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Archive for the ‘Biographical’ Category

Coney Island/ Reginald Marsh

Posted in Biographical, Favorite Things, tagged , on August 26, 2010| 1 Comment »

I’m always intrigued by the paintings of Reginald Marsh, who painted scenes depicting the urban world of New York City throughout the early part of the 20th century until his death in 1954.  His paintings always seemed densely packed with figures and movement, all rendered with easily recognizable linework and colors that were strong yet had a soft transparency.  Striking.

One of his favorite subjects was Coney Island, the famous part of Brooklyn with its beach, boardwalk and amusement park.  Whenever I see Marsh’s Coney Island paintings I am always reminded of the several trips I made there as a child in the late 1960’s.  My parents and I would go to NY to see Mets’ games, leaving my older, busier siblings at home, and would sometimes go to Coney Island on the day when the games were at night.  It was always like entering an exotic, much different world than my country home.  It was dirty with  trash strewn everywhere.  I remember the first time we swung into the parking lot at Astroland, the amusement park there, and thinking we’d entered a landfill as there were literally piles of paper and bottles over nearly the whole lot.  If you spent much time in NY at that time, it was not an unusual sight.

But it was great fun and over the few visits there I had many memories that burned indelibly into my memory bank.  My parents, and my aunt and uncle who sometimes were with us, would, after a while stop at one of the bars that opened to the boardwalk to have a cold one and I would wander alone.  It was a wonderland of colorful attractions and games, their facades faded by time and sun. I have sharp memories of standing at one bar’s doorway and watching a singer all dressed in cowboy regalia standing on the bar with his electric guitar singing out country songs in the middle of the afternoon.  I sometimes wonder if it might have been Jerry Jeff Walker. 

 I remember seeing the crowds down on the beach and suddenly seeing everyone there pointing out to the water and yelling.  Looking out, I saw two legs bobbing straight out of the water, almost comically so.  The lifeguards rushed out and dragged the body in.  Dead and, now that I think about it, had proabably been so for a while.

I also remember going into a baordwalk arcade and approaching an older man with a gray moustache and a coin changer on his belt.  I asked for change and handed him my dollar bill.  He made a couple of clicks on the changer and handed me a pile of nickels.  As I turned to go the machines, he put his hand on my shoulder.

“Hold on!” he exclaimed in a thick accent that sounded Greek to a terrified nine year old.  He started chastising me.

“You don’t know me! Don’t ever trust anyone you don’t know.  I give you money and you trust me and don’t count.  You should not trust me.  Now, count!”

I stood there petrifiied and counted out loud.  It was the right change, of course, and the man’s gruff demeanor suddenly changed and he beamed a smile at me.  “You understand? Now go.  Have fun,” he said as he gave me a pat on the shoulder.

A little life lesson along with the change on the boardwalk in 1969.

That moment is clear as yesterday and it always reappears when I see images from Marsh or images of Coney Island

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August

Posted in Biographical, tagged , on August 18, 2010| 2 Comments »

Skeleton- Pablo Picasso

This print from Picasso very much sums up my feelings for the month of August. 

I have never been a fan of August.  Memories of the so-called dog days of summer spent as a child.  Hot from a relentless sun.  Bored.  Burnt grass crunching underfoot.  The coming school year hanging overhead like the sword of Damocles.

August has always had a faint aura of death around it for me.  I remember the death of my grandfather in ’68.  My beloved dog Maggie years later.  Several friends over the years, from a variety of causes. Elvis.   The bright glare of the August sun seeming to taunt the grief of the moment.

August.

We were watching something on television the other night, perhaps Mad Men– I can’t really remember.  Anyway, the character in the scene that was on said , “I hate August.” 

It made my ears prick up and I couldn’t help but mutter, “I’m with you there, brother.”

August.

Well, I’ve got a lot to do this August  morning.  It takes a lot of work to keep busy to ward off the cruelty of  August…

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County Fair

Posted in Biographical, Influences, Neat Stuff, tagged , on August 3, 2010| 3 Comments »

Today is the first day of  our local County Fair.  The Chemung County Fair is in its 168th year and for a good part of my youth was the high point of the summer.  I wasn’t in 4H and had little to do with farming, so outside of quickly racing through the barns to look at the prize cows and chickens, I wasn’t there for any of the agricultural aspects of the fair.

