Wolff Chair/Sun Chair

I sit in this chair to look at paintings I'm working on. I've done two portraits of people sitting in it. Figured it was time it had its own done:

Richard Nonas at Esso & music

Friday night Richard Nonas opened at Esso. The show is a beautiful, exact landscape of metal and wood constructs. Each one has a peculiar simplicity. They are friendly and vast simultaneously. A toddler walked on, through and over the floor pieces, tasting every positive and negative aspect with his body. A band (Los Gatos) set up against one wall and played while the toddler marked the beat against the face of the nearest sculpture.

Tuba:






Guitar:




Drummer:




Baritone sax:




Bass & guitar:





Baritone sax:



Bass:



Tuba:


Drummer's hands:

subject verb object

This is an old painting done from life. I remember sitting out on the point with my easel waist deep in green as the morning's mist hovered over the Hudson. It has no cutting edges or metaphorical reasons for being. It exists in a pure retinal zone. I recently rescued it from my brother's house, hung it in the studio and spent some time bemused by the simple redness of the boat.

during all this

...in between the loud cries of men outside, the siren marking an uptown avenue's course, and the insistent hum of compressed quiet inside, a cloud drifted, turned its hue from warm to cool and intermingled with the sky...

memory and landscape

This is a painting of a place I haven't been to in probably seven years. Gazing from the mossy shadows of the back yard, light fell down among trees and ferns and was forever fascinating to me, as was its memoric gilding. The entry of criss-crossed branches and aquatic depths always promised. Once within, the sonar of ones senses pinged through the reaches of forest and brought back a song of strange fungus, starred moss and decades of hemlocks.

scrap of Shackleton

Among the myriad of images I've made based on Shackleton's ship Endurance is this collage/ink & watercolor piece. I like it for its smallness and use of various materials at hand, including a bit of old silk brocade, and then the slash of silver paint on the black paper--I guess as a nod to the ice.

messages

There were (are, perhaps) several phrases that I had deep language/visual attachments to. I did many paper paintings and collages based on them. Something about their everyday acceptance had disguised their lucid, visceral quality and softened the contemplation of their actuality as opposed to their metaphoric body.
Here is one of the more direct:

unexpected

Upstate, out in the studio, I went through some old paper things and found this. Its a small ink wash/pen drawing based on an image of a painting I did inspired by two horse head masks I made that I had my son put on and run about in while I photographed him:





..and then I came out and discovered a late rose that had reached up and bloomed amid the wild grass heads:

Grey Matter

Yesterday I went to see Van Gogh and the Colors of Night at MOMA. He does this beautiful consideration of vision without sun, under moonlight and the in between stages of sunset and moon rise. I had forgotten what a colorist he is with greys. Later I went to my Mandarin class and began to develop a wonderful, itchy case of Chinese Head.
The state of brain amidst the wordless eloquence and the musical/visual language has an underwater richness and a similar lack of gravity.

Soldier

Solitary figure in a complicated place:

At the Zipper

Last Sunday there was an aerial performance at the Zipper Theater. It was produced by Britt Nhi Sarah. I have been coaching Britt Nhi for several years. As well as producing she also performed on Sunday. It was a beautiful, succinct and emotionally precise piece. It relied on sustained, fluid movements that flowed and levitated around, in, and above the hoop.
all photos by Jan Meissner:

Glass Thoughts

I thought they were done, but...

After looking for several days I went back and reworked details of both Carla's portrait and the underwater picture:

Portrait of Carla

from my fire escape

Pouring up through amber haze like the shattered gaze of diamonds, the 9/11 lights pass across the night to pierce and nuzzle clouds.

Tidal Heart

Outside the sky has darkened to the point of aquatic coloration, dissimilar to dusk, more akin to Atlantic. Inside I have been working in a pool of light that reaches only so far as the storm darkness pushes against it. I'm enamored of the place of pisces, forever tipping over puddles, tidal pools, runnels, streams and gigantic rivers becoming harbors. I look and look, peering for the beauty and the possibilities.

Pisces Post

I'm painting water. Its been raining hurricane spillover, threading through my tomato plant out on the fire escape. Inside there are the tendrils of seaweed committed to undulation beneath their sashay of light. Then suddenly the sky is bang-your-eye blue and the wind is just slightly over friendly. The seaweed nudges me and I highlight its curves, giving the sashay its due.

Portrait of Karen