Category: Notes On Painting

Talking A Good Game Is Easier Than Painting

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Job Jar

Basement studs for new wall
Basement studs for new wall

I almost forgot I had a blog going here. Just as it should be. With vacation and jazz fest chalked off I reached my hand in the job jar and came up with a good one.

I spend most nights painting in the basement and it is my favorite room of the house. I like the Adirondack siding that came with the walls down there (our cat does too and uses it as a giant scratching post) but I want more white down there at least on the wall I face. So I bought some 4×8 sheets of white panel board from Home Depot and then framed in the wall so I can cover the fireplace opening. The sheets were tough to hang. Peggi and I were wrestling with them when Julio stopped by. He pitched in and had some great ideas for trimming the edges in order to cover our crude cuts.

I went to Home Depot first thing this morning and bought the trim for the top and bottom of my new wall but I didn’t go as far a julio had suggested and trim the sides. But then I changed my mind and decided to add the trim on the side so I went back to Home Depot to buy the last piece. You cut your own lengths over there and then pay by the foot. I came home and carefully cut the wrong angle on the new piece and I didn’t have any to spare so I went back to Home Depot for a third time. This is how it’s gonna be when I retire. I can see it all pretty clearly.

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Truth To Power

Leon Golub painting in Retiro Park, Madrid
Leon Golub painting in Retiro Park, Madrid

Art is everywhere in Madrid and quite few of the exhibitions we have stumbled on have been sponsored by the government and the admission is free. And of course there are monuments and sculptures in every plaza. Yesterday we were headed down to the Reina Sofía, Madrid’s modern art museum, and we found five or six commercial, contemporary galleries on the way.

The Reina Sofía had organized a show called “Arte en un Mundo Dividido 1945~1968” with work from their collection and in conjunction, they had a retrospective of the American painter, Leon Golub. We were excited about that but it turned out the Golub show was in a satellite site in the Parque Retiro behind the Prado. So we followed our eyes through the maze of Picassos, Richard Serras and Antonio Tápies, a Spanish painter that we liked quite a bit and headed over to the park. Golub’s scruffy tactile work holds its own with “Guérnica” from the Reina and Goya’s “The Third of May 1808” at the Prado!

Heading up Jerónimo toward the Puerta del Sol we found a heavy police presence surrounding a large crowd of Los Indignados outside a government office building. Their “15 Mayo” movement is almost a month old now and still strong. We watched for a bit while a police helicopter hovered overhead and I was still thinking about Golub’s pantings.

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Painting, Smoking, Eating

Philip Guston "Painting, Smoking, Eating" 1973
Philip Guston “Painting, Smoking, Eating” 1973

“I don’t write. I put down my thoughts.” I love that quote from “Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations.” Guston quotes others pretty well too like Paul Valery. “A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.” This book covers the same ground that Fred Lipp does in our painting classes.

Addressing the whole:
“You paint the form without looking at the form but looking at the whole.”

Locating forms:
“The form is not just executed there. It must emerge from this background or environment.”

On visible erasures:
“Erasures represent erasures of notions and of good intentions.”

Starting over:
“To paint is to start over everytime.”

Frustration:
“Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing.”

Trouble:
“You have to have trouble and contradictions. It has to be complex because life is complex, emotions are complex.”

Imagery:
“Imagery is endless. The image thing and pursuing the image is endless. It changes you. That’s the most wonderful thing. It makes you shake. the other thing I want, and what I think an artist wants, is to be baffled all the time. Baffled, puzzled, new problems. Problem. A terrible word. I don’t mean problem. Baffled. To become dumb. Innocent – how?”

Creation:
“Real art makes you shake. Let’s not kid ourselves. Creation is force. It’s a power. It’s not a craft. It’s a power and a force and everybody has that force. If you don’t open yourself up to this power then get out.”

