Ford Torino in front of Home Depot in Rochester, New York
My cousin tries to organize a yearly “family reunion.” This year I suggested she just call it a “family picnic” because one year is not long enough for a reunion. Well see how much sway i have when the email invite comes next year. I have about fifty cousins and of course they all have children so we have to wear name tags. My aunt used to bring a giant percolator for coffee but she has passed on so this year we had Wegman’s Expresso. At the coffee table I found myself between two teachers, cousins of mine, and those conversations always go in one direction with two enemies. Overbearing parents and state and federal curriculums. Common Core and No Child Left Behind carnage.
My painting teacher started his career teaching elementary school students and he discovered that kids have an innate sense of color and design. When he switched to teaching adults he had to start undoing the grade school damage. He was my mentor as well as a friend and I miss him. Without his actual voice I rely on his abstracted voice. Instead of hearing him tell me to trust my eyes I am learning to trust my eyes.
Claude Bragdon’s Universalist Church in Rochester, New York
Martin Edic’s friend, Lucia Guarino, had the nicest stop on the Landmark Society’s tour this weekend. Her Capron Street condo in a former canal warehouse is fabulously decorated, has a perfect layout and a rooftop terrace with a great view of downtown. And she was there in person to welcome the throngs. The tour wasn’t as spectacular as last year’s but it did get us out to new Edge of the Wedge lofts, the Cub Room and Local Meat Market.
It was hard for me, an ex-Catholic, to appreciate the Claude Bragdon designed, Arts & Crafts, Universalist Church. Where is all the iconography, the Stations of the Cross, the heavenly aspirations? It was kind of fun to get into the old National Clothing Store where the new Holiday Garden Inn has set up shop. The National was always a step above Sibley’s and McCurdy’s. I remember my mom picking out a pretty adventurous sport coat for my Confirmation. I was nine or ten and had some input but she had great taste. This was a wide striped cream and maroon number making me the loudest note in the class photos.
Our First Friday route has to be rethought with the closing of Lumiere’s gallery. The photo gallery was one of our favorite stops. R Gallery, next door, had a solo exhibition of sculpture and installation by RIT alumni and Dedalus Foundation Fellowship recipient Cecily Culver. Her work “aims to shift viewer perspective and celebrate the mundane phenomena of the everyday” and it did that.
Pete Monacelli’s “Midtown Plaza” works on paper at Richard Margolis’s next door gallery looked fantastic. And on top of that Pete was holding court with a small crowd gathered around him in the center of the room when we got there, talking first about Midtown, his love of the city, and the changes he has seen in his years here. The conversation quickly swerved to Ad Reinhardt’s cartoons and then Thomas Merton’s letters to Ad Reinhardt. And then the many facets of Thomas Merton who was born one hundred years ago. Someone said, “he sounds like a Unitarian.” Please, the Catholics need all the help they can get. There is a show of Merton’s “Zen” photos at Nazareth College, up until November 4th.
Geri’s son, Sam, called to see if we had upgraded to OSX El Capitan. He was doing so as we talked. I might wait a few days and see how the reviews go. We had a few hiccups with the last update. We plan to visit Sam in Elmira this weekend so we’ll hear all about it.
We helped close up the street pool this morning, piled up the chairs, took the ladder out and put the diving board in the pump house. Peggi is in charge of the chemicals this year and she found the PH was a little low so we stopped down to our neighbor’s place to ask him how we should address this. He’s is a chemist so the answer took about a half hour to get to.
I’m not sure exactly what happened at the end of the gig last night. Either someone tripped on the cord for the Zoom recorder, maybe the upright bass knocked the recorder, but it and the stand it was mounted on fell toward Bob’s brand new guitar and it has a few dings in it.
Ossia has their first program of the new year tonight. They’re free at Kilbourn Hall. This one finishes with a Steve Reich piece. We are going to have to hustle home to catch the NWSL final between Kansas City (Heather O’Reilly‘s team) and Seattle. And there is another 20th Anniversary OJ show on tonight.
The Creative Workshop is offering an open studio in Fred Lipp’s former classroom. Tonight would have been the first night of a new session with Fred. He died near the end of the last round and the idea of showing up here to paint without him and his incisive guidance is absurd. You can pay by the session so we decided to give it a whirl.
I brought in some paintings that I was working on during that last session. I had been looking at them all summer and I knew pretty much what I needed to do. Mostly small things, Annoyances that kept drawing my attention. But still, questioning a painting, determining that something is wrong and then making that correction feels like big decisions without Fred.
