Category: Notes On Painting

Talking A Good Game Is Easier Than Painting

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Paradox Lake

Creek in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester New York
Creek in Durand Eastman Park, Rochester New York

When I catch myself bearing down on a painting I know I’m doomed. I will be trying to get a clunky part of the painting to look right and I’ll lose the whole when I think I have the part right. I wish I had the foresight to not go down that road again but I will. It is almost easier to start over but I don’t usually take the easy route and that is another paradox. “Painting is not supposed to be easy or everyone would do it.” That’s one of Fred Lipp’s quips.

Another curious observation is that my paintings look better up close when they were painted from afar. That is provided I like what I painted from afar. And conversely when I work up close and think it looks great, I step back and cringe. I’ve tried long handled brushes and painting at arms length. I’ve put the painting on the floor while painting standing up. These methods work but they are rather cumbersome. I’m convinced there is some sort of force field between me and the painting where all the problems lie and I know I’m better off to stay out of there.

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Experience

Cowboy graffiti in Ithaca
Cowboy graffiti in Ithaca

When you travel somewhere you experience that place intensely. You are stimulated by the new environment.

I’m reading this book on Philip Guston’s Roma paintings, paintings that I once thought slight, as if Guston could do slight and as if I am worthy to judge a Philip Guston. Guston got more sculptural in Italy in an direct, elementary way painting monuments and shaped shrubbery and looking at Morandi and the Italians.

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Winter Mugs

Warhol Mug Shots at the Johnson Museum, Cornell University
Warhol Mug Shots at the Johnson Museum, Cornell University

“Nowadays if you’re a crook you can write books, go on TV, give interviews—you’re a big celebrity and nobody even looks down on you.”
from the The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

I have sort of a false memory of seeing Andy Warhol’s “Thirteen Most Wanted” at the New York State of the 1964 World’s Fair. I was there with my father and brother. We drove down and slept in the car in a parking lot in Queens. My father is big on architecture and I know we went in the Philip Johnson designed New York State Pavilion but Warhol had probably already painted over the mug shots.

I have my own mug shot piece, a watercolor, in the new show at the Lucy Burne Gallery at the Creative Workshop.

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Good Question

Rochester NY Crime Stoppers December 2010
Rochester NY Crime Stoppers December 2010

I come up for air from time to time and revisit my subject matter but I always find a compelling reason to dig deeper with these crime faces. It seems even the county is loosing interest in this subject matter. The Crimestoppers page that appears in our paper every three months or so recently cut back to a half page. This thing used to be it’s own four page supplement. I know because I save them all and have painted most of their faces.

Peggi’s mom used to say, “Why don’t you paint your beautiful wife instead of these people?” Good question! I have been obsessed with these guys since my first art job, graphic artist for the Rochester Police Department in 1977 but they are not the only thing I paint. And what I paint is not as important as how I paint.

Because the latest Crimestoppers was only a half page and the photos were tiny I followed the link to their pathetic site and downloaded the pdf. I was printing out blow ups of the photos to paint from as I often do and “Content Aware Scale” feature in the new Photoshop caught my eye. It’s intended to help you scale horizontal pictures to vertical or visa versa while “protecting” or not distorting the subject elements. Pretty amazing when used that way. When I select these little thumbnail portraits and let that feature fly the results are out of this world painterly. Click the photo above to see what it did to Angel Correa.

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Learning Disabilities

Paul Dodd "Crimeface 2010" Watercolor
Paul Dodd “Crimeface 2010” Watercolor

My cat is fourteen years old and she still plays with my shoelaces. I don’t think she is going to grow out of it.

It was sixty degrees here today so I went up on the roof with the brown caulk and plugged the holes that the wood peckers made in our fascia board. I do this every year. I love hearing woodpeckers in the woods and trying to spot them. I love watching them slam their head into a tree so I can’t complain about them. I wonder whether they just peck away in an exploratory fashion or do they suspect we have some tasty bugs behind the fascia.

My father bought a Milky Way from the vending machine outside our painting class last night. He split it with his pocket knife and when he bit into his half he pulled out a temporary cap. We both picked up some bad teeth genes and you’d think we’d know enough to stay away from carmel. Our painting teacher stated the obvious. I overheard him telling another painter that he will never tell us what to do. He only points out the problems. If he told us what to do it would take all the fun out of it and we wouldn’t learn anything.

