

My friend, the writer Rob Staeger, had some observations of the show. Of particular interest to me is how he notes the difference between my work and landscapes done on site.

http://robstaeger.blogspot.com/2008/11/oasis.html

Barbara Grossman, a painter, friend, and former professor of mine had this to say, "I love the way you have found strength in the summarizing of your view. They are not plein air paintings in the traditional sense but you take us there." To me it parallels what Rob said.

Once while in grad school at Penn, Barbara saw what I was working on and said, "Don't do that again!" among other constructive things. Uncompromising and visually brilliant, I can always count on her to tell me the truth and bring insight as well. She is a great teacher.

President Obama

"Senator Obama Will Win Presidency" - http://www.nytimes.com/?emc=na

Optimistic but afraid to hope, I am now thrilled.

Butterflies (for the book) & artist's statement

etchings

4" x 3" image size

Note: The butterflies are bursting above the box, like Pandora in spring.

Nicole Maynard
Artist's Statement
September 2008

I make paintings, prints, and drawings. Imagery varies but may include landscape, other natural forms, and geometry. Form and color are combined with expressionist paint handling. Expressionism comes from the search for truth and the acknowledgement that growth comes from change and sometimes trauma. If glossing things over is a lie (think of magazines and advertising), then Expressionism is the antithesis. It is not cold; paint is infused with feeling. Some of my images are Minimalist, focusing more on large areas of color and light rather than on marks. Paint handling and surface are still important to these works, but are subdued in favor of sublime tranquility.
I am interested in getting closer to the mystery in non-verbal experiences. I am after what is intrinsic to the human condition, what can be sensed but is difficult to grasp. I am seeking the temporal and the eternal. I want my paintings to function like poetry and prayer, without words; to be objects for spiritual reflection and experience. The essence of something is conveyed through their substance, through their materiality, through the paint (there is nothing like paint, but paint can be like so much). Optimism is present, but there is an underlying toughness, backbone that keeps these images from being overly romantic, offering credibility to redemption. This intense presence is the unifying factor in everything I do. They are objects embodying sensual and spiritual experience, icons of renewal.

A note on The Butterfly Book:

The Butterfly Book is a collection of hand-pulled intaglio prints made in an edition of ten. The first five pulls of each image will be kept as folios or books, while the remaining five pulls will be sold individually. All the images are butterfly related, 8" x 6" paper size (Arches) and are made using 5" x 3" plates. Inspired by Goya's Los Caprichos, especially the print, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. In place of the monsters (or owls, bats, whatever they are) flying around the slumped figure in Goya's print, I made my self-portrait in Intellect and Optimism Create Butterflies with raised arms, interacting with the butterflies.

Fall III and Fall IV

oil on canvas, 36" x 32"
oil on panel, 20" x 16"

A friend of mine came into my studio as I was selecting work for my show, Images of Optimism, which opens October 28th at the Bowery Gallery. She was excited about what she saw after telling my husband a few years before to watch the landscape where we live work its way into my paintings. I didn't believe it then. Even though I loved trees and sky, I thought it didn't reconcile the political issues I wanted to address. Maybe the thing is that I see it all and want to respond. In any case, the next thing she exclaimed really made the connection for me clear, "The paintings seem to say, 'The world has gone to hell in a hand basket, but look out your window because there is more to life than that!'" So it is not so much with an escapist's searching that I turn to the view, but with an interest in seeing, experiencing, and affirming that there is life outside politics. I still gaze with the knowledge that politics effects everything, however. It is impossible to look at nature and not think of climate change, for example, just as the BBC podcast, "The Best of Natural History" investigates the changing migration patterns of eels most likely due to global warming's effect on the Gulf Stream.

Bonnard painted scenes of domesticity and landscape during wartime; a search produced a painting unfamiliar to me. In 1916 he was assigned to make paintings of the First World War; the painting, Un village en ruines près du Ham (A Village in Ruins near Ham), depicts French troops near ruins. To me it is obvious that his heart wasn't in it, although his mark-making is unmistakable and the isolated contrasting colors of blue and orange hint at the colorist within, handcuffed in the task at hand.
So I wonder sometimes why I'm painting something pedestrian like a landscape, why to paint at all when there are so many artists taking on ENORMOUS (in every sense of the word) projects in new media. I don't feel like such an old fashioned girl. I do believe in those small, quiet acts of looking, seeing, and being that can be transposed onto canvas through a person. There is no substitute. I can't fix the world. I'm a small ripple: mailing Obama postcards to swing states, helping to register a few new voters at a rally, casting my single vote, sticking a bumper sticker to my car (someone stole it!), recycling & buying Fair Trade, taking care of my family, and painting. The paintings reflect my unique way of seeing. I don't want to back away from experiencing the world through paint. This is what I do.

