Birds and Worms Clubhouse on Irondequoit Bay in Rochester, New York
My grandfather’s brother, Paul Dodd, was a local ballplayer of note. He took out ads in the paper announcing his availabilty to teams preparing for competition. He played for money. My father has been tracking down links to him in old newspapers, like those found on the amazing Fulton History site. He has found mentions of Paul playing at Sheehan’s field at 12 Corners, Windsor Beach in Summerville. a ballpark out Edgemere near where Schaller’s is today and this place called “Birds and Worms.”
At painting class last night my father (Leo Dodd), asked us if we had any idea where “Birds and Worms” was. He sent us this photo. He thought it was near us but we had never heard of it. My father continued his research last night and found it on a Google map. It turns out to be at the closest point on the bay to our house, a former Native American settlement and now home to the Newport Yacht Club. It is at the bottom of Seneca Road down a very steep hill. It is impossible to ride our one speed bikes back up it so we walk them.
The Birds and Worms clubhouse, shown above, hosted meetings of the “Early Birds And Unfortunate Worms Club” and later became the Birds and Worms Hotel, serving smuggled Canadian rum. There is not enough flat land down there for a baseball game so they must have sponsored games at another location. I’m thinking of re-organizing a social club called “Early Birds And Unfortunate Worms Club.”
I was kind of jealous, seeing that picture in the paper of the Winter Aconite blooming on the front yard of the Eastman House. I have been looking for the ones we have in our yard but they are still under the snow. Just a few years back they were out on February 20th. I like thinking about them isolated by the snow, ready to pop with just a little sun. They are official Spring marker. Sure, the geese are squawking overhead, the witch hazel is out, the pussy willows are in bloom but the winter is not over until the yellow Winter Aconite pop. And I found this one out back today, a full month later than in 2012.
This tree is monstrous. It’s a Champion Oak tree and it’s out back of Jeff and Mary Kaye’s. Down by the river that is, just like the Neil Young song, the one that came up in our shuffled library a few days ago. That damn thing still sounds good. Speaking of good. We heard “Bandit” tonight in the car. It may be time to watch “Greendale” again.
Don’t Tread On Me Flag on Saint Patrick’s Day in Rochester, NY
My niece is big on the emoticons. They all look the same to me. Noisy. I would rather read into text messages or read between the lines but most of the time I just take them at face value. These flags are a lot like emoticons. I’m big on imaginary emoticons.
Bill Keyser, Paul Dodd and John May paintings in scurrent show at the Creative Workshop of the Memorial Art Gallery
I couldn’t be happier with my placement in the current show at the Creative Workshop. My piece, “The Inquisitor,” is sandwiched between a Bill Keyser diptych and John May’s three dimensional space trip. They are two of my favorite painters. I wish Alice de Mauriac was still in town and painting in Fred’s class. Roberta Smith reviewed a Chelsea show this morning by Suzan Frecon, a painter whose current work reminds of Alice’s. There are so many things going on in the world but some days all I can think about is painting.
Charles Birchfield “February Thaw” watercolor 1920
I came across this 1920 Charles Burchfield watercolor in my Tumblr feed this morning. It’s called “February Thaw” and it is in the collection at the Brooklyn Museum. Burchfield spent a good deal of his life in Buffalo and this is pretty much the way things look around here now.
My brother and his wife are headed to Spain for Holy Week. We have been enlisted to provide tips. I wish I could do more that that and join them. Peggi and I were in Granada for Holy Week about twenty years ago and it was unforgettable. Palm Sunday, the start of the week, is still eleven days away but but we are getting in the mood by playing Miles’ “Sketches of Spain.” There is a song called “Saeta” on the record that I really love.
In Spain the “saeta” is an unaccompanied song where the singer shows his or her ardent devotion to a particular image of Christ or the Virgin. A Jewish tradition dating to the 16th century, the saeta is often performed outdoors during Holy Week (next week ) as local parishes’ prized statues are paraded through the street in long, winding processions. A saeta performed from the balcony of an apartment overhead can be a stunning emotional experience.
