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.

40th Birthday Self-Portrait 2-13-11

12" x 9", oil on panel

I'm not minding turning forty but it does feel different. At mid-life there comes a deeper looking at where one has been and where one would like to go. I'm feeling positively - that I've done alright and it will be alright. Appearing both strong and vulnerable, the gaze is penetrating as an artist's eye sees differently. Dots float in the background, incorporated into the figure in the eyes and round piece of white on the tip of the nose. The purple strap of my painting apron is painted asymmetrically, visually picked up by the delineation of the neck. I think I seem relaxed yet organized, structured. I've been wearing my hair in a way that is less controlled than when it was straight, going with the naturally wavy. It's looseness contrasts with the angularity in the picture. The oval cut black shirt mirrors the shape of the hair. Light comes from the right (I'm afraid this jpeg might appear overexposed but haven't been able to correct it). I might like to do this for every birthday. Paintings are made in time but this seems to accentuate the fact. It was very hard to paint, not because representation is difficult but because one has to wrestle with one's image until it feels right. The artist has to literally face herself, come to terms. There is nothing to do but move forwards.

Self-Portrait With Camera #2 & #4

digital photographs

The lower self-portrait, #4, seems a little sci-fi with the metallic eye. It is representative of the artist's vision, a special lens through which to see the world. The flash of light is like the bright idea light bulb. Hands have figured prominently in past paintings and I like the way my hand holds the camera at the top; it seems more pressed to the foreground, the hand that is the physical maker, laborer, tool for the eye. The limited palette works well, turquoise background playing off the shiny camera.

The top one, #2, is direct. Intense. Looking straight at the viewer I am confident with my identity as artist; my sense of self deepened with age. I like the light most of all and didn't want to let it go by without snagging it. The magenta and turquoise reflections float on the surface like paint, pieces of colored light. They help define the composition along with the hand, round circle of the camera lens, and the angles of the neck. I'm not quite sure where the photographs are going and if the landscape ones I take as notations for paintings are art. I enjoy making them and that is usually a good sign. It's all about searching, anyway.

Fall #9 Gray Sky

8x8

oil on canvas

In this painting I wanted to convey the dense fall treetops outside my studio window,

the muted, bluish trees on the horizon, and the particular gray of the sky that day. It

was a purplish haze, complementing the warm, mainly yellow middle ground. It is a quiet

little thing with bounce. Seurat worked with Pointillism in a very different way. First, he

didn't really paint complete circles but rather used short brush strokes. Secondly, he was

very aware of the edges between things. He defines form while also diffusing it, which

I do, but he has a much harder edge. The daylight paintings like A Sunday on the

Grande Jatte retain a softness because of the light quality and a rather tender manner

of applying the paint. His night paintings like The Side Show or the painting The Circus

tend to have harsh light and the paint application is different, more graphic, I think. My

work usually isn't so hard-edged, more concerned with paint handling than tight form.

Tenderness really comes through in his drawings, a quality perceived by art critic

Michael Kimmelman. At a lecture at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, I asked

him what art moves him the most and he said Seurat's drawings, the "why" we didn't get to.

The drawings have the feeling of a photograph, not at all in the amount of detailed

description but in the feeling of a moment in time, a concept true to the origins of

Impressionism. Their tonality and softness captures this to more of a degree than his work

in color. I think my September self-portrait depicting myself as shadow is similar in intent.

It is not always easy to discern the subtler qualities between oneself and others, not just in

art, but it is important in defining oneself. "She paints with dots" is about as informative

about what I do as "she is a basketball player" is to conveying who a person is. Trying to

convey what I do in words is so difficult that it takes weeks of circling around it

in this blog to come close. Sometimes I think I should just post the pictures.

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.

Self-Portrait 9 2009 #1

photograph

Of great interest to me are passing bits of strong light that make geometric shapes, particularly on walls. The shape of the light here in addition to the inclusion of the door connects to a previous painting, Another Door Opens. Both images are angular and luminous in the center with dark edges. I step into the picture in the photograph like the green in the painting. I typically don't set out with a camera as I think more about painting and drawing, but sometimes an ephemeral image stares me in the face that wouldn't be the same in any other medium but photography. I see myself ghostlike, a flash of life within the long continuum of time. Occasionally I need to "dust the relatives", what I call it when I take the old pictures of my family and my husband's down for a quick brush off. They are compelling; some are people I've never met. In making pictures I think about what I am doing in the flash within the space of the doorway, my frame in the time-line that someone might dust off to consider.

36" x 24", oil on panel, 2008