Louise Wareham Leonard at Visual Studies Workshop Pub Fair in Rochester, New York
I was on the roof, making a racket with our leaf blower. We don’t really have any leaves up there yet but plenty of sticks, acorns and moss to dislodge. I had my Home Depot earmuffs on, in my own world, trying to remember to be careful when I got near the edge when I spotted the green Google Earth car coming down our street. I was out playing horseshoes the last time a Google car visited. In fact I can be seen taking a photo of the car in the Google shots of our house. I’m hoping they got me up there in my element.
Visual Studies Workshop had their annual Pub Fair on Saturday. The auditorium was filled with book artists and self publishers. It was tempting to buy something from every table but we held off until reaching Marc Pietrzykowski’s table. Peggi bought his novel about a murder in an old age home and I sprung for a three volume set of his poetry. We ran into Anne Havens and made plans to get together and play music before she heads back to Florida. Visual Studies has such a great art book collection in their library it is upsetting to see them sell parts of it off each year but we always manage to scoop up a few things. Peggi found a book of Flannery O’Conner photos and I came home with “Ninety-Nine Drawings by Marsden Hartley.”
The writers’ readings, which should have been on the main stage, all took place upstairs. Rob Tyler read eight vignettes, each wry and crisp. They walked a funny fine line between mundane and absurd. Louise Wareham Leonard didn’t so much read as perform her Rumpus piece, “How To Date A Writer.” Her performance was hilarious and especially searing in the room full of writers. Reading entries from her new book, “52 Men,” she brought new life to the pieces and made you want to read the book all over again.
Once my grandfather retired, well into his eighties, he would hold court from a green chair in my grandparents’s living room. Near the end of his life he was pretty much living in the living room. I remember helping him to the bathroom and then helping him get up off the toilet. At the very the end he was just lying in a bed in the middle of the living room, groaning in pain. I asked my mother, “Isn’t there anything they can do to help him?” She said, “He’s dying” and she said it a way that struck me as “He’s dying, you idiot.” My mom was hard core. And she made it clear that dying at home was the way to go. She said she hoped she would be able to do the same thing.
Well, you are hardly ever as lucid as my mom was when you get to the late stage. Today, she asked point blank. “Paul, what is going to happen to me?” I laughed and said “No one knows what’s going to happen to anyone. We could leave here on our bikes and get run over. No one knows what’s going to happen to them.” Sort of a cop-out on my part and not exactly what she wanted to hear but the best I could do on the spot.
She is not happy now. Her legs bother her. She sleeps to escape her uncomfortableness and she told me she feels as though this is happening because of something that she did. She says “I feel as though I did something wrong.”
I told her she did nothing wrong. “This is what happens in old age. People don’t live forever.” There was a picture of my grandparents, her parents, near where we were sitting and I handed it to her. She studied it for a bit and I said, “Your mom and dad are gone. They died. No one lives forever. That’s life.”
She worries about everything and the best I can do is to. say, “Just don’t worry about it.” I wish I was as hard core as my mom.
In England they’re “wheelie bins” or “skips.” Here in the U.S. Peggi knows exactly what I’m talking about when we’re driving down the road and I say “dumpster!” It means we’ll be turning the car around and checking out a dumpster that we had just whizzed by. Not all dumpsters are worth a second look and not all dumpsters are situated in an environment that is suitable for a photo. But I’ve found sixty that I like.
Water tank on Sea Breeze Way near Seneca Road in Rochester, New York
Christo and Jeanne-Claude are already starting to dismantle their newest art project, the wrapping of the Seneca Road water tower near the Sea Breeze Water Authority headquarters. You had better hurry on up to the lake to take this dramatic sight in before it is all wrapped up. Each day provides distinctly different views. The top of the tower was partialy unwrapped on Saturday and it looked impossibly blue against the blue skies. Air flow is also a factor as the framework of the structure appears to bend as the sheets billow. The tower is normally fairly quiet as gravity has been harnessed to supply pressure to the residents below but during the installation you’ll be treated to something akin to a white noise soundtrack.
As is usually the case with the Christos, the securing of the permit, the town hall meetings and negotiations with the various neighborhood factions that are opposed to the project are all part of the art piece. In fact a documentary crew has been filming each of these related events.
In this case the town had to vote on the approval of the spending for extra security. The vote passed by a wide margin but because this is Irondequoit an outspoken stickler and member of the opposite party called the town supervisor’s attention to an “T” that wasn’t crossed and the whole town had report to the auditorium of Christ the King to vote on the tax expenditure a second time.