Don't Be Afraid to Be Vibrant

oil on panel
20" x 16"

Vibrancy in this case, to me, means to be full of life. The painting is about being unafraid to be one's best; to be one's best self without worrying about how one measures up to someone else, nor to worry about outshining anyone. It is about existing outside of someones shadow. Sometimes being one's best means standing out, not conforming. Geoffrey Canada, director of the Harlem Children's Zone, said in an interview with Terry Gross (Fresh Air) that part of a students' success depends on cultural attitudes changing: for academic success to be seen as cool, not as joining the establishment.

The artist Ben Shahn said that conformity was a failure of hope, belief, and rebellion.

To be one's best for one's self-fulfillment, to really live and pursue what makes one truly happy is a calling. The journey and answers are different for each of us. The flowers are together in one vase, in one situation, but there are a variety, needing different amounts of space to flourish.

After painting this, the Unitarian Church I go to had a similar theme for the day. We were encouraged to strive and celebrate life, to do what I just described without being distracted by glitz or the many forms of escapism available. If we all have the courage, the hope needed to pursue our best selves, to encourage others in this pursuit, we will all be lifted up. Sunflowers filled the altar and at the end of the service we were all invited to pick one up, return to our seats and hold them up together.

Fall Tree

16" x 20"

oil on panel

This is a celebration painting. The leaves in fall know how to go out in style. They make a final burst of color before their descent. Pierre Bonnard squeezed the last bit of life in himself just as he squeezed paint out of tubes in order to paint Almond Tree in Blossom. It was done the week he died. As such it deserves our special attention.

I recently saw the Julian Schnabel film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, made after the book of the same title "by Elle France editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, in 1995 at the age of 43, suffered a stroke that paralyzed his entire body, except his left eye. Using that eye to blink out his memoir, Bauby eloquently described the aspects of his interior world, from the psychological torment of being trapped inside his body to his imagined stories from lands he'd only visited in his mind. Written by Anonymous , IMDb"

While Bonnard uses his sight to make his last statement, he also uses his imagination and is aware of his mortality. Both Bonnard and Bauby embrace life, continuing to absorb and respond until the end, exploring their humanity, and the mystery of pain and beauty.

I am not in such dire straits, but this is my painting.

Fall II

16" x 20"

oil on panel

It seems that I am doing the seasons. Like many, I loved Vivaldi's Four Seasons in high school and was into the Omnimax movie featuring the music while I worked at the Boston Museum of Science. The rhythms in nature, music, and art are energizing but they also have a framework of something that makes sense, truth. Many people say that math is very reassuring to them because there is an objective rightness to it. I think the same could be said for rhythm, echoes of our heart beats, of life around us.

In Fall II there is a rhythm in the brushwork, a fracturing of the space not unlike Cezanne, but more with an eye for an all-over area of color predominating. The simple composition emphasises the space and scale, the vastness of the sky and grass bisected by a distant band of trees. This ability to see far, to take the long view invites relaxed contemplation. It drew my husband and I to make our home in Western New York, where the seasons, weather, and agriculture are an active part of life.

Fall I

16" x 20"

oil on panel

This is as close to Impressionism as I get. Maybe it's too close, I don't know. I like it, it feels like me, and the trees/curtains aren't particularly Impressionistic; they're of a different nature. It is a celebration of color and the color changes of fall. There is the dark of the left vertical, the neutral gray of the right, the horizontal clouds are white, while the rest of the painting is representative of the spectrum, although altered, sometimes subdued. The light is special in autumn, my favorite for taking pictures of my work. Crisp, warm in tone, the light and the air both sparkle.

