Month: September 2017

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Something Else

Paul Dodd Model from Crime Page painting 2017
Paul Dodd Model from Crime Page painting 2017

This painting was still wet when I dropped it off. I know that’s a risky thing to do, show something before the dust settles, but I wanted something that got away from the grid. Or grids. I’m showing a lot of them. Twenty new charcoal drawings, ten of the Bug Jar Mugshots, 12 of my 2008 oil on canvas “Models from Crime Page,” a double triptych of the 2004 “Models from Crime Page” (36″ x 24″ oils), six of the 2015 small oil on wood panel “Models from Crime Page,” and all six of the original 4″x4″ 1971 mugshots of my Bloomington friends. So this one at 4 feet by 5 feet, will position itself on one wall.

There’s other stuff there too. The place is huge. Original Crimestopper pages, scans of my sources on a monitor and the earliest mugshot painting I could find, one from 1996. I fretted for days about showing that one, thinking my new stuff is so much better. And then I came back down to earth. RoCo wanted an early piece to show show the scope of this project. I searched everywhere for one that was even earlier. A have a photograph of it but I must have thrown it away.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite Philip Guston quotes.

“There is the canvas, and there is you. There is also something else, a third thing. In the beginning’s dialog – between you and the surface. As you work, you think and you do. In my way of working. I work to eliminate the distance or the time between my thinking and doing.

Then there comes a point of existing for a long time in a negative state, when you are willing to eliminate things that have been looking good all the time; you have as a measure – and once you have experienced it, nothing else will satisfy you – that some other thing or force is commanding you: only this shall you, can you, accept a this moment.”

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What Vs. Why

Leo Dodd drawing of my accident with Sammy G" Gingello in Webster, New York
Leo Dodd drawing of my accident with Sammy G” Gingello in Webster, New York

I am not particularly interested in the why. I am more interested in the what.

But we have been developing a back story from fuzzy old negatives as to why I am interested in the mugshot. The better to serve the public.

I traced a certain fascination to 1970 when my brother was arrested in Ohio for pot. It was an incredibly minor infraction but he was facing ten years in maximum security. His arrest had huge impact on our family. My brother was in town a few weeks ago and shared a few of the letters my father wrote to him while he was in prison.

I was back home for the summer, staying with my parents in Webster, and I headed out somewhere in their black VW bug. I had my dog, Molly, in the back seat and I was only a few blocks from our home when I spotted Brad walking up to my house. He had probably hitchhiked over, we hitchhiked everywhere in those days. I swung the passenger door open for Brad to get in while trying to keep Molly from jumping out and then turned left right in front of a fancy red car. My dad illustrates all this in the enlargement of his drawing above.

But he left out one interesting detail. The red car that I hit, the guy I pulled directly in front of, was the infamous Salvatore “Sammy G” Gingello, a local mobster, and he wasn’t as pissed off as I would have expected anyone to be. He was just grumbling about how he was on his way somewhere and this was gonna set him back. I read a pretty interesting book about the Rochester mob written by Georgia Durante, Sammy’s girlfriend. Sammy was killed in 1978 when a bomb was detonated as he entered his car, which was parked outside Ben’s Cafe Society.

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Molly Malone

Funny that John Gilmore stopped by today. It was 90 degrees and he wanted to soak in our pool but by the time we got down there he thought it was too cold. This time of year I don’t stick my toe in, I just jump in. I say “funny” because I was editing this 2014 footage of my father speaking at an artist’s talk at I-Square in 2014. John videoed it and he gave us a copy. My brother John and I were also in the show but I edited our parts out. I may post them as parts 2 and 3 somewhere down the road.

There is an artist’s talk at RoCo on October 7th for the “Witness” show with Leo and me. I guess they are doing it FB Live so you don’t have to leave home. My father won’t be able to be there so I’m posting this footage. It’s 23 minutes long and and I don’t want to spoil it for you if you actually slog your way through but my father mentions this song at the end and I want to dedicate it to him.

