I’ve been revisiting a lot of very old work lately here in the studio, taking little walk down memory lane. Some of the memories are pleasant enough with “oh, yeah, I remember that” coming up periodically in my mind. Some are cringeworthy, making me glad I moved past that time. Some please me greatly and some make me smile. Such is the case with this little piece done in 1994.
Called Rockin’ Billy, it was done quickly in crayons. It’s rough-edged and kind of crude but has movement. I think I was listening to a bunch of old rockabilly at the time. Johnny Burnette, Warren Smith, Jerry Lee Lewis, that kind of stuff– rough-edged and a little crude with some real movement.
But I am pretty sure that this piece was a direct result of Billy Lee Riley and his distinct guitar playing, especially in a couple of my faves from that time, Flying Saucer Rock and Rolland Red Hot. Every time I stumble across this piece I have to break out the rockabilly for at least a few songs and that’s how it is on this Sunday morning. Here are those two songs from Billy Lee Riley.
Oh, what the hell, let me throw in Johnny Burnette’s Rock Billy Boogie. I can see Rockin’ Billy dancing across the stage now. Hope this helps you have your own rockin’ good time today.
My father suffers from Alzheimer’s dementia and is a resident at local nursing facility. One of the highlights of my frequent visits there is when he is flipping through the channels on his TV and comes upon a shot of the president(*) of this country.
It stirs him, producing a most visceral response in him and he almost always snarls out, ” I hate that f!@*&ing guy.”
My dad might not know what day it is, how old he is or where he is, but he knows a creep when he sees one. It always makes me laugh and I generally tell him that I feel the same way.
And my agreement with him might never be stronger than it is this morning as I watch this creep attempt to dismantle the healthcare system in a reckless way that most likely will hurt many people in healthcare facilities like my dad. That will hurt scores of working class families who depend on the subsidies to buy health insurance. That will put more and more Americans at risk.
This spoiled man-baby’s lack of empathy is breathtaking. You see it everyday in his actions and his inaction.
For instance, his response to Puerto Rico is beyond reprehensible and immoral. It is a shameful black mark on this country.
Another example is his silence on the tragic fires in California, not to mention the same for earlier fires that terrorized much of the west.
Or take the fact that he has yet to say or tweet a single word about the four US troops killed in an ambush by an ISIS affiliate in Niger. This blob of ego uses his support for the troops as a political tool of division yet instead of meeting one of the troops when their flag draped casket came home to Dover, he played golf at his club with a Senator on that day.
Not a single solitary word to honor those troops. Yeah, he’s got your backs.
There are so many other examples of his lack of empathy, his narcissism, his greedy self-serving actions, his barely covered scorn for people of color, his need for retribution and revenge, his lack of personal responsibility, his total lack of actual ideas,his ignorance of policy and our constitution and his stupidity in general.
Yes, he is a f@!*#ing moron, as his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson so eloquently stated. And that f@!*#ing moron is the face of our nation now.
People said they wanted change. Well, they got it, in the same way you get change when you drive your car into a tree.
Yeah, I know that 9 billion dollars for health subsidies for the working class is a lot of money. As are the billions of dollars required to help folks rebuild their lives in the wake of the horrific storms and fires the past few months. But a tax cut that overwhelmingly favors the top 1% and explodes our deficit by a trillion and a half dollars is somehow equitable.
I know, I know. Shut up and paint. And I will do that in minute.
I just need to vent periodically. Some vitriol sparks creativity and some destroys it. I find that holding it in is not conducive to my work. Nor is ignoring the things taking place around us. I preach transparency and honesty now so I would be wrong to avoid the subject, to parse my words to not insult those people out there who somehow can accept the actions of administration and can’t see the damage being done to our nation or the future that it portends.
In short, when I see my dad today and he says his piece on this person, I am going to tell him that he’s being too easy on him.
Okay, thanks for making it this far. Here’s the payoff: a 1901 film, Fat and Lean Wrestling Match, from French film pioneer George Melies. I love his early effects and the sense of fun and wonder he creates. A good way to clear the palette.
