Paul Dodd “Crime Face 46” detail. Click photo for full painting.
I was preparing an online submission of a group of paintings to a show and I was trying to chose which paintings to feature as details. Naturally I turned to Peggi for her expert opinion. I had a few guys open on my monitor and she said. “Well I have already told you which one I like the best”. And of course it is the one I have featured up top but I hadn’t shot it yet. So I set up my Lowel lights tonight and shot her and few others.
On a beautiful Sunday afternoon we watched the gallery assistant pull the shades at Rochester Contemporary so we could see the PowerPoint display on LA’s cornfield project. L.A.-based writer artist and curator Janet Owen Driggs from the Metabolic Studio, a charitable activity of the Annenberg Foundation, discussed our roles as industrial eaters and the new art movement toward not bullying nature. Her slides took us from Donald Judd’s aluminum boxes to Robert Smithson’s beautiful earth art to the political ramifications of public fruit. Janet used to paint but has turned her energy toward Edible Estates and Fallen Fruit and Islands of LA.
We stopped at Home Depot on the way home and bought a bunch of seeds for the garden.
We had our last painting class at the Creative Workshop last night, last one until the Spring session starts in three weeks. I had my camera with me and I grabbed this shot of Maureen’s painting. She stands next to me in class and it is really fun to watch her paint. She works really fast and has a good time doing it. I try to work fast but spin my wheels and I’m not sure I’m having a good time.
I checked out a Matisse book from the downtown library and I don’t want to give it back. I had a hunch that it would help me with my ongoing problems. That is: drawing ears and noses on faces when the sitter (or mugshot in my case) is facing head on. Matisse does this better than anyone and he makes it look so easy. His drawings are so much fun to look at!
House on the way to Shamrock Jack’ in Irondequoit, NY
When we lived in the City we got in the habit of walking to the corner to Carrol’s bar for a corned beef sandwich and pint on Saint Patty’s Day. They had bag pipe players and the Pogues on the juke box. The closest Irish bar to our new local is Shamrock Jacks. To get there we walk through the woods and through a neighborhood of funky Bloomington style houses and then down Culver toward the lake. This was a sort of ominous message to read on the way to a bar.
The ground is dry and the woods are pretty bare so we were able to do some exploring today. I think we were on a deer path. I took a short movie. Found a few Budweiser beer cans on the way home and ran into a neighbor who was out smoking a cigar. He had his own theory as to who has been doing all the drinking. He thinks his neighbor is pounding them on the way home and hiding the evidence from his wife by chucking them out the window of his car.
We picked up Peggi’s mom and brought her over for dinner. This is a big adventure for her these days. I marinated some chicken and Peggi roasted brussels sprouts. Peggi made tapioca pudding for dessert and we watched Rene Fleming sing with the Metropolitan Opera on PBS while we ate. We discussed the origins of Tapioca, speculating that it might have come from China or Japan or maybe Korea, becoming popular during the Martin Deny, Tiki torch days. I asked Peggi’s mom if she remembered having it as a kid and she said she didn’t. She thought it might be an Irish thing. On the way home she informed us that she really doesn’t have any sense of direction any more.
Fred Lipp, my painting teacher, has been trying to make me more aware of the different forms on the two sides of a head when the face is even slightly turned. Most of my recent paintings are mugshots and the photos I paint from were taken pretty much straight on but there is usually something I can pick up to make the structure more interesting. I working on that.
And then along come this painting of a horse by a fifth grader currently on view at the Shweinfurth Memorial Art Center in Auburn. This girl made the dead-on sing.
It is so beautiful this time of year when the snow disappears and the ground is a dusty brown. The trees without leaves are grey and the trunks turn black if it rains. Big trees take on Egon Schiele like expressions. We had little yellow flowers blooming out back last week before the snow melted. I did a Google search for first yellow flower in New York and I think I have identified them as Winter AconiteEranthis hyemalis. With a little more rain most things will be green before we know it.
