water for the new year

images for new year

I've been going through some old family slides...thinking about images to skate into the new year with. What I've come up with so far is the one above of myself swinging oblivious to anything and everything. I have no idea where it is, but I recognize that expression.

Below is the same alien creature happily swimming across the deep green, past what looks like an ancient ruin of an unknown civilization. Again, I am clueless to the origins of either civilization or location.




...and then we have this---a slide that has gotten so bored sitting for years in its little plastic cell that it has gone ahead and decorated itself:

snow

I spent the weekend in Massachusetts where it snowed for two and a half days. One night, driving up the hill from my brother's, the headlights caught a trio of deer slipping across the road, their shapes blurred into great grey forms behind the storm's scrim. They were only there for a moment and then gone into the whited shadows. Finally late Sunday it stopped and I looked out the window in the middle of the night to see the hard crystalline light of stars in the black black sky.

more from the Zipper

Here are some more photos from the performance Above the Belt at the Zipper last Sunday night.
All are of Britt Nhi Sarah by Jan Meissner.

this side and that

Left brain above, right below....

Last show at the Zipper

Last night at the Zipper theater was the last aerial show of 2008. There were twelve acts in the small space--people on the balcony were face to face (body) with the performers. I was scrambling over people, and balancing on the railing to deal with the rigging.
Here are two pictures of Britt Nhi Sarah (whom I coach) with me in the background.
all photos by Jan Meissner

paparazzi

Caught slinking between frontal lobes early this morning...we can only assume the worst

unauthorized photo of my brain

woods

Sometimes I try to do something that is akin to painting without looking, taking into account that you have to look to put the brush onto the surface--but almost as though you look with your head averted, from a corner, a glimpse, a place where you can see, but not so well that you grasp fully.
Well, so much for articulating the bedazzled brain process.
Hopelessly, incurably essential.
I'm working on the drawing that goes under everything else. Like the balls of mouse fur and bones you find beneath the trees where owls live....

paint, paper, glue & ink dance

Spatials of Weather

Outside it snows. Beyond the fire escape wizzing past the streetlight like a drunken group of teenage nebulae...snowflakes.
The black and the white of it.
Inside I've stretched a large canvas. Life is just too damned weird without a painting going on.

God's Pebble

Local Paper

There is an article about me, with pictures, in the local paper: here

Thanksgiving in Indiana

I flew out to Indiana for Thanksgiving with my best friend, Indigo, and to see her new house. She has been designing it for years and is now actually completing the structure. It uses pre-cast cement walls, sip panels and metal on the roof and walls of the third floor. The windows, bathroom fixtures and kitchen cabinets are all salvage. Its all been built on the ghost of a shoestring. We had a big Thanksgiving feast there---all the people who contributed and constructed attended.
The day before we were all madly cleaning, the toilets and sinks were being hooked up and the carpenter was still cutting and hammering. Food was being prepared and brains were melting.
The Ohio River was a sheet of liquid diamonds and the sun fell through the myriad of huge windows and illuminated all.

temperature

The cold is biting down on NYC and snorting through its bitter teeth. Even the traffic sounds have a brittle edge to them. Inside I have the space heater roaring away--one tries not to think about Con Ed. I'm working on a new painting and listening to music. The opposites come together and balance me happily in the middle. There is enough food in the kitchen, enough paint to make many more paintings than just this one, books that I haven't read yet, and a list of painting ideas on the wall that is only half finished. I love to make new lists where I keep the ones not attempted and add as many as my mind can concoct--its a sheer abundance of possibilities: Ali Baba's cave in code.

Visitation

when

...much younger, in the back corridors of a circus before I ventured in to the ring myself.

Michael Walker

I have known Michael Walker from our days as hippies growing up in New Jersey. He has always been an artist, from painter to glass maker and back to painter. In the last several years he has been working on a series of water images. I find them beautiful, evocative and plain in the way effective pictures usually are.
This is what he says about them:


the technique got thick and i start with acrylic paste mixed with acrylic colors...smush a thick layer on with a spackle knife...it is sort of like being a plasterer on a wall. i slash lines in it and pull up toothy areas with a rough roller. it goes fast, the stuff sags a little as it dries. accidents occur- they are a main part of painting.
i am staying with, in water...what is under the surface, what pokes up through it.
something happens...paint is a fluid medium, i have an image in my mind that flickers between what is or could be there...my hand arcs back and forth over the canvas...like developer pulling something out of the emulsion on photographic paper.
it dries...next day the smoothing, crisping pixels begin with oil.
when a painting is "done" something always remains of what i saw into it while painting. but the "seeing" is most present before.

Sea Composition




Sand




River Grass




Kies Beach




Jupiter Island






Buzzard's Bay, Cape Cod




Cedar Creek Grass




Island Beach

Wolff child

Be it karma, nature or luck, the absorbed creature that I was is still the one I embody now. There I am at some single digit age peering down through the water at the pebble jewels, the bright, little construct floating beside me. It could be one of my paintings.
Well, actually, I think it may become one of my paintings...

Lar Lubovitch

Last night I went to City Center to see the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company. There were three pieces: Jangle, Men's Stories and Dvorak Serenade. The first was a happy melange of emotional fluidity. It sounds simple but such expressive joy is rare. The incredible technical abilities of the dancers never let you hesitate at thought, and the choreography was a perfect song that you'd heard when you were young and never forgot.
Men's Stories was about guyness. The dumb masses of men became bodies of articulate muscle. Their hearts melted down, ran into their nervous systems and there flesh became liquid semaphores. We, the audience, were always with them, posturing, laughing, fighting, rutting, and singing the love of leap, slink and roll.
Dvorak Serenade seemed to be made from the alphabet of nature-the wind through the tall grass, the movement of leaves, the eddies of water-embodied in a group of young humans. They danced back and forth across the stark stage pulling the imagery of summer and young love with them.
Afterwards I was full of the fizz of beautiful acts.

autumn overcast

The greyed jewels whispered to me as the bus took me up and downstate. Once on foot the soft, rained air hovered between colors and licked the streets. I found an old sketchbook in the studio with drawings of my son from 4 weeks to 9 months. I discovered some books to take back with me: The Romance of the Horse, a book on Uccello, the Miea Calliographiae Monumenta, and several really good blank sketchbooks from the days when I was more flush.
I raid my past to fatten the present.

cartwheel

found, not lost

Always looking for treasure, the painting not seen, the book not read...thus the impulse to paint that picture or write that story. And then I stopped and looked out the window yesterday. Outside, across the street, the trees were going amber and blurring through the blue haze of glass behind the greens & silhouettes of my plants. And then there are the layers of lace greying in density and luminating in scrolly cutouts. Everywhere is treasure, not lost but always found, inside and out.
hey, its Halloween today...

Serious Swim

I've arrived here. I'll wait a day or so and see how it sits on the eyeballs and brain.
Meanwhile I have a poem (the painter's favorite cliches) up at:
http://gloomcupboard.com

swimming on

...so now I'm here. The day is cold and wintery, inside the stars come out underwater.