Busy morning here in the studio but I wanted to replay a post from over eight years ago about a painter whose work always dazzles me, Joseph Stella. I’ve added a few images from the original post as well as a video that shows the wider range of his work over his lifespan. Just plain great work…
When I see the paintings of Joseph Stella, particularly his modernist work, I am immediately engaged. They seem dense and complex, almost manic in their compositional content, yet the color and symmetry have an effect that I find calming. I often wonder how Stella viewed this work, what he felt from it. Not in an artspeak sense. Not academic jargon. Just how it made him feel.
Stella (1877-1946) was an Italian immigrant to this country who has often been linked with several movements- modernism, futurism, and precisionism among them. There is a contradiction in this in that everything I find about him points to someone with an outsider’s mentality, someone who never felt himself a part of any group and with an “antipathy for authority” as it has been described, with which I strongly identify.
Maybe that’s what I see in the work. I don’t know. I do know that I am drawn to the boldness and beauty of it. The strength of the lines. The depth of the colors. The sheer visceral bite of the image that when taken in as a whole seems to engulf you. Gorgeous stuff. Work that makes me feel smaller, even tiny, for a moment yet inspires me to want to move my own work further ahead. To grow and expand.
Maybe that’s how I classify other’s work in my head- by how much they make me want to do better, by the way their work’s impact becomes an endpoint for me, a goal that I hope to achieve.
The work of Joseph Stella is definitely such an endpoint. Now I must work…
_
It’s kind of last minute, but I will be doing one more solo exhibit this year. It will be called Sensing the Unseenand will open Friday, December 1, hosted once more by my friends atthe Kada Gallery. The show will run through the end of the year.
I said that it’s kind of last minute because even though I had been tentatively planning on an event at the Kada Gallery, we weren’t sure it would come about due to health concerns on the part of the owners of the gallery, Kathy and Joe DeAngelo, which limited many gallery activities for much of the past year. As much as I wanted to have another show there, I really didn’t want it if it created an overly stressful workload for either of them.
The Kada Gallery was the first gallery outside my home area to represent my work, back in the first months of 1996. Over the past nearly 22 years, Kathy has been a fervent advocate for my work and has created an inviting landing spot for my work in an area that is probably off the radar of many artists. She takes the work very seriously and her earnest excitement for the work comes through loud and clear when she speaks about it. She has hosted a number of extremely successful shows for me and some of my most avid collectors have started their collections in this gallery.
But more than that, Kathy and Joe treat me like family there which makes me want to do even more for them in my work and my shows for them. So, I view this show as an important thing for my friends there and myself, one that gets my full attention. I am excited for this show and think it will live up, and hopefully exceed, past shows. I have a few things up my sleeve that I think will do just that.
So, pencil it in on your calendar: Sensing the Unseen opening December 1 at the Kada Gallery. Hope you can make it!
I am at work on a large commissioned piece. As a rule, I don’t like doing commissions because I sometimes fear the client’s aims and expectations will somehow cloud my creative process and ultimately make the painting less than it might otherwise be. And for me, trying to please someone else’s eye rather than my own is not usually conducive to good work.
And at the beginning of this particular painting, that definitely seemed the case.
I had several reference photos that were provided by the client to give me context and as general guidelines for the kind of landscape they hoped for in the painting. I don’t normally– actually, I never– work from reference photos. I don’t know why but in this case I tried to remain absolutely faithful to them.
It wasn’t good.
I spent a few frustrating days repeatedly laying out the piece then painting it over to restart again. It just didn’t move, didn’t feel alive. It made me tense and a little angry to where I finally came to a place where I determined that I was being too fixated on accuracy and was setting aside the things that I felt were important to me in my work– rhythm, line and pattern.
This was my painting so it had to excite and please me first. I made the decision to have it do just that and began making big changes that would imbue it with the things I needed to see and feel in it. I began to move things around, cutting away elements in the composition and changing the flow of the landscape.
It began to grow in a more organic and less thought out way. Each step got me more engaged and more excited, each subsequent layer of color bringing it a bit more vibrant and alive. I worked last night on it, leaving as it came to a point where it is has all its momentum steaming forward. All of it’s potential seems now evident to me and it feels like it is a balloon filled to the absolute limit, ready to burst at any instant into a mass of color and movement.
For me, this is the most exciting point of a painting. It’s there and I just have to tear away the shell that is keeping it restrained. I feel a palpable excitement looking at it this morning.
