Coke vs. Pepsi ~ that sort of thing.
Rochester Contemporary’s show, “Artists For Ukraine,” opened on Friday night and there were already quite a few red dots on the wall by the time we arrived. All proceeds benefit Humanitarian & Medical Aid to Ukraine. Larry Merrill donated two beautiful photos from his “Wards of Time: Photographs of Antiquities” series and we chatted with him at the opening. I wish Putin was listening.
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The four page handout from “Echoes of the Ether,” Jenn Libby‘s new show at Mercer Gallery, is an essential part of her show. We took one with us and it connected the dots, between Icarus and climate change. The wall of 45s with ambrotypes mounted in the center hole of each was her “letter to Mother Earth” and the sound installation by Joe Tunis, was a composite of the runout grooves from those 45s. The acoustics in the crowded gallery were so lively we were unable to hear the sound installation. When we mentioned this to a friend they told us when they were there the sound installation was so loud they had to leave.
I particularly liked the set of tintypes, “Seeing is Forgetting” (like the one shown above), camera-less images that reveal aspects of objects not normally seen. A return visit is in order.
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Arugula likes Rochester. It’s hardy and rugged. It has a biting sense of humor. We generally do three plantings. It pops out of the ground in early spring, mid summer and early fall and you can start picking it almost immediately. It adds character to green salads where you would be hard pressed to taste the difference between Gentilina, red and romaine lettuce. On its own – a small pile of arugula, lightly tossed in olive oil and spritzed with fresh lime juice and a touch of salt – it is a rock star.
Monica made fresh pickles with the young cucumbers they grew and for the past few years she has given us a jar. She suggests that we wait at least a few days for the vinegar to permeate the pickles. She knows how much I love these so I count the days. Peggi doesn’t really care for them. I put them on my boiled egg and toast in the morning and make the jar last a at least a week. And then I boil a few eggs at once and put them in the brine. They get better each day.
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These canvases are the same size but they don’t look it. One is just a little closer to the camera. I like how this photo conveys the simple technique employed by artists to convey a sense of space in a 2D work. You could, for example, make one eye bigger in a portrait and it would appear closer to you thereby adding volume to the subject and depth to your field.
Tomorrow brings a new show to Colleen Buzzard’s Studio, “Works on Paper” by an artist named Beauty, whose work focuses on the inner vitality she finds in familiar objects. Beauty won’t be using the projector in the big hallway so Colleen asked us if we could prepare a disc of slides of Anne Havens’ work, all taken from pdfs of the Apple Books Anne did for her shows over the past two decades. It was pure joy to spend time with images of Anne’s drawings, paintings and sculptures but it was pretty much of bummer to discover more limitations of the Micca Media Player that we’re using to interface with the projectors. You would think you would be able to view both movies and photos if they were in a folder together but it’s one of the other.
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I came awake with “Rock Steady” going around in my head. I don’t remember hearing it recently. I couldn’t even remember who did it. Was it a Reggae song? There was a whole genre called Rock Steady. I could hear Aretha Franklin’s song by that name but that wasn’t it. I had to look it up. It was the Whispers from 1987 and the song was produced by Baby Face who is performing here this weekend.
The sun has set on “Manifestation,” my show at Colleen Buzzard’s Studio. Peggi helped me dismantle it last night and Colleen was already prepping the walls for next month’s show. Certainly not everyone who attended the show liked what they saw but I took note when someone liked one of the pieces enough to tell me. For most it was “Los Inmigrantes.” There was plenty of talk about “Passion Play” and “Brief History of the World,” and surprisingly some liked the “For Fritz” pieces the best. For a select few, the most enthusiastic response was to the “Arcadian Forms” and that was rewarding. They are my favorites as well. I plan to mount them on the wall in my studio and find a way to move forward in that direction.
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Do butterflies have sex in midair? The bottom one was following the top up and down the row of Sue’s Zinnias and unlike the top one it didn’t seem interested in the nectar. I could look up the answer to my question but its more fun to imagine that they do and I don’t want to be disappointed.
We ordered a new iMac for my brother, Fran, and found they were on back order (like everything else). The box arrived yesterday and we took it out to my brother’s place in Webster. He had just returned from a Corvette show in Pennsylvania where he bought a reconditioned panel for the inside of his 1969 Vette. His old Mac was from 2009 and his browser was slow as molasses. We made sure he was backed up to the cloud before we migrated and we discovered he had two Apple IDs so his photos on his old computer were never in sync with the ones on his phone. That took some doing to straighten out.
We took a break and walked over to the community of small cottages near Hedge’s on the lake. While we were gone my brother went out and bought us lunch from a joint down the road and a bag of fresh corn from his favorite roadside stand. Once we had the combined photo libraries on the phone and the new computer we took off. But we didn’t get far. We stopped at a new craft beer place on Lake Road and had an amber ale from Lunkenheimer’s.
