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Archive for May, 2009

The Commitment

Posted in Biographical, Technique/History, tagged , , , on May 21, 2009| 2 Comments »

To SanctuaryI’m in the last few weeks before my show in June at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA.  As I’ve written in earlier posts, this is a time filled with finishing paintings, filling in the final details of pieces.  There’s photography to be done and then matting the pieces on paper and framing them all.  There are frames to be stained and sanded and glass to be cut.  When I see it all written out it seems like an awful lot of work but I’ve been doing this long enough that it seems like second nature, just something that must be done.

The one thing I do notice in these last few weeks is finding myself so immersed in what I have to do that I neglect the outside world even more than I do normally.  I read the newspaper and listen to the news but nothing seems to register, nothing seems to stick.  A few minutes later and I can’t remember much of what I’ve read or heard. Quite honestly, even when I’m reading my mind is focused on my work and, as a result,  my attention is never fully engaged.   This bothered me in the past, making me feel even more apart from the outside world.  Made me feel even less intelligent. Less informed.

I’ve come to accept this as part of who I am and what I do.  I realize now that for my work to succeed on any level, my total involvement and immersion in it is required.  Commitment.

This was somewhat reinforced by a video a friend sent me this past week of Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, talking about the common traits of those who succeed creatively.  He spoke of a commitment to do whatever their chosen field was, to immerse themselves totally, excluding many other aspects of their life in order to practice their craft.  I immediately knew what he was talking about and  felt somewhat reinforced in my commitment to my work.   So I put my head down, push the world aside and get back to it…

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The Catlin Gallery

Posted in Favorite Things, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on May 20, 2009| 6 Comments »

Renwick Museum Catlin GalleryThis is a shot from the George Catlin Gallery which was contained in the Renwick Gallery, a branch of the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.  It was one of my favorite exhibits in a tremendous space and always fills me with a new inspiration to create when I think of it.  It was primarily filled with portraits of Plains Indians by George Catlin  and the sheer number of the pieces and the scale of the room was overwhelming when you first entered.renwick-gallery

These photos don’t really capture the scale or feel of the room.  Although it seems at first immense, there’s a very comfortable atmosphere there, one that beckons you to sit on the benches there and just ponder.

For me, I think about the lives of those in the paintings, their day to day existence as well as the plight of their people.  I think about Catlin painting this huge group of work over the years and the passion and drive it must have taken to complete such a task. I think about basking in such a great space and feel quieted, although deep inside it makes me itch to have a brush in my hand.

If you’re in DC sometime, look up the Renwick Gallery. There’s a new exhibit featuring selections from their American collection.  You’ll be glad you did.

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Finding Joy

Posted in Quote, Recent Paintings, tagged , , on May 19, 2009| 1 Comment »

The Coming Together


 

Joy lies in the fight, in the attempt, in the suffering involved, not in the victory itself.

          — Mahatma Gandhi  

How do you define joy?  Is there such a thing as joy that is the same for every person or is finding joy strictly a personal preference?  Are there people who live without any joy at all in their lives or are there moments in everyone’s lives where they experience something close to joy?  Maybe it’s not a giddy kind of joy.  Maybe joy for some is a feeling of contentment, an absence of fear, an absence of pain.  

Maybe that’s it.  Maybe joy is finding that which takes away our fears and pains.

I don’t know.  I know that it doesn’t have to be sought.  It’s just there or it’s not.  For me, it might be as simple as laying in the grass and having my dog come over and lay against my chest.  It might be in sipping a cup of tea or watching the deer graze laconically in the yard.  It might be  in laughing out loud at something I’ve seen a hundred times yet still find funny or in making my wife laugh.  It can seem so simple yet I see people who seem joyless and I wonder where their joy might be.

Certainly, they must have something which brings them something akin to joy.  At least contentment.  But maybe it’s not for me to see or maybe they live a joyless existence.  Who knows?  Just something I wonder about on a sunny morning when the sun filtering through the trees, scattering patches of light on the thick grass beneath them, brings me joy.

By the way, the painting above is a new one, The Coming Together, that is part of the Principle Gallery show in June.  It features the entwined trees I sometimes use as well as the field rows.  I really like the feel of this piece and love the texture and color in the surface.  

Makes me happy.

Gives me joy…

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Conscience

Posted in Video, tagged , , on May 18, 2009| Leave a Comment »

The Oxbow IncidentI don’t like crowds.

Maybe it’s just some sort of neuroses like agoraphobia or maybe it’s just having developed a sense of uneasiness from seeing how individual people could react differently after becoming part of a group.  It always confounded me from an early age how the dynamics of a group could change the behavior of a person, bringing out characteristics that might be undetected in one-to-one interactions.  It’s as though the protection of the group brings out extreme attitudes that would otherwise be stifled.  The whole moral compass is pushed further  from the center and the sense of conscience that is present becomes diluted.