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Mother Load

Three recent Philip Guston books
Three recent Philip Guston books

Musa Meyer, Philip Guston’s daughter, wrote an engrossing but brutal memoir about her experience growing up with an artist whose first priority was his work. The critic, novelist and poet Ross Feld wrote a beautiful book about his friendship with the artist and the art itself. Both of these both books brought more depth to the earthshaking experience of standing in front of his paintings.

So I snatched a few more books, “Philip Guston’s Late Work: A Memoir” by the poet William Corbett and “Telling Stories: Philip Guston’s Later Works” by David Kaufmann, the latter too dense in high brow criticism but the subject matter is thrilling.

Amazon thought I might like the recently released “Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations”. I do. It’s the Gutson mother load. Great artists (Rembrandt, Matisse, and Guston) get better with age, they certainly don’t retire. Just look at the amazing Guston trajectory. Guston was a painter first but also a teacher and somewhat of a philosophy nut so his lectures knock me out. His casual conversation, say hanging with Morton Feldman and a cassette recorder, knocks me out. It’s all here.

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Experience The Possibilities

"Model from Crime Page" tempura on paper, Paul Dodd 2011
“Model from Crime Page” tempura on paper, Paul Dodd 2011

I had my last painting class of the year tonight. It was a good one but they all are. It’s not a class in any conventional sense. There are no lessons and no course, just a group of people painting in the same room in a wide assortment of mediums and styles, abstract to still life. It’s more like group therapy.

Our teacher wanders from one painter to the next and looks at what each person is doing almost as if it was the first time he has seen the work. We can all hear the advice he gives each student and damn if doesn’t always apply to all of us no matter what we’re working on. It’s the same guidance over and over. The woman next to me tonight was explaining what she had planned for her piece and Fred said, “I want you to learn to experience the possibilities rather than the inevitabilities.”

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Bulletproof

Bulletproof artwork on work table
Bulletproof artwork on work table

Last time Steve Black was visiting from Singapore I remember showing him the “Road Masks” I was working on. They wound up on the wall at Tap & Mallet for a few years and now I think it’s in the owner’s back room. Steve called the other day and he’s been on my mind. I was working on some layouts for an ice cream company around that time and I had spray painted some lids and containers from ice cream we bought at Tops. I had spread out some newspapers to do the spraying on and when I was done I feel in love with the way the papers looked with the white holes and colorful sprayed paint. I cropped and mounted four of them under glass Steve really liked them too. He kept saying, “They’re bulletproof, they’re bulletproof”.

I recently submitted a ten six by six watercolors to RoCo’s annual 6X6 show. I cut mask out of white cardboard and held it over a bunch of 9×12 paintings I had done of crime faces. They were all ones that were finished but I wasn’t crazy about them so I cropped out sections that I liked. When I was done I put the mask done on my work table found this “bulletproof” image looking out at me.

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Sounds Like A Plan

Red Magnolia blossoms in Peggi's hands
Red Magnolia blossoms in Peggi’s hands

The temperature barely got in to the fifties today but it felt warm in the woods. Last year Spring came on like gangbusters so everything was in bloom at once and it was over before we knew it. This year it’s taking its time and that’s ok with me. We cut through the park to check on the magnolias. The pink ones are dropping, deep red ones are just starting to open and the yellow ones are still tucked in their fuzzy cocoons. The colors look more dramatic on cloudy days so quit yer complainin’.

I came to class unarmed last night. That is I only had a few small watercolor/drawings to show for the week. And of all nights to be so empty-handed! Our teacher, Fred, was a little late. He’s usually a little late and I’m always early. Punctuality is not one of my traits but painting is different. When he walked in I was only one in class. A lot of people were way late or just took the night off. I showed him the paintings on paper and we talked for quite a while. He liked one quite a bit and complimented me on my brush language but I had painted myself into a corner on another and it provided the perfect opportunity to rethink my process.