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Wednesday Night Ritual

Black birds in trees
Black birds in trees

Most of the birds are getting out but the smart ones are hanging around for this beautiful Fall weather. It’s not Indian Summer because we haven’t had a frost but that’s only a technicality because we live so close to the lake.

We were headed home from Peggi’s mom’s apartment with the last load of stuff to get rid of and we head this clanging under the car. I couldn’t even see out the back window because the big, green ,overstuffed, lift chair took up most of our cargo space. We stopped at the bank and I crawled under the car. Our tailpipe had broken off where it meets the muffler so I stopped in Jerome’s to have them take a look at it. They put the car up on the lift with the lift chair inside of the car and reattached the tailpipe. Further up the exhaust chain we noticed the heat shield on the catalytic convertor was falling off. I find these in the road all the time while on my bike but I’ve given up collecting them.

We don’t really have a piano player in our band unless Pete LaBonne is in town. Fred Marshall sat it a couple of weeks ago and he sounded great. Jaffe from the old Colorblind James Experience used to come all the time but we haven’t seen him in months. James Nichols threatened to come last week but didn’t. Maybe he’ll stop by tonight. He always sounds great. There’s no piano in the song below but the Little Theatre Café’s grand piano was sitting right next to us when we recorded the track so if you listen closely you’ll hear it vibrating sympathetically.

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Superba Shoes

Sea Breeze Water Tower from a moving car
Sea Breeze Water Tower from a moving car

We spent the whole day cleaning out Peggi’s mom’s apartment. Trying to figure out why people bought commemorative plates. Was it a scam like the sub-prime mortgages? We have a whole box of them for eBay. Had some nice golden hour lighting on the way home so I hung my camera out the window for this shot as we went around the Seneca Road circle.

We were asked to play at the Shoe Factory last opening last night so Peggi brought her sax and I brought a hand drum. The theme for the inaugural exhibition was shoes of course and we ran into so many familiar faces we never made it back to where the music was coming from. Beth Brown said we could just play in her studio and we considered that but never got around to it.

We stopped at Duane Sherwood’s foot video first and watched that go around about ten times. It moved from sensual to creepy but stayed engrossing. Chris Schepp from Schepp Shoes made some beautiful little leather boots and Heather Erwin was wearing some hot, knee-hgh leather boots. Jim Mott had four shoe related paintings scattered about and Alice de Mauriac mounted a most interesting Converse box. And I liked Dick Storms fuzzy slipper paintings. My “Superba Shoe Wallpaper” was hang on such a big beautiful blue wall that it didn’t really look like wallpaper but I’m not complaining. The show looked great and the place was packed so I would say it was a smashing success.

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Hit Me

It was so much fun to watch Texas lose with the Bushes in the best seats. Tim Lincecum is on the mound for SF tonight and I like his haircut. We’ve had to endure some bad commercials though. Are bad commercials more effective than good ones? What is it? I know this much. The World Cup is a lot more exciting than the World Series.

I talked to Anne Havens this morning. She’s been having some computer problems. Anne closes up her studio and heads south for the winter pretty soon. She likes the sunshine. I don’t mind the sunshine but I can only handle so much heat. It takes the life out of me or it takes the edge off at least. We’re supposed to have our first frost tonight and I love it when the house gets cool. Perfect weather for art.

I’ve not had any time for art the last few months but I do manage to get to painting class each week. I wouldn’t miss an opportunity to spend time with Fred Lipp and I’ve learned that I don’t have to bring in a pile of work to have an insightful conversation with him. I can just start working on something in class and Fred is off. In fact, the more on the line I am, the more cutting, right on and helpful the critique is.

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Process

Paul Dodd "Shoes On Silver" 1976, acrylic on canvas 36" x36"
Paul Dodd “Shoes On Silver” 1976, acrylic on canvas 36″ x36″

Beth Brown, Russ Lunn, Heather Erwin and Jim Mott have rented space in the Anderson Alley building, space that was a shoe factory when Rochester had many. My grandparents worked in shoe factories here. In fact, my aunt gave my father this tiny pink shoe made of leather, a sample from the shoe factory their father had worked in. I was called a “Superba”.

One of the only things I accomplished this summer (4D work doesn’t count) was organizing the garage. There were some tools out there and that were almost impossible to get at. I threw away a bunch of old paintings and one of them was the shoe painting above. I did it while I was in school and I had forgotten all about it. I found a big roll of white paper in the garage, something my father had given me when he used visit the Kodak surplus building before coming home from work. I also attempted to deal with the piles of stuff in our office and I did decided to throw away the light table we haven’t used in about twelve years.

