Bill’s nurse was talking about the book she’s reading, “The Company She Keeps”, when we stopped up to visit him. The book is written by Georgia Durante a former Kodak model and mafia wife. She lives in North Hollywood now but she grew up in East Rochester, the same town as Bill’s nurse and spills the beans on the mob bosses that ruled this town in sixties and early seventies.
As we moved closer to look at the pictures in her book we noticed someone had turned the drawing I gave Bill last week so that it was facing out the window. At first I thought that was kind of cool, maybe someone looking in would get a kick out of it, but the nurse offered that Bill’s son, Paul, had done the drawing from some criminal in the newspaper. “It’s nicely drawn and everything. I mean you can see the evil in the guys’ eyes. But why someone would bring something like that up here?”
Andre Osores painting entitled “Fall Walk” in Brighton Art Show 2012
My father entered his Washington Square Park painting in the art show at the Brighton Town Hall auditorium this weekend. My mom didn’t like the location or the height at which they hung his painting and she told the town officials so.
I particularly liked Andre Osores’s psychedelic fall painting, its leaves in your face, shallow depth of field, the lovely birch trees and especially the fact that someone road their bike to the woods to talk a “Fall Wall.”
Three Matisse drawings in Fred Lipp’s class at Creative Workshop in Rochester, New York
Fred Lipp brought three framed copies of Matisse drawings in to our art class this week and set them on my work table. He called them really fine examples of minimal maximal drawings. Matisse is indeed the master. With deceptively simple line drawings he creates an immense amount of volume along with expression.
These three self portraits demonstrate Matisse’s understanding of Cezanne’s use of space and all carry on from “The Watchmaker“. His understanding of these principles allows him to knock you out with amazing composition. The forms not only occupy the space they animate the space and the environment animates the form. They are close to sculptural. You can almost encircle the figure with your gaze.
Rose Mary Hooper painting at Creative Workshop gallery in MAG, Rochester, NY
Some painting students at the Creative Workshop are lifers. Like prisoners who exercise at different times during the day we don’t get to interact with people in the other classes. But when the the staff hangs a show in the Lucy Burne Gallery we acknowledge the common bond we all share, the struggle to more clearly express our visual take on the world. Rose Mary Hooper, in the day class, always knocks me out.
Last night in class I made just a few marks on a piece of paper. When the class officially started (the moment Fred Lipp enters the room) I became entangled in a confrontation with Cezanne’s “The Watchmaker.” Fred wanted me to study it because it demonstrates Cezannes power to animate a sitter. He does so by advancing the right side of the painting while the left side recedes. The eyes lead the way but the whole right side of the body follows. The slant in the wall, downward to the lower right accentuates the twist and convincingly opens the space around the sitter.
My task is to look for clues in the essentially straight on, dead pan mug shots, clues that convey a movement, an expression and use these clues in the structure as tools to bring more life to my subjects. It all seems so obvious but I couldn’t see it until I digested it and I spent the whole class trying to do so.
Lorraine Bohonos paintings at 1975 in Rochester, New York
The empty Little Bakery building is a sweet spot. I miss the bakery but was I am happy to see someone else has filled the space. The art gallery 1975 has a group show up there now and it features three beautiful “Untitled” watercolor or tempura paintings by Lorraine Bohonos. Lorraine was in our painting class before moving to New York and glad to see she has returned. My lopsided observational skills see her striving for the same elusive communication of human expression that I am shooting for so there is a real connection here. I came home from this show and rounded up a new batch of models, this time from a Chicago newspaper.
On the way out I took three of Gallery 1975’s small, promotional “1975” stickers and cut them up to form one “1969” sticker which I put on my drum case.
Margaret Explosion CD “1969” (EAR 10) on Earring Records, released 2003
“Sights & Sounds,” the artist/musician show at I-Square has come down. As we dismantled I grabbed this shot of a drawing Scott Regan had in the show. Something oddly familiar about this piece.