No, I was there for the Midway.  The whirling  rides, the challenging games and the lurid shows— it all conspired to trigger the maximum emotional response for a twelve-year old kid.  Or a thirty year old man with a twelve-year old’s brain. 

Every year at the beginning of August, the James E. Strates train pulled into town, 61 railcars packed with rides and all the paraphenalia it took to put on the spectacle.  Their carnies were easy to spot at that point.  Guys with greasy hair and cigarette packs rolled into the sleeves of their grimy white tee-shirts.  Crude tattoos running up their arms that were deep brown from a layer of  dust and spending their days in the full sun, tending to the machines that ran this carnival.  I always remember a tooth being absent in the smile of many of them.

These carnies would soon have all the rides assembled with their creaking  and spinning parts that didn’t give you the greatest feeling of confidence that they would remain intact as they whipped you through the hot summer nights.  They were adorned with flashing lights that raced all around the rides and many had blaring rock music to just add to the visceral overload of the experience.  I still associate the Foghat’s Free Ride with the Himalaya, one of the more popular rides at the fair.

Then there were the shows with their barkers, their voices crackling over their little speakers as they tried to lure you into see the Gatorboy or the World’s Smallest Horse or some poor hybrid creature (half chicken – half cat!) that you could hardly see and never moved, leaving you with a seed of doubt that it was even alive.  The barkers cajoled, they insulted, they prodded– whatever it took to get you into their tent. 

The biggest crowds were, of course, at the tent with the peep shows with the showgirls. They would parade out a girl with piled hair,  heavy makeup and a skimpy, glittery outfit to tempt the assembled men with the promise  of much more inside.  I was too young to go in and always wondered what really went on in there.  There was a book out several years ago (can’t remember the title or author)  that examined this cultural aspect, the county fair peepshow, and revealed that it was even more lurid than I imagined at the time.

I was a big games guy, trying to win the rich treasure trove of prizes they lured you with.  Off-off brand transistor radios.  Pepsi bottle vases with long stretched necks.  Ceramic unicorns.  More ashtrays than you can imagine.  Oh, I just had to win that stuffed snake doll!  And of course,  the games were almost impossible to win, with their tight, smaller than normal  rims that kicked out your basketball before it could find its way to the bottom.  Or the fruit baskets whose bottoms seemed like trampolines for the softballs you attempted to toss into them.

I could write and write about the fair.  The smells of the midway– Italian sausage and the sugary smell of taffy.  The sounds of the grandstand shows that wafted over the din — the country and rock acts that rolled into town for the day to play on the stage that stood on the inside of the track where harness racing had taken place earlier in the day.  And the people!  Oh, what folks you would see at the fair.  I could write pages and pages.

But I won’t.  Not now.  If you’ve been to a county fair, you have your own sensory memories that fill in the blanks.  If you haven’t been to one, go at least once.  On a hot August night.  But don’t look for me there.  I have enough memories to carry me through.

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Roots Show Through

Posted in Biographical, Influences, Neat Stuff, Painting, Recent Paintings, tagged , on July 20, 2010| 2 Comments »

This is a new painting that is also part of the New Days exhibit at the West End Gallery.  Titled Roots Show Through, it’s one of those paintings that, for me, brings to mind an immediate thought.  When I look at this piece I am instantly reminded that we are the products of our past and that our ancestry deeply dictates many of our behaviors.  We may believe that our actions are ours alone and that our forebearers are remote from us in all ways but they show themselves in ways we may never recognize.

I was watching the end of the PBS series Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates (of the infamous arrest and subsequent Beer Summit at the White House) which traces the genealogical background of a number of well known folks, showing how they came to be and how they are interrelated to many others.  I was captivated by how they were able to break down the genetic composition of their subjects, showing how richly we are endowed those things that make us unique by prior generations.  Each one of our direct anscestors made it possible for us to be here in the form, for better or worse, that we are at present.  Take away any of them and we become much different people, if we exist at all.

The roots show through.

Now there are roots that we would like to keep deeply buried.  I know from doing genealogy that there is a tendency to want to see our ancestors in the best possible light, to give them the most positive attributes.  You imagine them to be wise and good and often you can find some evidence that some of your ancestors were .  But sometimes you find things that are less flattering, things you hope haven’t found their way to you through the genetic network.  In doing my own genealogy ( and my guess is that it is similar to a great many people out there) I have found a number of good and learned people who had places of respect in their communities.  But for every one of these folks I found even more who were less accomplished. 

