We got to the opening of RoCo’s 6 by 6 Show too late to buy a Lorraine Bohonos painting. They all had red dots on the them by the time we got there. All the work in this show is six inches by six inches and it is all for sale at twenty bucks a piece. There were over three thousand pieces in the show, some by big name artists and it was all displayed annonymously. RoCo keeps the money and they made some, judging by the number of red dots. We wandered around for hours and kept finding things to buy. I’m happy the show was such a success for them. We finished the night over at Abiene where I managed to beat Bill Jones in 8 Ball.
Enjoying the summer will be a project. And then there are all those summer projects. First on my list list is looking at Cubism. Fred Lipp’s orders. More like a question really. “Ever look at much Cubism?”
I started last night with the Cezanne piece and continued my investigation tonight by looking at my recent paintings with my first impressions of Cubism in mind. I was struck by how obvious it is that I am still learning to draw. That’s what I saw first. And my paintings are really drawings. And then I saw a lot of room for expression. I’m still not sure what Cubism is. I’m guessing a more imaginative way of seeing and translating is probably an important part of learning to draw. So I am still on course.
The pool temperature hit 70 degrees today and the air is supposed to be near 90 this weekend so summer has begun. One of the past presidents of the pool club told Peggi to add chlorine tablets even though the chlorine reading was above normal. He said, “I know it’s counterintuitive”. We are trying to figure this out.
I have been painting a lot in the basement, putting a push on before the last class next week. I’m ready to start spending more time outdoors. We have tomato plants, jalapeño, basil and cilantro plants in the garden. We don’t really have a garden. The deer would get it if we planted anything here. Our neighbor, Leo has an extra lot that he has put an electric fence around and he lets us use space in there.
I brought a painting into class tonight that had some wacky eyes. One was too low but expressive. The pedestrian way I painted the nose and mouth killed the expression in the eyes so the thing needs work. My teacher suggested that I look at Cubism. He said it started with Cezanne and was driven home by Picasso and Matisse. He found a reproduction of Picasso’s “Gertrude Stein” painting that perfectlyly illustrated what he was talking about. I did a little google research and found out Picasso and Stein were both influenced by Cezanne.
I’m getting the picture that I need to be more expressive. The elements of my faces have to carry more form. Thinking about this will be my summer project.
If Padre Pio can be a saint then Marlene Dumas can be.
Martin Edic forwarded an email from Boo Poulin this morning with a link to a video with Marlene Dumas paintings in it. Boo assumed I had seen it but asked Martin to forward it just in case. I watch about as much YouTube as I do TV and that’s hardly any. I had not seen the video and I still haven’t. I keep pausing the damn thing so I can look at the paintings. I will take me weeks to get to the end. And the music – I turn the sound off and it works much better.
Is it legal to open a book, scan a bunch of paintings and have that be your whole video? Rich Stim would know. He writes and Intellectual Property blog for Nolo. Marlene Dumas painting or drawing, now there would be a video. Marlene Dumas talking about painting or drawing would be a good one too. I’d take a video of Marlene Dumas crossing the street so I do love this video.
In 2002 I painted twenty two “Artists’ Heads,” and mounted them together in two long frames. At the time they were my favorite painters. The piece was in the 2003 Finger Lakes Show at the Memorial Art Gallery. I’m still pretty happy with the list but if I was doing it today I certainly would include Philip Guston and Marlene Dumas.
Geri McCormick saw some Marlene Dumas work at MOMA and told me that she thought I would really like it. Wow, do I. I checked out a “Marlene Dumas: One Hundred Models and Endless Rejects” from the UofR library and ate it up. I brought it into painting class to to show to Lorraine but she wasn’t in class. My painting teacher, Fred, borrowed it and he seems to have devoured it (that’s a few steps above eating it up). He brought it back into class with yellow post it notes hanging out of the bottom of the pages. I’m happy that Fred liked it as much as I did and now it’s Lorraine’s turn. The book, from a show of her work in Boston is out of print. There is a copy on Amazon for $221.26 if you’re interested.
I look for a space to paint everyday. I don’t always find one but most days I do. I’ve been chugging along and I believe I’ve had a glimpse of the other side, the great expanse. The key seems to be in letting go. I start with a preconception but once I’m off and reacting to what I have, the plan goes out the window
I’m seeing missteps earlier, recognizing them as such, and making repairs. And I’m enjoying the road work. I even like the look of the patch job now because I have let go of the original idea. It is hardly a smooth ride but it is exhilarating.