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Ephemera

Street dancers on Gibbs Street at Rochester Fringe Fest 2017
Street dancers on Gibbs Street at Rochester Fringe Fest 2017

Part of this, for the time being, all-consuming show is filling a four foot by seven foot display case. A place for ephemera related to the “Witness” show. I could fill ten of those cases with my father’s sketch books but there is only one.

I snuck a few mug shot flyers out of the office when I worked for the cops in 1976 so I’ll show those. They used a transparent overlay system back then called “Identikits” to construct what perpetrators might look like. This kind of mustache, this kind of smile, a wide range for goofy haircuts. Some of the suspects are pretty Frankenstein-like.

I saved the newspaper clipping from the time the District Attorney bought my sketch of Arthur Shawcross. And I’ve been cutting out the Crimestopper page since the Times Union was around. My sister, Amy, saved a few articles about my father that describe him out there in all four seasons sketching the Can of Worms construction project. And there’s a 1970 letter from my father to my brother who was serving time in an Ohio prison for a a minor pot infraction. The letter is precious for a number of reasons. I recommend it.

When my brother, Mark, was up last he talked about his reaction to my latest batch of drawings. I liked what he said and I asked if he could write it down.

“Looking at my brother Paul’s paintings, based on mug shots, always brings up a mix of thoughts and feelings for me ranging from artistic appreciation to memories of personal experience. They’re all portraits of real, and various people who are sharing a certain exceptional experience. They’ve just been arrested, stopped suddenly in the tracks of a free life, and are being transitioned to captivity. They’re all entitled to the presumption of innocence. But it’s a hugely degrading experience. They’re now prisoners, about to be put in a cage. Yet for me Paul’s paintings expose their dignity, their humanity – their emotions: of fear, sadness, embarrassment, defiance, anger, or resignation.

For some this is their first arrest. For others it may be another of many. But they were all innocent children once. They all have families, most probably have families that really care about them. I did when I was arrested in 1970. It was a cold February night and I felt free enough to leave my college dorm with a couple of friends and walk to a distant ball field to smoke a joint. We were looking forward to returning to the dorm to listen to “Let It Bleed,” The Rolling Stones album that just had come out. Then the cops came around a corner, with guns drawn, and in that instant I lost my freedom.

I was handcuffed, forced into a patrol car, then fingerprinted, photographed, and locked up. Paul’s paintings capture people at this border moment, when they’re told to stand at a wall and how to hold their head. They’re portraits but not in the usual circumstances, and I see the dignity in all of them, as I’m reminded of my own experience.”

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A Dream Come True

Leo Dodd paintingsI in the back of our car, headed downtown for the Witness show at Rochester Contemporary
Leo Dodd paintings in the back of our car, headed downtown for the Witness show at Rochester Contemporary

We saved the big painting for last, the only full sheet watercolor in RoCo’s upcoming show of Leo Dodd paintings. The glass was spotless. We used a homemade concoction of 1/2 cup rubbing alcohol, 1/2 cup water and 1 tablespoon of of vinegar, a recipe we found online. The painting, of the old stadium on Norton Street, was sandwiched between an off white matt board and acid-free foam core but every time we nestled it into the frame we managed to suck in some tiny little pieces of our rug or some other disturbing micro fibers. We finally got a clean version but only by taking it into the bathroom under bright lights and assembling it on the edge of the bathtub.

I was thinking about the Red Wing games we saw in that old stadium. Havana, Montreal and Toronto all had teams in the International League back then. The time the guy sitting behind us burned a hole in my brother’s sweater with his cigar.

RoCo selected a great batch of paintings for this show. They focused on his Rochester paintings. My father was attracted to the scale of construction projects so there is a batch from the O’Rorke Bridge construction, the Bausch & Lomb headquarters downtown, the Freddy Sue Bridge and the biggest project of them all, the reworking of the Can of Worms, a project that coincidentally started in 1988, the year my father retired.

He’d sit off to the side and sketch the activity. The newspaper did a piece on Leo at the time and I like this quote. “It was a dream come true,” Dodd said last week, probably the only person in Monroe County who would say that with a straight face when it comes to the Can.”

