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Archive for March, 2011

War Horse

Posted in Neat Stuff, tagged on March 10, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I’ve seen several ads lately for a stage show opening for previews this coming week at Lincoln Center in New York.  Called War Horse, it tells the story of a young man and his beloved horse in England during  World War I.  His horse is sold to serve England in the calvary ( remember that this was WW I and horses were unfortunatelystill a large part of then modern warfare) in the fighting in France.  The horse ends up serving on both sides of the battle and ends up lost in no-man’s land.  The young man sets out to find his horse and bring him home.

Sounds compelling.  The interesting thing is the amazing puppetry that takes place onstage.  They have created life size puppets of the horses from leather, steel and aircraft cable that, operated by two puppeteers underneath the horse and one at the front, fully simulate the motion of horses, even to the smallest details such as a quick flick of the tail or an ear twitch.  They’re also strong enough for a man to ride which creates remarkable opportunities for a stage production, allowing them to have a show where the central figure is a horse without actually subjecting a real creature to the stress of performing on a small stage.  The puppets, created by the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa, are remarkable.  I have to admit that I spent a bit of time just watching videos on Youtube of these creatures moving and am stunned at the sense of reality thay create. 

The show first opened a couple of years back on London’s West End and has drawn huge crowds and rave reviews since that time.  So if you’re in London or NYC this year, it might be worth a peek if the opportunity arises.   Below is a British newsclip telling a little more about the show. 

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Grant Wood’s Winter

Posted in Favorite Things, Influences, tagged on March 9, 2011| 1 Comment »

January-- Grant Wood

I’ve expressed my admiration here for the work of Grant Wood more than once.  I find his imagery compelling, especially the way he creates mood and tension in what seem to be typical, mundane scenes.  His paintings and lithographs often have a wonderful rhythm throughout them that sings to me.  I see these qualities captured beautifully in a series of stone lithographs he created that capture the feeling of the winter months in quiet and moody tones.  The subtle shifts in the grays of the ink recreate the seasonal sense of atmosphere, a point illustrated wonderfully in this piece shown above, January.

February- Grant Wood

This print on the left, February, was completed in 1941 and has an ominous yet beautiful quality about it. I love the rhythm in its simple composition, from the patterned fields of the farm in the background to the placement of the dark figures of the horses to the three strands of barbed wire that cross the picture plane.  The way the dark horse in the foreground plays off the graded darkness in the right of the sky.  Just beautiful.

Maybe the foreboding nature of this print was an omen of Wood’s own death from pancreatic cancer the very next February.  He was born in February and died in February, one day short of his 51st birthday.  I am staggered by the work Grant Wood created in his relatively short life and wonder what might have been had he lived to a ripe old age.  I guess that doesn’t matter when he left such a rich legacy behind as it was.

Below, March is tour de force for the kind of rhythmic elements I’ve been describing.  The sway of the farm structures and the bare tree at the top of the frame.  The wagon and draught horse  riding in on the point of the winding path. The roll of the hills and the staccato rhythm of the fenceposts running upward.  Great stuff.  Instant inspiration…

March- Grant Wood

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The Dark Rise

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged , on March 8, 2011| 6 Comments »

This was a case of a painting dictating what is was to be, against my efforts to make it otherwise. 

 This new 24″ by 24″ canvas grew slowly and once I was painting  in the sky I kept telling myself that it had to be lighter and lighter.  Since  2002 when I was featuring paintings that featured darker tones (referred to as my “dark work“), I have resisted working in this series.  That work was not as well received as most of my work  and I was responding to the market.  Personally, I felt that this was very strong work, work that excited my sensibilities.  But if they had no place in the galleries, I was hesitant to spend my time on the work.

So when I was in the midst of this piece I began to naturally steer away from the darkness that marked these earlier works.  I saw the sky as being brighter and having high contrast but with each stroke there was a nagging feeling that that was not what was meant for this piece.  I went so far as to load my palette with lighter colors and stand, brush in hand, before the canvas, ready to change this painting in a way that would alter everything about it.

But there was something that told me to stop, that this was where the sky stopped, that this was the destination.  This was what this piece was meant to be.  I stepped back and put down the palette.  It would stay dark.

Now, maybe this will not fit into the marketplace for my work but that doesn’t matter.  When I look at this piece, that is the last thing in my mind.  I am immediately pulled into the picture plane and upward, over the knolls, toward the top of the rise where the sun/moon hovers, urging me to continue climbing.  It is complete and has its own life, its own momentum.  It is what it is and that is beyond me now.

