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Wednesday, January 18, 2017
Wolffland
Short film about my paintings, with appearances by Samuel R Delany, Annie Potts, myself in the circus, my son and Feather:
https://vimeo.com/148406219
Short film about my paintings, with appearances by Samuel R Delany, Annie Potts, myself in the circus, my son and Feather:
https://vimeo.com/148406219
Thursday, January 12, 2017
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
NOTES ON
THE CITY OF GREEN FIRE
by Samuel R. Delany
Mia Wolff painted her oil on linen triptych The City of Green Fire between 1997 and
1998, at her New Paltz, New York, studio, where I first saw them in late Spring
or Summer shortly after their completion. It is probably when I saw them again on
Church Street in New York City that I first wanted to write about them. (Comic
artist Eddie Campbell was also struck enough with them to quote them in The Birth Caul that he drew for Alan
Moore.).
And when she asked me to comment about
her painting in the documentary, Wolffland (Laura Checkoway, 2015), the triptych always impelled my
words, even when I was talking about other Wolff works.
The City of Green Fire is not a Comedy, divine and Dantesque, or human with some Balzacian bevy of social types.
It may be religious, however: the figure off-center in the middle panel is part animal and part human. The fish and flowers that populate the whole of it it do not hit me as Christian.
The City of Green Fire is not a Comedy, divine and Dantesque, or human with some Balzacian bevy of social types.
It may be religious, however: the figure off-center in the middle panel is part animal and part human. The fish and flowers that populate the whole of it it do not hit me as Christian.
The city itself seems both older and newer then any real ones—that
aspect suggests something comic (with a small c), and reminds me more than
anything else of Rem Koolhaas’s vision of Coney Island in his architectural
meditation, Delirious New York
(1978), the experimental try-out area for the shapes then to be exported to
Manhattan to create the actual city on its historical base, some time later.
The artist writes that it came to her in a dream in which she was barefoot, coupled with some photographic sources of the old castle of Prague and a woman—the Patron Saint of Roses—changing roses into fish; the chandelier hung in her New Paltz studio at the time she painted it.
Lights are reflected on its windows. Signs are legible on its walls (but not in English). It’s a city of silhouettes, cut out and made visible by light behind them, here and there thrown into relief with decorations and gleams from a more complex pallet in its flooded street.
Serious question: Does the liquid over in the city extinguish the fire--or fuel it?
I.
The panel on the left (The Sea Horse) appears to be an interior, almost black. Through a window, two portals left and right, and what appears to be a doorway at the end of a cobblestone hallway, a green fire burns.
The middle panel (The Sphinx) shows the outside of the city, the sky above it, filled with the same yellow-green. The viewer looks down an alley by a sphinx to the left, spurting liquid from her breasts, to spill over a fountain’s edge onto the street. Even so, the liquid seems to flow along the ground from the first painting around and into the second.
The third panel (The Patron Saint of Roses) shows the city
roofs. Then, through a brick arch we see roses, green water, and a female nude
(a self-portrait of the artist at the time of the painting); Green light still fills
the painting’s background, but the roses, the fish, the figures here are
illuminated by a far more varied and—dare I say—realistic palette than the rest
of the work (that is, panels one and two), which of course draws the eye across
all three.
II.
II.
In the first of the three paintings, in the foreground we can
make out a seahorse—a creature part of the architecture. At the doorway in the
back, a wraithlike shadow stands, with fronds and tendrils. Possibly it’s a female figure entering the
scene. As easily, though, it could be leaving. The figure could be a tree, it
could be a silhouetted break between the flames burning at either edge of the
door.
III.
In fact, the material actuality of the female figure in the panel on the right highlights a set of questions and judgments about the figures in the panel on the left.
Is the figure at the end of the hallway a positive or a negative space? (No question of that sort needs be asked about the nude with her raised hands.) Is it male or female? If it is a positive form, is it entering or leaving?
