I hit the motherland of mugshots at WFAA’s website. Downloaded all 144 Waco Texas bikers in jumpsuits. I’ll need a large quantity of orange paint for this one.
1 CommentCarpal Tunneled Sketch Artist
DIA Walk In
There has been so much written about Detroit’s hope for recovery and it seems every article covers exactly the same territory. We brought the recent National Geographic story with us and Peggi read it aloud as I drove. There are people farming on empty lots in the middle of the city. We got really caught up in it all. In Motown everyone roots for the home team. A bum who passed us on the street this morning broke the news that the Tigers had won all three games in Saint Louis. “All three,” he said, holding up three fingers.
We spent most of the day at the Detroit Institute of the Arts where they are featuring a special exhibit of Diego and Frida in Detroit. Edsel Ford, the CEO of Ford Motor Company put up the money, a quarter of a million dollars in today’s currency, to hire Rivera, an avowed Communist, to paint a mural of the story of Detroit on the walls of the museum. Rivera considered it his best work. Frida came along with him and did some of most sensational paintings here. The show is drenched with cultural and political significance.
When the city went bankrupt the Institute considered selling its assets. Who knows what would have happened to the mural. A Rodin “Thinker” sits outside the museum. They have some choice Cezanne’s, portraits, a Madame Cezanne, a landscape, a famous bathers painting the skulls. Choice Van Goghs and Rembrandts. “Detroit Walk in Portrait Studio” by Corine Vermeulen was in its last day and I’m so happy we caught this show. Her portraits perfectly capture essence of this city, the people. Here’s a link to some of the photos in the show.
Leave a commentGoing Dumb
There is a John Baldessari painting in the current show at the Memorial Art Gallery. It struck me as kind of dumb but fun. I’ve seen a few videos of Baldessari talking about art and I really like listening to him. I found this video this morning and I really love it. John Baldessari talks about why Philip Guston is the boss.
Leave a commentBuilding Blocks
About ten years ago we helped Pete and Shelley put a roof on their new Adirondack home. They were both afraid of heights and probably still are. There was no plywood involved, the roof was sheeted with rough cut cedar boards. I love the look and feel of this stuff and the smell when you cut it and all the cutting was done by hand because they are off the conventional grid. They bought the wood at a local saw mill and I asked them if they could bring me some the next time they came our way. I put the wood in the garage and have not used it until now.
I went out there to pick out a piece to cut into six inch lengths thinking I would do my RoCo 6×6 entries on wood this year. The wood was not as wide as I remembered. My pieces were more like six by five. So I glued two pieces together and cut it down to six by sixes. The seams were clearly visible so I thought maybe I would use them as a horizon line. But what to paint?
I usually wait until the last minute to do these things but I had a day or so to think about it. The wood pieces are a little over an inch thick so they are three dimensional. I considered dipping them in the Rustoleum oil paint that we use to paint our metal lawn chairs and horseshoes but I didn’t have time for one color to dry before I dipped the other. I knew I wanted to switch colors at the horizon line because the wood grain changes so radically. I settled on hand painting them with colors straight out of the tube. They remind me of the building blocks we played with as kids.
Peggi’s entries are faces, two of them, our friends’ faces, and they look great.
3 CommentsSubtractive Process
I was talking to a woman at Martin’s party about why I like charcoal drawing. She taught for years at the Creative Workshop and is now studying at the Chicago Art Institute. She explained that she was pursuing a course of study that involved removing the ego from the art making process. I couldn’t make sense of this and pretty much threw a monkey wrench into the conversation when I said, “Maybe I don’t really know what ego is.” That led to a discussion of art making basics like what tools we use and I found myself saying I probably do more erasing than I do drawing, a subtractive process.
The big pile of snow on our deck, the hard pack stuff that I shoveled off the valley in our roof, has been shrinking for weeks and of course I have been photographing it. I took this picture this morning but the little creature behind the big chunk is gone now. It’s been in the mid forties today and the whole thing will be gone tomorrow.
Leave a commentThings To Think About
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.
Leave a commentThere’s Your Painting
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
Leave a commentNew And Original Logic
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.
Leave a commentRelated
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.
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If God Was A Man
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.”
Leave a commentThis Ain’t No Picnic
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.