Paul Dodd charcoal drawings at I-Square Gallery in Rochester, New York
On Tuesday night I gave a short talk about my art work at the I-Square Gallery near the great House of Guitars. I pretty much talked about the obvious but that is often hiding in plain sight. I made some notes and then just winged it.
From the notes: I am drawn (pun intended) to graphic, expressive art, not particularly interested in technique or artist’s statements and all that. I walk in to a gallery and follow the magnetic force of the strongest piece in the room. There is no thinking involved and this quality is what I am looking for in my own work. Life is too short and getting shorter.
My loose limbed presentation almost crashed when I tried to make an art/music analogy about “great guitar players” obscuring the song and probably wound up insulting three of the five artists in the show.
The “Passion of Saint Joan” drawing I have in the show went rather quickly but usually it is a struggle and I am learning to enjoy that adventure. They’re portraits, but not really because I’m not overly concerned with making the work look like the model.
The opening is Friday night from 7-9 and some music will be provided by the artists.
Here’s Pete LaBonne’s track “Artist Statement” from his Earring Records cd entitled “Glob”.
I was reading an obit of the artist, Karl Benjamin, someone I had never heard of. He was quoted as saying he wanted to be a journalist but couldn’t find a job in that field so he took a job teaching fifth and sixth graders in a California public school. Art was a required subject so he passed out the crayons and the kids churned out drawings of trucks, trees and mountains. He found them boring so his next assignment included the instructions, “No trucks, no trees.” The kids asked, “What should we do?” Benjamin said, “Be quiet and concentrate.”The work the children produced from such simple instructions awed him.
Poster for art show at I-Square Gallery on Titus Avenue in Rochester, New York
This thing is coming up fast, like real fast. Zanne Brunner organized a show at I-Square Gallery on Titus Avenue over by the House of Guitars. Called “Sights & Sounds,” it features five artists/musicians (Jed Curran • Paul Dodd • Peter Monacelli • Steve Piper • Scott Regan). We hung the show today. There is an artist’s talk on Tuesday at 7pm and everyone is invited. The official opening is Friday, August 24 from 7-9pm and there will be some music by the artists in a small tent outside the gallery.
We had some of the best meals of our lives in Barcelona but the “Menu del Dia” there is a long way from El Bulli, the so called best restaurant in the world before it closed a few years ago. It was only open six months out of the year, the other six months were spent in Barcelona creating an ever changing menu. The restaurant took reservations in January for the whole season and would not seat walk-ins even if they had an empty table so as not to set a precedent.
The German documentary, “El Bulli: Cooking in Progress,” played at the Dyden Theater last night and contrary to the blurb on the Eastman House website it was not “the next best thing to dining there.” It was better than dining there. Not that I have ever set foot in the place but how good can a meal be? The brilliant moviemakers stayed in the kitchen and capture the Spaniards finely tuned attention to detail.
Watch the staff carefully place salt crystals on delicate arrangements of tiny servings (thirty five plates in a typical meal) was thrilling. And I’m so happy they didn’t go out to the dining room. It would have deflated the intense focus. Imagine watching De Kooning paint, digging the painting and then cutting to the hedge fund manager who had enough money to buy the thing. My favorite line is Chef Ferran Adrià saying that he wanted to bewilder diners.
Detail from “November 22, 2003-December 31, 2008” by Evinn Neadow at Rochester Contemporary
Gallery hopping and the summer heat is not a good combination so we didn’t expect much from First Friday last night. We considered skipping it altogether and riding bikes over to Wilco and whatever the Sonic Youth offshoot was in Highland Park, not paying the fifty dollar admission but just listening from the sidewalk. I kept meaning to google Wilco and find out what they sound like but I never got around to it. So we went with the gallery plan and started at the juried Arts & Cultural Council Members Show. I entered this show but didn’t get get in so I was anxious to see it. I loved the hard edged Bill Keyser abstract and remembered seeing it as he finished it in Fred Lipp’s class.