Fred characterized my overall approach as conservative, trying to get the proportions of the head right, the eyes the same size and adding an ear because the model has one or two, those sorts of things. He suggested I look for the characteristics I want to paint, in my case it’s always the expression, and paint that. Forget about the ordinary concerns, the mechanics, and go for the art. He offered an analogy I could grasp in the way jazz musicians play. Make a move and improvise on that, compliment it, amplify it, contrast it, provoke it. A dialog full of surprises. Add one mark at a time and keep them all in play like a juggler. He surmised that I get into trouble when paint something without confidence so I would be better off if I didn’t paint that which I am not confident about.

I’m getting so I can talk a good game.

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Sifting The April Sunlight For Clues

Alex Katz print from "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" at Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY
Alex Katz print from “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” at Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY

It was still April when we saw this painting in the Lockhart Gallery at the Memorial Art Galley in Rochester. We were there for the opening of the Fiber Arts show but found the sideshow in the Lockhart Gallery more interesting. In connection with Writer’s & Books’ thirtieth anniversary they have mounted a show of the pages of “Self Portrait In A Convex Mirror”, a limited edition (175 copies) of an artist’s book centered around, literally, the pages are round John Ashbery’s poem which was based on Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola’s 1524 painting with the same title. The book included an lp of Ashbery reading the poem, letterpress printed pages of the poem and artist’s prints form Larry Rivers, Elaine and William William DeKoning, Jim Dine, R.J. Kitaj and Alex Katz.

I have liked Alex Katz’s work since Charlie Coco took me to Times Square in the seventies to see his giant murals of people’s heads. And then a few years later we were looking at the Whitney Biennial and there was some sort of installation of drum set behind a curtain in the gallery and it appeared they were inviting people to play the set so I sat down and knocked out something. I put the sticks down and came out from behind the curtain and found myself face to face with Alex Katz. He was wearing brown bucks.

John Ashbery speaks at the Gallery about his his life, the New York School and his work on June 2nd.

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Three Faces

Three Crime Face tempura drawings by Paul Dodd at Lucy Byrne Gallery in the Memorial Art Gallery
Three Crime Face tempura drawings by Paul Dodd at Lucy Byrne Gallery in the Memorial Art Gallery

I have three pieces in the current “Drawing Show” at the Lucy Burne Gallery in the Memorial Art Gallery. My drawings were done with black tempura paint on brown craft paper. There really is very little difference between my drawings and my paintings. That is my paintings are closer to drawings than paintings. The only real difference in drawings like these and my paintings is that I can’t make corrections (unless I mix a batch of “craft paper” brown tempura paint) so the drawing has to work or I toss it. I did a small pile of these drawings for a few nights and would do more if I can find a way to do corrections on the misplaced black lines. I like seeing the corrections and the work that goes into the drawing and I miss that in these drawings.

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El Sueño de la Razon

Goya's "El Sueño de la Razon Produce Monstruos" print at the Johnson Museum in Ithaca
Goya’s “El Sueño de la Razon Produce Monstruos” print at the Johnson Museum in Ithaca

The Johnson Museum on Cornell’s campus has a room full of Goya prints currently on display. I planned on taking the day off and driving down there to see the show and celebrate my birthday but we had some work that just had to be done this morning so we got a late start. We didn’t take the most direct route either because we avoided the thruway and drove through Canandagua and then down the east side of Seneca Lake toward Watkins Glen. We were driving through Dundee when Peggi said, “I wonder how your aunt and uncle are.” They live in a farmhouse at Starkey’s Corners and we were a stone’s throw away so we stopped by to visit.

My aunt answered the door and showed us the new coal stove in their kitchen. My uncle was sleeping in a chair in the next room and he woke up with all the commotion. He said “Come in and sit down. I’ll put my teeth in.” The four of us sat down on the porch and my uncle talked to me while my aunt talked to Peggi. Two conversations at the same time, both full of tales of yesteryear. He was telling me how tugboats towed barges loaded with salt or ice up the lake and into the Erie Canal while my aunt was telling Peggi how she had been back to her old neighborhood on Rochester’s west side and how everything had changed. My uncle pointed to a painting on their wall of stereotypical Irishmen in green suits with whimsical pipes walking along the canal with horses that were hitched to a barge.