I feel good.
I can’t show you any in progress shots because I believe this is meant to be a surprise gift. So I will instead show a very old watercolor from around 1994 which acts as a segue to a little music from the venerable John Lee Hooker and a song whose title and feeling absolutely hit the mark this morning. It’s his boogie classic I Feel Good. I call the painting Leroi’s Yellow Guitar.
Painting has come to play a big part in my life. I’ve had a couple of different conversations with some folks over the past few weeks where I have tried to explain what painting has meant to me, tried to explain the void that it filled for me and the sense of purpose it brought to my life. I talked about never feeling any sense of destiny or anything like that in becoming a painter. It just seemed to work for me in the ways I needed it to work. These conversations brought to mind the blog entry below that I wrote back in early 2009 called The Need to Paintthat I thought I’d share today:
I wrote a few days ago about how I am often mystified by the meanings of my paintings and how this makes me glad that I still have the need to paint.
The need to paint?
I thought about that after I hit the button to publish that post. I have often heard artists say they had to paint, as though it were some sort of exotic medical quandary.
Paint or die.
It always kind of bothered me when I heard this, as though these people were saying they had some sort of predestined calling. Like they were prophets or shamans that without their visionary paintings the world would spin out of control. I don’t think I ever felt afflicted with this and it always sounded just a little pompous to me.
So when I wrote that I had the need to paint it made me twitch a bit. Maybe I’m the pompous ass here. That certainly is in the realm of possibility.
But I find myself kind of standing behind what I said– I do need to paint.
It’s not some call to destiny. It’s not to transmit some psychic message to the world. It’s more a case of me needing have a voice or form of expression that best suits my mind and abilities. Painting just happens to fill that need. If I could yodel–and thankfully for us all I cannot– I might be saying that I have the need to yodel.
But I need to paint.
I need to paint to try to express things I certainly can’t put in words, things that awe and mystify me. I need to paint to have a means to a voice to make the universe aware that I exist.
I need to paint just to remind myself that I am alive and still have the ability to feel the excitement and joy from something that I have created. I need to paint to feel the surprise of exceeding what I felt was within me, to go into that realm of personal mystery within and emerge with something new. I need to paint because it has given me the closest thing I know to answers to the questions I have.
I need to paint because it is one of the few things that I’ve done fairly well in my life.
Would I die?
Nah…
I’d adapt and find something new but it would be hard to find something that would suit me as well. So I guess I do need to paint after all. Call me a pompous ass. I don’t give a damn- I’ve got work to do.
There are sensory perceptions that we carry throughout our lives. It might be a sound, a smell, an image that once brought to mind brings forth the atmosphere and feeling of the time in which they first entered our consciousness.
The smell of a cooking turkey instantly returns me to my childhood and the farmhouse where we lived. It would be Thanksgiving and I can see Mom’s old formal dining table with the heavy chairs that surrounded it. It’s a long table with all the extending leafs in place and it’s surface is covered with the bounty of Thanksgiving, the mashed potatoes, canned cranberry sauce, stuffing and so on. Just the tiniest whiff of a roasting turkey always — and I mean always–sends me hurtling through time back to that table.
The same is true with certain songs. Take for instance, the song In My Life from the Beatles. Hearing those opening chords always sends me back to same big old farmhouse that played such a big part in my formative years. I can see the old floral wallpaper in the living room and there’s a big console record player with cloth covered speakers on its front and two sliding panels on top that uncover a turntable on one side and the controls for a radio on the other. Those opening chords have me immediately standing in front of that record player with the light from the large windows in that room filtering through Mom’s frilled white cotton curtains. On the wall there was a reproduction of a schlocky painting — I think it was a red covered bridge–printed on thick cardboard that was bought at the Loblaws grocery store.
It’s a good memory. I felt safe in that place, free to imagine places and adventures I hoped for in the future. It was a good place to foster some of the thoughts and observations that direct my paintings to this very day.
That’s my intro for this week’s Sunday morning music. I thought instead of playing the original Beatles version of In My Life which is understandably a favorite of mine, I would opt instead for one from Bette Midler with a beautiful accompaniment on ukelele from uke wizard Jake Shimabukuro. The feeling of his playing on this song works for me as much as the original in bringing back that earlier time and place.