I was reminded of this feeling when I saw a short film about the actor Henry Fonda that talked of the parallels of his character’s experience  in the movie The Oxbow Incident , where he was the lone voice of reason against a mob that lynches three men without evidence of their guilt, with his own as a young boy in Omaha, Nebraska.  He was 14 years old in 1919 when he witnessed a mob storm the courthouse that was located across the street from his father’s printing business.  They  were inflamed by allegations made by a white woman that she had been assaulted by a black man.  A suspect had been taken into custody and was in the courthouse.  The mob, whose size was estimated to be between 5000 and 15000 people, exchanged gunfire with police in which two of the mob were killed.  The mayor of Omaha tried to intervene  and was beaten and himself lynched before being saved.  The suspect was not so lucky.  

The accounts of this mob rule are horrific.  Fonda carried this memory with him for the rest of his life and it informed many of the roles he had over his career.   In The Oxbow Incident his character confronts the mob afterward in a bar and reads them a letter written by one of the hanged men to his wife.  I could go on and on but I think the clip says it all…

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Women in Art

Posted in Neat Stuff, Video, tagged , , on May 17, 2009| Leave a Comment »

WomenInArtA friend sent me a link to this video yesterday, called Women in Art.  It’s extraordinarily well known on YouTube, having something like 9 million views.  I, of course, had never heard of it.

It is a montage of famous portrait paintings of women through the centuries morphing from one to the next.  The creator of this video, Phillip Scott Johnson, did a great job of choosing and arranging the subjects, earning him an award for his creativity from YouTube. The accompanying Bach piece performed on the cello  by Yo-Yo Ma fits beautifully.  Makes for a nice Sunday morning viewing.

If you would like to identify any of the paintings used in the video, click on the group of six paintings above and you’ll be taken to a website that identifies each.  Enjoy…

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Time Soluble

Posted in Recent Paintings on May 16, 2009| 2 Comments »

Time SolubleI’ve been looking at this new piece quite a bit lately as it rests in my studio, waiting to be sent out into the world as part of my show at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA in June.  

It catches my eye whenever I glance its way and there’s a quality to it that I can’t quite put my finger on but gives me great satisfaction nonetheless.  There’s a sense of timelessness in the piece as though the momentum of time has been halted and the moment is captured as a whole, not as just a fleeting flash in the continuum.  

The sky is not typical for my work and the wateriness of it reminds me of how time and moment soon dissipate, like drops of color in a bowl of water,  and once again we’re propelled from the stillness of the captured moment back into the acceleration of the continuum.  It’s for this reason I’ve titled this piece Time Soluble, another title picked from the titles submitted in the earlier Name This Painting! contest.  I send out thanks  and best wishes to Tom Seltz for this wonderful title.

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Currahee

Posted in Current Events, Neat Stuff, tagged , , , on May 15, 2009| 2 Comments »

CurraheeThis is a small painting from a few years back that is titled Currahee, a word I first heard in the WW II series, Band of Brothers .  It is a Cherokee word that means “stand alone” and it immediately struck me as a real word with some sort of innate power.  It was the battle cry for the 101st Airborne Division, the group of troops portrayed so well in Band of Brothers.  It stands for a sense of self-dependence with which I can identify so felt a connection with the word and my paintings, which are often primarily about the idea of standing alone.

The reason I mention this is that I recently saw a segment on CBS news about a soldier severely injured in Iraq, losing both his legs and suffering brain injuries which left him totally unresponsive. Back here in the States in the hospital, the soldier was visited by General David Petraeus who talked with the young man and after a bit, getting no response, turned to leave.  He turned back and yelled out the word.  Currahee.

The soldier immediately tried to sit up, trying to utter the word.  

Amazing.  Since then his progress has been remarkable and he is walking with the aid of two prosthetic legs and is speaking.  He recently appeared with Petraeus at, I believe, the New Jersey Hall of Fame.   You can see the original story here.

I am always in awe of the power of certain words and icons, how we place such personal meaning to them that they become ingrained in us, triggering instant emotion at the mere mention.  That is real power.

Currahee…

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Early Effort

Posted in Biographical, Favorite Things, Video, tagged , , , on May 14, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Fausts GuitarOne of the first times I sold something I had created myself  was when I screenprinted T-shirts and sold them through the back pages of various magazines (the rock magazine Circus primarily although I also sold an anti-Reaganomics shirt in the New Republic) back in the early 1980’s.  They surely weren’t works of art.  I knew little about screenprinting and taught myself by reading a few basic manuals and by studying product catalogs, trying to discern what I needed to get the job done.  The shirts were a little rough around the edges but I actually found myself liking that aspect.

.  It was a different world then and if someone wanted your product they couldn’t simply go online to see and order it.  They had to write a letter and send a check or money order then wait several weeks for the shirt to arrive.  It was a pretty cumbersome process so as a result, of course, I never sold vast numbers of my shirts or even made a profit.  I wrote it off as a lesson learned.  The best part of the whole endeavor was hearing from those who did go to the trouble of ordering.