The larger and closer images of sea horses and fish are specifically architectural; they are images of things painted or carved on the walls as opposed to the realer and realer creatures as we see as we move to the right through the three paintings, the more and more unquestionably living creatures more and more convincingly pictured as we move from the left.
In fact, the material actuality of the female figure in the panel on the right highlights a set of questions and judgments about the figures in the panel on the left.
Is the figure at the end of the hallway a positive or a negative space? (No question of that sort needs be asked about the nude with her raised hands.) Is it male or female? If it is a positive form, is it entering or leaving?
The larger and closer images of sea horses and fish are specifically architectural; they are images of things painted or carved on the walls as opposed to the realer and realer creatures as we see as we move to the right through the three paintings, the more and more unquestionably living creatures more and more convincingly pictured as we move from the left.
IV.
“The reproach of escapism is seldom aimed at a painter; we do not hold it against Cezanne that he was living hidden away at Etaque during the war of 1870. And we recall with respect his “C’est effrayant, la vie,” (It’s astonishing, life) even when the lowliest student, ever since Nietzsche, would reject philosophy if it did not teach him how to live fully (a etre de grand vivants).
“It’s as if in the painter’s calling there were some urgency above all other claims on him. Strong or frail in life, he is incontestably sovereign in his own rumination of the world.”
--Guy Davenport (1989)
V.
Balthus’s (1908-2001) Passage du Commerce Saint-Andre (1952-’54) sets up a distinct dialogue with the middle panel of The City of Green Fire. The alley we look down in both paintings is rich with the theme of their artists, Balthus and Wolff. If Balthus theme is “the care a culture has for its young,” (Davenport, 50); that is, how the society treats its children, specifically its adolescent girls, with an attention that lapses over into the pornographic, even. Wolff’s concern in a city that recalls Balthus to me, is stated in the concluding panel: how its women treat its fish, its flowers—or, if I can make such a leap, it’s ecology.
For both painters, in both paintings, these themes are suggested as a more or less troubling resonance with sexuality, decentered as much as stated.
“The reproach of escapism is seldom aimed at a painter; we do not hold it against Cezanne that he was living hidden away at Etaque during the war of 1870. And we recall with respect his “C’est effrayant, la vie,” (It’s astonishing, life) even when the lowliest student, ever since Nietzsche, would reject philosophy if it did not teach him how to live fully (a etre de grand vivants).
“It’s as if in the painter’s calling there were some urgency above all other claims on him. Strong or frail in life, he is incontestably sovereign in his own rumination of the world.”
--Guy Davenport (1989)
V.
Balthus’s (1908-2001) Passage du Commerce Saint-Andre (1952-’54) sets up a distinct dialogue with the middle panel of The City of Green Fire. The alley we look down in both paintings is rich with the theme of their artists, Balthus and Wolff. If Balthus theme is “the care a culture has for its young,” (Davenport, 50); that is, how the society treats its children, specifically its adolescent girls, with an attention that lapses over into the pornographic, even. Wolff’s concern in a city that recalls Balthus to me, is stated in the concluding panel: how its women treat its fish, its flowers—or, if I can make such a leap, it’s ecology.
For both painters, in both paintings, these themes are suggested as a more or less troubling resonance with sexuality, decentered as much as stated.
VI.
In classical paintings the streets are often the setting for
Comedy. This is what gives meaning to the fact that in The City of Green Fire the paintings re relatively free of direct social
life. In the first panel, we can’t tell if the figure is a single person in
front of the flames or a break in the flames themselves. In the last, it’s a
nude woman, and both flank an absence—an empty street, with only a statue
spurting liquid (water? milk . . .? . . . oil?) from its breasts—in the second,
as if to emphasize the lack of living figures.
VII.
The “lost paradise” (of innocence . . . ? Of license . . . ?) that Camus wrote about in Balthus may explain Wolff’s unpopulated streets in this major work.
VIII.