The processions there are usually accompanied by a rag tag band and the band always stops for the spontaneous performance of a saeta. This song recorded last week at the Little Theatre and now entitled “Saeta” is in the spirit of those bands.
We were out by our mailboxes talking to our neighbor, Jared, for about ten minutes before I realized he was wearing his waders, boots that seamlessly transition into leakproof pants. He had broken the ice on his bond and he was taking inventory of the fish that survived our tough winter. There were twenty-four groggy fish in the pond before the snow came. They stop eating when the water temperature goes into the forties and just kind of float below the surface.
When the water freezes on top he has a small heater that keeps a small opening in the surface, just enough to let gasses escape. He was in New Zealand and emailed us to request that we clear away the snow from the top of the heater but when we did that the ice froze around the heater’s cover sealing the fish in for a few weeks. So far he has identified four living fish, one injured fish and six dead ones. Jared was in mourning but I am uncertain as to whether it is over the loss of the fish or the engineering failure.
My father called this morning to tell me I should buy Jeff Spevak a few beers. He spotted the piece Jeff wrote in Sunday’s paper about the band and my art show at the Little. Nobody reads the paper anymore so I posted it below. I say nobody but I still do. I’m not sure Jeff does because he refers to the “Crimestopper” page as a “feature once run by the Democrat & Chronicle.” I’m working on fifteen now that were in the “A” section a few weeks back.
I snapped the photo above to remember what parts of my painting Fred Lipp covered. His grey paper is his primary teaching tool. and you can see it in action here. I was struggling with this one. It got away from me and too many parts were out of whack. He told me he liked how I carved with white in what is shown and this let me see what works. The parts under the paper were smoothed out or blended. The dreaded “blended.” He can sometimes cover three fourths of your painting and then tell you, “There’s your painting.
Paintings by Paul Dodd, Fast Forward Film Fest and G. Love
“The narcotic groove of Rochester’s avant-garde jazz combo Margaret Explosion has returned to its free, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday residency at The Little Café, 240 East Ave. So that’s happening all through May. As a bonus this month, the walls of the venue are filled with the odd, haunting portraits by the band’s drummer, Paul Dodd. The pencil sketches are taken from photos from “Crimestoppers,” head shots of people wanted by the Rochester Police Department, a feature once run by the Democrat & Chronicle (Don’t you ever accuse this newspaper of not supporting the arts).
Six oil portraits on the wall behind where the bands play are particularly intriguing. It’s the 1957 Mynderse Academy basketball team from Seneca Falls, Seneca County, taken from the school’s yearbook. The whole team, it had only six players. In his artist’s statement, Dodd says he picked the team because the players looked “especially hapless.” Indeed, as the headline accompanying the yearbook photo notes, “Team Faced Tough Competition.” Virtually all of the portraits, basketball players and second-degree assault suspects alike, are reduced to heads floating on a white background.” – Jeff Spevak D&C
Charlotte pier in March, Winter 2015, Rochester, New York
We spotted some Pachysandra sticking out from under the piles of snow that line our sidewalk. We picked some sprigs of witch hazel from the bush down the street and brought them home to fully open in our kitchen. They smell rich like butterscotch. We’re two days from Saint Patty’s, our Spring marker, and we took a walk without our skis for the first time in six weeks.
Louise asked what pizzeria we liked and we told her “Nino’s.” We’ve been going there for thirty years, whenever we order pizza that is and that is only about once a year. I described why we liked it, great sauce, fresh ingredients, homemade sausage and thick crust. She stopped me at the thick crust part. “Matthew doesn’t like thick crust.”
On Friday we met Matthew and Louise at La Belle Vita in Webster, right across from the Denonville Inn on Empire Boulevard. They do wood-fired pizza, individual pizzas, and they are thin sliced. I had the “Rustico” with both roasted red and hot green peppers. It was fantastic. At dinner Matthew recommended “Leviathan.” It is currently at the Little and we had gone to see it last week but we never got out of the café and in to the theater. We sat down with Gloria while her husband was playing drums with Maria Gillard. They were stretching with with some rather complicated standards and having a ball. It was all very enjoyable.
I’m glad we got the push for the Russian movie. It’s actually based on an American story. The corrupt power theme works well in all languages. Leviathan is dark and fairly heavy but absolutely beautiful. We loved it.