Landscape in Grays

24" x 18"

oil on panel

This painting follows the basic schema used in Winter Landscape I in which the opposing verticals can be read as trees or curtains (domestic at a window sill or those for a stage). When I explained this reading to my mother-in-law, she had the correct observation that one gets the feeling of the first moment the stage curtains are drawn back to reveal the scenery. That moment is full of freshness, excitement, and anticipation. Perhaps, if I am lucky, I am able to show the long familiar subject of landscape anew. The pictures are unveiled and are about clarity. In Landscape in Grays, the crystalline, pale blue sky is captivating as it encapsulates the gray and stretches over the next layer of gray-green. Painting students learn to see the rainbow in whites and the dingiest institutional gray floors and surroundings. This painting makes use of a limited palette (a pared-down selection of colors), but still achieves luminosity. The proportion of the verticals is different than my other paintings and it gives the feeling of collosal scale like the columns of the Acropolis.

Watercolors!

5" x 8"
Moleskin watercolor book

I am enjoying working in this Moleskin watercolor book. My son didn't go to camp very much this summer and we took a lot of vacations, so the ability to paint as increments of time open up to me is wonderful. The travel watercolor set and book stay close to me, even now that the trips are over. I need to think in color; a single pencil isn't enough for the kind of painting I am working on. Sometimes pencil makes it into the watercolors, though, like in the first three here. It is used to sharpen, delineate form, and add texture.
The first image is about a framed, fluid space. The second is like a landscape of choppy waters or those waters can be read as grass. The horizontal lines also read as two things: delineations of sky or some kind of telephone lines. The third picture is more about atmosphere/gauze and tangibility. The fourth is a singular, light tree in a landscape. The fifth is effervescent landscape dots. If the latter seems too abstract for you, think of sunspots and vision.
Meanwhile, I'm working on publicity for "Nicole Maynard: Images of Optimism" opening at the Bowery Gallery on October 28th. I just updated my website with revised resume, statement, and portfolio - check it out!

Aerial View

oil on panel

Another unsatisfactory painting provided the fodder for this one on top. I always liked the fairytale Rumpelstiltskin and the concept of turning straw into gold; I think most artists do. The painting combines inspiration from plane views. In one flight one often sees farms, fields, the sky coming between us and the world. People's pools, highways, and parking lots of cars near Newark, newly arrived from overseas, also catch my curiosity, but this painting derives from the rural. Geometric but permeable, it has implications for memory, time, experience, the defined and changing self.
A fellow student at Massachusetts College of Art made paintings in this vein. They were abstractions, less about the landscape, but very heavy on layering and rich in color. I forget her name, but I attended her ninetieth birthday party then, in 1991. Even Shrek talks about his inner complexity in terms of layers, "like an onion" the ogre explains. While I enjoy the freshness of a thin wash like Matisse [his studio assistant used to remove the paint from the canvas with turpentine at the end of the day so he could begin again at the start of the next without any accumulation. It was important to have the luminosity from the white of the canvas through the color and to remove texture which would impede the large shapes of colored light he made.] I also can create light through the interaction of color despite density. The painting has history; the texture,like wrinkles, is the hard-won evidence of the journey.

From the West

24" x 20"

oil on panel

Inspired by my trip to New Mexico this summer, this painting has a lot of the Grand Canyon in it. My family did a small amount of hiking there as well as driving throughout New Mexico and a trip to Mesa Verde. It was my third or fourth trip to New Mexico and I am continually fascinated by the ruins of the Anscestral Puebloans, petroglyphs, and land formations/landscape.

From the West is a dialogue with the personal past (painted over another painting) and its thick texture resulted from this layering as well as through the use of chunky oil sticks. It has a compressed space, as if you are against a canyon wall or zooming close with a camera. The oranges change hue and tone, showing light and shade, defining rugged planes. The green square is not solid, so it comes to the surface and then seems to dwell with the rock, like the plants that grow in the dessert. The green substantiates that life can exist in seemingly inhospitable territory.

The Green Has It

oil on canvas

24" x 18"

The Green Has It is a funny painting. The stripes are curtain abstractions and the center is a view out a window. It owes much to Pierre Bonnard and one of his many window scenes, complete with striped wallpaper, curtains, light. I think much of my landscape painting has architectural references. They are nature influenced by a domestic view, like Bonnard (the sense of a window). They also often have the symmetry provided by the highway splitting the landscape into left and right when driving. Here there is more on the left than the right and it is a domestic picture, not the open road.

The yellow-green-blue goes through permutations but never bursts into orange or violet. There are a broad range of values, and paint-handling. This is a picture made by painting over another, this time an unresolved portrait. It was the right thing to do, a stronger statement.

