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Archive for May, 2012

Black Crow

Posted in Favorite Things, Music, tagged , , on May 13, 2012| 4 Comments »

One of the benefits of having my studio located in the woods is the opportunity to watch the wildlife from a fairly close perspective.  I have known all manner of animals over the years, from the mother raccoon and her kits that took up residence for a short time in the roof of my first, more rustic studio further up in the woods, and the everpresent deer that often nap  in the shady lawn outside my studio windows to the coyotes and bobcats that I have captured on my trail cam and have ran across in person, as well. 

I get to see how the animals interact, how they break down into family units and establish order.  How they survive the elements and their habitation among us humans.  Their survival instinct is powerful, a hard thing to see at times but powerful, nonetheless.

Over the years I have witnessed many deer with legs that have been broken, most likely from a misstep or an encounter with a woodchuck hole.  I am always amazed at their ability to persevere and prosper.  There was a doe several years ago who came around with a front hoof dangling, completely broken away from the leg above.  Eventually she lost the hoof completely, leaving a stump.  But it didn’t stop her.  She actually had 3 or 4 fawns over the next few years and it was only when she walked slowly to feed that you recognize that she was missing a hoof.  In full flight, she moved as fast as  the other deer and managed to evade predators and hunters for years.

I currently have a black crow that haunts the pines in front of my studio.  He came to my attention early in the winter.  I saw crow tracks in the snow that went from the studio all the way down the long driveway, about 1/5 of a mile.  I couldn’t understand why a crow would walk throught he snow when he could fly.  This went on for several days until I finally caught a glimpse of him, ambling up the drive.  It was a badly damaged  wing that hung off of his back to one side.  He would walk and hop with real determination and was seldom alone.  There was normally a group of crows that accompanied him, cawing to him from the trees above and sometimes coming down to walk with him.  I got the idea that they sometimes let him know what was ahead or behind, acting as his eyes in the sky.

I thought about trying to capture him and get him to an animal rehabilatation specialist such as the unit at Cornell but he was always quick to spot me and would disappear into the woods with surprising speed.  He was even aware and suspicious  of me when I watched him from my front windows. 

His mobility has improved over the past six months.  He hops quickly and to my surprise has developed the ability to take flight for moments at a time.  Not for very long distances but enough to carry him to low branches of the trees from where he can hop to higher branches.  Once he reaches the top he will glide, without flapping his wings, to a point quite a ways down the drive from where he will commence his walk/hop.

I really admire his grit and evident intelligence.  I have gotten into the habit of putting out for him  the poor small rodents that my studio cat, Hobie, captures and kills in the woods around the place, laying them at  my feet proudly as gifts on a daily basis.  I have watched him and his kin find these small gifts  a number of times and I think he understands the gesture.  Doesn’t make him any less wary of me but that’s okay.  He gets an easy meal and I get to see that the mice and moles go back into the big circle quickly.  Win/win.

Here’s a really nice rendition of Joni Mitchell’s song Black Crow from Diana Krall.  Just right for a Sunday morning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIwriS4Xahs

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In and Out of Rhythm

Posted in Painting, Technique/History, tagged , , , on May 11, 2012| 4 Comments »

Failure is inevitable. Success is elusive.

–Steven Spielberg

***************

I’ve written in recent posts about that rhythm that sometimes comes when I am readying work for shows, a deep groove filled with a self-regenerating energy that feeds on itself.  Just a wonderful feeling when I can stop for a moment and relish it.

But sometimes during these grand bouts of this rhythm  there are days when the wheels seem to come off the wagon and everything crashes.  Nothing works and every effort results in frustration and failure.  The rhythm that seemed onmipresent just moments before seems to have suddenly vanished completely and every action feels like I’m trying to move a huge boulder.  That was yesterday.

It started promisingly enough, working on the small detail work that is the grunt work of what I do.  Staining a few frames here.  Varnishing a few paintings there.  Then I worked for a bit on a piece in progress and stiil everything felt good, the synapses still sparking brightly. 

But then later in the morning  I pulled out a decent sized canvas, 2′ by 3′,  to start.  It had been treated with multiple layers of gesso and I felt like stars were aligned for this piece.  By the end of the day I realized I had misread these stars.  They were telling me to run.  Nothing worked at all on this piece.  The color was flat and every effort to bring it to life failed miserably and made the whole thing seem even more drab and lifeless.  Six or seven hours in and I step back to take it in and it is nothing but awful and the lightness that came with the rhythm has been replaced with a frustrating weight that rests heavily on my shoulders as well as in my gut. 