Dubuffet work in “Soul of the Underground” show at MoMA
“Look at what lies at your feet. A crack in the ground, sparkling gravel, a tuft of grass, some crushed debris, offer equally worthy subjects for your applause and admiration.” That’s Jean Dubuffet writing in 1957 about his influences. A Dubuffet show, “Soul of the Underground,”of mostly works on paper is up at MoMA until April 5.
Da Vinci Drums of War at Rochester Museum & Science Center
If we hadn’t spotted the announcement for today’s lecture in the morning paper we certainly would have spent the day outdoors. The gas company is replacing the lines on our street and attempting to move everyone’s meter outside. There is a lot of commotion out there and it was especially sunny.
Instead we settled into a darkened auditorium and struggled to understand French scientific engineer, Pascal Cotte, as he described the multi-spectral digital camera he designed to photograph the Mona Lisa for the Louvre. His camera takes images that are 240 million pixels using less light than the painting would receive in the gallery on a typical day.
His reconstructed photos show the incredibly detailed and intricate patterns of lacework on the clothing, You can see the individual strands of hair that made up the eye lashes and what’s left of the eyebrows. You can see DaVinci’s thumbprint in several places. He used it to spread the paint just so. The virtual restoration removes the varnish and restore the painting to the colors that were available in DaVinci’s day. You would think museums would be clamoring for this camera to authenticate paintings in their collection but Dr. Cotte says, “They do not want to know.”
Leonardo started painting the Mona Lisa in 1503 and kept her with him until his death, retouching and reworking her constantly and still felt she was incomplete. X-Rays reveal a different woman at the bottom of this painting. In 1911 an Italian worker at the Louvre stole the painting. He kept it in his home for two years. He added some orange paint to the picture and then tried to sell it to the Uffiza Gallery in Florence, calling it “her rightful home. A madman threw a rock at the painting in 1956. You can still see the damage.
The exhibit, on the top floor of the Museum & Science Center, has several reproductions of Dr. Cotte’s photos of the Mona Lisa along with seventy five of DaVinci’s life-sized, machine inventions. It is rather mind-blowing. The show makes it’s case. “DaVinci is surely the greatest genius the world has ever known.”
I was painting in my studio when the Amazon delivery arrived. I had been tracking it and expected it so it was no surprise but I couldn’t wait to pop it open. I hadn’t stopped thinking about the Madame Cezanne show since we saw it last month at the Metropolitan where it is up for another week.
The first pages I laid my eyes on were in the center of the book and they were all photos of Matisse paintings, a serious student of Cézanne. In fact there was a photo Matisse in his living room in front of one of the Madame Cézanne portraits from the show. Matisse owned it!
About painting Cézanne said, “The artist must perceive and capture harmony from among the many relationships. He must transpose them in a scale of his own invention while he develops them according to a new and original logic. Charlotte Hale, in an essay from the book entitled, “A Template for Experimentation,” says the Madame Cezanne paintings “are quietly explosive paintings about painting.” And that is exactly right on.
Cézanne invents ways to create spacial relationships. Cézanne is a saint.
Dejan and Lanna Pejovic- “Related” art show at The Geisel Gallery, Rochester, New York
Dejan and Lanna Pejovic’s current art show at the Geisel Gallery in the old Bausch + Lomb headquarters is aptly entitled, “Related.” They are brother and sister and they say it is only a coincidence but Dejan’s terra cotta sculptures and Lanna’s arched-motif paintings are physically related as well. Dejan teaches a class across the hall from Fred Lipp’s class at the Creative Workshop and Lanna teaches drawing and painting at RIT.
I like looking at a show before I read about it so I popped this picture of their artist statements and took a look at it at home. Dejan got his down to one sentence but he probably didn’t even need that. Their work looks fantastic together. The show runs until March 26 so stop in the next time you’re downtown.
