Maple Tree May

12" x 9" oil on panel

Gray Day

9" x 12" oil on panel

From the Hydrangea

9" x 12", oil on panel

I took a break from the studio to go to the opening reception of "Scale: Experiencing Size, Surface, & Story" at the Attleboro Arts Museum in Massachusetts. The show features the work of three artists, Juan Jose Barboza-Gubo, Jodi Colella, and Richard Kattman.

From the museum's press release:

"Barboza-Gubo (painting and sculpture), Colella (mixed media sculpture) and Kattman (painting) deliver visual expressions that truly absorb the viewer thanks to either their strategically planned size, detailed texture, significant message – or all of the above.

“In some cases the highly appropriate grand scale of this artwork engulfs the viewer – yet, we also have the chance to rise above work that is extremely exaggerated – but doesn’t tower over gallery-goers,” comments Mim Brooks Fawcett, Executive Director of the Attleboro Arts Museum.” “Scale controls our relationship with these authentic expressions and we are compelled to explore,” she added.

Click here for the full article.

Barboza-Gubo's work struck me in a way that doesn't happen very often. His self-portraits with antlers remind me of Joseph Beuys' watercolors also because of the limited color and alchemical properties as the former's are done in blood, gouache, and graphite. In the show is an impressive carved wood sculpture with twisting forms like a Van Gogh cypress tree with a narrative. Large-scale paintings of Barboza-Gubo's are also on view, forms reminding me of the violent chaos of Gericault's Raft of the Medusa. Not in the show is his his Pieta Series 3 that blows me away. It has the mastery of Picasso's fragmented form and the layers of transparency and graphics combined with figuration as in Sigmar Polke. You can imagine that I'm jumping out of my skin even more to learn that he received his MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design (my alma mater) and is a faculty member there.

"Scale: Experiencing Size, Surface, & Story" runs April 15 – May 7, 2011

On the home front, this is what I'm doing:

This painting comes out of the work I'm doing of Hydrangeas including an oil paintings, watercolors, and oil pastels. My oil painting, Blue Hydrangea, is focused on capturing the globes of petals while this new painting allows the globes to diffuse into layered colored points that go back and forth in space. They may be seen as part of the plant or as their own system. Painted in April during a series of cloudy days, I kept the edges of the circles soft. They are thinly glazed in contrast to the heavier applications in other paintings. I think they have a wet, earthy feel to them, the modulated brown ground reflects light like the dark backgrounds in old master paintings. Someone seeing the original asked if I use stencils. They are all freehand. Too much unnatural uniformity makes them too mechanical looking. I also draw the dots when using the iPad and don't use any of the tools that make automatic dots. I think there is an emotional tenderness that comes through in the hand no matter how perfect or imperfect the circles appear to be. Perfection isn't my goal. I'm involved in each moment. A dot is a moment but not an instant. I can't paint them in quick dabs. It's like patiently trying to catch rain drop by drop but not wanting the drops to combine. Maybe it's more like catching snowflakes on a mitten in order to look at each one.

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

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.

Hydrangea Oil Pastels (PRIVATE COLLECTION)

Blue, Pink, & White, 18" x 12", oil pastel on black paper, PRIVATE COLLECTION

I'm working on a pink hydrangea oil painting - slow going.

The Poetry Foundation has a great podcast, Poetry Off the Shelf. I came across the July 9, 2010 installment where poets Edward Hirsch (President of the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation) and Nick Flynn read Israeli and Slovenian poems in translation. One of the poems read by Hirsch was by an Israeli poet about his father. Hirsch commented on the particular tenderness in the poem, so unlike American Modernism. A hallmark of the latter is a coolness and rejection of anything with feeling for fear of sentimentality. This has continued in American Art and I am certain my bubbly and joyful images made out of color would be deemed frivolous and less serious through this lens. Today is my fortieth birthday. At forty, opinions about my art which run contrary to their truth are irrelevant. Just as certain as wrinkles beginning to set, so is my self-confidence. Dot I will.

Maple, Green

Maple, Green; 12" x 6", oil on panel, 2010

My family did the annual watching of It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. I love Schultz's* use of color and his watercolor night sky. His landscapes fascinate me. There is a stage-like, comic strip, panel-to-panel, left to right movement throughout. The cartoon is thoughtful; the pieces of color make us feel, qualities I strive for in painting. The music, story, and visuals make it something to return to. The annual ritual is not unlike the Swedish tradition of watching The Donald Duck Christmas Show. A friend told me the whole country tunes in on Christmas and many people are severely annoyed if phone calls come during the broadcast.

