Spoon

Sometimes I make sculpture. Often sewn things (costumes, stuffed animals), but then again sometimes from found objects like this twisted piece of hemlock filled with gold encaustic, then drilled and hung. I think of it as a giant spoon of gold, floating just as its hemlock parent did in a huge curve above the creek in the Catskills. I used all my old circus rigging tools to hang it.

Heart in Traffic

That Catskill creek turned out to be an important place for me, visually as well as emotionally.
In this, the second catspider painting I did, it became the heart of the painting both literally and figuratively. The colors of the hybrid beings are a direct result of my having spent a week in Japan before I began work on the painting. Japan is a place that is unafraid of color. Its OK to have a lavender backhoe, or a man dressed in orange, pink and gold at the Kabuki (OK, onstage). And when I was there the telephone booths were brilliant green.

From Andes

There was a time when I spent summers up in the Catskill Mountains in the town of Andes. I stayed in a little house on top of one of those rolling hills (small mountains) that ripple through that part of New York. The view from the house was always in the throes of incoming weather: summer clouds, wind, morning mist, and thunderstorms. It never held still...




Down the hill in the middle of the field there was a creek, blissfully clean and cold, running between the high banks it had cut for itself. It emerged from a culvert beneath the dirt road, the circle of metal reflected among the happy summer jumble of rocks and wild flowers...




It made its way into the hemlock forest where, under the huge trees, it muscled its way around gigantic rocks furred in moss, in between fountains of ferns and tangled wild blackberries, all the way down to the reservoir miles below...






In the meadow a spring ran from underground in a scribbled wetness that joined the creek through a miniature realm of dark-mud deltas, greenery and shadowy, reflective chaos...