“Ode to Whitman” Will Be the Prize in a Free Drawing Saturday!
I am running around today, trying to arrange everything for my quick trip down to Virginia tomorrow where I will giving my annual Gallery Talk at the Principle Gallery in Old Town Alexandria, which starts at 1 PM. A little framing and some paperwork then hopefully I can concentrate on my talk although if you’ve read this blog for long you know that I generally speak off the cuff in these talks, trying to create a conversation with the audience that allows them to sort of dictate what sort of information comes out.
Sometimes that means talking about technique, which is okay but not my favorite thing to stay on for long, mainly because I think it is a limited subject of interest for the whole audience. I just can’t imagine anyone be overly interested in my choice of brush or paint unless they themselves paint or unless these things themselves are the focus of the work. But I will talk about anything including technique though I prefer to talk about creativity, about motivations and influences, those things that propel the work forward regardless of the how-to aspect behind it.
I am always a bit nervous about these events. It’s not just the nerves that come with talking before a group of people– that’s understandable and easy to work past. Rather, I worry about sometimes sharing too much information, revealing more of myself than my work, as revealing as it often is, has shown. I sometimes beat myself up on the ride home over things I have said during these off the cuff talks, wishing that I hadn’t told this story or that story about my life. I often wish I were that mysterious artist who just produces the work without a word. But that is not the path I followed as an artist. I let my life be part of my work, my memories and emotions as integral to the work as the paint or the brush.
What I am struggling to say here is that I never know what i will say which is sometimes a scary thing but sometimes makes for an interesting talk. I guess you’ll have to come out tomorrow to see what I mean.
And…. if you do come to the show you can enter a free drawing for the painting at the top, Ode to Whitman, a 12″ by 24″ painting on canvas that was the subject of my blog a few days ago. Plus, there will a few more small surprises as well. So I hope you can make it tomorrow. 1 PM, Principle Gallery, King Street, Alexandria Virginia.
I usually take a small group of new work with me for the Gallery Talk I give each September at the Principle Gallery, which takes place this Saturday at the Alexandria gallery. It’s nice to have a few new pieces to illustrate some of the points I am trying to make during the talk. This is one of the new paintings that will be going with me, The New Revelator, a 16″ by 34″ piece on paper.
I’ve been finishing this piece over the last few days and it has underwent a dramatic transformation during the last stages, one that took it from a piece that was struggling to find its identity to one that has what I feel is a powerful presence. When I look at it I see the bands in the field that run towards the center as being not only a crop but as a representation of some sort of communal knowledge or power that runs through our world, unseen. The Red Tree stands at the center, joining this gathering knowledge with the greater power of the universe that I see represented here by the open horizon behind it. There is an ethereal quality in the descending hills, one that gives a feeling of movement through time especially when coupled with the breaking sky. The Red Tree is the new revelator here, exposing the hidden powers of the universe to those who want to see.
That might seem a bit of a stretch for some, as far as what they see in this painting. Again, I remind you that this is only what I see here, what this painting holds for me in an emotional sense. You might see it as simply a landscape with interesting forms and colors. That is good enough. Or you may not like it all which, too, is okay. Whatever the case, the painting stands as it now, hopefully revealing something for you.
The New Revelator will be at the Principle Gallery this Saturday. My Gallery Talk there starts at 1 PM and I will be in the gallery before and after if you would like to stop in and say hello.
For now, here’s an interesting version of the great old Blind Willie Johnson song, John the Revelator, from Nick Cave, who always seems to have a unique take on most things.
Orphans is the word I use to describe the paintings that don’t find a home. I’ve been fortunate in my career that there haven’t really been that many so that the ones that do keep coming back to me take on a special significance, especially the ones that I felt were somehow special beforehand. It may be the extra time I get to spend with them, examining them again and again to see if there is some inherent flaw or lack of fire that keeps someone from making it their own, that gives it this significance. I spend much more time with these orphans than those paintings that quickly find a home.
Ode to Whitman is such an orphan, it being a piece has toured the country and has yet to find a home. It saddens me a bit when I look at this painting because I do see the spirit of Walt Whitman in this piece, at least as he translates into my own psyche. Though quiet in nature, the Red Tree here is celebrating its very being and could be embodying Whitman’s verse:
I too am not a bit tamed,
I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
These were words that were very influential in the formation of my artistic voice. They dared me to stand apart. They challenged me to reveal my inner self to the world, to let my light shine. To let my yawp go free.