“But most people haven’t spent the past two and a half years sketching the construction of the new $123 million interstate interchange. Dodd, a retired Kodak engineer who has taught courses at Rochester Institute of Technology, has made hundreds of sketches of the Can reconstruction since work began in March of 1988. Dodd, who started sketching large‐scale construction projects four years ago, said the Can project was a blessing because it was just minutes from his home on Corwin Road. So while tens of thousands of people were dreading three years of detours, Dodd was delighted.”

I think he would be delighted with this show. It opens Friday, October 6.

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These Times

Brian Wilson playing Pet Sounds at Eastmanl Theater in Rochester, New York
Brian Wilson playing Pet Sounds at Eastmanl Theater in Rochester, New York

The Squire was there. Rob Filardo too. And Kinloch Nelson. Brian Wilson played Pet Sounds start to finish in Kodak Hall. We got our tickets at the the last minute, nudged into it when our thirty year old neighbor asked if we were going. Brian had an eleven piece band with him, a Wrecking Crew on wheels. His cousin, Rochester native, Al Jardine, was there along with Al’s son on vocals. The musical director played every kind of horn. Mike D’Amico and a percussionist played drum fills like Hal Blaine. A keyboard player sang like a Beach Boy and a second keyboard player, from Heart’s old road band, solidified the sound. Brian pretty much just had to sit there but he went for it in about half the songs.

First set was Beach Boys gold, Little Honda, In My Room, Surfer Girl, Wild Honey, Darlin, Add Some Music. No Surf’s Up, but just as well. That masterpiece should never be touched again.

We had to be there. I bought every Beach Boy album as they were released and still love them. Brian is a musical saint. He introduced Pet Sounds, the song, by warning the crowd that the song had no words. His version of Carline No, the last song on the album and the evening’s last tune was fittingly, achingly longing. “Where did your long hair go?” sung by the boy that wrote that in his latter years. I wanted to cry. Love and Mercy was a great tune to send us home with but I woke up singing, I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times.

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Next

Venus statue in Wolcott New York
Venus statue in Wolcott New York

I’m determined to swim today. Although we’re in charge of the chemistry for the street pool this week, I haven’t had time to get down there. I’ve been trying to complete a painting for this upcoming show and it has taken all my time. Even when you are “finished” with a painting there is no real sense of satisfaction. The painting may be finished but the next one is already all you can think about.

There must be some good in collecting your thoughts. Reluctantly. I have done so and I’m now ready to move on. I may find clarity in the swimming pool.

I am not comfortable in front of the camera. It is hard for me to stand still and a broad smile seems unnatural. I feel vulnerable, trapped. Maybe that is why I find mugshots so interesting.

Maybe it is because my brother was arrested at such an early age. He served time for possession of a small quantity of marijuana in 1970. I posed five of my friends in front of a white canvas shortly after that. My entire family’s life was impacted by his arrest.

In 1976 I took a job as a graphic artist for the City of Rochester. I worked on the fourth floor of the Public Safety Building in the Rochester Police Department’s Crime Analysis Unit. I had access to the mugshots and I constructed flyers and posters with them in an attempt to link perpetrators to crimes in particular areas of the city.

In the mid-nineties I started painting portraits of local people. My source was, and often still is, the Crimestoppers page from the Democrat & Chronicle, people who are wanted for violation of parole. I have continued to revisit this subject for many years and recently competed twenty charcoal drawings for this show.

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Plastic Arts

Hazelnut on picnic table in Elison Park, Rochester, New York
Hazelnut on picnic table in Elison Park, Rochester, New York

With this string of gorgeous days the outdoor palette is changing ever so slightly. Oranges and browns are creeping in. Nuts are falling from the sky. I heard an acorn fall on our neighbor’s trailer as I drifted off last night. The horseshoe pits are dusty. Although it was forecast we haven’t had rain in a week or so. It’s good that we can’t count on a particular kind of weather. You never know. And that’s why we live here.