I photographed the tiny shoe on my brother’s picnic table and did a few drawings from the photo and then a few small watercolors of it. I brought the scale up to oversize and it looked less like a woman’s shoe and almost like it could fit a nineteenth century dandy. I simplified the drawing and created a pattern that I put on the light table and then unrolled the white paper over the pattern as I painted one shoe after another.

It will be in the show when it opens on Friday, November 5th.

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Smiley Faces

Three CrimeFaces (Rochester mug shots) for Lucy Bryne Show at Creative Workshop in Rochester, NY
Three CrimeFaces (Rochester mug shots) for Lucy Bryne Show at Creative Workshop in Rochester, NY

For the last six months or so I’ve been painting on paper with water color, opaque water color, kid’s tempera paint to be precise. The Creative Workshop passed out a flyer to announcing a portrait show and students were asked to submit up to three works that were properly mounted and ready to hang. I don’t Know if push pins through the corners of works on paper would qualify and I waited ’til the last minute so I chose three small oils from earlier this year. I snapped a photo of them in my driveway before dropping them off. Rachel, the Workshop director told me they would only have room for two which I took to mean two of your “crime faces”. So I let Rachel pick the two she liked and I took the one on the right back home with me. The show is up now and it looks pretty good.

Stop by the Little Theater Cafe tonight for Margaret Explosion. We’ll be there every Wednesday until the new year.

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Zen & The Art Of Painting

Wetlands off Hoffman Road in Rochester, New York, September 2010
Wetlands off Hoffman Road in Rochester, New York, September 2010

I take the same photo over and over, it seems. I have to come up with creative names so I don’t overwrite older files. How many times have I photographed this marsh? I paint the same painting over and over too. I came home with a new batch of crime faces tonight, mugshots from the morning paper.

Our painting teacher came in with three quotes printed on a small pieces of paper. He gave one to each student first thing. And as much as we would like to think we are all painters, we are “students” in Fred Lipp’s presence. The first quote was from Juan Gris. “You are lost the minute you know what the result will be.” The second from Degas. “Only when he no longer knows what he is doing, does the painter do good work.” And the third one was from William Baziotes. “Each painting has its own way of evolving. . . when the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.

No wonder I have to take this class over and over.

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Get To The Point

Paul Dodd Crime Face Watercolor from September 2010
Paul Dodd Crime Face Watercolor from September 2010

As I noted here a few days back, we really enjoyed Anne Havens artist’s talk at the MAG. The slides of her work were beautiful. The presentation itself was a work of art. I did an artist talk there a few years back and I know how much pressure there is to add something interesting to the work that was created to speak for itself. You have to go deep to top your best efforts and Anne succeeded. Had I offered her the advice my buddy, Frank Paolo, gave me she would have had a perfect game.

Frank gives seminars on effective presentation techniques. I’ve seen him in action, knocking the socks off a large corporation’s top salesmen. Frank gets top dollar for a day’s work and any company would
realize a sizable ROI. When Frank heard I was doing this talk he invited me over for a few tips and I will never forget this one. “Skip the opening thank yous.” Frank says a crowd will never be more attentive then in the opening moments so don’t bring them down with obligatory thank yous to the stiffs in the front row. Launch right into your presentation.

We had our first painting class last night. It was full and two of the lost looking, new students asked me if I was the teacher. I said no and explained that the teacher will probably be late but it will be worth it. One of the older returning painters asked if I was still doing “those guys”. I said yeah and he asked if it was getting any easier. Of course I said no.

Fred Lipp spent most of his time with the new students. He has a habit of scaring off timid students and the classroom is guaranteed to be not as crowded next week. When he got to me he was as incisive as ever. He covered up the orange shirt on the guy pictured above and showed me my painting. Of course it much more effective without the distracting shirt. The point of the painting was all in the expression. “Always get to the point,” he said. I was stunned. So obvious.

As James Brown would say, “Hit it and quit.”

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Natural Approach

Birch trees on the ground in Durand Eastman Park
Birch trees on the ground in Durand Eastman Park

We took a walk in the woods and finished up down at the pool where we celebrated the end of summer with a stimulating dip. The water was 65 degrees but it felt great.

Fair warning. You have one more day to get over to see Anne Haven’s work in the Memorial Art Gallery. She is one of six local artists featured in the 4th Rochester Biennial. Anne gave a lecture on Thursday and we were in the front row. She showed slides of her work of course and read lines from her favorite poems and let us in on her intuitive and completely natural approach to making art. She is an inspiration.