I came back with three new signs for the Signs Section and the one above is my favorite. On our way down to New York we got off the Thruway in Waterloo and drove through Auburn toward Skaneateles. We stopped for a bit in front of this sign because it required some thought to determine which way to turn. I am visually oriented and I really wanted to turn right for Auburn. I’m guessing the prisoners who make these signs for the state are only allowed to “justify” their type. It would be a lot easier to read if they could flush left or right.
It was smooth sailing through the Poconos and on to Route 280 but then it all went wrong. We zoomed by our exit and saw signs for Newark so we got off and tried to turn around. We got back on but it was the wrong highway and we found ourselves heading north on I-95. The Manhatten skyline was receding behind us. We paid a toll and did a u-turn back through the Oranges and into Montclair just in time to drop our bags off at Dale (New Math) and Myrna’s (Human Switchboard) and get to the temple for a run though of the Hebrew chants. Except the cantor canceled the rehearsal because of a personal conflict so we returned to Dale’s and watched a black and white “Man From Uncle” show..
We did the service without rehearsal so I was on the Bima looking for the groove with a guitar player and the chanting cantor. Two kids were making their bar mitzvah today and there were about three hundred people here. The stained glass looked like it had been designed by a madman but my drum sounded great in the room. The young cantor was attending to her boisterous child while she waited for her partner to show up and she encouraged me to not be shy. She MC’d and juggled her parental duties while effortlessly leading us in ancient sounding songs like “Ma Tovu”, “Adon Olam”, “Kiibud Av Vahem” and “Tav L”hodot”.
The regular service ended and the bar mitzvah portion started. Our nephew offered a few possibilities for the meaning of the name of their temple as his bar mitzvah project. It translates as “Eternal Flame” and he made a good argument for taking on the responsibility of keeping it alight.
His parents got up and told a few stories about their son. I kept thinking of the scene in King of Comedy” where Rupert Pupkin listens to his grade school teacher toast him. Overall the ceremony was lackluster and fidgety with bursts of meaningfulnes. The party afterward was a blast. The kids had fun and we had fun watching the kids. My family chipped in to buy our nephew a Kindle.
My painting show from the Little is all boxed up and today I took down my painting show at the Genesee Center for the Arts. So it’s time to move on and an excellent opportunity to re-evaluate what it is that I spend so much time painting. I am enjoying this process and considering wild alternatives like en plen air and abstraction.
In the meantime I was asked to paint a portrait for the Memory Projct. They sent me a photo of this kid, an orphan somewhere, and I did a few versions. The kid kid gets the painting. The one in the middle looks the most like him so I’m sending that off. Now what?
Jeff and Mary Kaye gave us an Amaryllis plant before they went to Mexico. It had just barley broken ground before they left. We put it in the center of our table and now, six weeks later or so, there are six huge flowers in bloomand two more on the way. I wasn’t sure how to spell Amaryllis so took a stab at it in Google and found a time lapse movie of what we saw but set to a Liz Phair song. Peggi isn’t awake yet so I watched this without the sound.
“Science Fiction” by Ornette Coleman is one of my favorite album and I was thinking about this record last week when Bob Martin posted his top 25 lps on his Facebook page. We named our cat Ornette after seeing Coleman in NYC in 1998. I read in Jeff Spevak’s D&C blog that local trumpet star Paul Smoker and some of his Nazareth College students would perform interpretations of Ornette’s avant-garde classic album, Science Fiction on Sunday afternoon.
I got the lp out this morning so I could look at the liner notes and then I played a few of the tracks from our iTunes library. In Robert (Bob at the time) Palmer’s liner notes he says “Ornette’s music grabs you inside before you understand it intellectually.” That’s certainly how it got me and I still don’t understand it intellectually. He also says “To play this music, you have to step out of the mold your teachers taught you.” But this teacher is Paul Smoker!