Butterfly Window

oil on panel
24" x 18"

dry point (for the butterfly book, edition of 10)

The painting came first after a sketch. It is rather Matisse-like, bright, glowing color with black, flatly painted. My friend, the painter, Michelle Albert helped me with the printing technique. She did a bit of work in my studio while visiting me with her husband and daughter. I showed her plexiglass for dry point and basic supplies and she got a little time to herself to putter around. What she came up with surprised me - she spotted Akua-Kolor water based inks on the floor and used them monotype style with the oil based etching ink in the lines. It is always inspiring to see how someone else does something. I couldn't wait to try the technique myself because it is so painterly. To get painterly qualities in my prints I either make monotypes or hand-color etchings later. This was just what I was looking for! Sure enough, the lines were inky black and the areas of color were vibrant but not too flat. Every print I pull is pure joy. They have the feeling of rightness as when a painting comes together.

The black has a transparency to it and the location of the butterfly, either in front of or behind the window, is ambiguous. Maybe it is in the process of bursting through. The butterfly is a tangible, familiar life form, organic in contrast to the stark black and light pink architecture. The painting also has paint applied in washy areas, not completely flat solids, which energize the geometry. The butterflies are like dancers.

Curtains

oil on panel

24" x 18"

Another form of the square or the box in my work is this curtain. It is essentially a rectangle billowing in the breeze, inspired from a curtain hanging in a door of a stage at the Sterling Renaissance Festival in New York State. While waiting for the acrobat, Daniel, the Duke of Danger (GREAT act, by the way) I became instantly mesmerized by the form. That happens with me - sometimes images come in a flash, either imagined or triggered by something in view. I took out my sketchbook and studied the form in the wind, also intrigued by the darkness behind it. In reality the curtain was patterned, but in my painting I wanted to have it be white (it is white with grays made of green and pink). It retains a carnival feel, and I think I managed to capture the pull it had for me, an archetypal form. My first year of graduate school I painted three pictures of my grandmother hanging the laundry; only one was successful enough to keep. The figure held the ends of a sheet, attaching them to a clothesline. This billowing shape isn't new to me. It is interesting to forget about something and have it return. I look forward to seeing what else I've forgotten.

New York City Solo Show Dates

Pink, Green

oil on panel

24" x 24"


"Nicole Maynard: Images of Optimism" runs October 28 - November 22, 2008, at the Bowery Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, 4th floor, NY, NY 10001 646.230.6655. The opening reception will be Saturday, November 1st from 4 - 6 p.m.; the public is invited. A full press release will be posted sometime in September.

I am looking forward to the show. I am still painting towards it and have some ideas which works to put in. I began this blog immediately after my last show, so I have quite a bit of work to choose from. It will mainly be paintings, but I am thinking of showing a folio of small prints (The Butterfly Book) on a pedestal for visitors to handle with gloves like many artists books (check out this on-line collection at Otis College of Art and Design ) are exhibited. I will do the same for a book of watercolors I am working on, if I am happy with it in the end.

I am just glad the show closes after opening night of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince because my husband, son, and I are die-hards. I'm hoping we can see it in IMAX 3D. Taking down isn't as hard as hanging, but it is still quite a job; this will give us something extra to chat about while we spackle.

It Feels Right

16" x 20"

oil on panel

I am a position described by many artists throughout my art education. It is the state of simultaneously not knowing what one is doing and knowing exactly. I can confidently say that I am both sure and unsure. It is annoying, but is supposed to be reflective of the creative process, transition, and discovery. It is a bit different from the attitude needed for sales, for instance.

I have an endless supply of ideas and need to make many pictures to explore them all graphically. I believe in them all as artworks that can stand alone, but I also see them as different ways of getting at the same thing, facets. This thing I am trying to get at is Eternal Truth and it is obvious and elusive all at once, hence the conundrum.
It Feels Right is about this "feeling in the dark" way of painting. Emotion, vision, the mind's eye, visual thought/organization and paint all combine in making an art work. I could add "imagination" and "perception" but "visual thought/organization" is already slightly redundant. It is emblematic, yet unconcerned about being nameable. It is itself; it is not nothing. The figure/ground relationship
is somewhat fluid, a comment on entropy, living things, and nature. The blue on the brown reminds me of the reflections the sky makes on roads.