And that is what I see in this piece. It as though once the yawp has been released, even as the surrounding trees seem to be recoiling from its sound and fury, a placid pall has come into the center of its being. It is calm now that it knows who it is, what it is.
As you can tell, I see and feel a lot in this simple painting. I guess that is why it pulls at me to think of it as orphan. That’s why I am going to give this piece a home and this is going to be the painting that will be given awayat the Gallery Talk this coming Saturday at the Principle Gallery, which starts at 1 PM. I know that it will find a good home in this way because someone who didn’t like my work would not spend an hour of their time listening to me talk about it.
So I hope you can make it to the talk and that, if you’re the one who takes Ode to Whitman home , you realize the feeling that it carries with it.
Here’s another bit of Whitman that like, from the preface to his landmark Leaves of Grass:
“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
My annual show at the West End Gallery in Corning ended yesterday which leads to the question: What’s next on the horizon?
Well, for starters, next Saturday, September 7, I will be at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA for my annual Gallery Talk there. It’s normally a pretty good time with some laughs and, hopefully, some real information passed along. If you’ve never been to one, don’t expect a lot of technical mumbo jumbo that might scare you away. Oh, be assured, I will answer any question about technique but I try to focus more on the stories behind the work. Motivations, meaning and emotional content. And maybe a story or two.
Plus, as in the past few years, there will be a free drawing for one of my original paintings. I try to make the work that I give away special and this year’s piece is one of my favorite orphans. It has meaning for me and hopefully will as well for whoever takes it home. So, if you’re in the Old Town area next Saturday afternoon, stop in at the Principle and maybe win a painting. I If you don’t win, I’ll try to at least make the time seem well spent. Hope you can make it.
After that, my focus will turn to my final show of 2013, which will open November 23 ( my early morning mistake– it is actually the 16th!) at the Kada Gallery in Erie, PA. I’ve been showing at the Kada since 1996 and owners Kathy and Joe DeAngelo have always done a great job for my work and my shows there, so I always do my best to provide some very special work. This year’s show is titled Alchemy and I promise that there will have some interesting work to support that title.
I will, of course, provide more details in the upcoming months.
For the moment, that is what in store for the next few months. Got to get to work!
Yesterday I checked my blog with a search to see if I had ever written here before about that day’s subject, Long John Baldry. I found that I had only mentioned him once in a post from back in 2009. I read the older blog and it made me chuckle. It was titled You Can’t Judge a Book… from a song that Baldry had once covered and had to do with how our preconceptions are often wrong about people. It immediately brought to mind something that had happened over the weekend here at the studio.
My niece, Sarah, brought a friend and her husband to visit the studio from their NYC home. Sarah didn’t share much about her friend outside of saying that they danced together and that she was a filmmaker for one of the large big-name auction houses. I had no idea about what her husband did. That was the extent of my knowledge outside of knowing they had been married the year before in New Orleans. But they arrived and we had a wonderful visit. Both were charming and inquisitive, asking real questions and relating their own experiences in response to my answers. They made me feel comfortable in describing my work and process, not something that a lot of people can do easily. We visited for a couple of hours and they headed back to the city.
During our visit we learned a bit about the friend’s husband. I won’t use their names out of respect for their privacy. He was in the music business in some fashion. He was DJ and had spent a lot of time touring here and abroad. He also was working on soundtracking films. When I asked what sort of music he worked in, he said, in an almost apologetic way, that it was mainly rap and hip-hop. It struck me in a curious way. He went on to explain that it was the music of when and where he grew up, in the neighborhoods of NYC. Again, this was said in an apologetic manner.
I didn’t think much about until after they left and I decided to see if I could find out more about his music. He had a prodigious reputation in the rap genre, with over twenty years in the business as a DJ and producer for a pretty big name rapper. He ran his own newer record company and has released an album of his work only weeks before our meeting. I watched a couple of videos of his work and listened to several songs. I am not an authority on rap in any form but it was powerful stuff.
I was really impressed and thought back to his apologetic description of his work. I understood it then. He didn’t want to be judged and was trying to make it easy for me to not judge him. I mean, here I was, a middle-aged white guy with gray hair out in the country— not exactly a prime candidate for a hip-hop connoisseur. He had surely heard the venom directed toward his musical genre before from people who looked like me.