 I am at that moment verging on  screaming in a very primal way, like the character in the Edvard Munch painting.  My scream was replaced by a grab for the  paint and within minutes there is a layer of  black on the canvas, all evidence of my day covered in thick strokes of paint.  Seeing the failure of the day covered in black actually takes the edge off of the frustration I am feeling at the moment.  The flatness is dead and gone and I know that I will no longer be struggling over it, no longer struggling to bring a corpse back to life. 

But the frustration still lingers in the studio and I know that there will be nothing gained by fighting it.  I clean up and end my day, hoping that the new morning will find me refreshed and back in rhythm.

That being said, I have to go.  There’s a rhythm in here someplace and, godammn it, I am going to find it.  Like Darth Vader says above– failure will not be tolerated.

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Beeswing

Posted in Music, Painting, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, Video, tagged , , , , , , on May 9, 2012| 2 Comments »

I wrote the other day about the rhythm I’m looking for when I’m in the studio, that groove where the painting is more instinctual than intellectual.  Everything flowing fast and easy with little thought, each brushload of paint inspiring the next and on and on.  All intuition and reaction with hardly a thought given to subject or meaning.   It’s a great feeling, one that makes me feel as thought I am somehow connected to some sort of better self within, one that can only be reached by letting go of conscious thought.

A rare and delicate thing.

Delicate in the sense that I find myself at points coming out of this groove to examine what I’ve done and I lapse into conventional thought.  At these times I look at the work spread around the studio, in various stages of their journey to completion.  I forget for the moment how the work came about , about  the fact that the work is not about subject or the scene but about capturing emotion and feeling.  All I see is repetition of form, red trees and red roofs set on mounds and plains.

And for that moment, I panic just a bit.  The delicate thing seems almost crushed in that instant.

But then I focus on a painting and the fragility of  how it came about and what it really is doesn’t seem all that delicate after all.  Though there is often repetition of forms, I can see by looking at this individual painting that these elements are only part of the whole, that, while  they often serve as the central focus of the piece, their importance comes from how they play off the other less obvious elements of the painting to create the real feel of it.  People are not moved by the tree but by the sense of feeling that the tree evokes within the painting. 

It’s not subject but the emotion captured that makes each piece unique. 

And with that realization in hand, I feel free once again to go back into the rhythm, that rare and delicate thing.

The painting above is a new one that fits perfectly with this post.  It is a 10″ by 16″ painting on paper that I call Beeswing,  after a line from a Richard Thompson song of the same name that has as its chorus the line, ” she was a rare thing, fine as a bee’s wing…”  There  is a delicacy in this piece, a fineness of form that makes the moment of it seem forever fragile.  When I look at it all I can think of are those incredibly rare moments of absolute happiness, when the outer world is completely forgotten and there is a clarity of joy in myself.  A fleeting feeling, rare and delicate, fine as a bee’s wing.

Here’s the song from Richard Thompson—-

 

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Blue Sovereignty

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, tagged , , on May 7, 2012| 4 Comments »

I’m in the midst of finishing up work for my upcoming show at the Principle Gallery early next month.   This show, my thirteenth there,  is titled A Place to Stand , after the famed quote from Archimedes, and opens June 8.  I’ve written here over the past few years about the process of working towards a show. For me, there’s a real rhythm that comes from this process, a deep groove where each new painting begins with little thought as to where it will go, each new piece just starting with a line or a slash of color then taking off on its own at a breakneck pace.  This rhythm is something I look forward to with every show.  It’s exciting to see work that sometimes doesn’t come so easily suddenly begin to flow easily before my eyes.   

I’ve done this long enough to appreciate how rare and fleeting is this feeling.  When I first experienced this euphoric rush, I didn’t recognize this, actually thinking it was just how things were, that I’d just progressed to a level where this was the norm.  Years later and many peaks and valleys in between, I know better.  As a result, I find myself really relishing the last few days when this rhythm seems to be fully in effect.  Relishing and hoping that it will hang around for a while.

This is a painting that came from this rhythmic surge, a 12″ by 16″ canvas that I call Blue Sovereignty.  There are a lot of things I could say about this painting.  The coolness and smoothness of tone in it that gives it a placid pall, for example.  Or how I see it as a sort of abstracted portrait when I look quickly at it, the moon serving as an eye in profile.  Or about the title’s reference to sovereignty,  about how we each have authority over our own life, our own empire of self.

 Or any number of different things.

But I will leave those alone for now. 