So I made arrangements for Peggi to drop me off at the Atrium on the way out to her mom’s place. I sat down next to Greg Bell from “Jazz Rochester” as Paul Smoker introduced the lineup. There was only one Ornette piece in there, “Happy House”, and Paul told the crowd that they would be doing all Ornette later in the month at Nazareth. I had heard that there was a lot of inaccuracies and untruths in the blogospere but didn’t believe it until now. The band sounded great but I gave up some prime painting time to be here and Ornette is one of the few people I would do that for.
There was a discussion panel after the set and Paul Smoker said they would talk about, “Why we do what we do. Why do we keep beating our heads against the wall despite cultural indifference?” I had to leave to meet Peggi out front.
“Irondequoit ain’t just pretty. It’s my home.” Apologies to Bat McGrath and his “Naples” song. Bat was just in town for a house concert and we watched a few songs at the D&C’s website.
One of the prettiest sites in town these days is the town’s infrastructure installation over on 590. These things have been here all winter while construction on the four new traffic circles has been on halt. There are probably a hundred or so of these things over there of all shapes and sizes. I wonder if they are still going to call it 590.
There are a number of Irondequoit legends. One of them is about how the Kodak executives over in the Oakridge Drive area voted down the final leg of an expressway loop that would have crossed the northern edge of the town connecting the end of 590 with the northern end of 390 in Greece. I always thought it was pretty cool that 590, an expressway, dead ended at Marge’s. In fact we did a song about it on our Planetarium release.
I’ve been looking at these concrete structures all winter waiting for a sort of warm, hazy day to photograph them. They look particularly good with some snow around them but snow and sun make impossible to get the rich grays in these thing. I want to thank who ever is responsible for the installation. I’m not sure how long the show is running.
I was on my bike. In fact it’s visible in this photo. The only reason I am mentioning this is because of what happened on my way home. I came up behind three teenage girls who were walking home. One of them had bright red orange hair and it was course like Raggedy Ann’s. I didn’t want to get caught looking at them so I darted off the road down the embankment. Just as I did this I noticed the girls looking at me. My bike crumbled beneath me in the mud and I went over the handlebars. I tried to get up quickly but my handle bars were at an angle and my basket was all bent up. I hit my thigh on that post above the front wheel. It must have looked hilarious and I’m laughing as I type this even though my thigh hurts.
The Clarisa Room is no more but the old Shep’s Paradise is open as “Clarissa’s” and it is still a great sounding room for jazz. We were there last night for the open jam hosted by 1968 RL Thomas graduate, Mike Allen, aka “A King Of Soul”. These three horn players, probably Eastman School of Music students, were waiting to play “Love For Sale”. This is one comfortable bar and it was midnight before we knew it.
We were talking about Gap Mangione last night because the bass player from his big band was sitting in. Conversation turned to the Buffalo plane crash and the Chuck Mangione players that died there. We hadn’t heard from Gap in a while but he called today to request some changes to his web site. We did another quote today for a web site. We have a few out there. We could be busy again if all goes well
Found some more cans near a turn in the road on Hoffman today. We brought them home.
Spent a good part of the day trying to develop this template with vertical centering. I manage to get it working but I created a page that had no scroll bars in any browser. With Joe Tunis’s help, I got the scroolbars back but then lost the centering.
I say “I” but all I have done is search the web for help in executing this design. I wrote about this project a few days ago and Martin Edic sent me a link to a blog that had a great piece on vertical centering with css.
I ran out of spray fixative, that nasty crap that you coat a charcoal drawing with so that it doesn’t smear. And it was Sunday and Rochester Art Supply is closed so I started calling around. Staples put me on hold for about ten minutes and Home Depot had never heard of the stuff. The bay bridge at the end of Culver is open in the winter so Webster was an option. Peggi wanted to look at some fabric so we headed out to Jo-Ann Fabrics.