 Going through census records, I find many ancestors in the recent past  who could not read nor write.  Some are listed on these same records in prisons and county poor houses and sanitariums.  Some are found in other records listing their misdeeds.  I have thieves and swindlers in my line.  My favorite was a beaver thief from the late 1600’s up the Hudson Valley.  I have some ancestors who were killed in various battles and massacres and as many who took part in other massacres, including one who was darkly remembered for the lifelong  revenge he took against the Indian tribes who had killed his father.  I have murderers including a great-great grandfather from several generations back who was hung in the town square in Easton, PA  for the murder of his wife. 

You hope some of those roots found a dead-end generations ago.  But they probably found their way through in some form and you ultimately deal with the background that brought you here in ways you hope allow you to live and prosper, with some semblance of wisdom and good.  You hope that the positive traits handed down to you by your ancestors far outweigh the negative ones.

Oddly enough, all of this and more comes to mind when I glimpse this piece.  It has almost become an icon for this particular thought.  How others see it, I cannot guess…

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Emerge the Light

Posted in Biographical, Recent Paintings, tagged , on July 8, 2010| 5 Comments »

Very early morning. 

 Gray light just breaking through the trees, birds tweeting and twirping awake in the branches and a haze in the air as the slightly dewy ground gives up the precious moisture to the warm air.

I’m tired, having woke much too early but I’m in the studio now and I’m readying to go to work finishing up a handful of work for my show.  I’m at the end of a creative cycle and I’m usually a bit fatigued and, as a result, more susceptible to worries and concerns about what direction I will next take my work.  The work I’m finishing now is basically done, all creative decisions completed,  so the die is basically cast for this work.  My mind has moved to what comes next and how I will get there. 

I feel now the need to push myself in some way, break from the safety zone of what I know so far as technique and style are concerned and trust my instincts in maneuvering in a new territory.  Maybe it’s a new material or a material used in a different way.  Maybe it’s a new look on the surface– I have a deep seated  desire to let strokes break free from restraint and show their ragged edges and energy.  Slashes. 

Maybe it’s a new subject, a new icon on which to focus my attention, or simply dropping representation and letting the abstract elements take over.

I don’t know.  At the end of one of these cycles, it’s not a matter of how it changes. It only matters that it changes.

I feel fortunate to have my work to express the end and beginning of these cycles of energy that culminate with the need to change, to emerge somehow differently.  Dealing with them in real life, without the use of painted icons to serve as the avatar for the expression my own life’s twists and turns, has not always been smooth sailing.  But transferring the need to transform, in some way, from one’s actual life to a substituted surface of paint has been a blessing for me, if not always an easy one.

With paint, I usually find my way through the shadows and tangle of thought and emerge in light. 

Changed. New.

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The painting at the top is titled Emerge the Light  and is part of my upcoming show, New Days, at the West End Gallery in Corning.  It is a work on paper, a 4″ by 30″ image that is matted and framed out to 10″ by 36″.

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Father’s Day

Posted in Biographical, Favorite Things, Influences, tagged on June 20, 2010| 1 Comment »

I’m not going to go all sentimental about my dad on this Father’s Day.  It’s not either of our styles.

But I did want to show this picture of him from back in 1963 or 1964.  That’s my brother, Charlie ( Chuckie back then), in the background.  When I think of images of my father this one is always first in line in my head.  It was a Sunday morning ( my memory says it was an Easter but I can’t be sure) and we were living in an old farmhouse on Wilawanna Road, outside Elmira, that played a very large part in my formative years.  We had a large chunk of yard to one side of the house that became a ballfield, a place where many of the kids on our road came to play baseball regularly and where Dad would often pitch to us or hit soaring fungoes that we would run under, pretending to be Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle.  Dad is standing near home plate in this photo.

I love this photo.  It show my father at about 30 or so years of age, as strong and powerful as I would ever know him.  I was four or five years old and he was larger than life to me then, could do no wrong.  My protector and my boon companion.  This view of him sums that all up.