So, he judged me before I could judge him. I understood that. It’s what I would have done had I been in his place. My only regret is that it robbed me of an opportunity to ask the many questions that I formed in looking up his work after they had left the studio. It would have been fascinating to compare our creative processes, to see how he synthesized his influences. I got the impression from our talk that, though we worked in vastly different environments with disparate influences, we both working on a similar creative rhythm, expressing emotion within the framework of our own personal environments.
Well, the next time we will both know and won’t worry about judging one another. Here’s the original post from back in 2009:
I’ve just put the final details on a couple of paintings that will be part of my solo show at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA. The show opens June 12th and I’m scheduled to deliver the work to the gallery a week before so I’m in the final stages of preparation. This is my tenth one-man show at the gallery and before that I did two shows as part of a group of painters from the Corning , NY area that was dubbed the Finger Lakes School.
I particularly remember one moment from the first show with that group. There was a pretty good crowd and several of us from the group mingled, answering questions and such. I had a small break in the conversation and I heard a female voice from behind ask her companion where we were from. Her friend answered that we were from the Finger Lakes region in New York. He said it was a pretty rural area with a lot of wineries and farms.
“Well, you know, they do look like farmers,” she replied.
I think I did a spit take. Over the years I often think back to that lady’s comment and sometimes laugh. Maybe we shouldn’t have all worn our overalls and straw hats that night. It just reminds me how people judge others by that initial glimpse and how often they end up being wrong. Actually, I’ve come to the conclusion that, in the end, I would prefer being mistaken for a farmer than an artist anyhow. Offhand, I can think of more positive attributes for the farmer. So, if you can make it to the opening look for the guy who looks like a farmer…
That brings me to a song, You Can’t Judge a Book, that was originally written by blues great Willie Dixon and made popular by Bo Diddley. My favorite version was from Long John Baldry, one of the pioneers of the British blues/rock movement in the early 60’s and a guy who had real panache, but I couldn’t find a version online. But while searching I came across an interesting jazzy version of the song from Ben Sidran. Give a listen and enjoy…
I just wanted to remind any readers in or near the DC area that there is a free show in support of his new CD , Comin’ Home, from singer/songwriter Michael Mattice tomorrow night, Thursday July 11th, at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria. It is a great chance to catch a rising talent in a really intimate setting and I urge you to come on out if you can make it. If not, pick up a copy of his CD — you won’t be disappointed. It is gaining steam and has been sitting at the top of the Hot New Releases on Amazonfor some time now.
His acoustic guitar work on it is impeccable, creating rich, complex textures for his songs. I was expecting that, having watched his guitar prowess through his years at Berklee. The guy can outright play. But it’s the songwriting that caught me off guard. I wasn’t expecting such a cohesive set of songs with choruses that I find myself singing along to and melodies and rhythms that hang with you long after you stop listening.
This is a strong and consistent effort that excites me from a creative standpoint. There’s a real purity in Mike’s work here, a genuine and confident voice that has evolved as he has voraciously absorbed everything around him. It’s what you want to see in any artist but it’s a rare thing to find.
This is a wonderful CD but , moreover, it is portending a future- it is not a culmination. It is a giant first step in what I see as a creative arc that stretches high and far, a truly impressive debut that sets a really high baseline for his future work. A baseline that I have no doubt he will exceed time and time again.
So, if you can, see Michael Mattice at the Principle Gallery Thursday. The event starts at 6 PM and Mike is expected to begin around 7.
Check out his site for more info and to preview the CD.
While I am busy at work in the studio preparing for my show which opens in a month at the West End Gallery in Corning, I wanted to remind everyone that my show, Observers, at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria will still be hanging there for the a little more than another week, until July 7. If you haven’t had a chance and would like to see this show, I suggest you make your way to beautiful Old Town Alexandria and take a peek before it comes down.
The painting shown above, In Clarity, a 10″ by 20″ canvas, is part of the Observers show along with the title piece, shown below.
I was on the road so I didn’t get a chance to post that a new CD titled Comin’ Home came out yesterday from my friend, Michael Mattice. I’ve talked about Mikey here before, most recently in the notes after my recent opening at the Principle Gallery. I’ve known him since he was a gangly kid of 13 or 14 tagging along with his Dad at events at the gallery. Even then Mikey gave off a tightly focused vibe, like he was there in the physical sense only while his mind was elsewhere, running through an unending set of musical charts that had his full attention. I recognized his obsessive look that said that he something deeper to express, that it was in him and was eating impatiently at him from the inside.
