Painting: January 2011

22" x 26", oil on canvas

I'm thinking of a convict tracking time with hatch marks in relation to my dots. I'm not using them to keep a calendar or with longing for the passing of time. The dots occur in time, however, as actions and records of a moment. Like the prisoner's marks, they result from my existence in time-space.

The convict is uncertain of the future, as am I. I don't think the convict has the same relish for making his mark, the drag of the pencil or chalk on the wall. His marks are numerical symbols. Mine incorporate vision, organization, and sensation. Both are emblematic of will. Both are of personal importance.

My dots are made with the love of painting and the belief that they, and hence painting, matter. I know what the paintings of others mean to me and so I persist, insist that they are relevant. Take a step back and its our collective hope that our lives matter. It's our will that makes it so. No giving up.

Oil Pastels: Studio #1-4

Studio #1 (gray orange tree)

Studio #2 (Window View)

Studio #3 (Gray Purple Tree)

Studio #4 (Blue Tree)

all are 18" x 12", oil pastel on paper

"I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace

and beauty...an America which will reward achievement in the

arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft."

Remarks at Amherst College, 1963 - JFK

Tree and Trees, My House (First Day of Summer)

Tree and Trees, 12" x 9", oil pastel




My House (First Day of Summer), 9" x 12", oil pastel

I recently went to The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City to see the Charles Burchfield exhibition. The Whitney tweets about the show:

Burchfield only did 27 oil paintings but thousands of watercolors. Four of the oils are on view in this exhibition.

In the 1940s Burchfield began taking earlier works & expanding on them. If you get close enough you can see where the pieces of paper join.

Later in life Burchfield suffered many ailments but still got out in nature to paint, sometimes laying on the ground due to a bad back.

Peter Schjeldahl of the @newyorker on Charles Burchfield: http://bit.ly/aGjNW6. Lovely audio slideshow: http://bit.ly/a74zBZ

Whitney Museum
http://bit.ly/PWu4l

The tweets don't mention the scale of the later watercolors, epic at my guess of 4' x 3'. Rather than using a roll of watercolor paper like Arches makes (I'm not sure that was available at the time), the papers he tapes together are smaller than 8" x 10". The color and rhythmic patterns are stunning. The specific places and weather he directly observes spin into fantasy which is the difference compared with his earlier, grayish paintings of American buildings of the time. Permitting himself to let loose, he boldly puts forth an inner vision the general populace may not understand. This is the difficulty of being a visionary, waiting for people to catch up.

The exhibit has old copies of Life and Time magazines opened to feature stories on Burchfield celebrating his depiction of American of American life via common architecture. The paintings capture a gritty feeling of manufacturing at the time, working class environments rather than the monumental achievements of sky scrapers. People saw their lives in these pictures while his assertions of his dreams were less concrete in their minds. Of course, these later watercolors are the best and his place in art history would be be diminished without them. They sometimes focus on a central space like the altar of a cathedral, not unlike the spaces I'm after. Many artists say that art museums are like church to them and even more people say the same of nature. Burchfield's paintings evoke the celebration of the divine on both counts. This interest is an expression vastly differing from the ripples of the industrial revolution. A forward thinker, his work challenges us to stay true to ourselves and to trust our instincts, artists or not.

My pastels open the door to summer day dreaming, allowing you to float away with art as a springboard. Many artists can help get you there.

- Tofu-Powered Art-Chick

Drawings and Economic Events

March 16 2010 ink 6"x6"

Woods Inspired By Jake Berthot 12x9 pencil

Woods Across the Street 18x12 colored pencil

Woods and Window 12x18 charcoal on paper

Sunset 9x12 colored pencil

Sunset Snow 12x9 colored pencil

February Trees 12x9 ink

February 12th 12x9 pencil

This is a techi week for me. I set up accounts on Twitter and YouTube:follow Art Weekly on Twitter: Art_WeeklyNM.

My YouTube channel where I uploaded three videos this week is under tofupoweredartchick.

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Three recent events, not all negative, reflect the effects of the economy on the arts:

Art school friends told me the Nielsen Gallery in Boston is closing. There's a post about it on the blog Gregcookland.com. I left a comment. The gallery represents many painters whom I love including Jake Berthot, who I have written about before. Now open by appointment only, I rue not being able to see exhibitions by their artists. Berthot's Untitled (3475), graphite from 2008 shows a mapping of light and form, vectors visible as thin lines structuring the drawing. It is truly amazing and shows an depth of concentrated looking rarely seen in art. Patches of light coming down through leaves and branches are subtly integrated with the rest of the environment. If the number 3475 is the number of untitled pieces he has made, it is a sign of someone who has put in their time.