New Yorker Obama Cartoon

My two cents regarding the Obama cartoon by Barry Blitt on the cover of the recent New Yorker http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7505953.stm is different from my opinion on the Danish cartoon of Muhammad. The right's uses fear and rumor tactics to discredit Obama. Blitt's illustration of these misconceptions (lies) is shocking and horrid because it made the lies visible. It gave them a new form, something that shows them for what they are. There is the risk, however, that anyone ignorant enough to believe these lies in the first place will see the picture as confirmation. The scariest thing about America today is the number of people unable to discern fact and fiction from the media. It seems that many are easily manipulated. It would serve the country well if a course in understanding journalism and images were included with English literature classes in high school (as well as a semester in mediation and keep those art and music classes, by the way).

I don't think Blitt's cartoon was a mistake. I think the outrage shouldn't be that someone made it and published it, but for the situation it reflects.

In contrast, the cartoons published of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper took an image that is holy and satirized it. The sacred should be left sacred and the pictures were unthinking instigation. Obama's integrity shouldn't be slandered, but such high standards aren't reached in U.S. politics, as the New Yorker cartoon makes evident.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy

Red

24" x 24"

oil on panel

This painting uses a stage-like format again. The curtains double as trees. It is hot, intense; certainly climate crisis is a subtext. There is a sense of movement despite the square nature of the composition. Some relief is offered in the gauzy pale pink up top and the high-light of fresh grass green where the ground meets the red air. In high school I did a pencil drawing of a forest on fire, the only color being red pencil. This is more sophisticated but in the same tone, the blackish foreground feeling of peat, ash, mud. Red and black are always dramatic, but the particular hues chosen and the handling of the paint reference these specifically earthy things. It makes me think of swamps, walking on hot coals, and Greek theatre. It resists complete narrative in favor of a painted experience.

Purple Veil & Ten Years Later

Purple Veil, oil on panel, 20" x 16"

Ten Years Later, oil on canvas, 14" x 14"

I'm painting over some old paintings. No one should ever bother to x-ray them in hopes that there is a hidden masterpiece underneath. I have pretty good judgement about these things and usually don't miss what was. It is an interesting process, a dialogue with a past self. Hindsight lends a hand. I stand by the majority of my older work. I am unable nor desire to repeat the past. The old paintings are springboards for new ideas; either by keeping some of what is there or by having the reaction to negate everything in favor of a new direction. George Lucas has been critizied for wanting re-do parts of the Star Wars trilogy. I understand both the desire to keep tweeking a work and to let it stand, marked by the context of its time of creation. Artist Pierre Bonnard was said to have retouched one of his paintings after it was hanging in a museum. There is always the danger of over-working a piece, to be so compelled to keep going that the piece is taken past freshness. Giacommetti's brother, Diego, often pulled sculptures and paintings away from the artist in an effort to curb this tendency. He was so brilliant, hard-working, and prolific that the compulsion probably served him more than hindered.

Purple Veil is a fresh panel, nothing to paint over, although a few sessions on it has left it pretty bumpy. The light rectangle is like a time dimension, unpenetrable to our gaze. It reminds me of the veil in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that Sirius falls into when he dies; Harry is unable to follow. This is similar with the pale blue rectangle of Ten Years Later, which, although also a portal, is made of thinner air. The title came from painting over the image underneath, which was done in 1998. I don't have the tendency to overwork things. With Chinese painting and caligraphy in mind, I try to be alert for the moment when the image clicks. The tricky thing is to be open to unusual outcomes, but that is the exciting part.

Burnt Orange Square

14" x 14"
oil on canvas

I painted over an older painting and the (color of the) frame is now a part of the art work. It is a very physical thing, painting-as-object, in addition to the burnt orange square feeling dense like a Richard Serra paintstick piece or sculpture. It is some kind of hybrid of Serra, O'Keefe adobe houses and Josef Albers. The blue in the gray is complementary to the orange, but it isn't a picture about transparency like the Albers painting in the previous link. It's a tough painting, a Tae-Bo kick painting, not a Celine Dion painting. I don't usually paint this way, but here it is. Perhaps painting over an older piece made me think more about the physicality of the thing, the work as artifact.