We drove along the lake and turned up Baker Road toward the village. Most of Webster has been swallowed up with housing tracks and they are sprinkled between old farm houses so it makes them all the more depressing. There are still some open spaces and we spotted one on our left. There was someone out in a field struggling with a huge kite. I pulled over and we watched while this guy get the big red kite off the ground. And then he took off but never left the ground. He was wearing cross country skis and a helmet just in case. He traveled the length of this field in less than a minute.
Turns out we were looking at the Gosnell Big Woods Preserve, a 163 acre woods with oak, hickory and hemlock trees that are 350 years old. If we get some more snow we plan to head out here to ski the trails. I think we can manage without the wind propullsion.
The Ethnic Heritage ensemble showed up about 9:30 for an 8pm gig tonight at the Bop Shop Atrium. They were coming from Toronto and they got hung up at the border but the crowd stuck around. The band sauntered in like they weren’t even late and opened with a trance/chant tune on thumb piano with the lyrics, “Pharoah Sanders”. When we last saw these guys at the Jazz Fest in 2005, they did a similar piece called “Ornette Coleman”. All three played beautiul percussion at various times. Corey Wilkes, who also plays trumpet with the Art Ensemble, is an amazing player. Tom Kohn should have a great recording of this show.
I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to get the contents of a html/php page to stay centered vertically, as well as horizontally, no matter how big you open the browser window and no matter how much content is on the page. This used to be easy with tables but I’m trying to do it with CSS. I came awake early this morning thinking about this. I’ve been using bits and pieces of various people’s code to develop this thing. When I put paragraph returns or includes or just about ay more content into this this thing thing it all falls apart.
I am trying to come up with a template that I can use on the Refrigerator and other sites. The template has an include for the header, footer and Goggle ads (if I go that route) and I want to get the Google search bar in the header of each page. Yesterday I got the logo graphic (with its link) to change on a rollover with css so I don’t have to pile on that java script. I found a pretty cool trick here for that. And I still need to develop a Spry menu bar for the header so you can navigate the site. It has been getting so complicated that I keep wondering what exactly is wrong with one link on each page that goes back to an index page that has links for anywhere you might want to go on the site.
We were eatting dinner kind of early so Peggi could get to her yoga class and a big bird flew by our back window. It was a turkey and it landed in one of the trees down back. I grabbed my camera. When we come across them in the woods they are usually waddling along in groups of eight or so. They stand about four feet high. It seems like a miracle that these things can fly.
There was a new Crimestoppers page in the paper yesterday morning. I have it next to my scanner and I plan on scanning it so I can enlarge the pictures. I am getting much more comfortable with backing up and getting some distance between my eyes and my paintings. I need larger source material because I’m finding that I would like to see it and the piece I’m working on at the same time and both from a distance. I use to hold the small pictures in my hand and then turn to the canvas to paint. I resisted backing up because I was afraid of what I might see. I could only take so much.
Lately I’ve been drawing and painting with chalk (or a brush) taped to the end of a yardstick so I can maintain some distance and this is really helping. I am much less likely to get a great looking eye in the way wrong location. I wish I could get a hold of some bigger versions of these mug shots. They are only an inch and a half high in the newspaper and that’s with a 65 line screen and sloppy 4-color registration. They don’t get any better when I blow them up. Maybe I can talk the Sherriff’s Department into letting 4D do the Crimestoppers website so I can access to the original files.
We stopped in to see AMP at the Little last night and Sue Rogers came over to out table to tell me that there was a really interesting face on the Crimestopper page in the morning paper. She encouraged me to “go for it” in capturing the defiant expression on this one dude’s face. I’m not sure which one caught her eye but I really appreciate her enthusiasm.
We are taking care of two cats on our street while their owners are away. We visited both this afternoon There’s Dietrick at one end of the street and Puddles at the other. Maybe tomorrow I will photograph both for the Refrigerator.