Dennis Kois, the new director of the Decordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, has gotten the museum into the black, raising one million dollars. At first the decision to return twenty-five sculptures on loan seemed dismaying. I am reassured to learn it un-clutters the thirty-five acre grounds, making it easier to see the work as well as making room for the acquisition of two new works.

This week the Ford Foundation announced it is donating ONE HUNDRED MILLION dollars to renovate art spaces and fund art projects in culturally diverse spaces (see the article in The Huffington Post. YAY!!! I almost couldn't believe it. It is not unlike Providence, RI's commitment to the arts and belief in art's ability to revitalize communities. Art centers, studios, and events bring new residents and foot traffic with businesses such as restaurants and stores not far behind. Providence is called "The Creative Capital".

I hope you enjoy the drawings this week. Drawing is the beginning of many artistic ideas, immediate and direct visual thinking. It can also be an end in itself. It is still important.

Speaking of important art, blogger Amy Cook sent me this:

“100 Awe-Inspiring Artists You Should Follow On Twitter” http://graphicdesigndegrees.org/100-awe-inspiring-artists-you-should-follow-on-twitter/ .

Winter Landscape #14 The Neighbor's House & #16 My New Neighborhood

both are 12"x12" oil on panel

When I think about these paintings I can make fun of myself, hearing Weird Al Yankovic's latest song, White and Nerdy (the resemblance to certain loved ones is hilarious) or the theme song to the kids movie Over the Hedge, Rockin' the Suburbs by Ben Folds.

I hesitated to post these. I'm living in the suburbs of Rhode Island, back to the suburbs (song) like where I grew up in Massachusetts, no longer the countryside in Western New York State. The subject is pedestrian; the suburbs are planned. I didn't want it to seem like the strange, artificial neighborhood in one of my favorite childhood books, A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle. Everything is the same in that neighborhood and it's really creepy. Magritte's Empire of Lights is eerie with its blue sky and clouds but town in darkness.

I don't want the pictures to look like so many dead paintings done by amateurs. This kind of landscape is done to death like roses and it's hard to escape the cliches. I think I overcame them in my series of roses and I hope I did here. I'm happy with the way the trees came out and there is an overall joyous feel. People may see the familiar subject and feel comforted, something they can relate to, something pleasant. That's fine but it can also annoy me because they may miss the point just as much as they may find an abstraction illegible, undecipherable. Or the joie de vie will come across and the viewer will perceive the whole thing without additional knowledge like how I intuit a lot of classical music without being a musician. Appreciation can be just as deep because the art speaks to humanity not just the trained and educated.

I'm getting acquainted with my new home, orienting myself and using art as one way to do it. Many artists worked to capture the every day: Vuillard, Chardin, Vermeer, the photographer Nan Goldin and photography as a medium in general. The painter and art critic Fairfield Porter painted similar subjects to this and I love is work; it's so fresh. Who is to say that what superficially seems mundane can't be extraordinary? So much occurs within the routine. We study the every day lives of past cultures to find out what made them unique and how they are similar or dissimilar to us. And we always look at their art.

Maybe there are people in these houses who are hooked on the game Farmville on Facebook. There's a good chance because there are over eleven million daily users. This isn't a typo. The draw in pretending to be farmers may relate to the new trend of consciousness about where food comes from and the environmental and fiscal advantages of buying local. Maybe the the bucolic life is fantasy enough for suburbanites and city dwellers. I think the peaceful feeling I'm painting is like that. I don't play Farmville because painting is so fascinating but kudos to you if you do.

Sunrise (Welcome to Rhode Island)

44" x 48" oil on canvas* PRIVATE COLLECTION

A sunrise means a new day, new beginnings, something hopeful. We might know the outline of our day ahead: responsibilities, schedules, challenges that make going back to bed appealing or happy prospects that make us jump into our clothes and out the door. Most of the day is unknown: how things will happen, conversations, details about place, the way time feels.This painting comes from the sunrise seen through my kitchen window as does Sunrise January 2010. My sunrise is about the unknown that is about to unfold, the beginning of the play, and the belief that the play is worth seeing, the day is worth living. It is about possibilities, opportunities in which to act, Carpe Diem, an expression conveying the urgency that life is short. Sunrises are exuberant celebrations of the start of the day, fireworks in the morning rather than the dark. Would you believe I feel this way even though I gave up caffeinated coffee?! The title of my solo show at the Bowery Gallery in NYC in 2008 was Images of Optimism; the theme is consistent in this work, its snappy dots each like notes in a composition, all necessary, none extra. They are insistent. The raw canvas, prepared with PVA, helps convey the transparency of the curtains, simultaneously forming the wall behind their white material and the air outside. These side areas define area of the central dots. The gray trees below don't upstage them and add to the depth, a vanishing point located about two-thirds down on the right.

