Abstract Vocabulary

Standing in the middle of Eastman Lake, Rochester, New York
Standing in the middle of Eastman Lake, Rochester, New York

Lake Ontario is the only one of the Great Lakes with some open water and if the cold continues as expected it too will be frozen over in other week. The lake looks fantastic but don’t look too close. An RIT kid may have fallen off the ice covered Charlotte pier this week and disappeared. Peggi and I skied across Eastman Lake this afternoon, trusting that it was completely frozen over. I took this photo from the middle of the lake.

The best part of Margaret Explosion’s gig at Mercer Gallery was hearing the talk Carole d”Inverno gave at the opening of her amazing show. Carole takes a place (in this case, Rochester) or an event as a starting point. She gathers multiple layers of information about the place, the building blocks of a visual vocabulary and at the breaking point she works from memory creating sketches and then these beautiful paintings.

She says she “is not a non-objective painter.” All the sketching clears a lot of stuff away so when she gets to the painting she doesn’t try to recreate the sketch but tries to stay in the moment using her newly found abstract vocabulary. We had dinner with Carole the following evening and followed up with the “in the moment” part of her delightful process.

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