Lynda Barry, Shiva & Kali

In between days of painting I went to see Lynda Barry at the NYC Cantor Film Center. I'm a big fan of her work but have never heard her speak. I didn't realize that I was going to be laughing so hard I would cry. One guy in the audience began to slide out of his seat. She was amazingly perceptive about making art and its biological purpose, the nature of memory and how we react to what we think is real but know isn't.
I then decided to read her book Cruddy which is the only one I have that I hadn't read. It's a full out horror story. Who knew. It smells of rotting meat, train tracks and youth.
She's great.




In the studio Shiva and Kali are still dancing, and I'm still chasing them with a brush...

2 Views

Outside on Church Street they are doing a fashion shoot, having the models pretend to walk across the street over and over.....





Inside I have been working on the new painting, pretending that Shiva and Kali are dancing on the wall together forever and forever...

Performance at Church Street Studio

Last night we had a performance of my aerial students.

Emma:



Jan Meissner

Jan Meissner



Jan Meissner



Jan Meissner


Charlotte:


Jan Meissner

Larry Hedrick




Jan Meissner


Jan Meissner



Britt Nhi Sarah:



Jan Meissner

Jan Meissner
Jan Meissner

Larry Hedrick


Larry Hedrick






Jan Meissner


Jan Meissner

Brooklyn Garden Guru

Out in Brooklyn my friend, Sally, has been creating a garden for several years. One of the first things she made was a small pond. She told a friend that she had read that if your pond is just right the frogs will come. He scoffed. She got fish for her pond and adopted a turtle. All flourished. Recently she began to hear, well, frog noises. People doubted. They, again, scoffed.
But out in Brooklyn the frog has come to Sally's pond. And a bullfrog at that!

Fire Escape Views

After the the green free form of my garden and the tangle of spring upstate the grey linears of NYC are especially strong in the overcast shroud...
peering off the fire escape along with the pigeons I view my Friday morning geometries:



...looking north is more narrow and darker. Being in New York involves a lot of outdoor living, but the change from in to out is always dramatic, unlike less urban places where the transition is softer. One's nest away from the street usually has a strong individual aura that sets it apart from the overwhelming mass persona on the street. The morning's emptier streets are such a delight--one becomes lighter and physically expanded as your psyche relaxes to interplay with space, leaving off the usual dance of constant interweaving and pin--ball sensitivity.

Green

...upstate sitting in the garden watching the bits of tree fluff float in lazy parabolas...I find myself dreamily melted into the gold green...



I wander between garden and studio in between bouts of wild grass hacking and weed pulling...




the magic window aperture between the two:

...in the studio

I started the under drawing on the new painting (click to enlarge):



...and then worked on it again the next day:




looking in the other direction...out the window in the late afternoon light:

Hero(ines) & poets on the Hudson

Looking south by southwest past a blue lantern you can just see the Statue of Liberty holding her post in the harbor:


Looking at New Jersey:



Ulysses standing guard on the edge of Manhattan:






Seamus Heaney's poem: Death of a Naturalist inscribed on the rim of a pool:

starting again

So now I've got another blank surface to work on. I always love the empty space before I begin to mark it up with lines and color. It has all of my fantastic head pictures and none of my hesitancy or imperfect lapse with the brush. Here it is, having mute conversations with those around it already full of themselves.

details and visitors

Drawing/watercolor with the shadows from the wire catspider above it:



Collage/watercolor/ink of a bottle that was my mother's and the ripped up pages from on old physics book of my Dad's:




Ink/watercolor image from a story I wrote years ago:




This weekend I did a two day open studio with other people in Tribeca. People wandered in, wandered out, stayed for 15 seconds, hung around for conversation. Some obviously want nothing to do with you and others pronounce you the best of the tour. One woman told me a story about her painter Dad who supported 5 children with his art out in Pennsylvania. He had his own gallery in a separate building and then built a Japanese house to add to the mix. The kids would go to sleep whenever and wherever. We talked about the ability to paint and to draw (not synonymous) and about children's books.
..and then you get some people who bring with them an aura of actual weirdness, their words always at an oblique angle to your own, their laughter rushing in to make puddles in between.
Now I can start on the new painting with its foliage, Hindu dancer-gods, illuminated edges and chaos at the end of the Kali Yuga.

Open Studio Walls

Today is the open studio walking tour where strangers wander into your space and look at your art, you and your abode. Usually people don't say much. The idea of talking about art hits a mute button. The best responses come from firemen and workmen who are in the building for completely other reasons. They are almost always eager to tell me what they think. They have no problem with the imagery and the colors.
...so we'll see what happens today

north wall:



south wall:

NYC

Friday night I took my son to see Macbeth with Patrick Stewart on Broadway. Awash with Shakespeare we ventured back out into Times Square 3 hours later. I forget that it's now Bladerunner Redux without the Asian kiosks. People jammed the square footage and a wailing cop car pulled over a cab in the midst of crowds.
The play was great.
Today the island is dense with mist and the overcast wet of harbor humors. Seagulls fly high in the currents dropping their plaintive calls down to us on the streets like strange predictions or just rude comments.

Crazy Fish

So this is what I've been working on. Maybe its done. Click to enlarge, as all images...

what happened to Wolff

Wolff is painting...and then painting some more. That's before and after visiting Washington DC's American University on student acceptance day.
..still painting...

looking at you

This is a very small (25.1 cm X 31.9 cm) Rembrandt in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. It is in a room at the end of a cavernous hallway. Its on a plinth in the middle of the room among many other, mostly small, Dutchish paintings. Its a jewel. There was another really good painting on the other side of the plinth that got smashed out of my brain the minute I saw the Rembrandt. Its a painter's painting: to the point, funny and perfectly painted. There you are in your studio, your eyes full of your work that you've denied the viewer, giving out only the place, the face and the profession (obsession). Its a calling card, a portrait, a joke and a great picture.

Mermaid Necklace

Down into the sea and back up again with the jewels of water, bits of gold, and dark-glinting weed threaded together.

Mia & Lencho in the River

This is the first painting I did after leaving the circus. I plunged right into figurative imagery after years of making abstract pictures and odd forays across the border of minimalism, coming back with cuttings from their garden to plant in Wolffian dirt.
It is based on a memory of a deep creek that ran between blond hills in the southern inlands of California. There, on a rare day with no shows, I went swimming with my boyfriend, Florencio (Lencho for short). I was just beginning to do paintings about actual places and things, still a bit shy to try and put everything in (like I do now)-thus the spare set design.

MOMA

photos by Larry Hedrick



Spent four hours the other day wandering through MOMA looking at the design show and various other beauties like Giacometti, Cezanne, Kahlo, and Van Gogh. Came home with my mind full and have since been looking at the incredible paintings of Jakuchu.
The world is lush with art.