New Paintings

At Long Last! I have finally got the website updated with this year's work, in spite of a horrendous week of downtime due to internet provider problems. The site is as yet incomplete; I had intended some verbiage to explain what they're about (a radical departure from what's gone before) but that will have to wait for the nonce. And considering the disparaging words about artist's statements over on Carol Diehl's Artvent (with most of which I wholeheartedly agree, by the way) I find myself rethinking the effort. I also intend to finesse the navigation a little bit, when I get the time. For now though, this is it.

Au revoir

Well, this is it for the season. As of this time tomorrow, I will be up in Rhode Island working on a new series which has nothing to do with flowers. If you need to get hold of me, it's either snailmail, cellphone, or drop in for a visit, as I will be completely off-line.

I will probably make a trip of two back to the city between now and the fall, but other than that it's going to be just me, and the cats, and the garden, and the work.

Hasta la vista!

Lolita & the fishpond

Loli wakes up from a nap

Bebe

Bebe stuck inside during a rainstorm

Garden Gate

The Blue Garden

Plum Tree

what it looks like in the fall

More from the Backyard

These were made the year the starlings invaded our backyard and snapped the heads off all the tulips before they even bloomed. Not sure when that was, but the cats have since solved the problem.

Backyard

These are from the backyard, in varying degrees of abstraction. The middle one has to do with my plum tree (which I have drawn countless times and am now inspired to hunt down amongst all the scribbling). The tree is quite beautiful and in nearly twenty years has given me exactly one plum.

Flower Pictures

Not my usual flower pictures, but just some scribbly forms from the backyard. Which reminds me, I have weeding to do this morning. 

Tuesday morning

Summer is a-cumen in...

Counting the days now before I close up shop here in the city for another summer's work. This year feels different to me. It feels like an end of something. I'm going back to my usual place; the cats will come with me and T. will stay down here to hold the fort (so to speak). What feels different is that the paintings I'm making are for no one but myself. It's a change from the past several years when I knew there was a gallery interested in what I was doing, whether they were able to sell them or not. But, I'm on my own this time and the heady feeling of exploration is often countered by abject fear. Recent perusals of the artworld, both on-line and on foot have me convinced that the jig is up. There is most definitely a resurgence of painting, but what kind of painting? Mostly bad. I am resisting the temptation to name names here because it feels mean-spirited, but suffice it to say that I think maybe painting has died yet again. We'll see what I can manage to bring back in the fall before leveling criticism at any of my own tribe. But I'm worried.

Four more from the sketchbook

Contrast & Compare

A sketchbook page from late '90s, not even sure it was supposed to be a head, but it reminded me of this by Alexei Jawlensky:

 

as well as this by Constantin Brancusi:

At Random

Back to Normal—But not for Long

Various dusts have settled, and I've been in the studio working on a new series. This time, it's NOT flowers! A whole new direction which has been simmering for several years. But I'm not posting sneak previews, this time, because I'm not sure yet where (or how) it's going. In two weeks, I'll be outta here and off to my summer studio with no internet, email, TV. Just me and my garden and the work (and a cellphone). Meanwhile, I'm still combing through old sketchbooks for signs of life. These were done in the summer of 1969 when I was a highschool dropout living in a garage in northern Vermont, having escaped the asphyxiating chaos of my family home. Ancient history. More later.

NEWS FLASH—Upcoming Exhibition

I will be exhibiting one of my flower paintings in a group show at the Mills Pond House Gallery, Smithtown Township Arts Council on Long Island this May. The show is entitled: Of A Botanical Nature and, as you may surmise, it comprises work relating to plant life. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, May 1 from 2-4 pm. The show runs until May 28th.

Mills Pond House Gallery is located in the town of St. James on the North Shore (Suffolk County)--the perfect destination for an afternoon drive in this nice Spring weather.  If you'd like to go out and see the show, directions can be found on the google map at the bottom of this page: http://www.stacarts.org/.