Writing in 1980 in an introduction to the republication of
her earliest story “Acrobats in a Park,” (written in or about 1935) Eudora
Welty wrote that Walls were like families. (“In performance, their act had been
the feat of erecting a structure of their bodies that held together like a
wall. . . . from points of view within and without, I’ve been writing about
this Wall ever since and what happens to it . . .”)
When you look at the brick and stone and dead black walls of all three panels in The City of Green Fire, it’s interesting to remember that Mia Wolff after starting as a visual artist, became an acrobat and a catcher in a trapeze act—with a partner. She has described the relationship to me as one as close as a family, and that ceased after an accident when her partner fell because of a piece of faulty equipment, after which she was not comfortable going up to perform with anyone else (Footage of her remains from these days, in the Wolffland documentary), though she has taught trapeze work, even as she has become a more and more extraordinary painter. (See her own children’s book, Catcher [1994])
IX.
When you look at the brick and stone and dead black walls of all three panels in The City of Green Fire, it’s interesting to remember that Mia Wolff after starting as a visual artist, became an acrobat and a catcher in a trapeze act—with a partner. She has described the relationship to me as one as close as a family, and that ceased after an accident when her partner fell because of a piece of faulty equipment, after which she was not comfortable going up to perform with anyone else (Footage of her remains from these days, in the Wolffland documentary), though she has taught trapeze work, even as she has become a more and more extraordinary painter. (See her own children’s book, Catcher [1994])
IX.
Contemporary art criticism is a criticism of photographs and art books. Even if we spend time with the actual painting in the museum, or on the studio wall, photographic prints or reproductions are likely to play their parts. In my case that’s a CD reproducing all three paintings, separately and another of them side by side, that I can put on my computer to re-view what I have seen so frequently before.
I look at an image presumably shared by the artist who wanted to communicate it. At the same time, though, I am interacting with an image that came into being though the interaction of what was in the artist’s mind with its own realization on the canvas an image that grew in a certain way and submitted itself to certain criteria or just changed so that with her brush and pigments the artist both made it, then made it look better:
Painting, and the painting’s final look of necessity have a self critical relation with the initial conception if the painting is to encompass any complexity.
Some of that as a beholder, once the painting is through, I have some access to, perhaps in the brush work, in a comment the artist might have made to me, some of which stays and most of which goes (“I wanted to make this seem darker, and so I . . . “, the correction of an imbalance that did not even exist before the painting reached a certain stage), and none of is present in the static image of the “completed,” which joins the painting even as it creates itself.
X.
On her liquid filled pedestal running with water or milk, the winged sphinx rearing to the left of the central panel spurts multiple sprays from her breasts in my memory (and in the tiny photograph on the CD case) and appears to be blind. I see her as a classical cherub, an angel whose ancient form was a centaur with a lion’s body and the torso of a human, another image of the artist herself, the guardian of the work as well as the city, and at the same time the rector of all the chaos that the darkness of the painting wrestles with.
The reflections of the city here and there in the water at various distances comprise the streets from the interplay of dark and light, of colors and cutout figures that is what painting is.
In the same panel, a stack of Chinese characters beside another that are clearly not Chinese at all, suggests a private language for which the artist may or may not have a meaning in mind; in any case they are essentially the same color as the relatively “realistic” fish swimming through the air and observing or even reading them, though each rests in different colored hazes of incident light.
One of the
fish even moves above its own shadow, which give an authority to the space
between them. The highlights on the roof ornaments of the city are another way
for the artist to speak directly to us of space, of illumination, of mind
itself.
Can we ask what layer of the painting we are looking at?
Can we ask what layer of the painting we are looking at?
When we
choose to look at any few inches of the surface, are we looking at an early
painted layer or a last? Did it contribute to the organization of the rest of
the painting or did the rest of the painting eventually produce it at its
climax?
Is it an
impetus for the work, or a final layer that reveals a meaning not there at the
start?
And can it
matter to the viewer that it may be the opposite of the artist’s process of
creating the image in pigment laid on a ground we do not even see?
The illusion is that we are observing a static picture, but of course we are not. We are looking at an image put together over time—weeks, even months. Possibly years.