My aunt is also my godmother and I have always had a soft spot for her. She was a nurse at Saint Mary’s when my uncle was brought there because of a farm accident. One of my earliest memories was going to their wedding. They’ve lived on this farm since and it was my favorite place to visit as a kid. It still looks exactly the same but they’ve sold their property to a group of Mennonites who work the land and let my aunt and uncle continue to live in their old house.

We usually park in the Ithaca Municipal Garage and then walk up the hill to Cornell but this time we drove up and got sort of lost. We were across from the hillside where Personal Effects played back in the day when we asked for directions. It reminded us of Dunn Meadow at IU. She said we were on the wrong side of campus. The museum closed at five so we had only forty five minutes to see the show but it was an intense forty five minutes. Goya is often called the first modern artist. His work is every bit as gripping and relevant today as it must have been in the late 1700’s. “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” A perfect birthday gift.

Listen to Margaret Explosion “Sleep of Reason.”

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Where The Magic Is

Painting in the bathroom upstairs at Polska Chata in Irondequoit, NY
Painting in the bathroom upstairs at Polska Chata in Irondequoit, NY

After the Margaret Explosion gig on Wednesday I sat down with Jeff, a therapist and friend from high school and beyond, and we began talking about the painting/therapy nexus. Jeff felt there was a strong parallel between the two practices and why shouldn’t there be? This conversation was just getting going when we were interrupted but the topic has been kicking around in my head.

When my father started taking the painting class with me at the Creative Workshop he’d come out of class many times saying he felt like he was in therapy and I would laugh but I know exactly what he meant. Breaking old habits requires someone to point the detrimental habits out. Staying open and using your eyes instead of your brain, learning to trust your own eyes is tougher than would seem so why not accept help from a coach?

Recovering alcoholics all subscribe to the “one day at a time thing” just as painters in Fred Lipp’s class learn to “address the worst first.” “Always, get to the point!” “Painting is not supposed to be easy or everyone would do it.” The journey is the thing, not the plan or final piece, and the toughest lesson is learning to enjoy the struggle because that is where the magic is.

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Good Bad

Painting for sale in house on Queensboro in Rochester, New York
Painting for sale in house on Queensboro in Rochester, New York

About twenty years ago or so Kim sent us a book called “Thrift Store Paintings” by Jim Shaw. It was a pretty cool collection of good bad paintings and it turned out Jim Shaw was the nephew of Peggi’s parents best friends, the Gardners.

Danny from Abilene has a pretty cool collection of thrift store paintings at his bar downtown so when we spotted this painting this morning in a household sale on Queensboro in Rochester I took a photo and emailed it to him. I could just as easily have alerted Marie Via or Clair Marziotti whose collections were featured in a Democrat & Chronicle article on bad art but if they scooped it up I wouldn’t be able to visit it as often. Jack Wanderman, Susan Plunket’s brother, was organizing the sale and asking $65 for the painting. We were there to visit some of Peggi’s mom’s stuff one last time. Jack has been putting her stuff in household sales around town.

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Drummer Jokes

Portrait by Richard Butler from the Psychedelic Furs
Portrait by Richard Butler from the Psychedelic Furs

My friend Brad, also a drummer, usually has a good drummer joke when we talk but I haven’t heard any in while. We watched a Nilsson documentary a while back and I really enjoyed it. I was not a fan but I am now. Too bad he’s dead. I thought our friend and neighbor Rick would have some of his records on vinyl but the only one he had was “Sandman.” It’s a very odd record with song titles like “Jesus Christ You’re Tall,” “How To Write A Song,” “The Flying Saucer Song,” “Hear’s Why I Didn’t Go To Work Today,” and “I’ll Take A Tango.” The first lines of that last song are “Deep down in my soul I hate rock and roll. And I don’t like the way that them drummers beat on them drums. They always hum along, out of tune.” That hit home for me.