Plastic has been around so much longer than plastic, way before Dustin Hoffman’s line in The Graduate. “Capable of being molded or modeled. Capable of adapting to varying conditions.” There is a time-lapse video out there of someone working on a painting. He reworks a section and it looks exactly like it did before he reworked it. I have not seen the video, I have only heard about it. I don’t want to see it.

Paint is malleable. I’ve been reworking sections of a painting for the last week. Does it look any better? Am I going around in circles? Painting always gets the best of you. That’s the way it should be.

That’s my Uncle Bob heading to the bathroom in the blowup of the photo above.

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Points Of Departure

InkJet watercolors at Mercer Gallery Rochester New York
InkJet watercolors at Mercer Gallery Rochester New York

Colleen Buzzard, the thinking man’s artist, along with Karen Sardisco, has brought together twenty or so artists who explore the idea of mapping as thinking. The show, at MCC’s Mercer Gallery and six satellite locations, turns out to be whole lot of fun. We started with a three page handout that associated 61 artworks with the artists. There are some familiar names like Ann Havens, Scott McCarney and Jim Mott but many from other cities. A postcard for the show listed the six satellite locations but you might need a map to find them. Three are on the UR campus, one is at RIT, one at VSW and one opens sat RoCo in the Lab Space on October 6.

Ryan Boatright, from Paris France, deconstructed a failed email attachment and translated it into a score for music. The binhex code is printed on a stack of pages on the gallery floor and the music is looped on an iPod. Tate Shaw’s watercolors above, photos printed on watercolor paper and reworked with water, were stacked in an especially inviting way but accompanied by two little notes that read “Please do not touch.” By clicking on the photo you can see six beautiful works that we were allowed to look at. It’s a wildly interesting show including even a circuit board negative for an old MXR effects box.

There is a four foot high pile of US Geological Survey maps at the door of the gallery and we were invited to take a map home with us. Mine shows Santa Margarita Lake in California.

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Pure Creation

Paul Dodd "Models From Crime Page" paintings from 2008 getting sun at the pool in 2017
Paul Dodd “Models From Crime Page” paintings from 2008 getting sun at the pool in 2017

Peggi is practicing sax upstairs while I work on a painting in my studio. There has hardly been time to come up for air since I found out about this show last winter. I suppose I could have just just put work in from the past. Bleu, the gallery curator, wanted to show the scope of this project, the “Models from Crime Page.” I’ve been revisiting it for over twenty years now. But as he was pushing me to show examples of the earliest pieces I could only think about doing something new. So the summer flew by and I’m still banging away, but not on my drums. I haven’t touched those since June. Not that I have any chops to lose but I don’t like cramping up after the first hour. Margaret Explosion is back at the Little on Wednesdays in October and we will be joined by the great Phil Marshall

I haven’t been listening to music while I paint. It is too distracting. But the sound of Peggi’s sax, as she plays along with Margaret Explosion recordings and melodies that she originated the when those songs were recorded is very inspiring. I can barley hear the backing tracks over the dehumidifier but her lines come through perfectly. From my vantage point it is extraordinary, the way Peggi pulls these melodies from the air. An act of pure creation. She is my favorite artist. I can always tell when she’s winding down because the last few play-alongs are from John Coltrane’s “Ballads.”

I took a bunch of paintings from 2008 down to the pool so they could sit in he sun. A funny thing happens to white oil pigment when it sits in a box for a few years but a few hours in the sun bleaches that yellowish tint.

Listen to High Life by Margaret Explosion

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Park Nuts

Walnut Man in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, New York
Walnut Man in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester, New York

On a good day we don’t see anyone in the park. Actually, that is not entirely true. On really nice days we always run into other people. Most days, though, we hardly see anyone in the park. I used to find that surprising but not anymore. People have stuff to do.

We were coming back up from the lake on Pine Valley Road when we watched this guy pull over, hop out of his car and walk directly over to a tree near the side of the road. He didn’t even look back at us as we walked by so I asked, “What’s going on with that tree?” He said, “I didn’t know there was a walnut tree here. I’ve been picking walnuts from the tress over there for years but I never new there was one here.” He had a few of them in his hands already. They are about the size of a tennis ball before you get the outer green layer off. And inside that there is the wooden shell and inside that the fruit.