I think I just want to take it in without thought, much as it was created.  Free and easy…

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Richard Thompson/ Black Cab Sessions

Posted in Music, Neat Stuff, Video, tagged , , on May 6, 2012| Leave a Comment »

There is an internet broadcast that started in 2007 and is ongoing called the Black Cab Sessions.  It features a musical guest performing one song as they ride through the streets of London in the well known black London hackney.  It has had a tremendous variety of artists over the year, from the very well known to not-yet-quite-there, all performing in the compact confines of the cab’s back seat.  Grand pianos and harps don’t play a big part in these performances.

Here’s one of my favorites, Richard Thompson, perfroming in the Black Cab…

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Setting a Path/ Redux

Posted in Uncategorized on May 4, 2012| 4 Comments »

For ten years I walked up the road through the woods to my old studio. It was a logging road from the two or so times the forest had been harvested over several decades and ran along a run-off creek that dries up most summers. There were two visible tracks from the tires of vehicles that had climbed the gentle rise over the years and as the years passed, another track formed between them.

This was the path I walked several times a day, up and down the hill. At first I thought nothing of it. It was simply a path. But over the years I began to notice things about it. I could walk the path in the absolute black of night with no problem, each step falling in a natural way directly to this path. If I tried to walk off the path it seemed unnatural and required a degree of attention to my stride so I wouldn’t stumble.

I came to realize that my trail was the path of least resistance. It was the path that carried me with the least effort. Each step fell naturally in place, accounting for the slightest change in the topography and had the same effect as water flowing down a creek.

I began to notice that the trails formed by deer and other animals were the same. When I followed them, they would move slightly in one direction or the other, just when your stride wanted to shift naturally and simply from gravity. There was the same sense of rightness I talk about in my painting. They never veer drastically, always in smooth, subtle curves. They would always run along the grade as though were the elevation lines on a topographical map. Following them required little effort or thought.

Going off the path was a different matter. It took thought, concentration and effort. There were new obstacles to overcome. Branches that crossed the path, blocking your view ahead and slapped the side of your head. Downed trees that had to be climbed over. Roots that rose through the dirt and tripped you. It was real work.

I guess herein lies the point. If I wanted to go where others had went before me, I could follow their trail. This would be the simple and logical way. But if I wanted to go to a different place, one that was fresher and less visited, I might have to set my own path. It wouldn’t be easy. It would require more effort, more thought and the risk of not finding my way. But if I forged ahead and found my way, there would be a new, hard won discovery and the sense of accomplishment that comes with it.

I could blather on a little more but I think my little lesson learned from the land (nice alliteration, eh?) has come to an end. We all choose our paths. Some take the easier trail. Some blaze new trails. And some go into the woods and never come out…

This post originally ran here in April of 2009.

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Humble Home

Posted in Painting, Recent Paintings, tagged , , , on May 3, 2012| 4 Comments »

This is a new painting, a 16″ by 20″ canvas, that  I am calling Humble Home.  There’s a real crispness in the color of this piece, both in the clarity of the hues and in the way they react to one another.  It has, for lack of a better term, a real snap to it.

The form of this painting, the lone house  under a huge dome of  sky,  is one that I have revisited several times over the years.  The idea of a lone home standing against a vast sky always stirs emotion in me.  Their is a sense of grandeur and power in such a sky that gives one perspective on their own place and influence in this world.  However highly we esteem ourselves, we are indeed tiny before the sky and all its forces, both seen and unseen.  Thus the title, Humble Home.

But while the house here is humbled small beneath the forceful sky, it is no less confident of what it is at heart.  Humble does not mean a lack of confidence or a form of  servility.  It simply signifies a knowledge of things greater than one’s self.  The house here speaks of a solidness of belief  in one’s self and their place , however humble, in the great scheme of the universe.  It has purpose. 

It brings to mind the words from Ecclesiastes, or the Byrds if you prefer: To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.

Turn, turn, turn…

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The Photoallegory of Sarolta Ban

Posted in Favorite Things, Neat Stuff, Photography, tagged , , , , , on May 2, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I came across some very interesting allegorical  photos  on the PhotoBotos.com site.  They are the work of a young  photographer from Budapest, Hungary by the name of Sarolta Ban, who digitally manipulates images of basically everyday items into thought-provoking scenes.  Her work reminds me very much, in tone and substance, to that of  Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, who created the fantastic photos of the book The Architect’s Brother, which I featured here on the blog this past year. 

 The primary difference is that the ParkeHarrison work is not digitally manipulated.  They instead physically create the scenes and photograph them.  For some, especially photography purists, this is an important distinction.  But I am definitely willing to look past that and simply admire Ban’s beautiful work.  For me, it comes down to how her imagery affects me and makes me react.  And for me, her work has a dreamlike quality, filled with a quiet magic.  Peaceful but ponderous.  Just good stuff.

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