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Snow Blindsided

Posted in Uncategorized on March 7, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Well, I wasn’t ready for this one.  I know that I’ve espoused my love for snow in this blog but this storm caught me off guard.  We ended up getting about 15″ which should be no big deal but with the thaw of the last week the plowing was hideous.  I spent about five hours this morning just getting a rough path through the heavy snow which is five hours less in the studio, shown here draped in white, which can make me a little testy.

But it is beautiful and, being March, the snow piles will soon be gone.  Anyway, the day is melting away and I must get to it if I’m going to salvage any of it for my work.

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David Bromberg

Posted in Biographical, Favorite Things, tagged , on March 6, 2011| 6 Comments »

When I was a kid there wasn’t much available on the radio beyond the local AM radio stations.  The one I usually listened to was WENY and at the time my favorite DJ was a guy named Paul Lee, who also hosted a late night Saturday monster movie as his alter ego, the Undertaker.  He was entertaining for a 12 or 13 year old kid and had a pretty sharp wit for a DJ in a small market.  He was always runnings call in contests and on one night Iw as lucky enough to be the 20th or whatever caller.  I won a stack of 25 albums and I thought I was in pig heaven.

Of course, they were just getting rid of all the promos that had come their way and never made it on the air.  Most were pretty bad and some were just not the taste for a teenager.  I remember there was an Ornette Coleman LP that was a very conceptual jazz thing that sounded like squawks and buzzes to my ears at the time.  Actually, it still sounded that way to me everytime I’ve pulled it out over the years. But there were a few gems in there.

One was this self-titled first album from David Bromberg.  It was produced by George Harrison who appears on the very enjoyable song, The Holdup.  Several of the songs are Bromberg’s interpretation of blues and traditional classics mixed in with some wonderful originals, including the strange and haunting Sammy’s Song.  I still listen to it on a regular basis and it has always held up through the many years.  Bromberg’s an interesting guy, a folk guitar wiz who basically quit the business for several years to learn the art of violin making.  He has returned and plays several shows a year but maintains a violin shop in Wilmington, Delaware.  He seems like a  man who lives life on his own terms.  A rare and wonderful thing.

Anyway, on this rainy Sunday morning, I’m glad I was the 20th caller and found this album.  Here’s Last Song for Shelby Jean from it:

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One from the Pile

Posted in Painting on March 5, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Yesterday I wrote about a piece that I considered somehow incomplete and how I was hoping to somehow  keep it from the failure pile.  Afterwards I decided to take a look at some of the pieces that occupy this pile .  Some are downright failures, just wrong in so many ways.  Drab color.  No sense of rightness in the lines of the composition.  No focus, no point in the whole piece.  Some are just bad concepts that just don’t mesh with my mind.

And then there are pieces like this fellow.  It’s a smaller piece on paper, I think about 3″ by 7″, and was painted several years back when I was in the midst of my Outlaw series, a group of dark figures who often held guns.  I remember very well painting this.  There were things I very much liked in this piece but there were little flaws, little nagging details, that bothered me enough to hesitate in showing it in a gallery.  I remember going back to this image many times back then, debating whether it worked for me.  Ultimately, I moved him to the failure pile.  Actually, it’s a bin but the pile sounds better.

Revisiting this piece is an interesting exercise.  I still have many of those same reservations but I find myself really intrigued by this piece.  It is probably destined to exist only in my bin but has something that strikes a chord for me nonetheless.

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Incomplete

Posted in Painting, Technique/History on March 4, 2011| 2 Comments »

In my studio I have several pieces that sit in varying states of  incompletion.  Some have sat for quite a long time, waiting for the possibility of a few strokes here or there to bring them to life.  Most have obvious flaws, the result of me taking the painting in a wrong direction in some way.  Some still have possibility and I will at some point revisit them.  Others have no chance to ever see the outside world and will be consigned to the failure heap.  I keep them around because often they possess certain concepts that just weren’t brought to fruition properly at the time but might work with a different approach.  So in that way they are useful.

Then there are pieces like the one above.  It’s from early last year, a piece that’s about 9″ by 16″ on paper.  For all intents and purposes, it is done.  But there’s something about it that nags at me, that tells me that it’s incomplete.  So for the past year I have been looking at this painting on and off, trying to ascertain what doesn’t click for me or if there’s a chance of making it work.  Or if it’s even worth trying to save.