Which again bring us back to the fact that there are three paintings, which we look at all at once—and which were done presumably one after another . . .? To what extend were they separate?
Did the artist move back and forth between them?
The illusion is that we are observing a static picture, but of course we are not. We are looking at an image put together over time—weeks, even months. Possibly years.
Which again bring us back to the fact that there are three paintings, which we look at all at once—and which were done presumably one after another . . .? To what extend were they separate?
Did the artist move back and forth between them?
(She tells me
she did.)
XII.
The title of the whole work suggests a creative/destructive eruption which must consume and support the artist through the transition of the work’s conception to its completion.
Green fire . . .
A city of it. Is the city only named by it? Is it created from it? Is the fire destroying it?
As I write, I can remember two years of my life given over to a trilogy of novels, the difficulties of completing the second book of which simply scared me off conceiving of any work in that form again—even as the toboggan of pleasure that was the writing of the third and final book almost (but never wholly) made up for it.
For better or worse,
the memory of my own mental movement over those two years becomes a part of my
experience looking at that these three Wolff paintings together.
Part of me wants to know if I can find any answers to the lingering despair that was my own experience of the second panel of my own three-volume work in the second painting of Wolff’s.
Imagination being what it is, I would have no problem with Wolff’s three painting, with their questions and visual resolutions as images on the covers of my own volumes from twenty or thirty years before Wolff’s were painted. As easily I could see her response as one of horror at the thought, as though green fire at its most destructive was consuming the meaning of her canvasses.
Part of me wants to know if I can find any answers to the lingering despair that was my own experience of the second panel of my own three-volume work in the second painting of Wolff’s.
Imagination being what it is, I would have no problem with Wolff’s three painting, with their questions and visual resolutions as images on the covers of my own volumes from twenty or thirty years before Wolff’s were painted. As easily I could see her response as one of horror at the thought, as though green fire at its most destructive was consuming the meaning of her canvasses.
XIII.
The image of the woman making a fish from a rose as it is read to sit at the end of Wolff’s narrative arrives with an immense sense of narrative relief.
If we decide to read the work right to left, so that she is placed at the point of origin, it is equally satisfactory. The way she stands out from the background, the way the fire in this panel seems to be closer to resolution or taming, is simply reassuring to anyone who experiences the disruption of the green illumination perfusing the work.
Read in the traditional direction, the three paintings foreground “shadow,” “myth,” and “body” respectively.
Body is also in the first, though it’s entailed in the represented architecture.
Shadow is there in the third, in the backgrounds, enfolded in the petals of the roses, wedged in the grout between the bricks.
XIV.
In the first painting, as I return to it on my computer
screen, I am reminded (or am I seeing it consciously for the first time?) that
there is a great deal of blue in the walls of the building I assume we are
within. The liquid running in over the cobbles is as likely to be tar or crude
oil as water. (That, I know I have
noticed before.) And the decorative fish swimming down the wall on the upper
right gives a sense as “realistic” as any of the goldfish swimming through the
air in the other paintings.
XV.
Looking again at the middle picture, the very act of writing
about it makes it seem much lighter and livelier than my own meditation
transformed it into: the city itself is an intricate city, a city in
silhouette, not a heavy city at all, which is how my own ruminations on it
pushed it in my imagination.
Looking at it again I feel both disoriented and relieved to have it back.
The particular myth of the sphinx as Mesopotamian angel/monster is, at least in my recent meditations on it, a highly creative image, and one that comes with renewal and—in Wolff’s central panel—is painted with it.
Looking at it again I feel both disoriented and relieved to have it back.
The particular myth of the sphinx as Mesopotamian angel/monster is, at least in my recent meditations on it, a highly creative image, and one that comes with renewal and—in Wolff’s central panel—is painted with it.
XVI.
In the third picture, the chandelier, the bridge shape across the top, the red roof—all these are details that vanished during my reading in note III. The rose in the woman’s hands is being transformed into a fish, from the tale forward. The expression on her face as she performs this change in mid air is . . . in a word, priceless.
