The Garden

Depraved Life

Since the summer heat has hit the clients have swept off to other locals. Thus I spend my days painting, watching episodes of Ashes to Ashes, and then more painting. I have two fans on and the fire escape door open. The heat sizzles across the asphalt as the afternoon sun hits my building and presses its greedy face against all the windows. Sometimes when my shoulders are tired from keeping the paintbrush moving I lie on the green floor and look up at the studio lights. Some of them have a sparkly pink backwash. Sometimes I sit on the trapeze and look at the painting from an elevated position. It can be useful.
I've always thought that that place (the place where the trapeze hangs in the middle of the space) is one of the best. Ultimate Fung Shui seating.
...so the summer goes...

important information from Brooklyn

According to my friend, Robert Morales, the best line in philosophy is:


Slippery when wet

Turner & waterfalls

Yesterday, before I went to see the waterfalls I went to the Met to see the Turner show. Room after room of paint slathered, scrubbed, glazed, slurred, and meticulously detailed against the magic of image (either eye or brain). An illusionist of great ability and also wonderful largess. Here is the exact line where the sleeve of that dead soldier is among the murk of dark red sienna, here is the intimate illumination of the wave's curve before it reaches the flat, scrumbled beach, and here is the barely described sea monster in the huge, paled immensity of an imagined sea. And so, then off to see water plummeting from metal scaffolds into the East River and the harbor of NYC:

Wolff & the Waterfalls

Downtown tonight.....to the South Street Seaport with its hordes of tourists, screaming black Jews for Jesus (I think that's what they were for), very loud rock and roll, and plenty of commerce I went with my son to take a boat tour of Olafur Eliasson's Waterfalls:












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dogs in Jamaica Plains

At my friend's house in Jamaica Plains live numerous birds and 2 dogs.
While visiting I got the chance to draw the canines...

Zillion:




and Pushkin:

tiny fur helicopeter attacked by tiny suede chopper

photo by: Larry Hedrick
metaphor assist by: American Fez

under trees, under umbrella

Out in Framingham, Massachusetts I walked with my father through a garden in the woods. It was raining so I carried a large umbrella that we both used. My Dad is in his mid 80's. He walks slowly and is curved over. The umbrella would pull against the lower branches and the spilled water would rattle on its cloth. We went down a hill amid the old woods and cultivated plants, around a lily pond and back up the hill. No one else was there. The leaves were shiny with rain. When I wanted to take a picture he would hold the umbrella for us.

Bees in Brooklyn

Out in Brooklyn Sally's garden is flourishing, her turtle is wandering, and the blooms are drawing in the tiny fur helicopters.
photos: Larry Hedrick

Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser

What I did upstate in between forays into the green jungle of my garden and various domestic intrigueries was read Fritz Leiber's sword and sorcery series. I have all of them and every time I go up I read through some more. I've read them many times, but each time they get better. The colors seem brighter, the humor funnier and the adventures more ridiculous and simultaneously more riveting. Much better than what most summer movies try to do. I love these two guys. They seem to be exaggerations of people I know. They have strange versions of relationships I've had, almost had, wanted to have. I can't imagine Harrison's Viriconium without Lankhmar, nor Gaiman's Sandman without Leiber's structural dance of Gods and interweaving worlds.

Green Demon Foliage & return

Here is the garden with studio (foreground) and house (with little tiny kitchen window). The garden reaches out between the two, a demon green tongue grown furry and cocky in the days and days of rain. Everywhere the foliage makes its patterns, overlaying, overlapping, interweaving green on green, lace on leaf, frond on frond, and petals floating, gliding on the foamy tide.




in the midst, a spot of human comfort:




...and then plunging back into green's self:




on the way back into NYC you see the helter skelter of NJ and the promise of Manhattan:




and then the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel:

I forgot!

Clearly, mainlining foliage for several days is not conducive to hindsight reconstruction. I remember that I did go out more than once yesterday. I went up Broadway and into Pearl River where I found these shoes awaiting me. Very sparkly. I might even wear them. I might even paint them.

the foliage

Did you ever have one of those days where you just paint foliage? You know, where you maybe go out once to the post office, but can't remember the next day if you did, indeed, even leave the loft. Like that.
Sometimes when there is such a day I go out later and see everything as if it's a painting.....the stonework of buildings, the fluid melt of traffic, the fabrics of people following their motions, & the sky heaving between buildings.

So, to the foliage--still accruing, curling, blushing unaccustomed color and circling, ever so slowly, the two dancers:



This one is way too dark but I kind of like its before-the-storm light:

faces & places

One of my favorite places is the sun chair--where I sit and look at whatever painting I'm working on. At the moment the view fills the yearning for landscape...






...since this is the view of morning light, horizons mitigated by structure inside (& out)...






But there are faces. This is Indigo and I. She visited recently to attend my son's high school graduation. We had a brief sojourn as exotic women shawled in ancient silks...



Jan Meissner


..and then there are the others, still dancing, their landscape bower becoming ever more complex. The more the detail develops the better I like their dance...

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...