Green Demon Foliage & return

Here is the garden with studio (foreground) and house (with little tiny kitchen window). The garden reaches out between the two, a demon green tongue grown furry and cocky in the days and days of rain. Everywhere the foliage makes its patterns, overlaying, overlapping, interweaving green on green, lace on leaf, frond on frond, and petals floating, gliding on the foamy tide.




in the midst, a spot of human comfort:




...and then plunging back into green's self:




on the way back into NYC you see the helter skelter of NJ and the promise of Manhattan:




and then the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel:

I forgot!

Clearly, mainlining foliage for several days is not conducive to hindsight reconstruction. I remember that I did go out more than once yesterday. I went up Broadway and into Pearl River where I found these shoes awaiting me. Very sparkly. I might even wear them. I might even paint them.

the foliage

Did you ever have one of those days where you just paint foliage? You know, where you maybe go out once to the post office, but can't remember the next day if you did, indeed, even leave the loft. Like that.
Sometimes when there is such a day I go out later and see everything as if it's a painting.....the stonework of buildings, the fluid melt of traffic, the fabrics of people following their motions, & the sky heaving between buildings.

So, to the foliage--still accruing, curling, blushing unaccustomed color and circling, ever so slowly, the two dancers:



This one is way too dark but I kind of like its before-the-storm light:

faces & places

One of my favorite places is the sun chair--where I sit and look at whatever painting I'm working on. At the moment the view fills the yearning for landscape...






...since this is the view of morning light, horizons mitigated by structure inside (& out)...






But there are faces. This is Indigo and I. She visited recently to attend my son's high school graduation. We had a brief sojourn as exotic women shawled in ancient silks...



Jan Meissner


..and then there are the others, still dancing, their landscape bower becoming ever more complex. The more the detail develops the better I like their dance...

Lynda Barry, Shiva & Kali

In between days of painting I went to see Lynda Barry at the NYC Cantor Film Center. I'm a big fan of her work but have never heard her speak. I didn't realize that I was going to be laughing so hard I would cry. One guy in the audience began to slide out of his seat. She was amazingly perceptive about making art and its biological purpose, the nature of memory and how we react to what we think is real but know isn't.
I then decided to read her book Cruddy which is the only one I have that I hadn't read. It's a full out horror story. Who knew. It smells of rotting meat, train tracks and youth.
She's great.




In the studio Shiva and Kali are still dancing, and I'm still chasing them with a brush...

2 Views

Outside on Church Street they are doing a fashion shoot, having the models pretend to walk across the street over and over.....





Inside I have been working on the new painting, pretending that Shiva and Kali are dancing on the wall together forever and forever...

Performance at Church Street Studio

Last night we had a performance of my aerial students.

Emma:



Jan Meissner

Jan Meissner



Jan Meissner



Jan Meissner


Charlotte:


Jan Meissner

Larry Hedrick




Jan Meissner


Jan Meissner



Britt Nhi Sarah:



Jan Meissner

Jan Meissner
Jan Meissner

Larry Hedrick


Larry Hedrick






Jan Meissner


Jan Meissner

Brooklyn Garden Guru

Out in Brooklyn my friend, Sally, has been creating a garden for several years. One of the first things she made was a small pond. She told a friend that she had read that if your pond is just right the frogs will come. He scoffed. She got fish for her pond and adopted a turtle. All flourished. Recently she began to hear, well, frog noises. People doubted. They, again, scoffed.
But out in Brooklyn the frog has come to Sally's pond. And a bullfrog at that!

Fire Escape Views

After the the green free form of my garden and the tangle of spring upstate the grey linears of NYC are especially strong in the overcast shroud...
peering off the fire escape along with the pigeons I view my Friday morning geometries:



...looking north is more narrow and darker. Being in New York involves a lot of outdoor living, but the change from in to out is always dramatic, unlike less urban places where the transition is softer. One's nest away from the street usually has a strong individual aura that sets it apart from the overwhelming mass persona on the street. The morning's emptier streets are such a delight--one becomes lighter and physically expanded as your psyche relaxes to interplay with space, leaving off the usual dance of constant interweaving and pin--ball sensitivity.

Green

...upstate sitting in the garden watching the bits of tree fluff float in lazy parabolas...I find myself dreamily melted into the gold green...



I wander between garden and studio in between bouts of wild grass hacking and weed pulling...




the magic window aperture between the two:

...in the studio

I started the under drawing on the new painting (click to enlarge):



...and then worked on it again the next day:




looking in the other direction...out the window in the late afternoon light:

Hero(ines) & poets on the Hudson

Looking south by southwest past a blue lantern you can just see the Statue of Liberty holding her post in the harbor:


Looking at New Jersey:



Ulysses standing guard on the edge of Manhattan:






Seamus Heaney's poem: Death of a Naturalist inscribed on the rim of a pool:

starting again

So now I've got another blank surface to work on. I always love the empty space before I begin to mark it up with lines and color. It has all of my fantastic head pictures and none of my hesitancy or imperfect lapse with the brush. Here it is, having mute conversations with those around it already full of themselves.