The Faramia Duo

This was our double trapeze act, the name being a combination of mine (Mia) and Donna's last (Farina). The tent in the little painting is the Big Apples's but we didn't have that name until we went out on the road with a three ring show on the west coast.
A bit of history in paint...

The Drop

1985
more water
and always the head butt of dark and light
one of the more exciting things to happen in the great mess of painting while extracting a readable image from it
really, the attempt to paint light (thus employing its opposite) is the reason for much of the centuries of fuss..its a pretty good reason, too
and thus we come to color which is the blush at the word, the swoon at the touch, to light

Between the Wars: Dreamtide

Done in 1983 from an actual dream.

dark scribble

...a bit of detail from an old, old painting, from the time of acrylics, which for me feels prehistoric. I still love scribbles and they have shown up in my newest painting as undercurrents in the atmosphere of the studio. I like that they are pure hand and yet completely open to illusionist reading. Hence my passion for Twombly.
My brain is too full of images to go such a route. There is no thing that can be seen in or out of the head that isn't a possible painting.
I guess you could say I'm an omnivore inclusivist.

Witttgenstein & Wolff

I did a series of paper paintings using Wittgenstein's aphorisms (as I call them) out of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I don't pretend to understand the book at all, but I really like the little bits. This one caused a lot of reaction when I hung it in a show at a restaurant upstate. The show was called Sex & Death and went up around Halloween. I left a blank book for people to give their opinions. No one objected to images of Death (as I usually depict him as a skeleton with one wing), but this piece got to people. No one seems to have read the quote and looked at any of the images included except for the anatomical one. I thought that the selection of volumes (ladle, vagina, skull top, and carved white pumpkin) along with the words was pretty interesting. When I'm in the studio I'm not thinking of ways to unglue the viewer. Its more about what I find fascinating and visually twisty enough to unlock the eyes, brain & heart together. And then, of course, I always want to share it with others.

Jungle Island at Night

This is an imaginary place I often painted. Not unlike City of Green Fire, it maintains permanent real estate in my mind. I have a yearning to go back to dreamy places. There is a landscape brewing, and I have been collecting peripheral images to encourage it.

Easter

I went to the Met to see Chinese scroll paintings (dreamy, glorious entities), and then walked through Central Park. The bluebells and hellebore were up and blooming. There was music everywhere and I stopped to draw a group near the bandshell. This was the base player:


While they were playing a large hawk flew into a nearby tree. It was a very light colored bird. I don't know if it was Pale Male, but certainly of his lineage if not. It took off and flew over the crowd, dropping its huge shadow across us. The band played on.

one-armed handstand on the water

A long time ago I wrote a short story where the ending was this image. It was a science fiction story about a circus performer who works with a show that travels to other planets. With a bit of editing:

From the building I walk down to the sea. I step out onto the water. The clear emerald face meets my foot with a cold tongue. Below swim the creatures of this sea, their clouds the white soles of my feet, and between us my reflection, breaking and reforming with the swells. I walk out far enough to lose sight of land. I am the single vertical on the plane of moving water.
Bending over I see movement in the depths; movement beyond my own liquid face that comes up to meet me. Cautiously I place one hand on the surface and shift weight into that shoulder. The cold wet clasps my fingers. I bend my knees and spring up, all weight coming down through one arm. There, balanced; one armed handstand on the water. A small wave slaps my wrist. Wind blows spray into my face. I taste salt.

drinking the trees

I think its about time to start breathing in the green, consider light that penetrates leaves before it palms your eyes, and take the draught of arboreal spirits.
In the meantime I watched No Country for Old Men and relished the taste of dust, blood, and metal. I don't think that was exactly the point, although it certainly was part of the flavor. I really like Cormac McCarthy. I found his book The Road to be one of the best I've read in the last few years.

shorthand water

I found this series of tiny canvases I did a ways back..all of water. I see it now as a shorthand of things I have expanded on since, especially with the Catspider paintings:




I like the abbreviated forms of line and iconography, but am equally fascinated with realizing the whole dream in my head. It would be interesting to go back and forth within the same time period.

in the studio

We are working on new shapes in the lyra. The painting (behind me) is creeping along, although I'm sick of painting my own face. I went to the Frick the other day and soaked up some serious magic, came home and worked again on my face. I'm looking forward to someone else's.
The wind is blowing fierce up from the harbor. It has a silky,throaty sound that makes the traffic seem tinny.

ink & pastel

A bit of chalk and sooted water, a little dip into an odd movie (Kiss of the Spider Woman), and you get this. It doesn't take much to nudge the hand and eye into imagistic action. Actually the brain is usually jabbering away behind the controls, trying to wrest them in that direction most of the time. Although, sometimes its nice just to watch the movie of possibilities roll by and laze back in the viewer's couch.

double trapeze rigging

If you can't quite manage the walking on water bit, aerial work is very satisfying.
..and the great thing about visual art is that you can do anything. Its an illusion, and thus infinitely protean.

Ides of March

A Piscean's dream, to walk on water, so that the soles of one's feet would feel the kiss of sea, yet resist the temptation of gravity.

New Year's Eve 1995

...collaged from my massage school notebook doodles, various fancy papers, photos of another paper piece, and a bit of watercolor...

water lilly pads

A scribble & a scratch of paint on raw linen...
Sometimes you have to go opaque to get transparent & reflective.
I find that the impulse to do the offhand loose and make the detailed, in-depth depiction are arguing for the reins in my brain.

nothing fancy, just water

It's the time of Pisces. All that is needed is a body of the above. Therein the fish will disappear like Alice down her terrestrial tunnel. There is no problem with up, down or sideways. Its all available for laze, swim or hover. The diagonal fin dance is also good.
The truth is that the fish lives in this element all year around, but now the rendition of its face becomes beautifully transparent.

don't eat any large rocks & prophecies

I find it ridiculously perfect that I still find this painting amusing and aesthetically in harmony with my brain.
I think I might still have it somewhere.
And then there is this one which was painted even earlier (1973?). The mysterious orange V which I scribbled into the surface has always intrigued me. I have no idea why I did it, except as a bit of Delphic graffiti in honor of my red haired son, Virgil, who arrived 17 years later.

into the night

There are two jackhammers going at once, the roar of some other machinery and the thud and scrape of a backhoe. I don't see the gigantic pipe that was on the flatbed...actually the flatbed seems to be gone. Maybe the pipe is in the ground already. I have a huge bucket of ice in the bathroom.
Running water and plumbing are glorious.

collapse of civilization (local)

When you wake up to the sound of helicopters circling endlessly overhead you know that something is broken, escaped, shot, or caught in the act. All it takes is one pipe. In this case the water main on Church Street. Just glad I don't live around the corner from the governor.