We stopped at RoCo next for the annual State of the City show and just like last year the installation in the Lab Space was more interesting than the show. Evinn Neadow showed a polaroid self portrait from each day of her life between her 21st birthday and the birth of her son five years later. Entitled “November 22, 2003-December 31, 2008”, this time tested concept proved engrossing. I hear Jeff Munson is working on a similar project but no one has seen them yet.
We planned to stop at the Hungerford building but drove right by and took a midnight dip in the street pool.
Jasper Johns Untitled (Skull) screenprint 1973 at Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York
“To be an artist you have to give up everything, even the desire to be a good artist.” This Jasper Johns quote was on the wall tag next to his silkscreen print, “Untitled (Skull)” 1973, at the Memorial Art Gallery. I don’t like wall tags but this quote is better than the print.
We were there this morning to hear Corning artist, David Higgins, talk about his paintings in the current Rochester Biennial. He is a teacher and he has an engaging speaking voice so it was a delight to hear him talk about his work. He is a great painter and I love the paintings that don’t look so much like photos. Somebody should help him with his frame choices because the gold leaf, ornate window trim on his paintings in the show make it hard to see the paintings. You have to block the frame out.
Jeff Munson art in 2012 Rochester Contemporary 6×6 show
Art is something you do as testament to being alive. And responding to art is proof that we are alive. The proof is in the art. Art that celebrates the mystery is particularly effective. I really like these dreamy red pieces in the annual 6×6 show at Rochester Contemporary.
John Gilmore emailed us with a Breaking Bas-ass prediction. He has been rewetting all the old episodes and says the swimming pool in Walt’s back yard keeps popping up and will probably be the last shot of the final episode.
You know how sometimes you read something or hear someone express something that you is true but you have never heard it formulated so clearly. This Robert Irwin passage from the brilliant “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” has really stuck with me.
“As the questions go up, the performance level goes down — and that’s natural, because people don’t yet know how to act on those questions., they’re stumbling around in a fog — whereas when performance goes up the quality of the questions tends to go down. So while the objects that Kazimer Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin (Russian Constructivists) came up with may not have been particularly sophisticated as objects — they weren’t Stellas, or anything — they were absolutely loaded in other ways. Man, we’re still feeding off their questions. Those guys were soaring.”
I like the trade-off and it pretty much explains the attraction of punk rock or so-called primitive art.
Chuck Webster painting entitled “Untitled” 2012 at Ziehersmith Gallery in Chelsea NYC
Poor Chuck Webster. He delivered a monster painting (it is a crime for me to have cropped the photo of it so click through for the full thing) to his current show at Ziehersmith in Chelsea. The fine work in the rest of the show is not nearly as strong. This one is like a magnet. You are drawn to it. It is hard to look away. You must get closer and examine the surface because it has already convinced you that it is three dimensional. It is not. It has the meaty presence of a Guston. How is he going to top this?
I can’t figure out why there would be an Alice Neel show in Chelsea. Doesn’t someone already own all of her gorgeous paintings? She is a painter’s painter and my favorite woman artist hands down so I don’t really care why there is a show of hers in Chelsea, I’m just happy there is one.
I had jotted down the addresses of three shows in Chelsea in my little notebook and we saw all three along with a Cindy Sherman show and lots of instantly forgettable stuff. The third show on my list was a Brancusi photo show, beautiful arty black and white photos of his sculpture in the studio. This gallery was up on 24th Street so climbed the stairs to the High Line, an absolutely beautiful rooftop park on an old elevated train track. Even in New York City nature can can give art a good run for it’s money.
Marsh at the end of Hoffman Road in Rochester, New York
Ray Bradbury, who died the other day, was good friends with Federico Fellini and the Renaissance art scholar, Bernard Berenson. I would love to be a fly on the wall in a room with those three.
