Watercolor Book p.2

watercolor, 8" x 5"

August Landscape

watercolor, 6" x 4"

Aerial

8" x 10", oil on panel

Maple Tree May

12" x 9" oil on panel

White House Blue Trees

18" x 21", oil on canvas

Woods and Grass

8" x 8" oil on canvas

Green

9" x 12" oil on panel

Forest

12" x  9", oil on canvas

Like Niagara Falls (last post with text)

8" x 10", oil on panel

Peter Schjeldal, art critic for the New Yorker, said in a lecture to students that artists do not need to write artist's statements. Art business often requires it but his opinion is that they do not always have anything to do with the work. I remember being discouraged from attaching words to my paintings in graduate school because words are so limiting.* I love talking about art but I love making it and looking at it more, much more. I've had the experience of reading something and having the text expand my understanding of a particular artwork or artist. In Art Weekly I have tried to offer that kind of insight into my work and the work of other painters. The writing is, at times, too elementary for those who in the field yet can be still to esoteric for the lay person.

The iPad Project is very freeing in that I post it, sharing it with others, and everything I want to express is in the picture. I'm not obligated to verbally expand or qualify. I'm done. It's been fifteen years since I graduated Penn with my MFA and I've painted through a lot of territory. I haven't scratched the surface of ideas I want to dig up and haven't reached the bottom of the well of ideas I have already unearthed. I know where my strengths are. I suck in math and I have a huge imagination. I am committed to being stylistically flexible when the art world wants to label, define, and categorize for collection. I'm forty. It's said that after forty people are more confident about their identity and just don't give a shit anymore. I've had a good time with the blog. It's very important to me. I see it as an artwork on its own. There's plenty to go back and read if someone is looking for explanation. If I really feel the need to write about something, I can, but I'm shaking off the need to plead with people to look. Now it's going to be purely visual. We'll see what happens.

Here's my new motto:

"I'm this and I'm also that."

*Ineffability is concerned with ideas that cannot or should not be expressed in spoken words (or language in general), often being in the form of a taboo or incomprehensible term. This property is commonly associated with philosophy, aspects of existence, and similar concepts that are inherently "too great", complex, or abstract to be adequately communicated. In addition, illogical statements, principles, reasons, and arguments are intrinsically ineffable along withimpossibilities, contradictions, and paradoxes. Terminology describing the nature of experience cannot be properly conveyed in dualistic symbolic language; it is believed that this knowledge is only held by the individual from which it originates. Profanity and vulgarisms can easily and clearly be stated, but by those who consider they should not be said, they are considered ineffable. Thus, one method of describing something that is ineffable is by using apophasis, i.e. describing what it is not, rather than what it is. - Wikipedia

Hills

9" x 12", oil on panel

Painter George Tooker died on March 27th this year at the age of ninety. Tooker is famous for his work which expresses modern anxiety and the human condition. He said he never wanted to be part of the New York art scene or be a household name like Jackson Pollock. [See the NPR story reporting his death and including five images of his paintings.] He was grateful that people bought his work so that he could live a quiet life with his dogs. His work was considered out of fashion, along with most figurative art, at the time when Abstract Expressionism ruled. Now his name is established.

I appreciate Tooker's attitude and feel the same. Being able to make the work is most important. Sales and notoriety are only important to me in that they lead to people appreciating and taking care of the work. Becoming established in that way also makes the work visible, placing it in relation to other art, thus reciprocally enriching the meaning and understanding.

I like the quiet life (and dogs). Hills has a meditative quality. The sense of peace invites the viewer in but is also slightly distant. The black bands try to hold onto it while serving as reminders that the scene can't be touched. There is a polarity of longing and contentment, also part of the human condition, a dichotomy perhaps Tooker would appreciate.

Twilight, White Light, Silver Woods

all 8" x 10" oil on panel

I just came across this Van Gogh, Painter on His Way to Work. I've never seen it before. There are so many paintings I haven't seen in person or in books that are viewable on-line. My professors in graduate school said there were only black and white photographs of paintings when they were students. It's so different now.

Of course I love the bracketing with the two trees in this one. They are like figures, the actual figure bisecting them. The lyricism is embedded in the color, space, and shape play. The vanishing point in the upper left marked by the point of the green field/triangle. The arch leading to its apex makes a shape echoed in the walking stick and the artist's leg and shadow, suggesting a gait or bounce in the step created by this visual rhythm.

The color in my new landscape paintings is subdued with Silver Woods crossing the divide into drawing. Twilight has a complementary blue/orange thing going on which contributes to the sense of tension between the trees. The curved black shape at the bottom seems to suggest looking out a car window. The neutral plane on the right edge has strokes connecting the black with the trees. The central light blue light is the calm amongst it all.

There is a fluidity in all of them that I like and a space I don't usually paint. I'm typically drawn to very open spaces but here the focus is finding open spaces within the woods. Leaves rustle, wind blows, shadows move. The planes of trees, space, and ground interact. The green leaves in White Light appear to extend toward the viewer, a tricky thing. I would like to do it again, to puzzle it out, to feel it again and reinvent it. I'll see what I can do.