Another Family Portrait

The snapshot was taken on the event of my parents' 50th wedding anniversary, in June of 1999. They are both still living, as are all the rest of us, a major miracle—I sometimes think—given the odds. We, the children, are arranged from youngest on the left to the oldest. Yours truly is second from the top:

And here is the sketchbook version (from memory):

And another, more characteristic grouping of the same gang:

I believe the overwhelming pressures of growing up in this chaos has made a profound impact on the art I make. It often feels as though I am perpetually untangling a big mess. It's not always clear what generates the imagery, although sometimes I am caught up short by the obviousness of a particular piece. 

One Word: Plastics

Well, I have hardly anything to say on this subject. I spent most of Saturday on my hands and knees picking bits of Styrofoam® out of the grasses at the edge of the harbor during the twice-a-year Salt Marsh Cleanup sponsored by the Friends of Liberty State Park. This garbage breaks down rapidly under exposure to UVs and the bits get smaller and smaller, so much so that they become impossible to remove from the environment and end up in the stomachs of birds and fish.


Not one of the items pictured above existed when I was growing up. Somehow we managed without them. There has got to be a better way!

click on pix to enlarge

Cubes & Spheres

click on pix to enlarge and see the cubes better

Holy Saturday, we went for a bike ride around the Kill van Kull & Newark Bay. The ship traffic was very heavy that morning. If you've ever wondered exactly how all that stuff gets from China and into your house, take a look at these container vessels. And if you want to know where exactly those vessels go after they pass under the Verrazano and disappear out to sea, you should check out this fascinating website. It is a live feed so you can actually identify and follow a boat you have seen. My mariner brother tells me:

Post 911 all ship of class size have to have a transponder on it, Big Brother u know. That includes large pleasure yachts.The system actually works real well cause theyre profile show's up on the radar screen while underway and tells u the ship, it's direction, size and flag of origin. This is very helpful when navigating in close quarters and need to hail some one on the radio, you at least know who your talking too.Unfortunately this system only work's when dealing with civilized countrys, It also help in the recovery of hijacked ships. It's kinda like LOJACK for the water.

Just think back to the days when Bon Papa [our grandfather] was carring a huge box camera in a balloon or plane to take plate photo's for the Belgian armymaps during the 1st war. Well sattellite has got looking into your back yard down to a science to the point where they could tell you what flowers you have growing in it.

This ship the Ludovica (below), had just made the turn from her berth into Newark Bay and was heading south toward the Kill van Kull.

We got on our bikes and rode down to the park at the bottom of Bayonne in time to see her passing under the Bayonne Bridge and into the Kill. A guy there told me that this ship is too big to go through Panama, that she can carry 6,000 containers and she plies the China trade via Suez. We managed to keep her in sight all the way out of the Harbor. There was still fog obscuring the towers of the Verrazzano as she headed into open water. 

Here's a screen shot of the Ludovica's passage. She's the green boat at the very bottom.

And now for something completely different: benzene tanks.

 HAPPY EASTER!

More Pets

While I don't usually draw from life, occasionally the cats get into my sketchbook. I just ran across this one. Probably the same cat as before.

Now (that the Armory Show is over) We Return to our Usually Scheduled Program

That is, more sketchbook stuff: this dating back to the time when the children I had prepared for my entire life up 'til then, refused to be born. These little watercolors seem sort of comic and light-hearted to me now, but that was the darkest decade of my life and I still wonder that I managed to survive the craziness, rage and depression. My body had betrayed me completely and I subjected myself to as much "science project" as my meager health plan would provide, which, clearly, wasn't enough. Me and how many thousands of other women? It was and still is more than I can comprehend and shook my world order more severely than any of the cataclysmic global change stuff that currently rocks the daily news. For a long time, I considered doing a serious piece about the whole drama, but 20 years later, I still can't touch it. So for now, this is all I can muster. I vaguely remember a sense of ironic detachment when I did these. It was a desperate attempt to "get a grip" whilst treading the quicksand of despair. I even wrote poetry during that period.

Actually, the middle one reminds me of a painting I did when I was still young, optimistic and blithely unaware of the impending tragedy. They say that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Hah! they also say (or at least my therapist did) that "Time heals all wounds." In my opinion, time only makes you old. You learn to live with the wounds.