He told us he takes them home and soaks them in a bucket, about a hundred at a time. “If they rise to the surface I throw them out because they are rotten but that only happens to two or three.” He said he cracks them open with a rubber mallet and eats them while he’s watching tv. As he was talked he got a small shovel out of the back of his car and he cracked a few nuts open and gave us taste. They were great, nice and moist. Then he showed us a long handled pruning sheer that he uses to cut them from higher branches. I asked if the park people ever bothered him while he was picking and he said, “No, but I’m not picking nuts today, I metal detecting.”

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Big Bird

Eagle in dead tree in marsh off Hoffman Road, Rochester, New York
Eagle in dead tree in marsh off Hoffman Road, Rochester, New York

As we leave our street we get a good view of a few of the neighbors backyards. One is mostly unused but with a professionally maintained lawn. Periodically dosed with chemicals and surrounded with the yard-worker version of yellow police crime tape. A small evergreen tree, the size you would buy as a live, tabletop Christmas tree, sits in the middle of their lawn. Still in the red plastic pot from a few years back it is now partially brown.

The house next door is like Noah’s Ark. They have one of everything in their back yard. An extra car, a boat, a camper, a small patio with chairs and fire pit, a dog pen, a small vegitable garden and an old treasure chest. It wasn’t surprising that they picked up the small pink tent that we saw out by the curb further down the street last week. It caught our eye too but we assumed a little girl had outgrown it and another would find it, not these middle aged scavengers.

The other day there was a hawk on their garage and we didn’t scare it off. It was so close to us I wondered whether the bird was right (rabid?) and then I put it together that we had interrupted it. Instead of taking more photos of it I looked down at the ground and sure enough there was a dead squirrel about ten feet from us.

We continued down Hoffman Road and stopped at the marsh like we always do. There was a really big bird sitting on top of the tallest dead tree and I assumed it was another hawk with its prey. As we moved closer we started to think it might be an eagle. Steve Greive came around the bend in his Jaguar and he honked at us. That scared it off. I had to come home and compare my photo with a google “eagle” search to be convinced.

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The Experience Of Experience

Irondequoit Bay from front porch of MacGregors on Empire Boulevard in Rochester, New York
Irondequoit Bay from front porch of MacGregors on Empire Boulevard in Rochester, New York

John Ashbery grew up in Sodus NY, near where our literary friends just bought a house, and he went to school in Rochester, later living on Dartmouth Street where Peggi and I lived when we moved (back here in my case) from Indiana. I di not know much about him until died. I still don’t but I love the snippets o poetry hat have been quoted in his obits and related remembrances.

“I feel the carousel starting slowly
And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,
Photographs of friends, the window and the trees,
Merging into one neutral band that surrounds
Me on all sides, everywhere I look.
And I cannot explain the action of leveling,
Why it should all boil down to one
Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.”

Ashbery claimed that he was trying to convey “the experience of experience.” What a noble pursuit.

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I Remember Maggie

This post originally linked to a video that has since been removed by YouTube.

Actually I don’t remember doing this show at all. And I wish I didn’t remember all those years we had Maggie Brooks as our County Executive. I read this morning’s obit for the Cuban boxer, Sugar Ramos, whose opponent, Davey Moore, died three days after their bout in Dodger Stadium. Bob Dylan’s “Who Killed Davey Moore?” started going through my head and sure enough, as I read on, Dylan wrote the song based on this story. He lays the blame right where it belongs.

So off to the right, as I’m watching the video to Dylan’s song I see this “Personal Effects featuring Eddie Allen” link suggestion. Who the heck is Eddie Allen? The WHEC guy who talks over the performance and says “Let me see the little girl singer Camera 5”?

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Animated Violence Mild

Deer Hunting Game at MacGregor's on Empire Boulevard in Rochester, New York
Deer Hunting Game at MacGregor’s on Empire Boulevard in Rochester, New York

I know someone that would love this video game. We were sitting next to it at MacGregor’s overlooking the Irondequoit Bay. The place didn’t come up when I searched for nearby “sports bars” in my map program but I remember coming out here with Matthew and Louise to see a match during some other tournament. We were looking for someone who had the BeIn network so we could watch the US Men’s team play Honduras in a near must-win qualifying match for the 2018 World Cup in Russia.