Oh well, there is always painting. There must be some good painter jokes? We saw a show of Richard Butler’s (lead singer in the Psychedelic Furs) paintings in Chelsea on Saturday. I really liked this portrait.

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Expressionists & Expressionism

Philip Guston painting in "Abstract Expressionism" show at MoMA
Philip Guston painting in “Abstract Expressionism” show at MoMA

A note written on the back of a business card next to a full pot of coffee read “Out for bagels, Be back soon.” I hadn’t even finished my PopWars entry when Duane returned with a brown bag full. He got on his computer in the back room and told me I had some of the best typos on my blog. I had written “we opened the widow” in that morning’s post. I can’t spell and I depend on spellcheck so I often use the wrong word because, hey, it doesn’t have a red line under it.

We are not members of MoMA so we had to wait until Sunday to see the “German Expressionism”show when it opened to the public. The museum’s staff staged a dramatic presentation of these powerful, graphic works, mostly prints but some paintings, mounted on grey walls interspersed with deep red, yellow green and mustard sections with the usually offending curator’s notes on colors to match the walls. These details are important in a show with 250 mostly small, mostly black and white works on paper. They come off with a bang.

Otto Dix’s “The War” etchings filled a red wall with updated versions of Goya’s “Disasters of War.” Max Beckman’s 1917 painting, “Descent From The Cross” uses Christ’s crucifixion as a metaphor for war. Kathie Kollowitz’s heart wrenching woodcuts from her series called “War” stand as a timeless display of the emotional costs of war. If they were as powerful as they look we would all learn something from them before heading off to war. None of this work is as grizzly as I’ve made it out to be. Nolde, Egon and Kirchner, all giants of German Expressionism, have a masterly ability to cut to the chase.

We had looked a the “MoMA Abstract Expressionism” iPad app so many times I felt as though we had already seen the show but nothing can prepare you for the impact of these monumental paintings in the flesh. Kline, Motherwell, Rothko, Newman, Pollack, Gottlieb and Guston transformed the art world in the last century and their impact is still being felt.

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Art And More Art

Hermann Nitsch (in chair in front of string quartet) at his show at Pace Gallery in Chelsea 2011
Hermann Nitsch (in chair in front of string quartet) at his show at Pace Gallery in Chelsea 2011

The Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch is described as notoriously theatrical. That’s him slumped over in the photo above. We didn’t know a thing bout him until we stumbled on the opening a show of his paintings in Chelsea and we were just in time to catch a string quintet, Quintetto Nitsch, performing with Herman. A controversial painter and performance artist, he has staged crucifixions and has been arrested many times, his work plays with religious rituals and our violent tendencies. His canvases looked blood soaked even if they weren’t and created a rich, dark mood with the long sustained drones. We were offered soup after the performance but moved on.

Wandering from one gallery to the next in Chelsea is like putting your iPod on shuffle. It is an experience full of surprises and unexpected juxtapositions and it alters your perception. After immersion in or just glimpses of fifty or so galleries you are open to even the trash piles in the street as art.

Back at Duane’s pad in Brooklyn we opened the window, New York style, to the twenty degree weather. Peggi cued up mxrich videos of Angel Corpus Christi and we streamed half of Fellini’s “8 1/2” before sleeping like babies.

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See Something, Say Something

Amtrak 714 with Kodak Headquarters
Amtrak 714 with Kodak Headquarters

Rick Simpson came to the door at 7:45 with our two papers. We had arranged to have him bring us to the train station and you’d think we would have been the ones to be in a hurry but Rick said, “Let’s get cracking’.” Rick dropped us off at the train station before we had a chance to finish our coffee so it was an especially dreamy ride across along the Erie Canal and then down the Hudson into the city where we hooked up with our nephew Andrew who’s going to Columbia Law School.