Lastly, the painting is playful. I'll leave you with an image of one of my favorite toys when I was a kid:

*The white in the bottom corners doesn't have that blueish tint but reflected the light so that I am having trouble getting the digital photo to cooperate.

Summer #2 Birch Trees

36" x 24"

oil on panel

Here we are. Three triangles, do you see them? If you are a regular at Art Weekly, I should have you eagle-eyed by now. Pressed forward, "in your face" the painting shouts "Look!" Scale, texture, and brightness of the trees provide foreground. They are angled like theatre curtains abruptly, energetically pulling back to reveal color center stage, a reoccurring theme in my work. Landscape is seen afresh. I resist the urge to check my e-mail on my iphone while I'm walking past trees. We're all so twitchy now.

The upper corners of the central triangle of dots allow the viewer to drift back in space away. The mainly red-purple-brown dots represent a maple tree. Lemon-lime grass on the lower right is less dense than the maple; the eye has more room there. The birches themselves are tough, dramatic, and feel akin to Marsden Hartley's paint handling to me. the dots have the preciousness of gems, raw amethyst, particularly due to their conduction of colored light. I don't want to own jewelry. Sometimes tempted by the sparkle, I prefer to paint beyond what it has to offer. Paint itself has a history of containing semi-precious stones like lapis lazuli, replaced in the early 19th century by a synthetic ultramarine blue. A great article on the history of pigments is in Wikipedia. Back to the studio I go, no Tiffany's for me.

Summer #1

6" x 12"

oil on panel

Here is a summer one for you now that it is August. The trees are dense with leaves, bits of color and texture begging for dots. I like the undulation of the tree line, difficult to imagine convincingly without direct observation. Greens range from yellows to blues, light to dark, bright to subdued. Sometimes in winter the contrast seems closer and I miss hitting the different keys. The painting I do isn't isolated but comes out of a cultural context.

I've written a bit about the history of landscape painting in America. Painting the landscape was a matter of pride in the eighteen hundreds, a new territory for painters to conquer like the explorers. Europe has old monuments and a long history, but America has its land. It became a matter of pride, the Grand Canyon acts as our Coloseum. I came across an interesting snippet about President Roosevelt. He initiated conservation plans. Aware that resources will run out (even the Ancient Puebloans of Mesa Verde had that problem), he began initiatives resulting in the preservation of approximately 230,000,000 acres of American land in the form of National Parks and Forests and other preservations. He speaks to Congress:

"To the Senate and House of Representatives:

. . .The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life. . ..As a nation we not only enjoy a wonderful measure of present prosperity but if this prosperity is used aright it is an earnest of future success such as no other nation will have. The reward of foresight for this nation is great and easily foretold. But there must be the look ahead, there must be a realization of the fact that to waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed. .."

My little painting is a reminder of the beauty of the natural world and the personal revitalization it offers.

June Watercolors

watercolor on paper

5" x 4" and 4" x 5"

The summer is throwing a curve ball in my blogging so don't think that I don't know it's not June anymore. I like these three. The way an artist thinks about abstraction is evident from picture to picture. Reducing, "less is more", simplicity, it's all there but the basic impetus is to capture as much as possible in the fewest means possible. I guess I use the word "means" because its not as easy as it looks and the artist doesn't really know what to do and has to wing it. They are kind of haiku-ish. I start out with the feeling, "Okay, I want to show you everything" (although probably not as intensely as a photo-realist might). After that it is something like, "now that I've gotten all that off my chest, I can show you what else I see with my special x-ray reduction glasses". My son and I are currently listening to A Cricket in Times Square by George Sheldon, and it is like the symphony compared to a cricket and maybe the cricket is John Cage. He realized the importance of listening in relationship to sound and music. The process is like removing layers to reveal what is underneath. Seeing things anew, artists can take the smudges off your glasses (I won't try to take that analogy to sound and the ear).

