Mist and Sun

In the garden the shapes melt and fur in the mist. Their shadows soften and their leaves kiss.
It is not so with the ghosts that flit through the body like needled threads. One cannot avoid them any more than the air can stand aside from the passage of birds.



What color is mist? Is it blue or violet or simply just a dissemblance of form?





..and then the sun turns everything to color leaning against black. One underestimates the charisma of black until green gets drunk in summer's seductive fold.

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...

Dream Deer to Summer

This is a paper painting (pencil and watercolor) I did several years ago. I gave it to a friend who had it framed and hung it in her apartment. I had forgotten about it, so when I visited her and saw it hanging at the end of a long, narrow hallway (which funneled you straight into the image) I saw it as though it wasn't mine. I was smitten. I decided to do an oil.
When I did the paper version I had no preconceived ideas--I just started drawing and painting. When I did the oil I was beginning with the original picture and it then began to take on a more realized, intensely illusional quality. The path turned into a stream and the figures took on weight and color. The painting itself became the dreamy essence of summer:

this summer

Now that it is cold and the rain strips the last memory of an overlong summer from the piscean brain, I find this: the path through my studio garden. Very similar to the fish's progress, it curves its way. In a winter garden there are no obvious luxuries, but here as in my brain there are endless moments of delicate details and colors rippling through their possiblities with the changing light. I think I'll put this one in my pocket and keep it as the grey light fills the volumes of NYC.