Foundation

19" x 22"
oil on panel

A stone foundation provides the square framework I enjoy. The landscape can seem like a direct downward view, or a frontal angle with the stone tipped up like a frame to look through. I recently heard a podcast through MOMA NYC, I believe, about Sean Scully (very good article I've linked, by the way). I never gravitate to his work but now I have a new appreciation as he described the rectangles in his paintings as "bricks" and the significance of the brick in history/culture. Now I am all over them.

Foundation is about the architecture AND the landscape, however. There is a sense of mapping through the linear element in the work. The bricks are a bit quirky, beautiful and unique like people. The Williams Visual Arts Building at Lafayette College, where I once taught, is a wonderful building whose bricks were individually hit as they were made to purposefully bend them into irregular shapes. They protrude from the walls and curve in an aesthetically stimulating manner. Back to the painting - the yellows and greens bring new life to the bricks. A new foundation or old, we can not tell; it speaks to the past as well as to the future.

The Loaves and Fishes III

oil on panel
36" x 24"

Soutine still life painting of fish

This is my third painting of the subject, all done in this size. The second I donated in December to St. Luke's Episcopal Church, New Orleans, LA, where there was reconstruction after Katrina, no art, and every member but one lost their home. I received an e-mail last month looking for the insurance value of the work because they had a fire and the painting was destroyed. I don't know any details about the fire. I really liked the painting and to do something a second time (or a third) is to do it differently, so there was a bit of a loss there. I didn't want to sulk too long, so I made this version. The composition of the one lost went something like this digital version. I have a jpeg of it somewhere. In this new painting, the hands are almost juggling the pita bread loaves/suns or they are buoying in an ocean-sky.

The Soutine painting of fish (sorry I couldn't find the title; it is on the cover of the first volume of the catalogue raisonne published in 1993) is one I think of often. I was proud when my son pointed out that the oval plate is like a stomach, the forks are like hands, and the bowl above like a head. The forks are pulling at the stomach edges like surgical tools to reveal what is inside. Soutine suffered from stomach ulcers and his paintings have a characteristically churning rhythm to them. The "hands" reveal psychological as well as physical pain. The eyes of the fish, the central oval of the plate, and the fork-hands were inspirational in planning the composition of my painting. The color in my painting contributes to the feeling of jubilation, while Soutine's dingy palette sets the tone for starvation and poverty, despite the "stomach" full of fish.

Fields

18" x 24"


oil on panel

This is like an agrarian Broadway Boogie Woogie. It is fun, like Mondrian's. As a rule, I'm not so interested in the perfectly square (you should see me trying to mat things), primarily because I like the slightly imperfect. At the same time, the color is orchestrated in perfect pitch. The rectangles aren't static; the color induces ocular somersaults. Radiant, it seems to give off heat.

Anniversary Hands

Happy 13th Wedding Anniversary, Christoph!

June 3, 1995

For You, It's Love!

20" x 16"

oil on panel

If I could distill my childhood into one image it might be this one. My grandmother's favorite flower was lily of the valley. We had them in the backyard and after she died my grandfather would pick them for me, as well as other flowers from the garden. Her name was Lillian and his Mundy, a nickname, as he was born at 11:59 on a Monday night and his twin at 12:01 on a Tuesday. My grandparents called each other "Pest" and I remember him being scolded for tasting tomato sauce on the stove from the cooking spoon. Even though I was six when my grandmother died, her warning to him regarding other women was etched in my brain, "You can look, but don't touch." She died on their anniversary at fifty-five and he missed her ever after.

It is his hand in the painting, a construction worker's hand, so much bigger than mine and so familiar. We lived together and when I was a little girl I held it whenever we went places together, which was often. The hand is painted in a way that shows human suffering; its mass is in contrast to the delicate flower. There were thirteen children in his Italian first-generation family. His younger sister was run over by a trolley in front of their home at the age of five, and his twin brother died of a burst appendix at fifteen. My grandfather always said that his brother was the smarter one and neater, describing the way Bobby parted his hair just so with his comb. A picture of the two of them when they were about five shows them with their arms around each other, my grandfather easy to spot with his tongue sticking out. After those deaths, my grandfather was the youngest. I think he always missed the noise of living in such a full house and maybe tried to make up for it by being so loud himself. As the only grandchild, I was the apple of his eye and I have never heard anyone introduced with more pride than when he introduced me as his "little granddaughter". I can't remember even one time when he wanted me to leave him alone. As a parent, it strikes me as rather remarkable. The painting squeezes all this narration into one image with feeling, part memory, part personal icon. Without the back story, it is an allegory that small acts of tenderness matter.