I hope you enjoy my light, lyrical chirps.

The White House and House with Black Roof

oil on panel

36" x 24"
PRIVATE COLLECTION

ceramic relief

6" x 4 1/2"

The ceramic relief was done after the painting. Circles are made by pressing the end of a tool into the clay; some look convex but they are all concave. They define planes but also float.

There are trails leading your eye around, dictating a specific speed, tempo, like most painters do. The book Cezanne's Composition maps the directions Cezanne takes the viewer, like arrows painted on the floor for learning dance steps. Cezanne is often somber, intense and a lower key than Van Gogh. The Plain White T's have a song I like similar to this mood, Write You a Song. "I will write you a song; that's how you know our love is still strong." I've said it before - I'm a romantic.

In my mind my painting and relief aren't just depictions of houses but are about making a home with someone. Crosby Stills and Nash's Our House and Billy Joel's You're My Home does it for me as does the new kids movie Up. The part of the story that takes Up beyond the pat endings of many animations is the relationship of the elderly man and his wife. He has a loyalty to his house because of his memories of her together with him in it. He has a very hard time letting go, to say the least. A house is a house. A home is the love inside. Pass the tissues.

For Christoph who wrote "I love Nicole" in sharpie on my arm.

March

36" x 42"

oil on canvas

March is windy! The dots are blowing, springing out into space; invisible vectors seem to pull the eye back in. The center strip of landscape substitutes for a vertical person, the white the outside world. The dots' flow is symbolic of a personal connection with the life. Like an individual, the landscape is rich, layered, complete within itself as it sends out positive energy and receives it in turn. The circle is known to be a symbol of the self. As such, the dots can additionally be seen as a collection of individuals also radiating their uniqueness and place in the universe. [Do I sound New Age-y or what?] It is a picture of harmony but also fluctuation and change. We don't always know which way the wind will blow. Lyrics from one of my favorite songs, U2's Kite, "Who's to say where the wind will take you Who's to say what it is will break you I don't know Where the wind will blow".

A reoccurring theme is still there: a window looking out into the landscape. Pinpoints of the view appear through sheer curtains. As far as curtains go, I thought of those white ones with stitches forming tiny dots.

There is a good article describing the symbolism of the circle by two mathematicians: Reza Sarhangi and Bruce D. Martin.

A landscape I responded to as a kid that I think relates to this painting is the poppy scene in The Wizard of Oz. The plentiful poppies cause the journeying characters to become hallucinogenic. The sudden snow shower pinches them awake and they continue, not knowing if their destination will fulfill their longing. The grass, a neutral light ochre with variation, is newly uncovered from snow. The painting is the moment of awakening. There is more certainty in my painting than the movie scene, but I think the color and movement of the dots dazzle, kaleidoscopic, like the bright red of an expansive poppy field. In high school I painted a copy of Monet's Poppy Field in a Hollow Near Giverny at the request of a friend. I had forgotten until now.

Winter Landscape #8 (Blue Dots)

oil on canvas

52" x 30"
PRIVATE COLLECTION

I often see or think of things that make me smile. The dots will hopefully have that effect on you, especially while looking at the originals, where they might come into view unexpectedly. The dots sometimes seem surprising as you scan the surface. During a grad school crit, Nigel Rolfe remarked of my paintings, “the color wants to reward you.” This quality persists.

A comment (thanks, Rob) about the blurry but beautiful effect of seeing Christmas lights without glasses (for nearsightedness) is not off the mark. Christmas comes at the darkest time of the year and the lights we decorate with are attempts to restore some of the absent daylight. The light and color in my paintings also aim to lift spirits. The combinations of colors often make me smile as do a flock of birds turning in the wind, a patch of sun, pink toenail polish, and a dog whisker found while sweeping. This list is parallel to Rodger and Hammerstein’s My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music. Meant also to cheer one’s self, it funny that some of the lyrics include wild geese, the moon/sun, and kitten whiskers, not unlike my own favorite things. John Coltrane’s version (available to sample in I-Tunes) embodies the philosophy. In that way my paintings celebrate the silver lining.

On a similar note, in a The New York Times article Bruno Shultz, a Polish-Jewish artist killed in the Holocaust is heralded for creating paintings that help one "get through the long winter."

