My Hand and My Grandmother's Crocheting, photographs

Every once in a while I do a little photography. I intend to use these shots of my grandmother's crocheting in my iPad work, which I still am going to do, but they turned out to be photos on their own. I like the texture, light, pattern and the meaning of the handmade, connotations of warmth both personal and from the shawl. The sparkling threads of silver in the white yarn and the flowers remind me of snow and snowflakes. The top photo has my hand resting on the crocheting by my kitchen sink, light coming from the unseen window above. A hint of my grandmother's cranberry glass is in the upper left. Her name was Lillian Romano, which I add rather than letting her go unnamed as so many women who leave their crocheting behind do. I think I'm thinking of her because her birthday is April ninth. She took care of me until she died when I was six. I think those six years I spent largely in the kitchen with her made some kind of impact. I watched Days of our Lives and The Price is Right with her and she taught me to make meatballs, sometimes for Italian wedding soup. I love the sounds of cooking, water running, dishes, and people (dogs too!) in the kitchen. It's peaceful, home. The kitchen is supposed to not matter much anymore. It's a place women fought to get free from. It's a workplace where money doesn't get made. We are busy and so many families struggle to find time to eat together so it can be a place to walk through, grab something from. Still, it is where people gravitate towards at a party. I think it's where the heart is.

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.

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."

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.