Possum in snow along trail near the Genesee River in Rochester, New York
Good thing Peggi brought along the tube of “Glide.” We met Jeff and Mary Kaye at their house on the river for French Toast, “lab meat” sausage links and French press coffee. By the time we got suited up the snow was beginning to melt and stick to the bottom of our skies. We applied the blue, wax-like substance to our non-wax skis and took off around the old, overgrown harness racing track, then through the woods down to the river where we ran into this little guy.
He was in our trail but seemed oblivious to us. We all wondered if he was just coming out of hibernation or something because we thought they were nocturnal. Could he possibly be hard of hearing or sight impaired? I looked it up. “Opossums do not hibernate. The winter months will see many opossums change their foraging habits from night to day in order to try to take advantage of the warmer weather during sunlight hours. Their tails are particularly susceptible to frostbite as they have no fur covering to protect them. Neither their eyesight nor their hearing is particularly acute, but they can both see and hear.”
Back inside we were happy to assist Jeff with a presentation of his life-long project, a daily photo of himself, mostly self portraits including scans of slides, prints and multiple iPhoto libraries. It will be sensational when it is officially out of the bag.
1840 white house on Stoney Clover Road in Pittsford New York
We pushed it yesterday and skied down one side of Lake Eastman then across the lake on the ice and back on the other side and then crossed back over again just because we could. Consequently I was late for a doctor’s appointment, an appointment that was scheduled at the same time as JD McPherson’s free show at Record Archive. We headed over there anyway gambling that maybe the show started on rock ‘n roll time but no such luck. Danny Deutsch, who was promoting the show was walking out as we approached the door. Guess “they played their asses off.” We had never heard them but we liked Spevak’s interview with the guy in the Thursday’s paper.
It was nice sunny day so we headed out to Pittsford, just south of Rochester, to track down a short list of Don Hershey homes for Peggi’s website. According to Don’s notebooks there are either three or four Hersheys on Stoney Clover. Stoney Clover Lane is off Stone Road which is off of Clover. I was riding shotgun and shooting photos. We are pretty good at spotting them. Low slung ranches with his mid-century modern touchstones like glass brick, corner windows and most importantly, houses that are ideally situated on their piece of property.
My first photo caught a young woman standing in the window of big, brick, monastery-like house. She came out and told us it was “a little unnerving” to have someone take photos of their house. The houses out here are huge and the lots are all at least an acre. I took the photo above of one that looked like the White House or a southern plantation in snow. I just assumed it was a MacMansion but we looked it up when we got home and discovered it was built in 1840.
Carnegie Building on Goodman Street in Rochester, New York
Our painting class was canceled on Tuesday because of the weather. It was somewhere between snow and rain so the roads were iced over. We were disappointed but a make-up class will be tacked on to the schedule. We already missed another session the night after this building on the old UofR campus burned down. It was being rehabbed and going condo like every other hundred year old building in the city. Our class in the basement of the Cutler Union building is directly downwind of this building so we were literally smoked out.
We ran into Jim and Gail Thomas at an art opening tonight and they were telling us about the time they were living in Medina and the winter came to a quick end and the snow melted so fast that water came rolling down the street and filled their basement. We are headed toward 50 next week so this conversation course was only natural.
We heard Bowie’s “Art Decade” on the way home. What ever happened to him? He had good thing going with Eno in that “Low/Heroes” period.
I was happy to see Janet Williams studying my basketball players at last night’s opening. I remember talking to her about the first batch of paintings that I did of these guys. I love Janet’s paintings and couldn’t wait to hear what she had to say about this batch. Her husband, Ted, showed up as we were talking and pulled out a picture of his high school basketball team. He wanted me to find him in the picture. Unlike the six member Mynderse Academy team that I painted Ted’s Brighton High School team had almost twenty players on it. Without thinking I said, “Wow, I’ll bet you never played.” Ted told me they put him in once and and he ran a layup and slammed the ball against the backstop so hard it bounced all the way to the other end of the court. The sports reporter, Bob Mathews, and former County Executive, Bob King, were both on his team. I found Ted in the photo right away. He looked just like one of his sons.