Give a listen, think about some of those sensations that trigger your own memories and have a good Sunday.
I was going through my little treasure chest the other day. It’s an old square cardboard box filled with old experiments, failures, breakthroughs and other assorted oddities from my earliest days painting. I enjoy doing this because many of the pieces stimulate some of the same sensory triggers that drove me back when they were painted, back in 1994 and early 1995. Feeling that same sensation now creates an urgency in me, one that makes me want to get back to work so that maybe I can create that same feeling in this moment.
Motivation comes in many forms. It even rises from work that I felt was not good enough to show years ago. Over the years many of these pieces have grown in my estimation and I see now how they fit into my larger body of work and how they made the transformation from borderline fire-starters to things that I value highly today.
While I do see motivation in this sometime visitation to the past, part of me wonders if there is any value in going back and experiencing these pieces once again. After all, I have moved on since that time and can’t return to the point that produced that work. The nostalgia of it makes me forget the frustration that was present at the time that came from knowing that these pieces weren’t hitting the spot I envisioned, that there was much progress to be made in my work before it would satisfy me on a consistent basis.
So maybe going back serves little purpose. Maybe it prevents one from moving on to new paths, new ideas, new work. As aviator/author Beryl Markham wrote in her memoir, West With the Night:
“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”
She may be right. But this morning I am looking back to a place I don’t want to return to in the present moment. I know I have to move forward, have to progress. These works now belong to a past that cannot hold me back from that formidable future ahead.
And they won’t. If anything, they make me want to be better…
Don’t have much to say this morning and I’m fumbling around the internet looking for something that sparks my imagination. I did come across the painting above from F.H. Varley (1881-1969) who was part of the famed Canadian Group of Seven painters, a highly influential gathering of landscape painters in the 1920’s and 30’s.
This piece is called Untitled (Mist and Sunset)and is from around 1930. It’s a bit looser than most of Varley’s other work, which I will highlight here at some point, but the expressiveness of it really spoke to me. Something very right about this piece, at least for me. Those bits of light in the center, which might be ( or not be) sunlight on the caps of waves, give the piece an ethereal feel that gives me pause this morning.
It reminds me that I wanted to mention the passing of Tom Petty the other day which was somewhat overlooked on another bad and black news day. I had been following and listening to Petty since the 70’s with Breakdown still being a personal favorite. Some of his songs have become part of the soundtrack of my life and hearing them sparks personal memories and times long past. He was always rock solid and it seemed like everything he released never let you down.
It all felt honest and part of who he was as an artist and a person. All you can ask…
Here’s his You Don’t Know How It Feels. I guess that is the basis for all art — making people know how you feel– from his music to the Varley painting above.
American Jacob Lawrence was a great painter who worked as a Social Realist, capturing the experience of the African-American community in the 20th century in a number of different series of paintings and prints featuring his strong colors and often abstract forms. His work is powerful and engaging across the board, giving the his work a universal appeal that culture and place. I seldom see anything from Lawrence, even among those pieces that don’t move me as much as others, that doesn’t have purpose and something to say.
It is work of humanity.
It’s work that comes across as instantly identifiable as his whenever I see it. His forms and colors and compositions create a unique and individual voice that speaks clearly to the viewer, easily transmitting feeling and emotion from the image to the eye and mind of the viewer. I believe that’s a quality every artist craves and Lawrence has loads of it.
Lawrence was born in Atlantic City in 1917 and lived in New York City from his teens until around 1970 when he moved to Seattle area, where he was a professor of art at the University of Washington for many years after. He died in 2000. His wife, Gwendolyn Knight, was also an artist.
If you’re not familiar with Lawrence’s work, I urge you to look into it a bit more. For now, here’s some of his work below along with a nice video of his work set to Blue Train from jazz great John Coltrane. Enjoy…
I’ve been revisiting a lot of very old work lately here in the studio, taking little walk down memory lane. Some of the memories are pleasant enough with “oh, yeah, I remember that” coming up periodically in my mind. Some are cringeworthy, making me glad I moved past that time. Some please me greatly and some make me smile. Such is the case with this little piece done in 1994.
Redtree Times