Bill Jones bought a plug-in for Cart Weaver (a shopping cart add on for Dreamweaver) that allows you to sell digital files and collect through PayPal. We are collaborating to set up a functioning store for Pete LaBonne’s entire oeuvre to date, entitled Gigunda. Today I scanned the covers of twenty six Pete cds. When we get the bugs worked out we hope to off this service to our website customers. Here is a sample from “Gigunda”. This track is from Pete’s “Ask Mr. Breakfast” cd.
I brought the Marlene Dumas book that Monica checked out of the UofR library to painting class last night. I had hoped to show it to Lorraine but she wasn’t in class. She has been really tearing it up lately. She brings in two or three paintings a week that just knock me out. My painting teacher really liked Dumas’s work too and he has borrowed the book for a while.
I saw that Lucian Freud’s fat lady painting sold yesterday for more money than any other painting by a living artist. Beautiful tribute/obit to/for Robert Rauschenberg in yesterday’s NYT’s. I particularly like this passage.
The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”
Raoul Dufy painting “Race Track at Saint-Cloud” from the Memorial Art Gallery of Rochester
I didn’t even know there was an American Impressionism movement but the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester has mounted a show in the main gallery of such paintings from the Phillips Collection. It is not my cup of tea and I do like tea. My favorite of late is Yogi Tea “Green Tea Rejuvenation”. And I love the European Impressionists.
The MAG has a beautiful small show at the same time in the Lockhart Gallery of Impressionist Masterpieces from the Permanent Collection. Don’t miss this show. There are some real beauties in there that are not normally on display. The Raoul Dufy painting above reminded me of Leo Dodd’s paintings. The Europeans win hands down.
A more interesting contest is the one between Wendell Castle’s clocks and the Midtown clock that he calls “1960s’ kitsch” and “junk”. I like the Midtown one better. Someone has been quietly tidying up MAG’s permanent collection and familiar paintings are shown in new company.
We have Google handle our email accounts and it does a pretty good job of filtering out the junk but it let this one slip though this morning (my birthday). The above was the extent of it. Thanks. I love it. I am fine. The title of this entry was the subject of the email. Its like an mysterious emotican.
Peggi got up before me and had coffee and a few gifts sitting on my chair. There was a Francis Bacon book, a newsprint sketchpad and a small book of artist’s quotes. I love this one from Otto Dix. “You know, if one paints someones’ portrait, one should not know him if possible. No knowledge! I do not want to know him at all, want to see what is there, the outside. The inner follows by itself. It is mirrored in the visible.”
And our neighbors had a package hanging on our door this morning. It was R. Crumb’s, “Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country”. It has stopped raining so we are headed out for a walk. Other years we’ve taken rides in the country on this day but we have decided to drive down to NYC as soon as we can find a few days without commitments. There is a Philip Guston “Works On Paper” show opening at the Morgan this Friday that I would love to see.
We heard the magnolias were out so walked up to the park to see for ourselves. Some of them were already gone and the ground was covered with pedals. The yellow ones are still big buds. We cut through the golf course and found a couple of balls, a Dunlop and a Nike. Would much rather walk around and find golf balls than play that game.
Tonight is the first class of the Spring session of painting. I am excited about that. During the break I finished a few and revisited some paintings that I was not entirely happy with. I tried to make them better but we’ll see what the boss says tonight.
There was a note from Janet Williams in my in box today and she attached a photo of the sensational painting that I referred to in yesterday’s post. I hope you like it as much as I do. She currently has three paintings in a show at the Oxford Gallery.
A few months back I took the tunnel between the new downtown library and the old library building by the river. There is usually some art on the walls there and this time it was Rochester Public Library employees. I scanned the walls as I walked but came to a screeching halt when I spotted this lusciously painted typewriter. It was the paint itself that stopped me. I realized it was a typewriter after a minute or so. And that is not because it was abstract. It was alive with painterly expression and raw beauty. The painting was by Janet Williams and I knew that she worked here but I had forgotten. I didn’t have my camera with me or I would have grabbed a shot. It doesn’t seem fair to inadequately describe something that I was knocked out by with showing it to you. Maybe Janet will send one along.
We were extremely busy with 4D Advertising work last year and we are extremely slow now so I thought I would update the woefully neglected Refrigerator. There is such a backlog of items to post that I have been researching content management systems to help me out. I found a few paintings by Janet from last year in the “Items To Post” folder. Here is a beautiful one called, “Lamp Left On All Night”.