In this case, I tend to think it’s worth saving.  I keep seeing things that I like a lot in it and think that sometime soon I might go back in and try to bring it to some satisfactory completion.  At least I hope I see things that make it worth going back in.  It may be that I know how much time I put into this painting initially and don’t want to see it squandered without a fight.

We’ll see.  Hopefully, it won’t be relegated to the failure heap.

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My Girl

Posted in Biographical, Favorite Things on March 3, 2011| 11 Comments »

This is my best girl, Jemma Jones, who passed away yesterday.   She was perhaps the sweetest creature to ever grace our lives and Cheri and I will miss her greatly.

Jemma came into our lives a little over five years ago. At that time,  I began looking for another pet to replace our poor little beagle, Mae Belle Brown, who had passed away two years prior and whose story is also a compelling one that I may tell here at another time.  I came across a photo online of this little red Corgi at a shelter about 70 miles away and it was love at first sight.

Jemma, it turns out, was rescued from a puppy mill in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania that was ran by the Amish.  The breeding of puppies to supply pet stores has become a huge cash crop for the Amish and in areas where there are concentrations of the Amish there are generally large numbers of puppy mills.  It was estimated that Jemma was about 7-9 years old at that time and had been bred many times.  She had no name that they knew of, which is not uncommon in these circumstances where the dog is treated as livestock,  so the rescuer gave her the moniker Jemma.  We added the Jones just for balance. 

 When they found her, she was wandering free in a large barn with a couple of hundred dogs in cages.  She was eating kernels of whole corn off the floor ( a practice she continued with us).  The representative of the rescue organization said that she may have been a favorite of the breeder because they had agreed to give her up because of lumps on her breasts rather than simply have her destroyed, which is often the case.  They had no intention of paying vet bills for a sick piece of livestock but were willing to at least let her have a chance else where.  For that, we are grateful. 

Over the next two years Jemma underwent surgeries to remove three of her breasts.  She endured the process with a real peaceful dignity and had great recuperative powers, often back to her happy demeanor within just a day or two after the major surgery.  She also was discovered to have a heart arrythmia and arthritis in her shoulders but despite these physical ailments, including the spectre of recurring cancer which had led the oncologists at Cornell to give her 6 months to two years to live, she lived her remaining years with great joy.  She was fast to excitement and her joy in the things that gave her pleasure was immense.  I have no greater joy in my life than the memory of her on a walk suddenly stopping and flopping on her back to wriggle in grinning ecstasy.  She loved to do this in the snow and even on the night when she went into respiratory distress she wanted to wriggle in the snow when I took her outside into the cold air so that she might breath easier.  But she couldn’t and at that point I knew she was in deep trouble.  She survived in an oxygen chamber at Cornell for five days but none of the many attempts made could relieve her symptoms and the team of doctors there was stumped in finding a cause besides the obvious conclusion that her cancer had metastasized in her lungs.

She was unhappy living in the confines of the oxygen chamber and we knew that it was time to let her go.  We spent quite a long time with her yesterday, just petting her and feeding her treats.  Despite her obvious discomfort in breathing, she was happy.  That was one of her great qualities, this ability to live in the very present, to find instant joy and not carry the past with her.  She went peacefully and quickly.  She has moved on and Cheri and I remain here with broken hearts and loving memories.

I would never insult parents by saying that Jemma was like a child to us.  There are definitely differences in the two, besides the obvious.  Children, when properly raised, become more and more independent until they go out on their own.  Pets become more and more dependent on their owners for their care and comfort as they age and grow sure of the love they receive.  The relationship is not like a parent but  more like that of a caretaker who offers love and protection and is rewarded with unconditional love.  It has been our great pleasure to see Jemma and Mae Belle flourish in the last years of their lives.  Both were exceedingly happy in the last years of their lives despite their physical problems.  And that happiness fills ones soul.

Thanks for coming into our lives, Jemma.  You have  filled my soul.

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A Thousand Miles From Nowhere

Posted in Favorite Things, Recent Paintings, Video, tagged on March 2, 2011| 1 Comment »

We’ve been spending a lot of time the past few days visiting our little dog, Jemma, in the hospital at Cornell where she is not doing so well. So I’ve been a bit distracted in my blog and my art, as well.  This is a painting on paper that I finished last week that I’m calling A Thousand Miles From Nowhere, after the title of a favorite Dwight Yoakam song of mine.  It’s about 10″ by 17″ in size and has a feeling of detachment that fits the title and my mood this morning.

Enough said.  Here’s the song whose title I borrowed.

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