As familiar as I am with these pictures, writing as I look at one of them changes it even now so that every new look is a healing of the violence of interpretation.
XVII.
It is—I almost want to say, “of course”—precisely when I free
myself of my own story of the artist painting these pictures that they speak
most directly to my own needs as an eye in time. For whatever reasons and by whatever process,
it is an image created. If I loose the why and how (in which only my own
uncertainties of the moment can be reflected) and try to fix on the what, the
picture is (or the pictures are) more numinous, richer, and more a sat of
paintings in which I can grapple with what kept drawing me to them in the first
place:
XVIII.
The green fire is bright. All the figures walk on the surface
of the liquid that grounds them. The sphinx in the central panel has no hands,
but paws. The liquid arching and falling from her breasts foams and bubbles in
the fountain’s pool before her hind paws. She is green, but parts of her
body—her own paws, the edges of her wings—catch all sorts of other colored
light from the painting, holding it together.
The intelligence and energy in the paintings details are what, at this viewing, I am responding to the most. And the light.
The intelligence and energy in the paintings details are what, at this viewing, I am responding to the most. And the light.
XIX
Historically, art seems to move from picturing what we know is there (what we think of as primitive art) and moving on to what it looks like. And somewhere painters such as Wolff come in to paint what is not there and what it might look like anyway. The result is cities or landscapes recognizable as such, but impossible to locate in the world.
This is certainly the city of Green Fire, as it is in her most recent series of landscapes.
Under such a regime the works become combinatory, immediately seem to be in the midst of conversations with other works as soon as you blink at them, infinitely legible.
Thus the way morning or evening comes through my windows in the apartment in Philadelphia where I currently live is the way the light of the Green Fire comes through the windows of the city that bears its name. It’s an interesting experience how, over the years that it has been talking to me, that I have become so at home in it.
XX.
.
Clearly physical and conceptual space fall between each of the paintings. Even as there is clear passage between paintings one and two, two and three, there is resistance as well.
It is what
gives the city its sense of size..
The interior molding does not get from painting one to painting two. The wings of the sphinx do not make it from painting two to painting one.
The interior molding does not get from painting one to painting two. The wings of the sphinx do not make it from painting two to painting one.
The red
illumination in the brick archway of painting two is not continued in the brick
arch of painting three. Neither is the sidewalk.
And of course the massive symmetry of painting three is not
continued in painting two.
XXI.
Buildings in the city suggest apartments and restaurants, and even possibly places of entertainment, but not libraries or places of business per se.
Clearly, however, there are catacombs, which at least in the neighborhood we are in have access to the surface.
Buildings in the city suggest apartments and restaurants, and even possibly places of entertainment, but not libraries or places of business per se.
Clearly, however, there are catacombs, which at least in the neighborhood we are in have access to the surface.
And at least one
thing the Green Fire has displaced is weather itself.
The antennae pretty clearly suggest broadcasting. But I doubt the city is as massively on line as we are in the present, since—after all—it is a work of the last decade of the 20th century, not the 21st.
The antennae pretty clearly suggest broadcasting. But I doubt the city is as massively on line as we are in the present, since—after all—it is a work of the last decade of the 20th century, not the 21st.
XXII
The tiles and cobbles of the first painting suggest to me sunset, locality, edifices that are utilized largely by the public. Others have recently passed by. Others will soon arrive.
XXIII
In the second painting there are two lighted doorways open and exiting onto the street. And there is a larger one that visually balances the sphinx on the other side of the walkway. Out of its half visible arch, one of the fish in the series swims—not in the water, but through the air.
I find this very hopeful.
In fact, I find this the most optimistic node in entire sequence.
XXIV
A curtain of green fire hangs across in one of the doorways, reflected on the water. I am intrigued by the little blue window in the city’s upper copula.
In fact, I find this the most optimistic node in entire sequence.