Turkeys are almost too big to fly and even though they have wings it seems they would rather walk. Occasionally we come up on a group of them and they will all take off but that is only if we have really taken them by surprise. Otherwise they just walk a little faster to get away form us.
Alice asked to see my recent paintings last night and I expressed or tried to articulate a problem that I thought I was having with a few of them. I feel like I am ill equipped to fine tune some them that started off full of energy but are now bogged down. Bogged down because I’m trying to attend to poorly executed details. As I fumble my way through addressing these problems I feel like I’m over polishing and loosing the original energy.
Alice pointed out that speed isn’t everything and if the problem was really severe I could paint it out and start over. She made me realize that the choice is entirely mine as to whether I like the painting or not. And if I do, it is worth whatever it takes to finish it. The time frame is dictated by the situation and is really irrelevant to the finished piece.
Last night’s opening of “Electric Florets” was really well attended. Geri’s son Paul worked the bar while simultaneously hanging out with his friends. The big wall with a grid of sixteen oil pastel mandalas was most impressive. Geri’s painting teacher, Fred Lipp, was there engaged in deep conversation with Alice. Another fellow classmate, Lorraine, slipped in and out while we provided a sonic background to the din in the room.
During our break Katherine Denison told me the band sounded “really tight”. I told her that “tight” was a word I would never apply to Margaret Explosion. And she said, “I know. I’ve been at the Little when it’s been real loosey goosey”. That’s more like it.
Pineapples went up a dollar at Wegmans. They were $3.99 each all winter and are now $4.99. They are one of the only produce items left with a flat cost attached to them instead of a per pound cost. With most produce I enter the 4 or 5 digit code and the scale computes the cost based on the weight. But with pineapples I put the fruit on the store scales just to see which one is the heaviest and then buy that one. I can usually find one that is over six pounds. I think limes are sold this way too.
It is a beautiful day here, sunny and headed toward sixty, a perfect day for painting in the basement.
OK. So it’s raining. No excuse for not taking a walk. If you don’t get out there you won’t see the robins gorging themselves on worms or the one legged turkey doing the turkey hop. And you won’t find any golf balls along the golf course and you’re never gonna find any empty 24 ounce Bud cans along the road. I picked up two today and had them in my hand when I waved to a neighbor who drove by. She’s probably thinking, “So that’s the guy that’s been dumping all those cans down here.”
Geri McCormick asked Margaret Explosion to play at her opening tonight of “Electric Florets” at the Genesee Center for the Arts.
Remember when Ronald Reagan was a joke and not the revered right wing populist that he is today? Remember Danny Deutsch behind the Reagan mask behind the bar at “Schatzee’s?” Danny bought the old gay men’s club, “Tara’s”, renamed it “Abilene’s” and opened last night. The place was packed with old friends.
Every bar in town seems to go with the locally brewed, Custom Brew Craft or Rohrbach’s. Both are world class and we are lucky to have them. Danny had something from Rohrbach’s on tap and we had a couple pints. You could talk over the music but still hear it and my ears weren’t ringing this morning. I loved the paint by number landscapes on the walls. They looked like embroidery or tapestries.
By coincidence we saw the Shawn Penn film, “Into The Wild” and Hans Petter Moland’s “Zero Kelvin” on back to back nights. Both films have young men ( a top student, an aspiring poet) heading into the wilderness (Alaska, Greenland) for adventure. I won’t spoil it but it is rough out there.
“Into the Wild” opened with with a graduation ceremony at Emory University in Atlanta. We will be there in seven weeks for our nephew’s graduation and the lead character in this movie reminded us of our nephew’s brother who is currently hanging out in Guatemala. Peggi read the book and pictured our nephew in the part and sure enough Emile Hirsch looks just like him. I know my nephews are listening to better music than the Eddie Vedder soundtrack from this film because they plug their laptops into our stereo when they’re here. I don’t get Eddie Vedder. I didn’t like Pearl Jam and that record they made backing Neil Young was a dog.
“Zero Kelvin” had the edge on “Into The Wild” because it had a much better soundtrack. Terje Rydal’s music was the perfect choice for this dark and beautiful adventure.
