temperature

The cold is biting down on NYC and snorting through its bitter teeth. Even the traffic sounds have a brittle edge to them. Inside I have the space heater roaring away--one tries not to think about Con Ed. I'm working on a new painting and listening to music. The opposites come together and balance me happily in the middle. There is enough food in the kitchen, enough paint to make many more paintings than just this one, books that I haven't read yet, and a list of painting ideas on the wall that is only half finished. I love to make new lists where I keep the ones not attempted and add as many as my mind can concoct--its a sheer abundance of possibilities: Ali Baba's cave in code.

Visitation

when

...much younger, in the back corridors of a circus before I ventured in to the ring myself.

Michael Walker

I have known Michael Walker from our days as hippies growing up in New Jersey. He has always been an artist, from painter to glass maker and back to painter. In the last several years he has been working on a series of water images. I find them beautiful, evocative and plain in the way effective pictures usually are.
This is what he says about them:


the technique got thick and i start with acrylic paste mixed with acrylic colors...smush a thick layer on with a spackle knife...it is sort of like being a plasterer on a wall. i slash lines in it and pull up toothy areas with a rough roller. it goes fast, the stuff sags a little as it dries. accidents occur- they are a main part of painting.
i am staying with, in water...what is under the surface, what pokes up through it.
something happens...paint is a fluid medium, i have an image in my mind that flickers between what is or could be there...my hand arcs back and forth over the canvas...like developer pulling something out of the emulsion on photographic paper.
it dries...next day the smoothing, crisping pixels begin with oil.
when a painting is "done" something always remains of what i saw into it while painting. but the "seeing" is most present before.

Sea Composition




Sand




River Grass




Kies Beach




Jupiter Island






Buzzard's Bay, Cape Cod




Cedar Creek Grass




Island Beach

Wolff child

Be it karma, nature or luck, the absorbed creature that I was is still the one I embody now. There I am at some single digit age peering down through the water at the pebble jewels, the bright, little construct floating beside me. It could be one of my paintings.
Well, actually, I think it may become one of my paintings...

Lar Lubovitch

Last night I went to City Center to see the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company. There were three pieces: Jangle, Men's Stories and Dvorak Serenade. The first was a happy melange of emotional fluidity. It sounds simple but such expressive joy is rare. The incredible technical abilities of the dancers never let you hesitate at thought, and the choreography was a perfect song that you'd heard when you were young and never forgot.
Men's Stories was about guyness. The dumb masses of men became bodies of articulate muscle. Their hearts melted down, ran into their nervous systems and there flesh became liquid semaphores. We, the audience, were always with them, posturing, laughing, fighting, rutting, and singing the love of leap, slink and roll.
Dvorak Serenade seemed to be made from the alphabet of nature-the wind through the tall grass, the movement of leaves, the eddies of water-embodied in a group of young humans. They danced back and forth across the stark stage pulling the imagery of summer and young love with them.
Afterwards I was full of the fizz of beautiful acts.

autumn overcast

The greyed jewels whispered to me as the bus took me up and downstate. Once on foot the soft, rained air hovered between colors and licked the streets. I found an old sketchbook in the studio with drawings of my son from 4 weeks to 9 months. I discovered some books to take back with me: The Romance of the Horse, a book on Uccello, the Miea Calliographiae Monumenta, and several really good blank sketchbooks from the days when I was more flush.
I raid my past to fatten the present.

cartwheel

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":