Leave a commentArt Speak
Wayne Higby, a professor at Alfred University since 1973, has a show at the MAG. We hadn’t seen it so we decided to stop in this afternoon, check it out and hear the talk he was giving about the work. We discussed slipping out if we didn’t care for the talk but that would have been difficult because we had front row seats, the only ones remaining.
A couple of people talked about Higby’s work and then they joined Wayne on the stage to discuss prearranged questions. They were all long winded answers, fitting for a long time teacher, so there was only time for one question from the audience. One of the two gentlemen who introduced Wayne spent quite a bit of time on the vocabulary of containment as used in the descriptive names of earthen formations. Rim, bowl, crater, basin, valley, canyon, vessel. All of these fit the structure of Higby’s ceramic pieces. They put up a slide of the Arizona landscape that looked exactly like the motifs that Higby uses in his pieces that look like bowls.
I say “pieces that look like bowls” because Higby is an artist. He says his work is not about the American West but acknowledges that it is influenced by the landscape. And then there was a lengthy discourse on the age old battle of historical bias and snobbery in art vs. craft. If this sounds rather tedious it really wasn’t. It is always fascinating to hear people talk about art. You know it when you see it.
Leave a commentWhat Now?
We set the alarm last night in order to be upright and downtown by 9AM with my paintings and drawings. My last show at the Little Theater Café was 2009 when Pete Monacelli was still hanging the art. I believe that is when we first got to know him and I’m so thankful for that. Pete passed the baton to Kathy Farrell, the director of MCC’s Mercer Art Center, and today was her birthday although we didn’t know it until we got home. I put my six new (the paint was still wet) Basketball Players over the piano and fifteen “Models from Crime Page” (above) on the long wall. Actually one of the charcoal drawings is a local homeless teenager, poor thing was 16, pregnant and homeless when I photographed her, but she fits right in with others.
It was a lot of work getting them finished and framed for the show but I am so happy to have them out of here. My studio is empty at the moment and I have no idea what I am going to work on next, not even an inkling. This is so exhilarating.
Opening for the show is Wednesday, March 4, 7PM. Music by Margaret Explosion.
Show runs February 28 – March 27
Abstract Vocabulary
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.
Leave a commentTeam Faced Tough Competition
I’m not really a basketball fan but I can get sucked in to game if I’m near a tv. My own basketball team was rather hapless so I was really stuck by the page in the 1957 Myndersian Academy yearbook I found at a garage sale. The page pictured six kids, only one for the bench, and the headline read simply, “Team Faced Tough Competition.” I painted the six twenty years ago, threw the paintings away years ago, and painted them again this winter. I plan to have all six hanging on the wall over the piano in my upcoming Little Theater show.
Paul Dodd “Drawings and Paintings”
Little Theater Café
Opening Wednesday 7PM March 4 with live music by Margaret Explosion
Show runs from February 28 – March 27 2015
A Way Of Saying
If I understand this, Seattle artist, Carole d’Inverno, has new work on display at MCC’s Mercer Gallery that is based on her impressions of Rochester, a city she has never set foot in. This, from her bio; “To prepare for a new series, I extensively research a place, a time period, an event. From the information gathered, I develop an abstract vocabulary of images.” Well, she should be in town today, the coldest day of a frigid winter, her opening is tomorrow night, and I can’t wait to see her take on our fair city.
We are so happy to have been asked to play at Tuesday’s opening for “A Way of Saying”. There’s an artist talk at 4:30 and Margaret Explosion plays 5:30-7. Hope you can stop out and see the show. Here is a preview.
Carole’s husband will not be there. He has a gig in Oxford Mississippi.
From Sunday’s paper:
Seattle artist Carole d’Inverno presents “A Way of Saying,” her abstract pencil works on paper, from Feb. 24 through March 20 at Monroe Community College’s Mercer Gallery, 1000 East Henrietta Road, Brighton. The show features some “intuitive and abstract of the facts” based on d’Inverno’s research into this exotic new city that would be playing host to her work, Rochester. Her artist talk is at 4:30 p.m. Feb. 24, with a reception afterward and music by Rochester’s Margaret Explosion, taking the event further into the avant-garde. She’ll also present a workshop at 10 a.m. Feb. 26 and a lecture 6 p.m. Feb 26. It’s all free, except for the workshop, which will have a charge. Rochesterians may be familiar with d’Inverno’s husband through his work at the Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival, the guitarist Bill Frisell.
