Watercolors

...better photo

Here's a better version of the painting...

Also a new review of the graphic novel I did with Samuel Delany many years ago:
http://www.comixology.com/articles/324/That-He-Loves-i-Bread-Wine-i-

Ways to Cross the Water: Walk

This is oil on velum--so you get a certain amount of reflection on the curve of the paper--the reddish color in the sky...when the camera looks at things too long they heat up.
I think there will be several more, including Fly and Swim.

Yankee Fans!

Golf Play

Last night I hosted a reading of Golf Play, written by Brian Podnos, from the concept of Frank Millman. I did sketches of the actors:

more watercolors

Doodle Beach:




Dark Sea:

Falling into color, falling into sky

Upstate New York walking through the woods, the sky greyed with rain and the leaves pumped up in luminous contrast, the cricky-crack curve of naked limbs in black and the chocolate vines everywhere:




...and the sudden view of the Hudson down the long lawn, the streak of yellow leaves like a stroke of sunlight in the shadowless land of overcast October:





And from another day the feathered cloud portrait of Pegasus:

Yellow Dream & Austerlitz

Finished my huge watercolor and finished W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz. The first is my own dream and I can go with the strange of it. The second began as a dreamy, detached, melancholic memory excavation, and then someone slips a knife through the heart of the man and out spills the stars, his unfound life's blood, and the backswept ghosts of the dissapeared. It is profoundly sad & beautiful in a very sudden & silent way.

from the dream vault

Here's what I've been working on while it rains and freezes outside.
...from a dream quite a while back, the image never left...

Books to brain, kiss of rain

As the bitter rain pours all over the east coast I'm reading:
Merlin by Robert Nye
Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
The Man Who Heard Voices Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale
by Michael Bamberger
...thus the world melts down in cold wet stripes, and an interior world is embellished with a heart-on-the-sleeve, crazy movie guy, a pornographic devil making his anti-Christ via ghostly permutations with graphic assistance from Beelzebub and uncle Astarot, and a dreamy, but visceral architectural delving into memory and personality.

Sunday Slurs

Inside the watercolor & ink saturate the paper. I love paper. It seems so slight and yet it supports huge or small imagery.
Above my Arabian is the Sphinx sliding through the golden waters:




...and outside the rain comes down as steam ascends, making a weather & season peculiar to NYC:

Wolff draws Gato Loco

photo: Jan Meissner

Gato Loco!

An old fashioned loft party upstairs last night....the big band version of Gato Loco with deliriously, wonderful, sculptured music...musicians leaping on furniture and flinging music pages into the air as the beats come in, perfectly timed :

Saxophone:
French horn (I think):




Slide trombone:

Guitar:

Trumpet:


Trumpet:


Trumpet hands:

Trombone:

Tuba & trombone:


Sax:


Tuba:

Tuba, trumpet, & trombone:

Bass guitar & trumpet:

Conga hands:

Trumpet hands:

Other trumpet hands:

Sax:

Trombone plays, trumpet waits:
Trombone & trumpet with mute:
Trombone hands:




Trombone solo:


Guitar solo:



Trombone:

Sax:

Drummer's hands:



Bass guitar:

Tuba:

Done!

Sphinxland, still working

My friend, Robert Morales, came over the over day and looked at the painting. His comment was: "She's working." When I queried him he explained that the Sphinx looked very intent on whatever business she needed to take care of. A take that is quite Moralesistic. But I relish these articulations from the brains of others. Rarely do people tell me what my paintings do in their minds. What thoughts, feelings or musings. I don't know if it is a problem with words or a problem with comfort while the painter is standing next to you.
So here she is at work even as I am still at work on her:

Sphinxland in progress

The brush slides over the blackboard's surface like molten glass...thus the painting begins and we go off into the world of another mind with wings, fur, paws and a female brain with questions...

Last Above the Belt Show of 2009

Last night was the last Above the Belt show for 2009. It was spare in setting but extravagant in ability. As a former aerialist I prefer to focus on the pure physical art and this show was all that:
all photos by Jan Meissner


Britt Nhi Sarah



Rebecca Stronger & Rachel Ward



Kris Olness




Joshua Dean & Ben Franklin





Una Mimnagh

sketch

So the weather veers off kilter from summer, the summer of rains and unscorched lawns, and I reach for the nearest surface to paint on. I find another piece of black boarded aluminum, and lifting a piece of chalk from its pink, rhinestoned box I draw a scribbly blueprint.
There is always hope in the sketch that starts a new painting, like the opening credits and the music that seeps through the letters and levers open the brain's logic door. Out drifts sense and lets in sensibility.
Maybe I need coffee...

Lights in the Sky

I'm not big on memorials--I find that the memories come in their own idiosyncratic, organic way, and I'm OK with just that. But the 9/11 lights are beautiful, and the other night I was out on the fire escape, having completely forgotten the dates, and I looked up and saw the light hitting the clouds. At first I thought it was some fantastical moon event, but on following the beams down I realized what it was. Its one of the best public art pieces I've seen, standing simultaneously outside its own descriptive purpose, and deeply within it.

Phosphor