Last night, on Angel Corpus Christi’s recommendation, we watched something completely different, “My Kid Could Paint That”, about a really young girl from Binghamton who painted with encouragement from her parents. A creepy art gallery owner started selling the paintings for big bucks and the story got a lot of media attention. There was nothing extra special about the paintings. Art from most kids that age is special because they have not been taught or broken. It happens fast. One day they are extraordinarily expressive and the next day the sun is smiling.
Michael Kimmelman from the New York Times is interviewed throughout and offers insights into both sides of the old argument over whether or not modern art is a hoax. The creepy art gallery owner provides the meatiest art talk when he tries to make an absurd argument about the quality of the art being proportional to the time it takes to produce it. He makes his point by explaining how long it takes him to do his tedious exercises. They show him about three inches away from his painting with some sort of a magnifying class in one eye while he works on a huge painting by starting at the top and working his way down.
People buy what they like and sometimes they like the story more than the art.
Paul Dodd Crime Face Paintings in Living Room Early 2008
Peggi answered the phone tonight and a guy asked to speak to Paul. I said, “Hello” and the man/boy voice said, “Fuck you” and hung up. I’m thinking it was the answer to the title of yesterday’s post.
As brutal an exercise as painting can be, it is as brutal an exercise for me to look at one of my paintings. Of course it is not entirely brutal, but close. I’m talking about looking at the finished painting and noting what goes through my mind on confronting it. Just what kind of a dialog do I have with this thing? In other words, why am I doing this?
I alone am responsible for expressing what is on the minds of these people and I need to enable them to hold up their end of an interesting conversation. The procedure for developing a painting is one part of this activity. The conversation with the finished thing is the other.
It is sort of interesting how little anyone who comes into our house has to say about these guys. If someone is not into a confrontation I completely respect that but I suspect the paintings are not speaking clearly enough yet. I think some people are afraid to look at them or they think they are so terrible they don’t want to be the position to have to comment on them so they look away. Maybe everybody has stuff like this in their living room.
I’m trying to pick a couple to enter in a show and I have a bunch of recent ones propped up in our living room. I’m leaning toward bottom left and third from left on the bottom. I’ve been adding to the group over the last month. I would like them to be more engaging.
I just finished “The Object Stares Back” by James Elkins. I fell asleep to it for the last few weeks and it surly is responsible for this entry. But he started to to piss me off because he tossed out too many ideas too quickly. I disagreed with many of his opening arguments and he didn’t take the time to defend them. On to the next entry.
You know how when you wander off a trail in the woods and you find yourself wallowing in the brush, ducking under low branches with prickers grabbing your clothing and the ground gets all mushy and wet and you’re thinking it might just be better to go back but then you’d be backtracking which is usually a bummer.
After knocking off some pretty quick paintings, I have been spending a lot of time trying to bring others with a good start to a close. There is no proper amount of time that a painting should take. It could happen in a flash or it could be a long struggle. Both are equally valid. It could take a lifetime to learn how to execute a perfect stroke. And in the end it is only the process that is rewarding. The paintings themselves are markers.
I have terrible time management skills and it is really easy for me to get off the path while painting so I am really interested in procedure. My painting teacher, Fred Lipp has very few rules. In fact he boasts that he can break any rule and get away with it.
One of these rules is: “Always address the worst first”. If there is a sore spot in the piece you are working on, fix it. Now. Well, how do you know what the worst area is? Another one of his rules helps here. “If the question comes up, the answer is yes.” If you are questioning whether something is wrong, it probably is. This works 99.9 per cent of the time.
While working on this last bunch of paintings I have to keep reminding myself to stay focused on making the “worst” better. I would rather be starting some new, fresh faces but I created these problems and I’m trying to clean them up. The procedural rules help and I am grateful for them.
In “The Object Stares Back” Ithaca author, James Elkins, makes a case for why it is so difficult to see something and paint it. You don’t simply see anything. You can’t. The act is wrapped up in an activity of give and take with what you are looking at. And of course it is quite a different experience for each individual.
My painting teacher always says, “Trust your eyes”. If you sense something is wrong, it probably is. If your eyes really like something you’ve painted, trust it and follow it up. Simple advice but a powerful guide. But getting to the nut of what you are seeing can be an illusive experience with all that Elkins brings to the table.
Elkins says, “Art is among the experiences I rely on to alter who I am”. I am down with that. He says, “Paintings seem to be exempt from the world, as if their frames were parenthesis letting the text of the world flow on around them, or little fences keeping the picture from straying into the world.” He describes the many ways seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer. So this is a very fluid situation and art continues to nourish in circular ways.