Berenson, the lesser known, left us with a bounty of quotations.
“I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value. So, as I walk in the garden, I look at the flowers and shrubs and trees and discover in them an exquisiteness of contour, a vitality of edge or a vigor of spring as well as an infinite variety of color that no artifact I have seen in the last 60 years can rival. Each day, as I look, I wonder where my eyes were yesterday.”
and my favorite
“Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.”
Paul Dodd charcoal drawing from “Five Philadelphia Priests” 2012
I wrote these three words on the drawing above because that was the last thing Fred Lipp said to me in painting class on Wednesday. I have since worked on it and will bring it back to class when I’m done. It is funny how you start with a pure white piece of paper and add marks and such until you lose sight of the fact that the white needs to work as well as the stuff you’re adding. My father is in the class too and he said that’s the first one of these guys that I’ve seen with a smile on his face. I said, “That because he is a priest.”
Paul Dodd charcoal drawing from “Five Philadelphia Priests” 2012
It is so easy to pick on the church. They took a perfectly agreeable cat, an early bohemian, and ascribed absurd, super-human miracles to him and then browbeat a congregation, hungary for the literal word of god, with righteous rules and regulations. We don’t even know yet what kind of dirt the Pope’s butler was preparing to peddle. The Vatican has it’s own justice system, the better to shuffle predator priests around.
When we were in Spain years ago we did a bit of the famous Camino de Santiago, a religious pilgramage across the top part of of the country. We did our stretch in a rented car, passing hundreds of people who were doing it the old fashioned way on foot. I felt the same guilty twinge this weekend when we drove down the east side of Seneca Lake and then back up the western side. The Seneca7 relay race was the same day so we passed runners, each from a group of 7, as they ran the 77.7 circumference of the lake in the same direction as us.
The exaggerated gestures of German Expressionism are some of the most exciting art of all time so I planned to celebrate my birthday surrounded by works from the “Age of Discontent” at the Johnson Museum on Cornell’s campus. Max Beckmann, Erich Heckel, Ernst Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff are all there but Beckmann steals the show here with his intense, jam-packed compositions of people at home, in concert halls, taverns, strip clubs and opium dens. And how about this chimney sweep?
An added bonus at the Johnson is the “Witness: 20th-Century Photographic Images from the Collection of Gary and Ellen Davis” show with Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and a disturbing “Bravo 20” photo of a bomb crater by Richard Misrach. Bravo 20 was the name the U.S. Navy gave their illegal bombing exercises in the American west on a site the Native Americans called the “Source of Creation.” Coming back from Ithaca you pass 9,500-acres of land between Seneca and Cayuga lakes, the old “Seneca Ordnance Depot”, that is still fenced in and rather imposing except for the beautiful white deer and I couldn’t help but think of Misrach’s photo.
The Finger Lakes region is gods’ country, a wild mix of Indian reservations, Mennonite communities, mobil homes, luxurious second homes ringing the lakes and hundreds of vineyards catering to the stretch limo hoards. We whizzed by a sign mounted on someone’s mailbox that read “God’s Judgement Will Come” and then passed under a giant electronic sign on the NYS thruway that read, ” No Texting While Driving.” Peggi said, “Didn’t New York State just text us?”
Paul Dodd “Model from Crime Page 24” 2012 Charcoal on paper
I spent most of the day filling out a form for the Arts & Cultural Council’s Member Showcase, a juried art show scheduled for August. Picking three pieces that I like is one thing but picking three pieces that I think the judges might like is another and then the one page biography/ artist statement is really tough. I don’t do artspeak so I usually try to skip that stage because my explanations sound so obvious and redundant but the artist statement was “mandatory” for this show.
Although I like this guy with the wild hair I decided not to enter him. I’ll enter him in a show where artists statements are not allowed.
Here’s Pete LaBonne’s track “Artist Statement” from his Earring Records cd entitled “Glob”.