Brad called this morning And I almost expected him to tell us his tv had slipped off the wall. We were out there a few days ago and Peggi and I mounted his big tv on a wall in the living room. I brought my stud finder out there but had better luck listening for hollow spots. We got two of the four giant wood screws through the top two holes of the mount and solidly into studs. But then directly below those two screws the studs weren’t lining up so we had to put them in at an angle. We listened to Brad’s message and heard that he dropped his laptop and broke his screen.
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At dinner last night, in Kathy’s backyard, Jan mentioned a recent house fire in which someone had died. It was on Garford Road, one of the streets off Culver, and we were trying to place it. We walk in a different direction most days so if it is nearby, we have been down it many times. Turns out it is one of the sunnier streets and we prefer the tree-lined ones so we were not that familiar with it. We walked over there today and most of the Cape Cod is still standing but it looks like a total loss.
This nearby house caught our attention and we stopped to study it. We discussed the charred logs on the beds of white stones and the weathered stump with a plate on top of it. Peggi directed my attention to another detail and I broke out laughing, quickly catching myself because some of the neighbors were outside. She had said, “It appears they don’t want anyone using their front door.”
An American flag seems to completely cover one of the few windows in the house. The eagle (is that where the “spread eagle” term comes from?) at the peak is a nice touch. This patriotic section of the house appears to have a spotlight on it. It’s odd that the person who designed the house recessed the garage. And the canvas awning they have on the window near the garage makes it impossible to see in or out of it.
The shades are completely down on the criss-crossed picture window and the diamond pattern is picked up again on the tiny window in the door. Finally, I love the house number, the two digits separated by the bare bulb lamp.
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Despite the recent rain the lake level is .7 feet below its long term August average. The outlet of Eastman Lake had cut a deep chasm through the beach. We took our shoes off to wade across and it felt great. While we waited for our feet to dry I collected a handful small smooth stones, all the size of coins, and we marveled at how each one was a different color from the next. Exactly how do these well worn stones wind up together on our beach?
We take walks around the woods once the paths close in with the invasive garlic mustard and swallow wort. We had a hunch that those may have died back enough for clear passage but we were just a bit early. We went straight to the shower when we got back to drown the microscopic ticks before they had a chance to bore into our bloodstreams.
We picked our first proper batch of Pimientos de Padrón and watched our first La Liga match of the new season. Atlético beat Getafe won 3-0.
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Colleen’s gallery space included this small white wall in the back that I was originally going to leave empty. But why? How many opportunities does one get to show your work? So pulled these b&w abstracts out of a box and pinned them to the wall. They were taken in 1976 and were part of a much larger series. We had a darkroom in our basement at that time with an enlarger that our friend, Kim, gave us. They are in the same key as the rest of the show even if they don’t align with the subtitle, “Recent Work by . . .” The show is up for another week.
Our neighbor, Diana, shops at Costco and they sort of force you to buy too much. She offered us some mangos and we said yes but some other things came along with them. Pairs of cold little pancakes and some flat, chocolate crepes from France. We ate the crepes while we visited with our friends, Rich and Andrea, over Zoom. They told us they had decided who would inherit their houseboat when they passed on.
We told them we had just finished the series finale of “Better Call Saul” and Rich asked if the ending was disappointing. Peggi and I went both ways on that. Diana had already told us last night she didn’t care for the finish. But then she added she is bored with all the shows. The ending was a feel good one and I can see how that might be disappointing.
Our friend, Brad, has moved from the Bay Area back to Rochester. He’s living in a house he inherited, the one where he was living when I first met him in high school, the same one where his mother started screaming at him for singing, “I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth,” a line from a popular song at the time
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Andrew Cloninger contacted us about playing a gig with his band, Wren Cove, at Joy Gallery on West Main. We didn’t know him or his band but of course we said yes. Galleries are a good place for our band. The floors are usually bare and the acoustics are clear and lively. The people in the room are unusually quiet and that gives us the space to bring it down to a whisper.
Luvon Sheppard is the curator of this space and he was showing work by someone from Alaska. I’m quite sure we parked behind his car because the plates caught our attention. Margaret Explosion has played every gallery in town, a few times. RoCo, Visual Studies, RIT’s Dyer Arts Center, Mercer Gallery at MCC, the Eastman, Memorial Art Gallery and Colleen Buzzard’s space just last week.
I looked at my watch before we started and it was 88 degrees downtown and hotter inside but the door was open to the street. Wren Cove, an improvisational duo with guitar and cello, sounded so beautiful it was startling. We had a cello player sitting in with us years ago and it works so well we couldn’t resist asking Melissa to sit in with us. She fit like a glove.
