Avatar & cat

Seeing, being

I've been working on portraits of friends and discovering the difference between painting a face you've been drawing and painting for decades and one that you recognise but haven't examined intimately. I went off to the Frick today to look at masterpieces of the genre: Titian, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Ingres, and Bellini.
Meanwhile my son has gone off to college and I am bereft of the face I have painted and drawn since he was two weeks old. Not to mention his company.
Looking at beautiful paintings is always good, but there are many ways to go wonky.
I've been reading Tim Winton. Not since Patrick White has someone quite managed to chord so many of my aesthetic and personal buttons.
Not to mention his deep appreciation for wonkiness.

Bumble Love

Looking West

Light is the sculptural element. Here, where my eyes pass daily, is the reinvention of an odd space. The afternoon sun illuminates the lab lab plant taking over the window behind the lace, and just kisses the tops of the balls sequestered in and next to the Pilates table.

Jewel Thief

This guy used to be dancing with my artist figure of a space alien up on the shelf with comics, children's books and poetry, but now is fishing from the side of the jewel canal.

Luminance

So there you are with the 10 foot ladder out and your son holding it steady so you can go up and change a bulb in the track lighting. You eventually come down with a dead bulb. There is another from the kitchen, only slightly different. In your hand: two spherical cones of jeweled, iridescent metal.
So how dull can life be when changing light bulbs is like this?

Central Wolffland

...new painting...
My son said it looked like a Dr Seuss landscape which I consider high praise.
There is a perfume bottle, a shackle, and a paisley scarf. In my time with the circus I developed a serious romance with shackles. It goes with the thing for translucency, curlicues, and distant vistas. You never know what will come riding (flying, floating, sprinting or in some cases swimming) over the horizon. But just in case you have a few things happy in the foreground-- to keep things going while you see what turns up.

mirror stare

Wolff does Wolff

So this is what I worked on today...

bottle face

Lacking a human I've resorted to glass. I've got two people lined up in the next few weeks who have agreed to sit for portraits. Till then its whatever I find around the house or I may have to resort to the mirror.

images from upstate

A week upstate amid thunderstorms, greenery and discovering wasps and a toad living in the car. I convince my son to sit for me and I paint like crazy to make this:




Where usually August is dry and plants are yellowing, this year the rain beat itself against the earth. The garden got ideas of its own and I just let it:

Monsieur Leotard

Eddie Campbell and Dan Best's book: The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard has come into my grasp via Mr Campbell's visit and talk in NYC.
So what we have is a stone skip through history beginning with our hero's predecessor taking a huge dump before leaping off the trapeze and ending with our hero's demise (failing the catch after the leap off the trapeze). In between is a completely senseless and sense-full account of love (including inter species amour), daring, history and how to view life after living long enough to realize its foolish inevitability. The art is all over the place from scribbly vintage Campbell to wonderful loose watercolor extravaganzas. By the end laughter and love just scoot ahead of sadness and folly. May all our episodes be so.

anteater's conversation with God

So I had this wonderful dream about an anteater and then I read M J Harrison's The Course of the Heart. That explains everything.

bit of self

Wolff on youtube

Bird Fall

This week I decided to start right in again with paint--taking some of my birds from the freezer and doing multiple portraits. The top guy is a hummingbird that my friend, Indigo, sent me in the mail, its coffin a business envelope. The bottom one I found one day walking home from Chinatown. I saw it as I was going west and scooped it up into my purse without stopping. I admit to a certain chagrin at picking up dead bodies off the street.
Meanwhile my son and I went to see the second and third parts of The Human Condition. It is still in the front room of my brain. I would rate it three blades through the heart.

Kali Yuga dance

Here in the Kali Yuga epoch Shiva and Kali dance the dance of light. In spite of myself this painting has come out the way it has, dragging me behind it, oblivious to any attempt on my part to effect its trajectory. At one point I did try to assume some sort of control and modified the composition and content. I had to paint it all out. Towards the end it threatened to spin out of control and splash itself on the surrounding walls. It allowed me to nudge here and there: tailoring a skintight set of duds.
...you may click to enlarge

summer in the city

The dark shadows punched in the garden's green like wormholes, the light sliding off the leaves above these recesses, and the intricate tissue of flowers...
...and now after several days back in the city within a pool of molten air--last night my son and I trekked out to see the first part of The Human Condition, a three hour plus movie directed by Kobayashi and starring Tatsuya Nakadai. The walk to Film Forum was past groups of people who hovered like fish off their favorite coral reefs, bits of jewelry glinting as they shifted to and away from one another. Various eateries gave off red glows and murmurs.
The film was grueling but beautiful. We plan to see the other two parts in the next few days, which brings the entire running time to almost ten hours.
So it is to live in Gotham/Atlantis in the summer.

The Garden

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...

important information from Brooklyn

According to my friend, Robert Morales, the best line in philosophy is:


Slippery when wet