Relationships between actors, the drama, keep us coming back. I'm totally hooked on the show Mad Men. The psychology of the characters is layered and complex. Fashion is stunning as is the color of Joan Holloway's hair (played by Christina Hendricks). Most of all, the animated intro is absolutely brilliant. The black and white ad man/mad man is flat and absent of color as standard newspaper print. He slowly falls through the metropolis, the opposite of superman, past colored moving billboards, the creations of his mind, like Alice down the hole to Wonderland. Distress is communicated in both. There is a 20th century angst as in the American novel The Great Gatsby.

Charlie Brown is known for struggling with identity and his own painful growing pains, striving to fit in with kid society. Every year we watch him gets rocks for Halloween and conned by Lucy in her fall football false promises. Great design holds it all together. My dots serve this purpose. They are the actors taking their place, bouncing your eye around, intermingling while still their own. The painting is the unifier. The rectangle is the parameter, the screen, the viewfinder for studying them and seeing ourselves.

*[Who knew there is a Charles Schultz Museum in Santa Rosa, CA? It's more appealing to me than Disney Land.]

That Maple Again (3rd image private collection)

Maple 18" x 12" charcoal on paper

Late September Maple 12" x 12" oil on panel

That Maple Again 18" x 14" oil on canvas PRIVATE COLLECTION

It's not bad for an artist to be obsessive. I've already painted the maple in my yard a few times and the dots are certainly obsessive. I'm not tired of them yet, although sometimes I need a break. The maple is hard to grasp. It's more complex than one would think for a singular object. There are all those leaves, just beginning to fall, and the light that changes the color with each moment. The back lighting was tough this time around. One of my studio windows faces east, the light coming over the tree line and hitting the maple from behind. It's dark anyway and this type of lighting flattens it. I wanted to get what volume I could and needed to do the charcoal drawing to figure it out. The drawing has a breeze in it while the tree in the paintings is nailed, the color-movement coming from me. The dots aren't mechanical. The process may be controlled, a bit stiff, but the experience of looking at the finished painting is not. I paint them as playful units and the patience involved in their exacting delivery is done with the knowledge that each dot leads to a stronger feeling, an amplification.

I don't subscribe to the old-fashioned idea that the amount of time taken to craft a painting is an indicator of quality, however. Paintings can be overworked as well as conceptually poor. After Duchamp conceived of the ready-made, craft went out the window. Photography parallels the philosophy of the ready-made: the idea that the artist's selection of a form embodies his/her intent. Art critic Clive Bell says as much in his essay Art, in which he argues that form is what distinguishes art.

Although many photographs are manipulated in the dark room and now in Photoshop, there are plenty taken directly in a quick point-and-shoot process. It took time, therefore, for photography to rise to the level of high art in people's minds and "fine art" photography first imitated painting in the movement known as Pictorialism. Alfred Stiegliz, Edward Weston, Berenice Abbott, and Edward Steichen were pioneers and moved beyond Pictorialism to "Straight Photography" i.e. photography behaving as itself, not derivative of another art form.

If you get a chance, visit the International Center of Photography in New York City. They always have incredible exhibits* including the photographs of journalists and political work.

Appreciative of the medium but not a photographer, I'll keep building from the ground up.

*[Currently on view are "Rediscovered Spanish Civil War negatives by Capa, Chim, and Taro, September 24, 2010–January 9, 2011 and Cuba in Revolution September 24, 2010–January 9, 2011]

Blue Hydrangea

Blue Hydrangea, 24" x 24", oil on panel, PRIVATE COLLECTION

Blue Hydrangeas popped up all over my neighborhood this summer, a burst of color along my runs. I have a bush on my doorstep and was disappointed it isn't blue, but then I learned changing fertilizers can determine their color from pink to blue.

"The color of the hydrangea's flower is based on the acidity or pH level of the soil. The plant will maintain a blue flower color if the soil is between 5 to 5.5." It apparently has to do with an amount of aluminum in the soil. I know this thanks to EHow. I'm a terrible gardener.

I had to think of how I would translate them to paint, how much I would embrace or deny the volume of their spherical blossoms. I worked through it as I went along, having a general feeling of what I was after but not knowing what it would look like in the end. I painted in extended and brief sessions, sometimes stealing moments in the evening to throw in a few more dots. The dots are drawn, as it is impossible for me to make a dab of the brush that would make a circle. Impressionists worked with dabs like the painting Port St. Tropez by Paul Signac.