  The pose has a bit of the pride and arrogance of youth in it, still brimming with the what-if’s and what-can-be’s of potential.  It’s not something you’re used to seeing in your parents and witnessing it is like seeing a secret glimpse of them, a side you know must have been there but remains hidden from you in your day to day life with your parents.  Maybe that’s why I like this picture so much.  It seems like a marking point between his youth and ours, his kids. 

I don’t know.  Like many personal things, it’s hard to explain.  All I know is that when I see my Dad today or think about him, the image of this photo is never far from my mind.

happy father’s day….

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Interpret This Painting!? Last Day!

Posted in Biographical, tagged on May 16, 2010| 5 Comments »

Name This Painting!

 

Today is the last day for entries in this year’s Name This Painting! Contest.  The competition ends at midnight tonight and I’ll be announcing the winner within the next day or two.  It may take me a while to choose between some of these titles.

There have been some pretty evocative titles that give me real pause.  Some even disturb me a bit.  It’s just interesting to see how others perceive a painting, to see what they are reading in the work.  I am sometimes startled at how different some of these perceptions are from my own.  Startled but not surprised.  It’s obvious that  we all interpret things we see or hear in different ways.   If not, we would all see things the same way and draw the same conclusions, leaving us with a consensus in everything we did.  This is certainly not the case in anything we attempt as a people.

Art is no different.  I think I may have told of an encounter at an opening where a viewer stood before a painting of mine of two intertwined trees.  To me,  it was about the dependency of the two trees on one another, about how they became one entity, gathering strength from each other.   This person saw it in a completely different light.  In their eyes, it was about domination and subjugation, about violence.  This person was quite disturbed by the painting and I was left standing there, looking at the piece, wondering if it had somehow exposed some hidden corner of my personal psychology that I didn’t realize I was uncovering.   I felt like I was being accused by this person of being a dominator.  A bully.  A rapist.

I realized quickly, after taking a quick inventory of myself, that this interpretation was more about this person’s psychology, about their own personal agenda,  than mine.  I felt better but the episode lingered with me.  This person’s reading of and reaction to a painting that,  to most, would be anything but controversial seemd so out of step with its intent.  It made me better understand how difficult it is to put anything out in the world without creating some adverse reaction to some extent.  As an artist, you hope to create something that translates in a universal manner but it’s a rare event given the way we all see things through lenses tinted with our own personal biases.  But I just keep trying.

So give this painting a look and give me a look at how your mind works by submitting a title……..

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Follow-Up: Work of the Copyist

Posted in Biographical, Opinion, tagged , on April 12, 2010| 8 Comments »

I wrote the other day about an episode where my work- its format, content and style- had been seemingly appropriated by another artist in a city where my work regularly shows.  It was baffling because I knew and liked this person and had dealt with them in the past.  So I showed his work to a number of people who know my work very well and, to a person, they agreed that it was obvious that this was an attempt at replicating my work in nearly all aspects and that I was going to have to do something to counter this.  As much as I wanted to write it off as mere coincidence,  there were too many factors indicating otherwise for me to simply and philosophically shrug this off.

I contacted him and pointed out my concerns.  I really didn’t know what to expect.  In this era of rude and shameless behavior, I steeled myself for an argument.  But his response was quick and gracious.  He claimed to be ignorant of the similarities which, at first, I thought was a bit disingenuous but began to realize after a bit was truly the case.  This fellow really did seem to have a blind spot in this situation.  He asked his wife and some artist friends if they saw what I was seeing and they did.  Embarrassed, he got back to me quickly and agreed to pull the work from the website and would show the remaining pieces in his studio with “in the style of GC Myers” on the back and price tag of each piece.

That satisfied me and I consider the case closed.

I wished I felt more satisfaction.  I know I was in the right but part of me empathizes with this guy.  He is still struggling to find his own voice for self expression and has many long hours ahead before it will take shape.  Sometimes the prospect of that can be daunting in a world where instant gratification rules.

Perhaps that is why I was so protective of my work in this instant.  I realized, looking at his paintings that so resembled mine, the sheer amount of effort I have expended in the past fifteen years to get my work to the point where it now stands.  It is the result of spending literally tens of thousands of hours alone in my studio, agonizing over every aspect of the work.  I have struggled and sacrificed to make my work my own.  To make it an expression of who and what I am.  To make it my true voice.  It has been a long journey and there were no shortcuts taken.

