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.

The Faramia Duo

This was our double trapeze act, the name being a combination of mine (Mia) and Donna's last (Farina). The tent in the little painting is the Big Apples's but we didn't have that name until we went out on the road with a three ring show on the west coast.
A bit of history in paint...

The Drop

1985
more water
and always the head butt of dark and light
one of the more exciting things to happen in the great mess of painting while extracting a readable image from it
really, the attempt to paint light (thus employing its opposite) is the reason for much of the centuries of fuss..its a pretty good reason, too
and thus we come to color which is the blush at the word, the swoon at the touch, to light

Between the Wars: Dreamtide

Done in 1983 from an actual dream.

dark scribble

...a bit of detail from an old, old painting, from the time of acrylics, which for me feels prehistoric. I still love scribbles and they have shown up in my newest painting as undercurrents in the atmosphere of the studio. I like that they are pure hand and yet completely open to illusionist reading. Hence my passion for Twombly.
My brain is too full of images to go such a route. There is no thing that can be seen in or out of the head that isn't a possible painting.
I guess you could say I'm an omnivore inclusivist.

Witttgenstein & Wolff

I did a series of paper paintings using Wittgenstein's aphorisms (as I call them) out of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I don't pretend to understand the book at all, but I really like the little bits. This one caused a lot of reaction when I hung it in a show at a restaurant upstate. The show was called Sex & Death and went up around Halloween. I left a blank book for people to give their opinions. No one objected to images of Death (as I usually depict him as a skeleton with one wing), but this piece got to people. No one seems to have read the quote and looked at any of the images included except for the anatomical one. I thought that the selection of volumes (ladle, vagina, skull top, and carved white pumpkin) along with the words was pretty interesting. When I'm in the studio I'm not thinking of ways to unglue the viewer. Its more about what I find fascinating and visually twisty enough to unlock the eyes, brain & heart together. And then, of course, I always want to share it with others.

Jungle Island at Night

This is an imaginary place I often painted. Not unlike City of Green Fire, it maintains permanent real estate in my mind. I have a yearning to go back to dreamy places. There is a landscape brewing, and I have been collecting peripheral images to encourage it.

Easter

I went to the Met to see Chinese scroll paintings (dreamy, glorious entities), and then walked through Central Park. The bluebells and hellebore were up and blooming. There was music everywhere and I stopped to draw a group near the bandshell. This was the base player:


While they were playing a large hawk flew into a nearby tree. It was a very light colored bird. I don't know if it was Pale Male, but certainly of his lineage if not. It took off and flew over the crowd, dropping its huge shadow across us. The band played on.

one-armed handstand on the water

A long time ago I wrote a short story where the ending was this image. It was a science fiction story about a circus performer who works with a show that travels to other planets. With a bit of editing:

From the building I walk down to the sea. I step out onto the water. The clear emerald face meets my foot with a cold tongue. Below swim the creatures of this sea, their clouds the white soles of my feet, and between us my reflection, breaking and reforming with the swells. I walk out far enough to lose sight of land. I am the single vertical on the plane of moving water.
Bending over I see movement in the depths; movement beyond my own liquid face that comes up to meet me. Cautiously I place one hand on the surface and shift weight into that shoulder. The cold wet clasps my fingers. I bend my knees and spring up, all weight coming down through one arm. There, balanced; one armed handstand on the water. A small wave slaps my wrist. Wind blows spray into my face. I taste salt.

drinking the trees

I think its about time to start breathing in the green, consider light that penetrates leaves before it palms your eyes, and take the draught of arboreal spirits.
In the meantime I watched No Country for Old Men and relished the taste of dust, blood, and metal. I don't think that was exactly the point, although it certainly was part of the flavor. I really like Cormac McCarthy. I found his book The Road to be one of the best I've read in the last few years.

shorthand water

I found this series of tiny canvases I did a ways back..all of water. I see it now as a shorthand of things I have expanded on since, especially with the Catspider paintings:




I like the abbreviated forms of line and iconography, but am equally fascinated with realizing the whole dream in my head. It would be interesting to go back and forth within the same time period.

in the studio

We are working on new shapes in the lyra. The painting (behind me) is creeping along, although I'm sick of painting my own face. I went to the Frick the other day and soaked up some serious magic, came home and worked again on my face. I'm looking forward to someone else's.
The wind is blowing fierce up from the harbor. It has a silky,throaty sound that makes the traffic seem tinny.