There’s been a huge resurgence as of late in interest in the music and life of the great Nina Simone, who died in 2003 at the age of 70. You hear her music on all sorts of movie and television soundtracks and commercials. There has been a couple of documentaries made of her life ( this includes the highly acclaimed What Happened, Miss Simone? on Netflix) and there are a number of big screen biopics in the works.
The most current and yet to be released project is titled Nina and features Zoe Saldana as Simone. There’s been a lot of controversy over this film as Saldana altered her looks by wearing a prosthetic nose and darkening her skin with makeup. Plus the Simone estate disavows this film and disputes much of the story as it is to be presented in the film.
Even in death, Nina Simone can stir up a hornet’s nest.
She was a unique talent– classically trained as a pianist, supremely gifted as a performer/vocalist and militantly proud of her black heritage during the height of the civil rights era. But she had many other demons and her life was never simple or easy, filled with super highs, crushing lows and many conflicts along the way. It’s no wonder that we find her story perfect fodder for the movies.
Myself, I just love her ability to take a song from another artist and just transform it into something that feels altogether new, feeling like it is her’s alone. She was just a rare talent.
So, for this Sunday Morning Music let’s listen to her take on the Bee Gees’ To Love Somebody. Enjoy and have a great Sunday…
I don’t want to turn this into a political debate but watching the Republicans lately (or for that matter, over the past several years) is a lot like seeing a terrible car wreck. You want to turn away. You want to cover your eyes and make believe it’s not happening. You try to think happy thoughts but, oh, the horror of it all, it won’t go away.
I spoke informally with a group of college students yesterday during their visit at the West End Gallery in Corning. I was asked to speak briefly about a career as an artist and the absolute need for hard work in achieving this. Whenever I do these things I come away feeling that there were many points that I failed to make, that I somehow left out that one little bit of advice that one of them might find crucial in moving ahead.
There’s an 
Ashton echoes my own feelings when he writes: Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the work of becoming expert through study and practice, the work of finding solutions to problems and problems with those solutions, the work of trial and error, the work of thinking and perfecting, the work of creating. Creating consumes. It is all day, every day. It knows neither weekends nor vacations. It is not when we feel like it. It is habit, compulsion, obsession, vocation.
It reminds me of a conversation I had with a painter friend a number of years ago. He had brought up the name of a well-known artist whose work he admired who was incredibly productive. My friend bemoaned the fact that he himself wasn’t as productive and wondered how this person could do so much. In the conversation he told me about all the activities that his life held– traveling , classes, music sessions with friends and time with his kids. I couldn’t bring myself to point out that he would have to start sacrificing something in order to be as productive as this other artist. It was obvious that his X amount of hours were spent differently than the other artist, who I should point out also had a studio staff with a manager and several assistants to boost his productivity. My friend made the choices that he felt were right for him and who could argue that his kids didn’t deserve even more of his time? 
I wasn’t going to feature another new painting here this morning but I felt that this piece just fits perfectly into the momentary state of our politics. At least how it appears to me.
Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown.
I have always been a big fan of the movies. I’ve written here in the past how I will often paint while an old movie plays in the studio, especially some of the older classics that were often based on great ideas and great dialogue. They are not distracting in most cases and it’s easy to pull thought and emotion from these films that finds its way into my work. It’s hard to not want to inject more feeling into whatever I am at work on when I listen to some of the lines from The Grapes of Wrath or so many other great films.
This is the cover for the brochure for the Summer Workshop for the American Academy of Psychotherapists, taking place this coming June. This group also used one of my paintings (see below) for the program for their national conference this past year so I was really pleased and honored that they chose this painting, Unpuzzled, to grace this cover. I have gotten great feedback for many, many years from professionals in the field of psychology and psychotherapy so its really gratifying that they feel comfortable using my work to represent these events.
My latest works have been focusing on the use of pattern within my landscapes. Well, I guess you could call it pattern. There is often a motif of shape and sometimes a direction of movement but for the most part it is fairly chaotic and seemingly without order. Maybe that is what art is –trying to see pattern within chaos, trying to impose some sense of order so that we might better understand what we are seeing.
The more I read about this ancestor,the latest entry in my Icon series, the more interesting I find her. Her maiden name was Tacy Cooper and she is my 10th great-grandmother, born around 1609 in England. Little is known of her parentage or when exactly she came to America but she is known to have lived in Dorchester, near Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early 1630’s.
Between two worlds life hovers like a star,
Redtree Times