I had a guy from Manchester, England who wrote this great note in this mad scrawl who wanted to trade bootleg concerts tapes for shirts.  Another fellow from Georgia reordered after getting his first and wrote how much he loved the shirt.  And there’s my now longtime friend Tom from Northern Ireland who ordered a couple of the shirts.  We have stayed in touch over these now more than 25 years, exchanging music and keeping up to date on the changes in each of lives.  He sent me music from many British and Irish band that I knew little of.   Many years ago he sent me a tape of traditional Celtic music from the Boys of the Lough that became one of my favorite driving tapes back then.  It was fiddle and drum driven and at certain points I found myself flying along at 90 MPH due to the churning fast pace of the music. 

Here’s a small sample of the fiddling from the band courtesy of their Aly Bain…

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Loloma

Posted in Influences, Recent Paintings, tagged , , on May 13, 2009| Leave a Comment »

LolomaThis is a new painting called Loloma that was done after I was invited to participate in an upcoming exhibit at Lovett’s Gallery in Tulsa, OK that is called Masters of Influence in which the invited artists create works in their own mediums inspired by the work of the chosen master-artist.  The master selected this year is Charles Loloma, a Native American silversmith/potter.  His multicolored stone jewelry straddles the worlds of Native American art and Modern art, possessing qualities that make it stand out in both worlds.  His work is bold and has an aesthetic vocabulary of its own that I find remarkable.

Charles LolomaIn doing a little research I came across the fact that he had studied ceramics after returning from World War II  not too far away from here at Alfred University, famed for their ceramics program.  That gave me a bit of a connection and made me wonder how his eyes  viewed the landscapes of western New York, if they influenced him in any way.  The works that I viewed online were stunning and modern, gorgeous collages of stone in a multitude of colors that could grace any modern art gallery.  I was taken by how he created a sense of place in such a beautiful and abstract form.  It reminded me, in appearance, of some of the glass art that I have loved over the years.  

I really didn’t know what to do when I began creating my piece that was to be influenced.  I wanted to simulate a typical landscape composition but with colors and shapes that might have been used by Loloma.  Perhaps the yellow/amber color that I selected for the foreground was more my color of choice, rather than Loloma’s, but I wanted my signature in the work as well.  It evolved as I painted it into something that seemed more like a painting of a glass window that was influenced by Loloma.  

It ended up as a piece that has a beautiful range of color and one that may have become far more my piece than Loloma’s.  It’s hard to fully capture the spirit of another’s work because when someone is creating work that is a form of their essence and being it contains a wholeness and intricacy that defies replication.  The best you can do is try to see the rhythm of their work and let it guide your own.  I can only hope that this is the case here.   However it got here, this is a piece full of color and rhythm.

The Masters of Influence show opens June 19th at Lovetts’s Gallery in Tulsa, OK.

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At the Movies: The 39 Steps

Posted in At the Movies, tagged , , on May 12, 2009| 5 Comments »

The 39 Steps posterAt least once a year, usually more, I watch Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps in the studio.  It’s one of his early films and has  a very dark look to it, pretty grainy which might turn off some who don’t appreciate the unique qualities of black and white films.  Like most Hitchcock films it’s suspenseful but with comic touches and moves along quickly as we follow the hero, played by Robert Donat, who is wrongly accused of the murder of a mysterious woman and pursued across Britain as he tries to find the real killers.  It serves as a loose framework for his later and better known North By Northwest, featuring the iconic scene with Cary Grant being chased down a prairie road by a plane.  It’s good fun and a great film  that I recommend highly, especially if you have any fondness for Hitchcock and his genre, which I certainly do.

 Robert DonatThe reason I mention this film is actually to mention Robert Donat, the star of the film.  He is probably totally unknown to most movie fans today which is tragic.  He was one of the most popular British actors of his time and died in the 1950’s at age 51 from asthmatic complications. He is probably for his portrayal of Mr. Chips in Goodbye Mr. Chips in 1939 for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor, beating out Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind, Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights.  Pretty stiff competition.  

I have to admit that I didn’t know a lot about Donat but over the years, as I continue to come across his films, I have come to really appreciate the greatness of his talent for communicating his roles on the film.  He had a very malleable look that could be very soft and foppish or could come across as strong and dashing.  He could play both poor or aristocratic characters with ease and gave all a great a depth.  I hope that more fans of movies will rediscover this now somewhat forgotten actor.  

 There are a lot of great actors out there who are very much like Donat in that they,too, are little remembered.  One of my favorites is Joseph Cotten who starred in scores of great movies like Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Third Man and Niagara just to scratch the surface.  He was always exceptional but, unfortunately, remains relatively unknown today.  But to those who have found him and Donat and many others, they remain huge talents whose body of work lives on today.  

They’re out there waiting to be found…

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