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Like Obsession

A. Botts art at the Record Archive in Rochester, New York
A. Botts art at the Record Archive in Rochester, New York

First Friday comes around pretty fast these days. We started at the Bop Shop Atrium and heard a few songs by John and Mary. This was the last of a series called “Fourteen Fridays” there. Peggi and I played quite a few gigs with John back when he was in 10,000 Maniacs and we reconnected after their set. We walked across the street to the Print Club’s show at Rochester Arts & Cultural Council. The definition of a print is pretty wide open these days and it gets a little tedious trying to figure out how the images were made so I skip that part and just take in the imagery. There were some especially nice prints there. My father and I used to be members of that organization.

A. Botts art at the Record Archive in Rochester, New York
A. Botts art at the Record Archive in Rochester, New York

We headed over to the Record Archive next where a band had just finished. One of the band members, who goes by the name of A. Boggs, was showing his drawings and collages there as well. A. is influenced by Philip Guston and even used a photocopy of a pile of Guston’s feet in a few of his Dylan collages. The detail above is from a piece called “Two Heads Emerging.” A. Boggs work was priced at around $25 each. Since I am obsessed with Guston I got pretty excited at the show.

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The Right To Write Badly

Smokey lawnmower on Culver Road in Rochester, NY
Smokey lawnmower on Culver Road in Rochester, NY

I’m reading William Corbett’s memoir of Philip Guston where Philip Guston is reading Isaac Babel. “Comrades let us not fool ourselves: this is a very important right (the right to write badly), and to take it from us is no small thing. Let us give up this right, and may God help us. And if there is no God, let us help ourselves”. Guston cherished going out on a limb. Isaac Babel was arrested, tortured and shot during Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge.

We rode our bikes down to the old Newport House on Irondequoit Baty. The former speakeasy is still there but it’s boarded up and in demo mode headed for upscale condos. A worker came out and asked if he could help us. You know you’re in trouble when someone asks you if they can help you. On the way back we smelled something foul in the air. It got worse the closer we got to Culver Road and there we found this guy desperately trying to mow his lawn before his mower burned up.

We gave Kim Simmons two boxes of cds to sell on eBay. He takes 30% for his effort and that seems fair. We spent most of the weekend in the garage going through boxes of junk. Our house came with junk that the previous owners couldn’t sell at their final garage sale and we piled our junk in front of that junk. I feel like we’re all pawns in a giant worldwide garage sale scheme.

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Cubism & Bolt Cutters

Paul Dodd Crime Face watercolor 2010
Paul Dodd Crime Face watercolor 2010

I was in painting class last night, listening to Fred Lipp explain the principals of Cubism as first explored by Cezanne, when Warren came in from the office to say my father was on the phone. My father told me that Peggi had called him from her downtown fitness club to say her locker had been broken into while she was swimming and her clothes and car keys had been stolen. My father said he was going to swing by the gallery and pick me up so I could give Peggi my keys and check on the car. I walked out of painting class waited for my dad out on Goodman Street.

My father packed up some of my mother’s clothes and I passed them to Peggi who was wrapped in a towel. A few minutes later she came out of the women’s locker room with my mom’s clothes on and she confessed she wasn’t entirely certain which locker she had put her stuff in. There was only one locked locker in the area and it wouldn’t open with her combination. The lock did look like hers and she had become convinced that that maybe the lock was just acting up. The woman behind the desk suggested that they cut the lock off and see. She went in the back room and came out with big red bolt cutters and the two of them headed back into the women’s locker room.

They were unable to cut through the Master Lock so they cleared the women out of the room and I went in there. It took some doing but I popped the lock and there were Peggi’s clothes and her lock was in her gym bag! All she can think is that she picked up someone else’s lock last week, put it in her bag with hers and then put that lock on her locker when she went in to the pool.

Peggi dropped me back at class picked up the Cubist discussion where we had left off.

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Transcendental Landscapes

Charles Birchfield Watercolor Show Poster from Museum of Modern Art
Charles Birchfield Watercolor Show Poster from Museum of Modern Art

There are only two days left to see the Charles Burchfield Watercolor Show in Buffalo. The show was put together by the Hammer Museum at UCLA and it travels to New York next but seeing it in in Buffalo, where Burchfield worked as a wallpaper designer (his “hack” job), is a special treat. Burchfield paints “the healthy glamour of everyday life.” Passages from his journals accompany each of the paintings. He was a marvelous painter and writer. The show includes his compulsive doodles, a notebook of drawings called “Conventions for Abstract Thoughts” and rooms full of his transcendental landscapes. My favorite painting was of an oak leaf in his neighbors snow coverd front lawn, “The Constant Leaf.”