Dabs, circles require diligence, labor is evident. It isn't drudgery, however. Each piece of paint is painted with joy, or at least the belief in joy. There is an insistence fulfilled through the repetition, a sense of certainty. It is an attitude to bring to the start of each day, hoping it will sparkle.

Summer #6 Sunrise & Summer #8 The Yellow House

Summer #6 Sunrise, 20" x 26", oil on canvas, 1998-2010

detail Summer #6 Sunrise

Summer #8 The Yellow House, 17" x 21", oil canvas, 2010

This week's post focuses on landscape painter Rackstraw Downes. He's very different from me but he's good. I became aware of his work in 1992. This month while watching my niece and nephews in Ridgefield, Connecticut, I was able to trade off with my husband to run to the Aldrich Museum of Art, conveniently located in the same town. An intimate exhibit of Downes' paintings, drawings, and sketchbooks in cases awaited. [Two other Rackstraw Downes' exhibits are concurrently on view at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York and at the Betty Cunningham Gallery in Chelsea.]

You must click on these links to see examples of his work to follow along.

The paintings are panoramic views of the underneath of the Westside Highway painted from direct observation in 2008-2009. Downes says he likes to be left alone to paint so if you see him, just keep walking. In a sketchbook, Downes writes that he gets annoyed with the changing weather. Light effects everything, after all. Downes isn't after an amplified, enveloping view like I do. He wants to see everything, to put it all into form. He wants to take it all in, process it, be present in it. In doing this he makes use of perspective: arcs and vectors structure the deep space, constructing the construction of the underpass. The horizon is stretched. I look to the left, straight, and right, seeing the other end in peripheral vision. There is a turn of the head in the gaze; the painting demands a slow scan (and then more of your attention). Bikers are painted as whole people, not shirts and pants painted separately. I couldn't care less about painting cars, but it matters to Downes and he makes me look. They aren't as dreamy as my visions, but they are still a dream as the picture is artifice. An angled stop sign becomes oval, striped like a buoy. Bike wheels function like the circles of barbed wire painted in another area. There is a glimpse of a building between trees, a poetic bit of painting; it's all poetry despite being concrete. In fact, he paints pictures of concrete.

Many painters ascribe to this kind of description, a factual world to ground us. What makes Rackstraw Downes more than amateurs who don't paint as well as they think they do? It has to do with the degree of perception, care, patience, skill in translating sight into paint, experience, and discipline.

I have some thoughts on what he does. Change of color temperature and light gives form and distinction to each piece. Orange, plastic construction fence is woven with the spaces in between its holes. The degree of thickness of paint is important - too thin, it would most likely be too dry, less personal, while too thick it would get clogged, loose a degree of legibility that is so much a part of his clear vision.

Treetops are made of small pieces like Vuillard but not as regular a pattern. They are fuller but sometimes fall flat, seemingly intentional. There is more space, more of a rustle, than in Vuillard. Again, as seen in Vuillard and positively delicious to painters, are shiny horizontal colored stripes with lines oily, like I like. There are also light, thin lines defining sections and what's between, simultaneously views and pieces of paint, many of which could be paintings on their own, if larger. I see the framing of spaces between sections of trees and leaves, made central in my hands, in my paintings.

As for the drawings, they are pinned to the walls, unframed. I've drifted away from frames and this is another professional example. Pieces of paper are taped together to make a longer drawing surface for the panoramas. Squiggly fibers in the paper remind one of the leaves in the paintings.

I couldn't stop looking; the pictures are full. My dots are here to fill you.

Spring Landscapes #19, #20, #21

Spring Landscape #19 Sky 12" x 12", oil on canvas

Spring Landscape #20 Buds 12" x 12", oil on panel

Spring Landscape #21 Green and Pink Trees 12" x 12", oil on panel

On June 1st, 2010, The Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York City, will announce the winners of its competition, Contemplating The Void.

Competition Description:
To celebrate the close of the Guggenheim’s 50th Anniversary year, we invite you to create your own dream intervention of the Guggenheim Museum. Now you can take on the same challenge that 200 artists, designers, and architects took on for the exhibition Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum.

Contestants were asked to:

"• Design your own intervention of the Guggenheim’s iconic rotunda.