Window (Late Fall)

oil on panel

24" x 18"


I recently commented on Vermeer's View of Delft. Another thing, among many, I like about his paintings are the way he treated windows and light. He painted many domestic interiors including solitary women. The window is secondary to the figure, but it is the source of the beautiful light that tenderly illuminates the woman. Unlike Renoir who portrays women as ornamental (basically the only thing I like of his are the peaches which are as boobilicious as his nudes but not offensive to the feminist), it seems that Vermeer respected women. It is the difference between the derogatory term "soccer mom" and mentioning Michelle Obama's name.

This issue concerns me as a mother who is very domestic, shuffling between the studio and kitchen. I love both and don't like my mother/wife role to be dismissed as lesser than my husband's as breadwinner. In this context my vocation as an artist sometimes is perceived as a hobby, especially if the conversation turns to sales and other marketplace-based evaluation. Luckily it doesn't seem to happen as often as it used. Enough venting, I'll leave the rest to Whitney Chadwick who addresses gender roles and societal views in her book, Women, Art, and Society. To be fair, I've heard a musician say that people equate his profession with unemployment and an actor in New York City with waiting tables.

On the male experience of the home and workplace, I found out about an early telecommuter before the "tele". 2009 is the bicentennial of the birthday of Charles Darwin. A recent BBC program, In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg, focused on Darwin's domesticity. He lived in the country with his wife and children in a home where he based his laboratory and garden used for his experiments. Apparently this quiet setting and family support fostered his studies.

Domesticity is the back story to Window (Late Fall), another view from my bathroom window. The landscape, this rectangle, glows. It is like stained glass when fully illuminated by the brightest day. The landscape is far, based on its scale, but then it overtakes you as it presses forward into your space before receding again. The landscape is burned into my retina, seen in quiet moments between the laundry.

View from the Bathroom Window

12" x 12"

oil on panel

Art and the changes in the economy is addressed in a February 12th article by Holland Cotter in the NY Times, "The Boom is Over. Long Live the Art!" Cotter suggests that art often gets better when artists are left to do it for the sake of doing it, removed from any market driven pressures. He advises artists in this financial climate not to quit their day jobs.

I remember a children's book which exemplifies art's true value in society. Frederick is about a mouse who is a dreamer while all the other mice are working to prepare for winter. In the story (spoiler : ) Fredrick is able to tell stories of all he saw and imagined to the other mice while they were waiting for winter to end. While they were storing up provisions, he was immersing his senses, saving them for this collective sharing. I loved this book as a child and remember the colorful illustrations, often with round elements.

My paintings are bits of color and sensation stored up from the observed. Although I make them year-round, the ones made in winter are very much in keeping with the spirit of the book.

Notes on this painting:

It was done from the memory of looking out my bathroom window. The bright blues at the bottom were the color of the shadow of the house, the pale pinks, blues, and whites were the sparkling snow, and the top is the colors of the bare trees as well as some sky. I hope it buoy's you up while you wait for spring.

The Neighbor's Shed

36" x 24"

oil on panel

Okay, you might notice this is a fall painting when we are in winter. I did an oil pastel of the view out one of my studio windows and this is a painting done from the drawing. I think the dots are kind of perky, not in a bubblegum snapping teenager way, but in a playful way. Rather than crunching leaves, one feels as if it is possible to bounce on the treetops like with moonboots. This playfulness is a quality that keeps the work, harkening back to Pointillism, from being dry and redundant. A fellow student in art school complained on our trips to the museum that it was "like going to a cemetery. It is full of dead art by dead artists." Perhaps some artists might agree, maybe those trying to find the cutting edge. For me the art is timeless while of its time, as full of life as Mozart is today.
The neighbors put up a new shed and it creeped into my work. The Post-Impressionists found Impressionism limiting because the short marks didn't lend themselves to clearly defining form. It was almost a focusing problem. Cezanne delineated form, but I think his bathers walked the line. I didn't want to make the thin trees out of dots and used line with dots weaving in and out of them. I see so many variations in the color of what I am looking at that I am not always content to make one or two stand for all, thus this pixelization. This painting makes me think of Pissarro, especially one at the Guggenheim, The Hermitage at Pontoise, where I studied how he handled paint. His work strikes me as quieter than a lot of the other Impressionists, a little less bang, but the paintings are very thoughtful, carefully and beautifully seen and made. If you check out this painting: Landscape at Chaponval, you can see what I admire about his treatment of houses in a landscape. I like the way they are nestled there, part of the patterning of the picture with the greenery coming in front of, behind, and through. Imagine what would have happened if he had heard rock 'n' roll?!