Rounded Blue

18" x 24"

oil on panel

This strange shape for sky and clouds looks almost like a giant eye and reminds me of the eye sockets of skulls held up to the sky by O'Keefe. Perhaps the white on the sides is also like white curtains being drawn back, theatrical. The shadow in the foreground adds depth as does the reflected light on the hills. The blue seems to press forward as well as to recede. It is one of my more harmonious paintings. The brief commentary this week matches the reduction in the painting.

I went to NYC this week and saw the Whitney Biennial. Painting was barely represented and it was difficult to take in the numerous pieces of art in various media. I wasn't so excited about the work overall, but I did like this piece by Carol Bove.

I especially enjoyed the Guston drawing show at the Morgan Library (I'm off to draw next, very motivating!). Another highlight was the show of Natalie Charkow reliefs and Ruth Miller paintings at the Lohin Geduld Gallery. The reproductions don't do justice to the caring marriage of hand and eye in both these artists' work. They are two women who have made art their lives and have persisted in their own visions regardless of trends.

Two Trees

18" x 24"
oil on panel

This week, a smattering:

My friend, Aaron Brooks, is having a solo show at the Bowery Gallery in New York City. It closes May 15th and the link is: http://www.bowerygallery.org/current.html His work often combines different styles in one painting and they have a metaphysical bent.

I am entering into the world of free-lancing and am available to do illustration and graphic design work, such as children's book illustrations, greeting cards, logos, website icons, etc. I am really enjoying using Adobe Illustrator. You can check out my profile with portfolio samples on Guru:

http://profile.guru.com/963970

One of my roommates from Mass. College of Art went with me and a group to do landscape painting in Tuscany for a month. She did a series of paintings and gave titles to them such as "It is What it is" or simply "What it is." The flippant, philosophical titles didn't match the traditional style of the landscapes, but they did convey the painter's problem with language. I am of the mindset this week to say the same about Two Trees: it is what it is.

Spring Sublimation

18" x 24"

oil on panel



"Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest. " - Albert Einstein

I'm always looking for motivators. I mean, I am self-motivated, but even so it is good to get external reinforcement that I'm not wasting my time trying when it sometimes seems futile. It's kind of like looking for the cups of water and orange slices from people when running a marathon.

I painted over another painting to make this one. It is a put-the-past-behind kind of thing which accompanied my spring cleaning and multiple trips to the Volunteers of America. Roberta Smith wrote an article in The New York Times recently about how there seems to be a new trend in painting of working small, as opposed to the large works of the Abstract-Expressionists. She suggests it relates to the economy. It is a kind of simplification, reduction. The short but brilliantly succinct film, The Story of Stuff shows the current state of world affairs better than anything I've come across. My nine-year-old was able to grasp the problems that elude much of society because of its straightforward and appeal graphics. I didn't want to watch it at first, but was glad I did. I think it definitely relates to my art and why I'm making it the way I am.

As far as this particular work, there is a lot of texture visible in this photo of it, but in person the center square seems to hover and seems to be able to go in front as well as behind the green. I'm obsessed with green. Plants are supposed to relax people. The expansive green fields and luminous blue skies of Western New York helped to inspire this picture.

Pink Roses VII and VIII

20" x 16"

16" x 20"

oil on panel

The obsession continues...here are two more from memory. Whistler always fascinates me for his sense of scale. Take the way he paints the figure in Nocturne in Gold: Old Battersea Bridge (click here for a close-up). It is not how you think a person might be painted, but in this context it completely works. That is how a lot of abstraction is; it seems wrong at first, but when well done, it can be right on the nose.

I decided to zoom out in number seven. I had tried doing it in number four, but I couldn't let go of the huge blossoms yet. I think I must have painted this little bouquet about fifty times over before arriving at the way it looks now, almost singular like one flower. It looks figurative to me, like a parachuting person. Someone thought it looked like flowers on an altar, with that gray rectangle behind it.

Number eight is very fluid, rhythmically winding the eye through the bouquet, stopping to note the particular change in light/color of each rose. Of course it is its own thing. Might remind you of Cy Twombly, mid-career Guston, or Terry Winters.

What next? Stay tuned...