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.

...better

So the rain poured down and the wind came up from the harbor like a spray of knives. I painted, looked out the window and contemplated the amount of clothes people had on.
Its better but not done. Its also not at all the painting I started out to do.

lost in the piano lands

The Piano Lands are a place I invented in a story. A desolate, yet beautiful place of constant winds, metallic soil and huge boulders in shades of pink, grey, crimson and black. It wasn't a good place to get lost in, especially if you didn't know what you were doing. So, of course that is exactly where I end up almost every time I make a painting. And here I am again surrounded by possibilities and dream logic, lost among the boulders.
I am getting annoyed and forgetting the funny things. Usually if I smash my brains against the rocks enough times some interesting brush strokes leak out...

dead serious swim/thunder & lightening

Outside the rain falls and the thunder booms down around the buildings. I can hear the thwock of individual drops in an internal drain pipe and in the shaft way. Inside the painting loses its swimmer but gains its swimming personality.
...maybe
its going but doesn't know quite how

what to do when the economy collapses

I'm one of the fringe dominoes that is knocked over as the bigger guys crash left and right. Self-employed and not a plumber or doctor, I find myself face down in the mess.
What to do is keep painting. I spend the hours wrestling with the water element that is the dominant feature of this picture
Panic, done that. Rats-in-the-brain, ditto. Gone nuts thinking what I am employable as, ha!
Like I said, back to the paint.
Wish me luck.

swimming

The painting is going somewhere, but oddly and slowly. Because it is from a dream it's source partakes of no worldly painting considerations...it is all sensation: visual & tactile, with no regard for dimension, composition, time or the demarcations of paint. So I go as though blinded, presented at each decision with the particulars of real time brush work and its pictorial results, and not really knowing how to get that to run parallel with the dream information.

Trees, swim

From somewhere come all these greys amid the trees. I'm always surprised at the linear quality of a painting's beginning, and here it has continued with the thickening layers. I hadn't expected the misty effect.

painted otherwhere

I was on the train platform in Hartford. The sun was pouring down and I could smell creosote from the tracks. The platform was thick with dust between the worn, wooden boards. I took out my small watercolor book and painted this in my lap, thinking of the new painting yet to be made:

again from dream

This is the under drawing of a new painting. It's based on a recent dream of swimming endlessly, and the underwater event that presented along the way, akin to a cavern of jewels beneath the melted-mirror skin.
We'll see what happens...

Mom Post

This is a painting of my son in Greece on the island of the most beautiful sunsets in the world with a native Minoan:




..and this is my son now, doing what he calls "the girl jump":

Green Tomatoes in the Studio

I grew these on my fire escape---wiring the scraggy growth to the railing so they wouldn't blow over in the recent storms. Finally, it's getting cold, so I picked them in their small, green state and they are on the windowsill in hopes of reddening. Except for these three, along with a vagrant bottle, sitting for their portraits....

Homer in Boston

This weekend I was in the Boston area and managed to get into the city to see the Homer show at the Museum of Fine Arts. Its a small show of the museum's collection of Homers that includes etchings, drawings and a few paintings. Homer started as an exacting illustrator and moved into that realm of painting that it is hard to talk about. Yes, he painted nature and guys fishing. But that is almost irrelevant. He became an alchemist after years of focused labor. His paint is magic, full of truth and unsentimental obsession. My two favorites were of some cows on a dark silhouetted hillside and his last, Driftwood, of the wild sea and a lone man trying to rescue a tree trunk from the surf.

Pink & Delicate

Portrait of Eddie Campbell

So here is my portrait of Eddie, which I waited to post, as I had mailed the painting to him in Australia and wanted it to arrive there first, before I flung it up into the ether. He has mentioned that it might frighten the children.