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Don’t mind me if I continue to talk about my show at Colleen Buzzard’s Studio. In another ten days most of it will be in boxes. “Los Inmigrantes” are featured on the brightly lit, white wall directly in front of you as you enter the gallery. If you were to turn 270 degrees to your left you would be facing a small black wall with a white pedestal in front of it. I knew this would be the perfect spot for my self portrait and it looked especially good in the daylight when we stopped by the other day.
If Studio 402 hadn’t invited me to participate in their ”Self Portrait” show last winter I probably wouldn’t have titled the piece as such. I was already thinking of the driftwood pieces as bodies, the ones that frequently wash ashore in southern Spain when their overstuffed boats capsize in a desperate attempt to flee poverty. I mounted the more sculptural found pieces, the ones that hold your interest when viewed from all sides, on long finishing nails (like the piece shown above.) And of course that led to creating my own small body.
I picked a piece of oak firewood out of our stack and brought it into the garage. I put in the vice grips and went at it with saws, chisels and files and then drilled a hole in the bottom and mounted it on a nail. I was determined to create a piece as interesting as the ones I found on the beach.
The pieces in this show could easily be read as a disparate collection of work but I get to connect the dots. I think of my “Arcadian Forms” as forms and not shapes even though they are flat colors and two dimensional. The forms are reductions based on the figure, like the self portrait that followed from “Los Inmigrantes.”
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Duane lives in Brooklyn but came up for a wedding. He missed the opening so Peggi and I gave him a private showing yesterday afternoon. Colleen was working, adjusting a cloud of steel wool, so the studio was open. We turned on the lights in the gallery and then set up the slideshow while Duane took in the show. It is a little more difficult to get the hallway dark in the middle of the day and I can see in this photo I forgot to temporarily twist that light bulb off but Duane got the picture.
Duane is a camera man by vocation and he helped me, via FaceTime, photograph most of the work in this show. Seeing it in the gallery setting he told me the “Arcadian Forms” were “sexy.” I told him the best thing about the show was moving on from the work. The clean slate is exhilarating. I’ve been stretching some canvases for oils and, of course, I would like to move forward in an orderly direction so I plan to keep the capsualized view of my show (the postcard) top of mind. Like the Guston quote, ”What I’m always seeking is some great simplicity.”
Duane put some serious hours into editing a video he did for Margaret Explosion this summer and he told me when he finished it he was determined to do nothing for while. I can see both strategies. Neither of us have air conditioning and the humidity is thick enough to slow your momentum.
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I had the best seat in the house last night, surrounded by my favorite musicians as Margaret Explosion performed in the long hallway of the fourth floor in the Anderson Art Gallery. The ultra-short throw projector, mounted in the ceiling, threw a crisp twenty foot wide image on the white wall well in front of where Peggi was standing.
The band was ready to go anywhere and we managed to sculpt a multi-layered soundtrack for the show. The acoustics were perfect and unlike at the Little the crowd was silent while we played. It would have made a sensational recording if the recorder hadn’t been unplugged before the file was written to disc. But that fact only made the experience more special.
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I stopped by the Bop Shop yesterday for the annual sidewalk sale. There was nothing on the sidewalk so I masked up and went in. I worked my way through a few racks of one dollar 45s (Tom said he would sell them for 50 cents if I bought a bunch) and I found a clean copy of Barbara Lewis’s “Hello Stranger.”
A couple of young girls with colored hair were combing through the 80’s lps. And a guy with white hair and a black t-shirt was talking to another customer about his band. I overheard him say they played the Irondequoit town Hall last week. We can hear stray echos of those Thursday evening show’s from where we live. There is one happening as I write this.
Tom introduced me to a new employee. He said we should know one another. They put a Margaret Explosion cd on stores sound system. The guy (I can’t remember his name) asked where he could hear the band live and I told him we have two art gallery gigs coming up -Friday 7pm in the gallery where my show is hanging and next Saturday afternoon, 1pm at Joy Gallery on West Main Street.
The utility pole in this picture is brand new. A big delivery truck, bigger than the one shown here was delivering something to the house on the corner last week and while turning around it took out the power lines and pulled down the utility poles in both directions. The neighbors down here were without power throughout the night.
Our tv is nowhere near as big as the ones on this truck. We sit close to watch La Liga matches but they are still on break. We watched “The House of Gucci.” Started out fun but then crashed. Should have been made in Italian. The bad Italian accented English reminded me of the way kids talked in high school. We watched the Spanish horror movie “Passenger,” just because it was Spanish. The truck driver played cassettes of the traditional music you might hear at a bullfight and that was the best part of that movie. We’re watching “Resurrection” now and that is really good. Love the lead actress and the way she runs. I know something bad is going to happen to her. I feel asleep during it last night and then woke up when someone screamed. We’ll get back to it tonight.