XXIV
A curtain of green fire hangs across in one of the doorways, reflected on the water. I am intrigued by the little blue window in the city’s upper copula.
In this panel there
are suggestions both of excess and resolution.
XXV
Guy Davenport translated the Italian version of an ancient Egyptian maxim (“Il paradiso per un uomo e la sua buona natura”), "A man's paradise is his good nature."
That's good to remember because often
neither men nor women have any other.
-->
Be kind--to people and animals and
strangers---because that is how bits of paradise can be spread. Even when you
live with some one else who is uncomfortable with all three.
There is room for this insight in the burning city too.
There is room for this insight in the burning city too.
Monday, October 20, 2014
Wolff in Brooklyn
When I was in art school I wrote poems about autumn and my
feet.
Its autumn now and I’m living in the same exact
neighborhood. I walk the sidewalks
and absorb the nameless colors of the pavement stones, the cement, the bark of
trees and the drift of fallen leaves.
There are hills that lend geographical meaning to my walks, even if
there seems to be a destination and a prize (a ladder, a lunch, a new
sketchbook), the actual volume of the land has far more weight than any
excursion’s impulse. The untethered
quality of my body is exaggerated because my equilibrium is broken. I move through the streets as though
hydroplaning. Exactness doesn’t seem
desperately precious until it departs.
So much is possible and unwritten that I lean into the
ghosts that occasionally accompany me.
They, of course, can only offer furry warmth. It is not nothing, but it isn’t related to the manipulation
of the days. It is a back blow
glow of love. It is definitely
something because it is what I have lost in the real time of this
dimension. But I cannot access it
in a retinal, tactile way. I
cannot hear their voices. It is
the autumn of intuition; it is the autumn of the cracked heart. Radar is off, sonar is down and the
stride of my feet is unpredictable.
When I wrote of my feet I was interested in what a month of
walking barefoot in Brooklyn had done to my souls and heels. Ridiculous or not I remember it with
nostalgia for the strange, dreamy focus of an 18 year old trying to be an
artist. The searing energy of that
time propelled me buoyantly and haphazardly forward. My lack of finesse and discernment was melded with a
hypnotic ability to focus visually, and to work. I made lots of bad paintings, lots of silly drawings. But there were some gems that fell,
fairytale-like from my frog-spewing hand.
It was gloriously unedited and overseen only by the impulse to move my
hand across a piece of paper or canvas.
I drew all the time and everywhere. I drew on the subway; I drew the ballet classes at Julliard
when the Royal Ballet from London was in town, always hoping that Nureyev would
show up. I drew in Eric’s, the
local bar---you could drink at 18 then.
I drew sitting in the hallway in front of my dorm room. I painted everything that seemed paint
worthy, which in my case was figurative, dream imagery. Only later did I try to be more of an
abstract, even minimalist artist.
An interesting phase in which I painted and drew fields of color with
odd, X-marks-the-treasure-spot scribbles, occasionally words. That didn’t last and I returned to the
creation of spaces and unfinished narratives. I relinquished monochromatic and grey tones for the
world of intense color. My crazy,
shoeless self was back.
And so, here again on the same sidewalks, although the
neighborhood is vastly changed, there is still a lingering sense of those
cracked feet. Can I find that
ruthless propulsion into image making without the barefoot month? This is perhaps a question for my
ghosts.
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
in the wake of March
After a year of working on a single piece, Conference of the Birds, then arranging to have it framed, and suddenly having the wall empty again--the time of Pisces came in and a month of painting craziness happened. In it's wake: eight paintings, as though the tide of March washed in and left treasures on the beachfront of my studio. Now to wonder what the returning waters will bring...
Monday, March 31, 2014
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Friday, March 21, 2014
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Monday, August 12, 2013
Artist house
Where I live becomes the inside of my head. Over years it develops a patina of flavor. It has vistas and it has weather detailing. There are favorite sites, even views from high places. They all flow one into another, changing with the time, the light, the mood, and the author's intervention...