The US is still relatively new to the sport but we are lucky to be in Concacaf, the North, Central American and Caribbean confederation. Other than tough competition from Mexico it should be pretty easy for the US to finish in the top three of these 35 nations yet we’re getting right down to the wire. We watched the US lose to Casta Rico again a few nights ago and they barely squeaked out a tie via Honduras last night.

I still hold a grudge against MacGregors for leaving their original location in the South Wedge but the guy that manages this location was pretty accommodating. He told us he was a soccer player for thirty five years and he said he has arthritis so bad he has to stretch before getting out of bed. He said his team won the sectionals. Webster went to the sectional finals in my senior year so I asked where he played. He said Wayne County and I asked what year. I had him pegged for “older than me” but he was seven years behind. He was probably thinking the same thing of me.

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Day Off

Kathy Krupp's Porch
Kathy Krupp’s Porch

The lakeshore is usually overcrowded on Labor Day but there has been nothing usual about this summer. It felt like summer as walked along the beach but there weren’t enough people down there. The lake levels are still high. There is not much beach. It rained a lot this year and the rain kept the temperatures down. We swam after walking but the water in our street pool is down to 70 degrees. I’m not complaining, just cataloging. I use the search engine in this blog to keep track of the last ten years.

We have plenty of jalapeños but our tomatoes are still mostly green. We made salsa with those ingredients and had our neighbors down for a visit. I showed them my new drawings and we talked mostly about race and prejudice. It was a lot more fun than it sounds.

It was a perfect night for reading on the porch.

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Full Swing

Mizin Shin woodcut prints and silkscreen prints in the Lab Space at Rochester Contemporary
Mizin Shin woodcut prints and silkscreen prints in the Lab Space at Rochester Contemporary

First Friday in September. Gallery night out. We started with the show at R Gallery on College Avenue. Mitch Goldstein’s large scale abstract photograms made from small objects. Both were artfully displayed in the front room. The back room was surround projections from Nancy Bernardo. She creates intentional and accidental glitches by manipulating the scanner bed while digitizing and then layering the results in moving pictures.

“Under Pressure,” Rochester Contemporary‘s new show features work by four printmakers, very unusual printmakers. They push the boundaries of printmaking big time. We spent quite a bit of time talking to Michael DeLucia about his high tech process for making low tech contact camera-less prints and 3d cork sculptures. They were beautiful and the more questions you ask about the work the more engaging they became.

Mizin Shin (photo above) really wowed us in the Lab Space. That space has been transformed as never before with her B&W silkscreen and woodblock prints.

We finished our night at Roc Brewery where A.R. Stone’s early aerial photos of downtown Rochester were on display. Stone’s great great grandson was on hand to talk about the prints that were handed down from his grandmother. He told us how she accidentally broke the glass negatives so we were looking at the only surviving prints. The Brewery crafted a beer named after Stoney for the evening.

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Geocaching

Milkweed caterpillar at pool
Milkweed caterpillar at pool

Our hike took us along the beach this afternoon and we were surprised to see the water level was still so high. Our garden and horseshoe pits are dry.

We ran into Hal, our jazz fest buddy, at the entrance to the park. He told us he had been geocaching and he had located three today. He wants to have a hundred by year’s end. Hal was wearing a Chelsea FC hat and he told us he has been following the Flash in their new North Carolina home. We asked if he was going to watch tonight’s US men’s World Cup qualification but he said he doesn’t have cable.

Hal likes to change topics so we talked about upcoming arboretum tours, Bop Shop shows and the Toronto Film Fest. He told us he was the first speaker at the City Hall hearing on the theater proposal for Parcel 5. He thinks the idea that the theater will bring business downtown is a sham. I don’t like that park idea either. I say sell the property to the highest bidder without incentives or tax breaks.

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