The Burchfield Penny Museum here, across the street from the Albright Knox, is brand new building. Their state of art men’s room use Sloan Technology on their “zero-water consumption urinals”. Thank god the water fountains were not similarly equipped.

A trip to Buffalo would not be complete without a visit with Mark from PosterArt. We started talking about the old days and he went in the back room and returned with a stack of “Closet Punk Productions” posters that he designed when he was booking bands at the Continental. A lot of them had dates one day earlier or later than the posters on the Scorgies website.

Mark recommended Coles, down the street on Elmwood for something to eat. This place has been around since the thirties and the outdoor tables were the perfect perch for taking in the Buffalo vibe. “Anarchy in the UK” was playing on the sound system as we sat down. Back on the thruway, pointed at Rochester, the trees looked Burchfield trees.

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Run On Sentences

Margaret Explosion performing at "Live Dive" CD release party upstairs at Abilene in Rochester, NY. Photo by Brian Peterson.
Margaret Explosion performing at “Live Dive” CD release party upstairs at Abilene in Rochester, NY. Photo by Brian Peterson.

We don’t set the alarm. We wake up when we wake up. Of course we work pretty late on occasion. Sometimes that’s before Rick and Monica and sometimes they are already at work when we crawl out. Rick brings our paper up to the door if he’s up first and I bring theirs to the door if I’m out there first. I have developed a sneaky approach to their doorstep that doesn’t set their dog alarm off but sometimes the dogs sense me and let loose. This morning I was headed up their driveway in my pjs and slippers, multitasking (brushing my teeth and reading the headlines as I walked), when the garage door popped open. Monica backed out and rolled down her window. I think she asked me how I was or something but I all I could manage was “Ugh Um.”

At last night’s Margaret Explosion (a five piece last night) gig I was still thinking about the post I made here before leaving the house. Although that post was filed under the “Notes on Painting” category it applies perfectly to what I feel we are trying to do with our musical collective. Start with an idea, only add things that improve on, develop or add to the expression. And if it’s not adding value, like my painting teacher says, “shut up.” I believe it to be a useful template but I am only the drummer. We have one more Wednesday at the Little and we will be off for the summer. James Nichols will be joining us on piano.

“And that’s the way I play. I play for the benefit of the band.” — Baby Dodds, New Orleans drummer

Here is Margaret Explosion – Dance Trance from the gig pictured above

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More Words Does Not A Better Sentence Make

Paul Dodd Crime Face - watercolor 2010
Paul Dodd Crime Face – watercolor 2010

“You’re having fun with this” Fred said when he worked his way around the class to get to my spot. “I am?,” I said. I actually felt like I was pulling my hair out all week, full of doubt that I was able to put the head on the paper. I want to physically place the severed head in this artificial construct of a space but I’m left with the realization that I cannot.

I expressed these concerns to Fred in less graphic terms and a rather long discussion took place. Of course Picasso, Matisse and Guston were all in there as examples of artists who made it their life’s work to describe form.

“What is the point of these paintings,” he asked. “To convey the expression,” I offered. He looked down at my recent watercolors (click on photo above for example). “Well, you’ve got it.” he countered. He argued that my frustration comes from my compulsion to get form down when it is not the point. “If the intent is to convey form, you should work on that.” True to form I said, “But I would like more form.” And true to his teacher form he said, “You could do it with less!” “If something doesn’t add to the expression you’re after, don’t paint it. You gotta know when to shut up.”

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Baby Dodds

“And that’s the way I play. I play for the benefit of the band.” — Baby Dodds, New Orleans drummer

This quote is printed in the front of a book of Lee Friedlander photos that I have on loan from the Rochester Public Library. And I love it. Not just because of the guy’s name but because I think Baby Dodds is addressing the nature of the creative act.

Take a simple example. You start a painting with an idea. You make a few marks and already you are committed to constructing an image that is worth looking at. The more interesting the better. Exciting would be nice. It is your duty to follow that up by only adding strokes that strengthen the picture. The original idea was the springboard but that is history. Your focus is now on how you can make this picture communicate more clearly. Step back for second and look at what you have. Fix the clunkers. It may go in a surprising direction. Wouldn’t that be nice? You are playing for the benefit of the band (painting).

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