Mikey had started his musical journey early, taking up the flute and piano at age 8 , adding a proficiency at electric and upright bass to his repertoire in his middle school years. But the guitar always held his deepest fascination. He studied guitar at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, graduating last year. After graduation, he toured as guitarist with Jamaican Aria Morgan‘s tour to promote her album, Full Time Love, as well as playing with the progressive metal band Yantra that he had co-founded while still at Berklee.
But time came to begin to get back to that obsessive inner voice which led to the release of his new CD yesterday that features his compositions, voice and playing. It’s a mix of folk, blues, country and indie rock but it’s all Mikey. I had followed his work through the years from afar and knew primarily of his prodigious talents as progressive metal guitarist so when he passed on to me a 3 song preview of the new CD at the gallery, I was expecting work in that genre. But from the first moments I could tell that I had only seen a small glimpse of his talent in his previous work. It started with a song, Train Hoppin’, that is drenched in the sound and feel of the early folk blues, recorded on the same sort of period recording equipment that Robert Johnson and other early blues pioneers used in the 20’s and 30’s. It is his homage to the influences that paved the way for his own work, which is shown more fully in the next two songs, Back to You and Window Pane. These songs feel like his authentic voice which is exciting, making me eager to hear more from this CD.
Comin’ Home is available now on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, Google Play, as well as a number of other online outlets. You can also order it from his site, Mattice Music.
Mike will also be doing a special acoustic show promoting the CD at the Principle Gallery on Thursday, July 11, from 6-9 PM. If you can make it, this should be a wonderful opportunity to experience his wonderful talent in an intimate setting. It could be one of those things where you can tell your friends years from now about how lucky you were to see Mike play early in his career.
Just to show off a bit of his talent and dexterity, here’s a clip from his progressive work with Yantra.
My annual show, this year titled Observers, opened Friday evening at the Principle Gallery inlovely and historic Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. For those of you who don’t know much about Alexandria, it’s just a few miles from DC, resting along the opposite bank of the Potomac River. From our hotel room we could look up the river and see the dome of the Capitol Building, always an inspiring sight.
Well, I should say, we could see it when it wasn’t raining.
The tropical storm that swept up the east coast brought a couple of days of solid rain to the area, slicking the roads and causing a few accidents which had traffic snarled on the always crowded beltways around the Capitol. When I went out from my hotel on Friday morning to take a long stroll and was greeted with a steady downpour, I knew immediately from experience that this could cut down on the show’s attendance. My experience has been recent as my prior two shows had terrific rains on the days of the show which had, in each case, kept the attendance down a bit.
But despite the rain of the day, people did turn out Friday evening. It was busy and I spoke with numbers of folks and missed speaking with others who made it there but didn’t get a chance to talk with me for a bit. I always feel bad about not getting to speak with everyone who wants to comment or ask a question, especially when they come out on a wet night. Hopefully, just seeing the work together in the gallery is enough.
Kai and the “Mechanical Soil”
It was great catching up with some old friends that I have met through my time there at the gallery. Some of my favorite moments are seeing kids who I have had the pleasure of seeing grow up in these yearly glimpses, some from their earliest childhood. Here on the right is one of these young ones, Kai, who I have known since he was a wee one. Kai coined the phrase Mechanical Soil when he told me that his favorite piece was this Archaeology painting.
Another was Mikey Mattice who I wrote about here a few years ago. Mikey is certainly not a kid anymore –the Mikey has fallen away to Michael and he is out in the world now, displaying his immense musical talents. It was great getting to see him again and see how he has evolved from a gangly kid into a confident man with much to give. From the first meeting, I have always sensed big things in his future and it’s such a pleasure to see that feeling come to fruition. Can’t wait to see what the future holds for him.
So, all in all and weather aside, it was a great night. My appreciation and thanks go out to Michele, Clint , Jessica and everyone at the Principle Gallery for doing, as always, a bang up job and for making us feel so welcome and at home. And many, many thanks for all of you who could make it and apologies to those who didn’t get a chance to talk with me for a while or who had our conversations cut off too quickly. For those who couldn’t make it, hopefully I will see you soon, either at my Gallery Talk in September or at next year’s show.
I am in Virginia today for tonight’s opening at the Principle Gallery. I thought for today that I would just show a few of the images from this show that have shown here over the last few months. They look much better in person so, if you can make it, definitely stop in and take a look. Hope to see you there!
Redtree Times 