White Window

8" x 9"

watercolor

regarding art:

"...transmission of one soul's innermost essence to another. Art is meant to be an unconstrained expression of the inexpressible. It's our way of telling each other things we feel but are unable to put into words. It is ultimately the only real way of sharing who we really are with the rest of the world."

- Dilbert

created by Scott Adams

Blue House

8" x 9"

watercolor

I am always taken by this cornfield and house when I go by it; it's down the street from me. I like the contrast of the texture, repetition, and color of the corn field, corn long harvested, with the blue triangle coming out of it. Both agriculture and architecture come from the human imagination, creativity born of necessity. Evidence of creativity in human history can be seen by the recent discovery of a Pre-historic bird-bone flute in Germany dating from 35,000 B.C., making it the oldest musical instrument ever found.

It seems that more students are faced with majoring in something "practical" due to the economy. It isn't an unreasonable and is most often a necessary consideration. It is difficult to ascertain if the value of art or artistic practice is now by the wayside. The internet, YouTube, and ITunes bring many artists, mainly musicians, to the forefront of our culture. Painting is more iffy, I think. This quote by John Adams condensed on a poster at Massachusetts College of Art when I was a student is relevant today:

"The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other

sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation

ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts.

I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study

mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and

philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture,

navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children

a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary,

tapestry and porcelain."

Adams basically says that once "practical" subjects are studied by our forefathers society will be stabilized enough for their descendants to be able to study art. War for the United States sometimes seems endless, and it is a sad state of affairs that this patriot's dreams for the country are out of reach for so many. America is trying to protect freedom for ourselves and others; that is the intent which may not necessarily work out in the doing. Freedom and financial security are necessary for a people's well-being, but contrary to this we can also find many examples of art made during difficult economic and political times.

I, for one, continue to partake in the luxury of art-making. It is not just a luxury, however, but imperative to the meaning in life. The bird-flute maker took time away from hunting and berry collecting to focus on carving an instrument that is art and makes art. It could not have been easy to live in his/her time. We should aspire to emulate what this evolved human valued in the face of survival.

Yellow Arch

8"x 9"

watercolor

This painting is about bright fall days, crisp blue skies, and growing things. The dots are appropriate in the sense of jubilation they convey. The focal point is the white area under the center of the trees where the green converges and the blue slips down. Different elements come together harmoniously. It is not a painting about problems - world problems, personal problems, worries. It is a release from worries.

"WHAT I dream is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art that might be for every mental worker like an appeasing influence; something like a good armchair . . ." - Henri Matisse

If anyone checks out my blog of archives, Before Art Weekly, they will see that aligning with Matisse's philosophy isn't always my goal. I've painted my night terrors. My more recent work, including this painting, is not about the upset. I think it is important to be restored. I'm not out to be your hot tub are equivalent, but to represent the beauty I experience in hope that you see it too. I'm imagining it but I'm not imagining it. Dreams are like that.

Western NY Landscape #1, #2, #3 Ceramic Relief

Western NY Landscape 1_Ceramic Relief_3 1/2 x 5 1/2_2009

Western NY Landscape 2 Ceramic Relief 3 1/2x5 1/2_2009

Western NY Landscape 3 Ceramic Relief 3 1/2x6_2009

I'm really loving making these ceramic reliefs. The layers provide a new way for handling space that is literal as well as perceptual. The clay is physically in different points in space and the glazing and overall reading of the image work like painting. I think I'm hooked. I like the shape and edges of the clay slabs, my "canvas", to be irregular. They feel natural like a stone worn by water. I don't want a machine edge because landscape imagery is about the earth.

Ana Medieta (1948-1985) is an artist whom I greatly admire. She worked with nature in a more physical way than I. Exiled from Cuba living in America from the age of thirteen onward, she felt the loss of her homeland and had a keen sense of identity and personal connection with land. This as well as gender became the content of her art, performances and photographs in which she interacted with nature by making body prints, for example, often nude. For any of you readers who think this is silly and anyone can do it, you are missing the point. She created poignant metaphors by doing things that were physical, real, and dreamlike enough to dramatically convey her feelings. The art goes beyond a narrative to convey experiences that are powerfully wordless.