It took this to make me realize what a precious thing this is to me, indeed.  These paintings of mine are not mere merchandise, products of commerce that can be easily copied like designer jeans or handbags on the street.  They are the products of spirit and thought, things that can’t be priced or simply copied.  But things that I now know must be protected.

I really hope this other person understands the journey he faces and is willing to undergo it.  You can only follow someone else’s path for so long before you must forge your own way.  But if he can stick with it, his efforts will produce something he can call his own and will be rewarded in some way.

I wish him well.

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As Clouds Roll By

Posted in Biographical, Early Paintings, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, tagged , on March 2, 2010| 1 Comment »

This  is a new painting that I’ve just finished, tentatively called As Clouds Roll By.  It’s a 14″ by 18″ image painted on ragboard.  It’s a composition that I have visited on a number of occasions, this time at the request of a collector in Pennsylvania, and one that I always get great pleasure from painting.

Even though this is a very simple composition with few elements, the great satisfaction I feel after finishing a piece such as this is something I can’t fully explain.  Perhaps it’s the recognition of the things in this piece that fully jibe with what I want from my own paintings.  The simplicity of design. The quietude of vast open space.  The depth into the picture, even though it is a very simple composition.  The inviting warmth of the house and tree.  The languorous fashion in which the clouds roll by, in a way representing the slow and inevitable march of time.

It clicks a lot of my own buttons.

The clouds in this piece always take me back to the first time I painted clouds in that looked like these.  I was not yet a full-time painter and had obtained a large commisiion that would prove to be very important to me.  I was on a short deadline and was still painting in the dining area of our home at the time with large sheets of paper spread over folding tables.  I was working on a large triptych and was nearly finished when our late cat, Tinker, decided to explore the tables.  Bounding up, she stepped first in a damp part of my palette and ran across the three sheets, leaving perfect little paw prints in a watery blue tint in her wake.  As the echoes of my bellow faded, my mind raced as I looked at my now very unfinished work.

Start over?  No time.  Try to blend them in to the background?  Not with this particular style of painting.  I sat and looked, concentrating.  Wait a minute.  The prints only ran across the sky portion of all the sheets.  And they ran in lovely diagonal manner.

Quickly, I was at it with paint and within several minutes I had blocked in clouds where once there were paw prints.  It worked.  Tinker’s run across the sky fit the rhythm of the piece and the clouds actually gave a fullness to the composition that it had lacked.  It was actually quite an improvement.

So when I see clouds such as these, I always flash back to my initial panic and the subsequent discovery of good fortune in this happy accident.  Since that day, when what seems to be a disatrous event happens with one of my paintings I step back with a much calmer mind and eye with the knowledge that perhaps this is just a new opportunity to see things a new way.

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Finding Home– A Short Film

Posted in Biographical, Painting, Recent Paintings, Technique/History, Video, tagged , , , on February 8, 2010| 6 Comments »

This is a short film that I put together one day last week.  It was a little project that I took on at the request of my friends at Lovetts Gallery in Tulsa, OK.  They, like many galleries around the country, have taken a hard look at how they interact with their clients and are making a real effort to provide more information about the artists they represent in their gallery.  To this end they are putting together a multimedia website that will give their clients a better look at the work and thoughts of their artists.

They asked that I provide them with some film of me working in the studio with some dialogue.  It was pretty difficult deciding what I wanted to say in the film.  I wanted to give an idea of what I see in my work and to tell a little of how I came to painting but I didn’t want to say too much.  Wanted the paintings to be the focus.

As I was putting it together and I was inserting narration a theme came around.  About the idea of finding one’s home.  It’s a concept that I’ve been seeing a lot in my work as of late and one that I think can be applied to most of the work through the years.  I think it fits.

The music is from the great acoustic guitarist Martin Simpson, a longtime favorite.  I had the chance to take lessons from him many years ago when he resided in Ithaca for a while, after coming to the States from England.  Carried the little classified ad from the Ithaca Times around in my wallet for the longest time but, like so many things in life, never got around to doing it.  I’m not big on regrets but I do wish I’d taken that opportunity.

Anyway, this is the film that I came up with.  I hope it works in some way…

To see the film in higher quality please click here to go the YouTube page.

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