We met at the Gagosian Gallery uptown on Madison Avenue near 77th where where they were showing five sensational paintings by the Russian Avant-garde Suprematist master, Kazmir Malevich. Andrew said he had done a paper on Malevich during his undergraduate days at Penn and had coincidentally finished the assignment in Rochester while visiting.

How does this business model work for Gagosian? Free admission to their gallery on three floors in a high rent district where none of the work is for sale? I’m guessing he represents some of the other artists in the show, “Malevich and the American Legacy”. Maybe Ellsworth Kelly or Richard Serra? Two beautiful black and white pieces by Kelly paid tribute to the master here as did work by Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Ed Ruscha reinforcing how powerful the Malevich pieces are still one hundred years after they were created.

We watched a guy pick lint off his black jacket as he stood in front of a Dan Flavin black light piece.

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The Journey

3 Face Drawings by Paul Dodd 03.14.11
3 Face Drawings by Paul Dodd 03.14.11

I left these three drawings at the Creative Workshop tonight. I did them last night for a drawing show that the Workshop is mounting in the next few weeks. No guarantee that they will accept them of course but they were fun to do.

Duane emailed a link to a Neil Young live recording from Carnegie Hall 1970. I downloaded it but haven’t listened to it yet. Our friend and neighbor, Rick, had coincidentally just lent us two British magazines with Neil Young features. Each had a cd of various artists doing Neil Young covers, a tricky proposition that hardly ever works when you’re crazy about the original.

I liked this quote from Neil, saying “I’ve been too concerned lately with moving on so I leave a lot of unfinished and unreleased stuff.” It struck me because it dovetailed so nicely with this quote from Picasso that was in Friday’s NYTs. “I’ve reached the moment, you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.”

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As California Goes

Freeway Ends Sign on Route 590 North in Rochester, New Yo
Freeway Ends Sign on Route 590 North in Rochester, New Yo

In painting class tonight our teacher, Fred, was talking about how expensive oil paints are now. He was speculating that turpentine is now a “hazardous material” and it costs extra to transport things like that. He was saying you can’t even buy commercial oil paint anymore. It’s illegal in California and “as California goes, so goes the nation.” It’s all acrylic or water based enamel now. A tube of paint is thirty bucks or so.

I got the conversation going because I said I was going back to oils after this batch of paintings. I’ve been using kids’ tempera paint and I’m getting tired of how it acts when I try to rework an area. You kind of reactivate what’s below and it gets messy.

Whenever Peggi’s sister was in town visiting her mom she would ask us what freeway she takes to get from wherever to wherever. I’m the wrong one to ask because I’ve lived here so long I just follow my nose and I can’t keep the 490, 390, 590 thing straight. I remember Route 47 doing pretty much the same thing. Anyway, the point is there are no “freeways” in New York. California has freeways. We have expressways and a thruway. So what were they thinking when when they put up this new sign on 590 North where that highway peters out and leads into the four traffic circles?

I don’t really think of MX-80 Sound as a California band but they’ve been there for about thirty years, long enough for vocalist, Rich Stim, to reinvent himself as video king, “MXRICH”. I love his his newest, done for an Angel Corpus Christi instrumental track.

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Painting For Sale

Enrique Mora Painting at the Hungerford Building in Rochester New York
Enrique Mora Painting at the Hungerford Building in Rochester New York

The photo above is detail from a painting by Enrique Mora. You’ll have to click on the photo to see the whole painting. It was featured on the First Friday site about a year ago when it was for sale at the Philips Gallery on East Avenue. I tried to see it back then but the gallery had already closed for the evening by the time we got there. I caught a glimpse of it through the window and never thought I would see it again but I guess it didn’t sell because it was hanging in one of the many art spaces in the Hungerford Building on Friday night. I really like it.

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