Saturday, August 10, 2013
communications
Today I received a missive from someone who had a dream, wherein our recently deceased, mutual friend sent her a message for me. The message was that he heard me and that he was there (with me). The dreamer and I have never met, although we have both heard of each other.
So goes the morning.
As I recently told another friend I often feel that I am not good at being a human being. Not that I'm a bad one, just some confusion about the lay of the land.
Or perhaps a rather huge confusion about the geography of here, and now.
I find the best way to navigate this lack of clarity is to paint. Then I am making beautiful maps. I suspect they are largely unrelated to what other humans perceive, but always hope that the tourist delight I take in making them will come across.
So goes the morning.
As I recently told another friend I often feel that I am not good at being a human being. Not that I'm a bad one, just some confusion about the lay of the land.
Or perhaps a rather huge confusion about the geography of here, and now.
I find the best way to navigate this lack of clarity is to paint. Then I am making beautiful maps. I suspect they are largely unrelated to what other humans perceive, but always hope that the tourist delight I take in making them will come across.
Friday, August 9, 2013
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Surfing the City
...so sometimes its just too hard to be human. Let me be a carrot with beautiful hair, or an oak tree with years of days in the sun, the rain, the animal infestations, just growing and loosing my leaves.
And then I go out into the tide of city, cut through the crowd on a good knee day, and perhaps sidle on the others. The energy surrounds, defiles, uplifts, and regardless of how you feel, will carry you. The trick is to be in cahoots with it. This is my buddy; the crazy, giant city, effluence. I'm with it. I'm gonna ride this wave till I can't carry the board to the sea, and then I'll hopefully find the sea at my doorstep, my inner door and then at my feet every morning.
And then I go out into the tide of city, cut through the crowd on a good knee day, and perhaps sidle on the others. The energy surrounds, defiles, uplifts, and regardless of how you feel, will carry you. The trick is to be in cahoots with it. This is my buddy; the crazy, giant city, effluence. I'm with it. I'm gonna ride this wave till I can't carry the board to the sea, and then I'll hopefully find the sea at my doorstep, my inner door and then at my feet every morning.
Monday, August 5, 2013
NYC August morning
There is a lick of cool in the air, and although it's only the beginning of August I can taste the end of summer before it exhales its last great breath of heat over us. Since there were those several weeks of truly grim weather--this is a joy, only slightly flavored with the melancholy of change.
I've been working on my new website Wolff Land. There will be a video sometime, hopefully soon. Spent a Sunday working with director and camera person which was wonderful. I hadn't know that you could use a camera lens like a brush. I liked being directed. It allowed me to just surf on ideas and images and not think too hard about structure. They even filmed me painting, which at first I was reluctant to do, but the minute I started fooling with colors on a surface the camera didn't seem too important.
All is in flux and I'm almost four weeks five weeks through my six week Intensive Chinese class. My brain daily takes in a huge amount of information and daily rejects some. It will be interesting to see what remains when the tide of intensive recedes.
I've been working on my new website Wolff Land. There will be a video sometime, hopefully soon. Spent a Sunday working with director and camera person which was wonderful. I hadn't know that you could use a camera lens like a brush. I liked being directed. It allowed me to just surf on ideas and images and not think too hard about structure. They even filmed me painting, which at first I was reluctant to do, but the minute I started fooling with colors on a surface the camera didn't seem too important.
All is in flux and I'm almost four weeks five weeks through my six week Intensive Chinese class. My brain daily takes in a huge amount of information and daily rejects some. It will be interesting to see what remains when the tide of intensive recedes.
Sunday, August 4, 2013
Garden of Light | WolffLand.com
The website is up! You can actually buy prints, or paintings......or just wander through the rooms listening to the paintings talk to each other. It's a museum, also.
The Wolff Museum
This is just one place you could go:
Garden of Light | WolffLand.com
The Wolff Museum
This is just one place you could go:
Garden of Light | WolffLand.com
Saturday, February 16, 2013
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