• Your submission can be a hand sketch, a computer rendering, a watercolor, a painting, a photo collage—in other words, any 2-D format that helps communicate your ideas. "

These ideas were then uploaded to flickr, where they are still on view.

I saw in person the actual exhibit at the museum which was the spring board for the on-line contest. It was like seeing professionals doing an art school assignment,, creative people stretching their imaginations to solve the same problem uniquely. Some filled the center of the museum with trees, chocolate, a butterfly garden, gay pride stripes, laundry on a clothesline, glitter, and an inverted spiral. It epitomized the brainstorming necessary in any creative endeavor.

My creative endeavors this week include the use of the center spatially, though not in any way involving the Guggenheim or its architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. #19 and #21 are squares with circular compositions. #19 is about the sky filling the void, the space framed by a circlet of trees and leaves. The green dots get smaller towards the center, pulling you up, while the blue central dots are somewhere in between, ambiguously falling or rising. The sky is a solid but thinner. It holds promise.

#21 appears to people differently. My husband thinks it looks like a pink moon through the trees. My son says it is like looking up through a tunnel at the them, "Cool!". I made it by looking through my hand like it was a telescope at the trees across the street, one of which is a pink magnolia. Pink, a type of red, complements the green and is echoed by the red-brown, large dots in the foreground. The dots are like the tiles of a mosaic or the sections of glass in a rose window. The paint is velvety, something the those media are not. It is like a kaleidoscopic mandala, having motion while mandalas are still. Similar to a mandala, however, I think the image invites meditation, daydreaming and glazing over. A friend suggested they look like the images used to check color blindness. They do resemble them in their construction, their elements, but the paintings are obviously much more.

#20 is left out of this conversation. It sits vertically, angular, with dots rebelling, buoyantly asserting their individuality. I like that.

Self-Portrait October 2009

12" x 9"

oil on panel

Hi. It is time for a new self-portrait. I don't have a time-frame in mind for how often to make them, but time is marching on so Carpe Diem.

My face is not fractured as in previous paintings. Fracture/facture. The facture of a self-portrait is often more noticeable in ones that are fractured, when pieces of paint are laid to denote the framework of a head, related to the planes of Cubism. Cezanne, who came before Cubism, studied such planes in space but was also sensitive to color as form rather than decoration, frosting on a cake. [I love making sentences with "Cubism" and "cake frosting" in them.] In Self-Portrait with Rose Background [c. 1875 (140 Kb); Oil on canvas, 66 x 55 cm (26 x 21 5/8")], he defines the facets of his head with pieces of paint and even turns one such stroke into his delicate lower eyelid, the pedestal for his piercing gaze. He is as intense as the red-rose background. It swirls, breaks into his form, defining his ear, the space between his beard and moustache, his lips, and even cuts into his neck threatening decapitation like Nearly Headless Nick from Harry Potter. He plays a similar game with the background and figure interacting in his Self-Portrait 1878-80 [(160 Kb); Oil on canvas, 60.3 x 46.9 cm (23 3/4 x 18 1/2 in); The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.] He is supposed to have been a quiet person and I've noticed his mouth is often obscured in his self-portraits while his eyes are very alert. His voice is his vision. The mouth in this gets lost in his beard of yellow ochre and greens with black marks, exactly like the background. His hairline continues in the sharp line of his collar, accentuating his vertical, solid presence. The word for his stare that keeps coming to me is "shrewd". Even a used car salesman would back down.

Now back to me. I don't want it to be all about me, but it is self-portraits we are talking about and they are reflexive in nature. I'm not looking shrewd. I can't say no to Girl Scouts selling cookies, but I am old enough to see a scam despite the clarity of my face. Landscape colors are the background with dots like my current paintings. They visually interplay with the blue circles of my collar and eye; this is what I see. A patch of purple background is the springboard for the purple turn of the collar; its blue is the mixture of the landscape yellow and green, completing the land with sky, blue hollow circles make for white cloud centers. The curl of my hair and its red highlights (not natural : ) suggest playfulness, very different than Cezanne's brewing. You can check out my blog of archives for my own brewing Self-Portrait With Gloved Hand from 1999. Both Cezanne paintings and the Degas Self-Portrait in the Getty Museum that I haven't forgotten (I saw it more than ten years ago) are in three quarter view, as is mine. Answers.com defines three-quarter view as, "A view of an object which is midway between a front and a side view." We don't disclose all but you get a good look. Speaking of museums, art museum lovers will get a laugh from this article in The Onion. Take time to play.