Kathy Krupp brought me a little laminated photo that she found on the ground over by the UofR. About one inch by one inch, a close cropped photo of a man’s head, like something you would see on an id. Bob Martin thought I was one of the ones pictured in the basketball series. Brian Peterson wanted to know all about my source material, the Crimestopper page, now online as a pdf. Most people wanted to talk about who these people were, which one was the homeless girl, that sort of thing. Fred Lipp was there even though he had seen everyone of these pieces in class. If I didn’t do them in class I at least ran them by the master before officially considering them “done.” I would rather talk about the paintings and did so for quite a while with Steve Caswell. He was making a connection between the way I paint and way I play drums. That was a springboard for the whole minimalism as maximalism thing. The importance of each element, what to leave out.
Richard Margolis asked me if he could ask me a business question. I said “no” without missing a beat and he asked anyway. Ken Franks asked me what I thought of the band name, “Sun Rags.” Pete Monicelli, who is on the board at BOA Editions, read us a poem that he wrote in response to a recent book that BOA published, something about if god was a woman. I was thinking a better title would be “If God Was A Man.” There were quite a few artists there but a lot of current and former art teachers there last night. I mean like ten that I can think of now.
I would have been happy to keep the art buzz going all night but a little after 8 Bob started making noise with his guitar. The band did have an engagement last night so with Martha O’Conner’s help we moved the hors d’oeuvres table against the wall and band began playing. Martin Edic came up to me while I was playing and said, “I want you to know. I really love your show.”
A better title for this entry would be “Leftover Vegetables and Hummus.”
We do groundhogs’ day a month late around here and we do it with chipmunks. This little guy, in our backyard, popped his head up and likes what he sees. He’s predicting St. Patrick’s Day will arrive on schedule, March 17th.
We are headed over to my parents’ apartment to wish my dad a happy birthday. I called to say we were headed over and he invited us down to the bistro where the Special of the Week is “Fried Bologna and Onion Sandwiches.” I have not had one of those since I was kid but I might go for one of those and a vanilla shake.
Before I start a drawing or painting I’m always tempted to try a different approach, mainly so I don’t wind up with the same old problems. The drawing can then become chore as I try to recover. My friend, Martin, who comments here often, would tell me to move on to another subject but that is beside the point. I suppose most people would love to be able to just dash off something good, the whole Midas Touch thing, but struggle is big part of the package. “This Ain’t No Picnic” – Minituemen
I get in trouble when I think about approach and I’m usually jolted back to Louise’s father’s advice. “Just put it on the page.”
Margaret Explosion is back at the Little for three months of Wednesdays. We’ll get started a little late tonight, maybe 8 or so because there is an art opening there at 7. I have 15 drawings including then shown above and six paintings on the wall and Sandy is making vegetable hors d’oeuvres.
I started reading Thomas Merton’s first journal. He has seven that were published after his death. Before converting to Catholicism and becoming a Trappist monk he lived a bohemian-style life in downtown New York where he hung around with the early abstract expressionists. His free-flowing thinking, all on the page, feels very contemporary. In a passage about the New York World’s Fair I was thinking, “hey, I was there” but he was referring to the 1939 World’s Fair, not the one in the sixties that I visited with my father. He described an attraction called, “Nature’s Mistakes” where they had animals on display that were misshapen and had missing limbs.
Peggi and I did see a display very much like that at a carnival in Paducah, Kentucky. We were four hours out of Bloomington, Indiana on our way to Mexico. We eventually drove to Oaxaca in Peggi’s orange Vega but this was just our first stop. We had found a campground there and we took in this nearby fair. It got real creepy after dark and this tent with crazy stuff in big bottles of Formaldehyde was the creepiest. I distinctly remember a cow with an extra leg sewn on its backside. This was not “Nature’s Mistake,” it was man’s mistake.
The snow is so deep that the deer have been taking our flattened path through the woods. We found bright red blood in the snow next to each step of one them. I know we scare the shit out of them as we ski by and they sometimes scramble up the hills in the deep snow. They are so much more vulnerable in the white winter months. Coyotes could certainly spot them much easier. I was thinking one of them may have stepped on the edge of a short tree stump buried under the snow and skinned its skinny ankle. The deer are responsible for killing the little trees as they rub the bark off them so it is poetic justice or maybe there is such a thing as nature’s mistakes but I kind of doubt it.