Night

12" x 9"oil on panel 2010-2011

I wasn't fully satisfied with this painting, Yellow Sun that I did in early 2010:

So now it's Night. It was fine before but the sky seemed too thin and something was not quite there. I decided to dig back into it. I think it's a better painting but I can see the appeal of bright daylight on snow. In both, the yellow (sun or moon) is glowing, compelling. It's optimistic and its height reminds me of the lyric "Hang a shining star upon the highest bough" from Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas by singer-songwriter Hugh Martin Jr.. He changed the lyric at the request of Frank Sinatra who wanted to include a happier version of the song on his album, A Jolly Christmas. It was originally "From now on we'll have to muddle through somehow".

Martin died in March at the age of 96. In response, Fresh Air re-released Terry Gross' interview with him from 2006. Remarkably, he reminded Gross of a previous interview from 1989 when she asked him to sing a few verses of one of his songs. He told her her kind words encouraged him to sing again in the years since. Kindness goes a long way. I'm wondering if positive affirmation can be squeezed into a painting, maybe into a yellow disc.

Purple Mountain

9" x 12", oil on panel PRIVATE COLLECTION

Artists come from fields other than fine arts. Chicago chef Grant Achatz is one of them. Dedicated to his work, he exemplifies inventiveness in the food he creates at his restaurant, Alinea. He is known for creating special machines and techniques for synthesizing foods and scents never before paired. He received the James Beard foundation award for outstanding chef in 2008.

Achatz has a new book out co-written with Nick Kokonas:

Life, on the Line: A Chef's Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat (Gotham Books, $27.50). In this autobiography he tells his story of being diagnosed with tongue cancer and risking his life in refusing the recommended treatment of removing his tongue. He lost his sense of taste for a period of a year, continuing to work at his restaurant with nausea. He raises the bar for all of us, artists or not.

Purple Mountain's idea is the heroic self. The mountain is a stand in for a strong person; full, solid, richly painted in large, layered strokes. In painting it I think of the slow process of making oneself from the inside out. It can take a long time.

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.

Over the House and Home Together

both 12" x 9" oil on panel

Over the House is inspired by the current housing crisis in the U.S. A stormy tree hangs over a diminished house like a black cloud, compressing it as do the flanking trees. A blue sky and reflecting sunlight provide sanctity.

Home Together depicts two houses side-by-side, quietly radiating their own colors, touching like people cuddling on a couch. It is about sharing a journey (a road), a relationship, a home together while retaining individuality.

Rembrandt had his own financial crisis. He is made more real to us when we learn he had creditors after him* and he subsequently tried to sign as much of his wealth as possible over to his son, Titus, before it was seized. Rembrandt's experiences correlate with today's short sales and foreclosures. All his property was sold and his house went on the auction block. A shoemaker and a silk seller bought it, dividing it in half by knocking down the gallery Rembrandt built. This happened in 1658, the same year he painted his weighty and so human self-portrait in the Frick Collection.* Go see it and the exhibition “Rembrandt and His School: Masterworks from the Frick and Lugt Collections” , on view through May 15, 1 East 70th Street, Manhattan, (212) 288-0700, frick.org.

*Holland Cotter NY Times , 2009 Rembrandt article.

**Information gathered from Rembrandt's Eyes, by Simon Schama.

Sky Scape

9" x 12", oil on panel

I recently read the F. Scott Fitzgerald book, Tender is the Night. He writes, "You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it." A lot of people base their self-image on being noticed and admired by others. To some degree we all need to feel appreciated. I like this quote because it so astutely puts this mirroring into words. Looking at landscape, at light, at paintings is different. Sky Scape looks a bit like the open skies of the Midwest but also like land after the snow melts heading towards the mud in April. Luminous and peaceful, it is grounded by the purple/brown/black bottom. When I look, I start with where I'm at, myself, look out, take in, and feel lighter. It's a re-energizing process - touching 'life in order to spring from it.' It is a way to feel centered, the opposite of chasing other people's ideas of perfection.

Peggy Orenstein in her new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, says that culturally it isn't enough for a woman to be smart or a good person. We're supposed to be "hot" too. It's exhausting. I think I'm ready for more wrinkles, for when time takes it out of my hands. Until then I'll try to keep perspective and focus on my own gaze.

iPad Advent Calendar!

Pale Green 1

Check in daily to Art Weekly for an iPad Advent Calendar! Each post will feature one or more of my artworks done on the iPad using the apps Brushes, Sketchbook Pro, Inspire Pro, Art Studio, or Type Drawing.

iPad Advent Calendar!

Purple Bands

Check in daily to Art Weekly for an iPad Advent Calendar! Each post will feature one or more of my artworks done on the iPad using the apps Brushes, Sketchbook Pro, Inspire Pro, Art Studio, or Type Drawing.

iPad Advent Calendar!

Tree Trunks

Check in daily to Art Weekly for an iPad Advent Calendar! Each post will feature one or more of my artworks done on the iPad using the apps Brushes, Sketchbook Pro, Inspire Pro, Art Studio, or Type Drawing.

ipad Advent Calendar!

Maple Top

Check in daily to Art Weekly for an iPad Advent Calendar! Each post will feature one or more of my artworks done on the iPad using the apps Brushes, Sketchbook Pro, Inspire Pro, Art Studio, or Type Drawing.