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

Chairs & blanks

After returning from upstate where an incredibly green and lush garden hosted fat rabbits, energetic humming birds, and gigantic squirrels throwing down hickory nuts day after day....I look back through an urban tunnel to a place where there was a blank in the studio that I filled (you'll have to wait as it isn't finished) and a deck with jewel coated chairs.
All in a bemused fuddle of memory now that I am a bit of drift in the tide of New York...but I glean the spark of color that throws down the short time line and meets my brain head on, here in the other studio.