It was 90 degrees out on Sunday and we don’t have air so we went to the 3 o’clock showing of “Memoria” at the Little Theatre. I loved it but hardly anything happened so I can hardly remember it. I loved how it spaced me right out. Tilda Swinton is fabulous. She registered what we were feeling as we watched. Uncertainty and dislocation with the panic. The movie can’t be streamed, it is touring the country like a traveling art show. And we watched the 1973 movie, “Badlands,” with Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen. It was a perfect movie except for one thing. They killed Warren Oats off too fast.
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Monica counted 90 rings in this oak. They had to take it down because the Gypsy Moths did it in. We’re guessing that Leo, the guy that built their house, probably had a big hook in the tree, something to tie his dog up with, and the tree swallowed up the hook and left these stains in the wood.
We watched a pair of mourning doves build a nest in the cherry tree just outside our window this spring. We kind of forgot about it when the foliage filled in so we never saw the babies. We spotted a Baltimore Oriole making a nest in the Tulip tree near the pool down the street but then sort of forgot about it. The branch with the nest was starting to grow over the pool so the pool members decided to take it down. We extended a pole saw with another pole and managed to get it up some thirty feet. We took turns moving the pole up and down and when limb hit the ground we found this wonder.
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A few days back I posted a picture of one of Jim Thomas’s light sculptures. They rightly belong in a museum but many of them still sit in his home studio. Jim and his wife, Gail, had back to back shows in Studio 402 and and then the Little but they were both experiencing health issues at the time so a small group of friends helped them hang the show. The Thomas’s had the group out to their place in Fishers and then emailed us to thank us for coming out. Mostly he wanted to thank us for talking art with them.
This was all backwards. We should be thanking them. Before leaving their place Jim offered us each one of his pieces, our pick, to take home. The three photos shown here are the pieces we considered before settling on a small oil pastel. They are a feast for the eyes but wall space is a limitation for us.
This last one is our favorite. Peggi sees a deconstructed apple. The colors, nearly flat in most places, look like they were both loosely and confidently applied. Not fussy, it remains fresh and alive. The forms move your attention through the painting and back out, not just clockwise but into the light blue space and then forward through the grey before dropping on your lap. We might have to do a little rearranging.
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Corey will get a kick out of this photo. This mirror is right across the street from his house. That’s his old mattress in the driveway. We brought. back an armload of Collard greens from the garden, the regular, giant leaf plant and the Hen- Pecked version which looks exactly like it sounds. We thinned our carrots and brought back some young ones and Peggi made greens and beans with it all and we ate out on the porch with an ice cold NA Saint Pauli.
Brad Fox is back in town, temporarily living with his brother and bound for his mom’s old place once they finish a few renovations. He’s been gone a long time.
First Friday was fun. Peggi took photos and got a great one of Dominica, Tom and Barbara getting off the elevator which Colleen was operating for the evening. It was mostly a different crowd from the opening and that made it fun. Plenty of art talk. And it was hot under the gallery lights, the way it should be at the peak of summer.
The gallery is open by appointment until the end of the month and there is one more event in the space. City Newspaper ran a little piece about that.
We were invited out to Jim and Gail Thomas’s place in Fishers where the two artists have their studios, workshop and gallery space. They have had some health issues recently and we helped hang their recent show at the Little. This afternoon’s gathering was their thank you to “the hanging crew.”
Jim started teaching at RIT when the school was still downtown. He and his wife had a gallery on Prince Street in the early 2000’s and Peggi and I bought one of Jim’s large (six foot tall) totemic, figurative, charcoal drawings. Jim’s work, mostly abstract sculpture, painting and drawing is based on the figure and grounded in natural forms. When we first entered his downstairs gallery the only illumination was coming from his light sculptures. I took this photo of a sensational floor standing piece.
Gail showed us the form-fitting, lime green mask she was required wear during her treatments and after a few hours of art talk and cookies Jim invited us into his studio where he offered us each the pick of any piece to take home with us. Peggi and I chose a beautiful oil pastel drawing of two interlocking forms.
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One of the nicest things about my show at Colleen’s studio is having the chance to get to know Colleen. She once told me she wasn’t “particularly fond of painting” so this wasn’t a given. I am particularly fond of her artwork and I only found her comment intriguing. She invited Peggi and I over to see the garden that she her husband, Hucky, have created in their backyard. It is the garden of the gods! Every kind of plant, flower and tree seems happy here and some like the olive, orange and fig tree are only out for the summer so it was a thill to see it all at the peak of summer..
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