-Jeff Spevak, Democrat & Chronicle
Minor Miracles
These yearly RoCO “Makers & Mentors” shows provide a great opportunity to witness the clusters of art making going on in this area and to experience the guidance a teacher can provide. Mentors, teaching artists like Robert Marx at Brockport, Kurt Feuerherm at Empire State, Judd Williams at the UofR and now Richard Hirsch from RIT all influence students in their own way. Sometimes the influence is literal and sometimes I can’t see it. I like Robin Whiteman’s hand built ceramic pieces in the current show and I like her teacher’s current work, the big abstract clay surfaces.
Someday the mentor will be Fred Lipp (Creative Workshop / RIT) and in the work you will see the depiction of form in two dimensions. A minor miracle.
Leave a commentDinner With Matisse
Peggi was an AAU competitive swimmer in her younger years and Matisse’s “Swimming Pool” cutout, re-installed at the Met in a room built to the same specs as the dining room where the work originally wrapped around the four walls, seems to have awoken the deep connection she has with water and art. This was the piece she wanted to see the most on our second tour of the show. And like the faithful on a religious pilgrimage we were rewarded at journey’s end. The piece is a masterpiece created by a master. Cut shapes that are not. Matisse cuts forms from flatly painted paper. The figures and water are abstract and representational and expressive at once. Ultimately thrilling.
This visit to the big city was different. We didn’t stay at Chez Sherwood although we did hook up for dinner. Peggi booked a room in midtown on Central Park South. Because we booked at last minute we were able to secure a “handicap accessible” room that they were looking to fill for a song. And when we checked in they asked if we needed the handicap stuff. We shook our heads (someday we’ll get ours) and upgraded it to a junior suite on the 29th floor overlooking the park for the same price.
We never took the subway this time and walked to the Met, MoMa and dinner. We stayed mostly in midtown and managed to not set foot in the big brand name shops, Gucci, Armani, Coach, Prada and Apple. And because it is so close to Peggi’s birthday we spent thirty five dollars on a pair of perfumy gin and tonics at the hotel bar.
Bowling And Art
Matthew’s company car, a hybrid, lost its charge in Syracuse so our bowling date was cancelled or rather postponed until last night. But the eight lanes at Park View Bowl were all occupied with a women’s league when we got there. The idea contained in the name of a view of the park (Durand Eastman) while you’re bowling is crazy. We had a drink at the bar and I returned Matthew’s “Speaking of Art: Four decades of art in conversation” book. I wanted to show Louise this quote from Nancy Spero, Leon Golub’s wife and one of the artists in the book, but there wasn’t enough light at the bar for her to see it.
“There’s a basic risk in the practice of art itself, in that it’s something that’s not wanted particularly by society. Only a few understand the need for this innocence in a culture, and yet it is the artifact of a culture in the final sense of the word.”
And I thought this one from Ed Ruscha was nice especially because he found common ground between his work and Morandi’s. “One of my favourite artists is Giorgio Morandi, and he painted the same picture for all of his life and did it very well. He fulfilled his destiny without doing any of this pushing into new frontiers. So pushing into a new frontier is not a necessity for any artist. But unless it’s done by someone, things end up at a standstill.”
The night was young so we moved down the road to the Reunion, another bar we had never set foot in. Sea Breeze apparently used to have a small shop that supplied the word with clown shoes and sure enough there was one over the bar. They have a print of Goya’s “Naked Maja” in an ornate frame and a sign that looked vintage but used contemporary jargon. “Wine. How classy people get wasted.” We pumped dollar bills into the juke box and played three games of 8-Ball on the pool table. We were both good and bad.
Leave a commentCircumstances
Beefheart’s “Circumstances” has been stuck in my head all night. Click here and could be stuck in yours’. It’s not like I heard it recently or anything. It just popped in.
I started this drawing this afternoon and finished in class. It still has a searching, coming into being feel. I like that and find the early, rough stages of my drawings the most exciting but at that stage there is usually structural problems or rethinking at the very least. If I tried to clean this one up I would kill it. These are the circumstances.
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