Again: Garden of Light

I think its finished. There were a lot of details that wanted soothing, color-lifting, and delineation. Probably will be clearer if you click to enlarge...

Charlotte's black board drawing

Garden of Light

RAIN

The other night I went to see Twelfth Night in the park. At the end of the (wonderful, very funny) play, the rain came down, glittering in the lights against the dark circle of over head trees as the cast sang a song with a rainy refrain.
This weekend I visited my garden. The bounty is thus:

why I live in NYC

Tonight I go to the Metropolitan Museum with a friend. We see Francis Bacon, we see Michelangelo's first painting, and we see Vermeer and Rembrandt. Then we go to the American Wing and look at old American rooms with old furniture. After that we sit in the cafe and drink wine, nibble on various museum food and watch the light descend through the multi-paned, glass, canted ceiling; various sculptures posed below. We go out into the still-light evening and take a bus across town and I take the subway downtown. In between all of this we talk and talk.
Could I kiss the sidewalk and tell the city how much I love it?
Meanwhile over Central Park--the light dazzles the edges of darkening trees as the streelights come on--I know this because I've walked through as it happens--not tonight, but still I'm aware of it even as I rush underground sitting close to strangers, but not quite (strangers-they live here, too).

when your garden times itself to your eyes

I thought I would miss the irises and the wisteria, the indigo's quick, deep & statuesque bloom, and the orange-fire burn of the poppies. But all of these and more waited for me to come back and pour my eyes all over them. The foaming, ferning green, the white water of huge goats beard, and the endless blue-violet of irises, both ordinary and butterfly....an exuberant, lovely, over the top and over my head frenzy...

I've been reading Ballard

Pink and Blackboard

Decadent Dalliance

Pancakes & the last two Dr Who episodes (before noon)
Wine and Yojimbo
Working half the day on the newest project that involves pink, gold, pearlescant paint & a blackboard surfaced table
Deciding and succeeding in not worrying about the economy's tidal influx into one's own little sand castle (even small time islands count here)
Reading China Mieville's The City and the City in between, and instead of everything else, right to the finish
Inventing sentences in Chinese as I walk the streets

Shadows in Green & feet in the breeze

lichen, jack & green

A weekend of lichen, green, and glooming skies suffused with illuminated foliage...
At night the rain poured down in its invisible watery hiss & flow.
We took the lichen chair into the studio where it might dry its damp green display and become a dark, Rembrandtian creature of structure.




...and outside the garden flourished in a quite refusal to borders or linear acknowledgment

The ferns, only half grown, are already fountains...


and the bluebells are little sky bits


just nodding half smiles to jack, hidden beneath the front door yew:

Orange Tulips

For Mother's Day my son brought me these petaled orbs of lipsticked orange. They alight delicious in the green vase next to the mug with flakes of gold glitter floating in its transparent body. I am one of those people whose brain never stops doing the dance of aesthetic possibility and projection. If I get lucky I am stopped by something that trumps my own internal circus.
It could be art, a bird (the grackles are so beautiful this spring!), a human, a fountain of emotion or just the dead stop of hallelujah.

Spring Garden and other adventures

The lilacs leave their beautiful scent in a stream of wind between the front of the studio and the side, where the white bleeding hearts dangle their pale charms. The ferns unscroll their fronds, the daffodils tell their last tale, and the dandelions dance with the violets in the scruffy grass.

Meanwhile in the bowels of the house a small skirmish occurs between two humans, a dehumidifier and its pump. The dehumidifier attempts suicide by plunging off its (admittedly very low) precipice, its hose mournfully detached from its pump companion. The humans try resuscitation and end up buying a new version at the local True Value. As a last ditch effort it is re-plugged in and finally gasps and breathes. The pump then has surgery to no avail, is shaken, peered at and then plugged in somewhere else where it spits water all over the kitchen floor. The two machines are reunited in their crawl space and left to do whatever they will. Meanwhile the brand new dehumidifier is carried out to the studio and left wheezing away in the sink.

Star Guitar

photos: Jan Meissner






photos: Mel Rabinowitz:

Open Studio

I moved all the paintings around so that the newer ones (mixed a bit with ones from other years) would be in the studio area and able to talk to each other.
This weekend I open the doors and people wander through. The star guitar will be here, all shiny, strung and electrified.
Its all the antithesis of museum cool--an architecture of images, bricks, green floor and attendant artist in her Mexican sun chair & man with painted cosmic guitar.

J G

J G Ballard died this past weekend. He was one of my favorite writers. One of those rare people who could articulate with words what I struggle to do with paint. I have many apertures in my head that open to places he invented. There are crystalline psychologies, rampant weathers, dire contemplations of ingestion, and the pure, hard stare into the landscape of this Kali Yuga.

Spring Garden

With the help of Feather (above) and the man with the Martian egg (below) I worked through the old foliage, stems and leaves to uncover the bones of the garden. The flowers were all the more sweet in their delicate radiance surrounded by the dun of earth.
I particularly love the bluebells and windflowers. Such cool tones are rare in the petal world.

off the cliff again

OK, here we go, taking a running jump into northeast Wolffland, off the little overhang of today into the clear abyss, scribbling in geometry (of a sort), body, buildings and cosmos (not drawn in-you'll have to imagine it flourished across the sky, squeezing through the brickwork (also not drawn in) and dancing on the the court lines) on the down glide, down fly, falling, falling, not yet landed---see you there...

Blue Roses

The same color as a four-armed God's skin...
Its the time of blue roses, just before avatars push aside boulders and go off to other places...
Two days ago it snowed and today I find flowers in the color of summers deepest sky.

stars with music

The painting has its own soundtrack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On5372UztI0