I'm involved with nature and the nonverbal and I look at her work and think that maybe I should make something like that because I intensely identify with it. The thing is that I love to paint/make things that I see around me. It doesn't matter how abstract they end up being, the impulse starts with something I see. I notice light, color, space, scale throughout the day but certain situations strike me and become the impetus for work. I might use a particular situation and go directly from that but also it is the accumulated perceptions in my visual memory that are called upon AS I work. Combine these visual memories with what is happening on the canvas/slab of clay/whatever medium, and art happens. It is kind of like cooking a favorite recipe you know by heart. The particular freshness of the ingredients on hand, the cooking utensils, and sometimes humidity like with bread, can effect the outcome. You remember the seasonings and look to create the same smell, taste, and texture you remember. There is a lot going on. This isn't Hamburger Helper I'm talking about. Then there sometimes is the frustration that the thing you are making doesn't resemble what you remember. Take the Twinkie. Stay with me here; I'm not digressing. I recently had a Twinkie for the first time since I was a kid, i.e. a LONG time ago. It was not the fluffy, fresh, amazing cream filled cake I remember. It tasted like it was from a factory, a plastic packing-peanut excuse for cake. That is like what happens on canvas when the art magic isn't happening. I can only hope I am getting a little magic into these baked paintings. I love Ana Mendieta but I also love my EASY-BAKE-Oven, my kiln. May chocolate seven-layer cakes, not Twinkies come out.

Fall #8 Clouds in the Middle

10x8

oil on canvas, PRIVATE COLLECTION

The photographer Alfred Stieglitz (husband of Georgia O'Keefe) is famous for promoting American Abstraction in his galleries 291 and An American Place and for his photographs of clouds, which he named Equivalents. Music: A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs (also called Clouds in Ten Movements) walks the line of representation and abstraction. Photography, often used to document, was not yet used to explore abstraction in the same way the American painters did. Clouds were a subject both tangible for the camera and amorphous.

Painters don't just look at the total image of a painting but look at paint passages. In Stieglitz's photographs this meant the textures of the clouds and sky and the actual physical substance of print and paper, its particular qualities. Passages are like phrases in music or a line or two of a poem, non-verbal and fully of the particular language of the medium. They convey a lot of information about the approach and attitude of the artist in the work. To the painter-viewer, sometimes thrilling, juicier paint feels like candy, visual caffeine. Paint surfaces are only truly observable in seeing in real life, "in the flesh". Painters actually call the surface of a painting its "skin". It is sensual and holds the content of the work. Paintings that miss the mark for me are disappointingly dry, dead, lacking in sensitivity. It is easy to do this in political work in which the message sometimes overtakes the paint handling. The message is loud and is focused on something else. The art image may still be great but it is not of the kind of painting that makes me tick. An example is Barbara Kruger's work, which would be ineffective in the medium of paint. Diego Rivera painted enormous politically fueled murals but he had a painter's heart and managed to do both. Andy Warhol's genius is in his societal commentary/observation, graphic sensibility and snap. I love his work but if the museum was burning I'd probably run away with this Bonnard (Nude in the Bath and Small Dog). It's like saving family over a book you respect and with Warhol, production is such a theme that there are so many similar pieces in other places.

Fall #8 Clouds in the Middle is a relative of Stieglitz and Bonnard but is my own. Love that paint.

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.

Spring 1 and Spring 3 (Favorite Green Space)

oil on panel
12" x 12"



Spring 2 is coming (spring itself is already here)! These two worked best together for a post.

The sky in the painting is more subtle and has lighter areas than in this reproduction. The sky and grass are very high-key in this as in the original, while the woods are in that neutral-budding-just-before-leaves state. Marks are loose and help show the space and growth patterns of the woods. The top green and bottom blue, both very saturated, are visual bookends. The curve of the lower green band is lyrical and comforting, like gentle waves or lying on your sofa. It's a funny painting because it has serenity as well as the snap of a ping-pong ball, blue on one side, green on the other. Spring is like that, lovely yet energetic. The sky and grass were both really that bright, done from sight from my studio window. Without the treatment of the center, they look like David Hockney's palette, hyperactive, not quite naturalistic.

Spring 3 (Favorite Green Space) is a block away from my house. I'm in farmland with corn, sheep, horses, cows, and unfortunately veal calves tied to their little shelters their whole lives, all on the same road. The green hill takes up three-fourths or so of the rectangle and obscures the bottoms of the trees. I look forward to the moment it comes into sight when I'm driving back home; in the bright sun it gives me a rush (some people get that when looking at Matthew McConaughey, not that I don't...). In those last two sentences you get the formal elements of design backing my work, visual perception, emotional resonance, and let's not forget sensuality (paint is very sensual, as nerdy as that may sound). There is my recipe. It's the winging it kind.