Huge pile of dirt for fill-in of the Inner Loop in Rochester, New York
It is certainly possible to correct your mistakes but often it takes forever to realize that you made a mistake. The Inner Loop, circling downtown Rochester, alleviated traffic alright. It choked the life out of the city core. Colorblind James used to lead chants at their gigs of “Fill in the Inner Loop.” Chuck (Colorblind) is gone now and soon one half of the loop will be buried as well. Let’s hope the new development in this area, the former moat between the Park Avenue neighborhood and downtown, will not resemble a freakin’ theme park.
The Brian Wilson movie, is really good. Not because it sheds any new light on the band for lifelong fans (I am one) but because the music comes first including long recreations of the making of “Good Vibrations,” “Pet Sounds” and the “Smile” sessions. I never get tired of the many official and unofficial boots of Brian and the studio musicians tracking and orchestrating snippets of these classic songs and, in fact, appreciate Brian’s genius more and more as the years go by. A funny notion for a surf band.
The movie could never be “great” because the music it is based on is “great.” The movie can only pale. Elizabeth Banks, playing Brian’s second wife, was better than both the young and older Brian actors. Can somebody play “Surf’s Up” at my funeral? Sorry Van Dyke Parks, I have no idea what those words are about but I love Brian’s music and voice.
Which brings me to Ornette’s passing. As the headline in the paper read, he “Rewrote the Language of Jazz.” He rewrote it so I could get it under my skin. My first Ornette lp was “Science Fiction.” Maybe the two hauntingly beautiful vocal songs pulled me in, ‘All My Life” and “What Reason Could I Give?.” They may have been the footing I needed for the music. Ed Blackwell’s drums blew me away. Charlie Haden’s bass playing is god-like. And Ornette’s totally unique, joyous sax had me dancing in my head. From there the rest of the catalog took hold of me. Long live Ornette!!!!
Rochester Contemporary gets submissions from all corners of he world for their annual 6×6 show. Its their biggest fundraiser so why should they quit it? Not to mention that no one has come up with a better idea. We heard director, Bleu Cease, on the radio talking up the celebrity entrants and the mad scramble to purchase their work on opening day. We had a soccer game to watch that night we missed the affair but we did have a chance to preview the work.
If everybody knows that Philip Glass has something in the show, as he does every year, wouldn’t you think someone would be doing fake Philip Glass’s and submitting them? I mean the real Philip Glass’s only bring twenty bucks like every other piece. Supposedly the authorship is kept anonymous but some artists work is so distinctive you pick it out in a sea of thousands. And in my father’s case he signed his “Hot Dog Row” homage on the front. Would Philip Glass really submit a piece on section of musical score paper with the words “Einstein on the Beach” on it? His most famous piece? I’ve tried some different things over the years and went minimal/maximal this year. Next year I plan to do forgeries. As a fundraiser.
Bleu trapped us on the way out and solicited video responses to three questions. One was what was you favorite piece in the show? I tried to describe this fuzzy, furry, three dimensional piece (above). I can’t wait to hear/see that rambling reply.
Marshall Street Bar with Western New York Flash for USA Women’s match vs. Australia
Brad Fox used to call this place the “Glass Bunion” back in the disco days. Officially the “Glass Onion,” I believe it was done in by a cocaine overdose. It’s called Marshall Street Bar now and the WNY Flash gathered there last night to watch the US national team in their first game of the 2015 World Cup, this one against Australia. The US may be favored but after watching the Germans run circles around Ivory Coast in their opener I’d put my money on then. I’m not a betting man though.
The women’s professional league is small and we are so lucky to have a team based here. Many of the US team players have either played for the Flash (Abby, Morgan, Lloyd and Leroux) or come through here to play against the Flash so it was blast to watch them win last night.
They were probably paid by FIFA to attend the broadcast because most of the team (seen sitting in the first row above) was there. They could have seen the game better on tv. Most of them seemed more interested in their phones than the game and who could blame them at their age. Our friend, Kerry, won one of the raffles and got most of their autograghs. I was headed to the bathroom when I spotted the Flash’s Lynn Williams by herself. I told her I watched her in the practice rounds and I thought she was the best shooter on the team. That’s where I should have stopped but I went on to say I thought she should be more aggressive on the field. She thanked me but I will keep my mouth shut next time. I can see how her phone would be more important than being on the national team.
It is the season to binge on soccer. The Champions Cup final with the dream threesome of Messi, Neymar and Suarez up front for Barcelona when they met Italy’s Juventus this weekend really got our blood flowing.
Fred Lipp sculpture entitled Omnipresent 1983 in the Marion M. Whitbeck Garden at Rochester General Hospital
Fred (Fritz) Lipp passed away on Sunday morning. A tremendous loss for his family, his students and Rochester. I’ve written quite a bit here about him. His longtime students, our fellow painters, could find no reason to leave the advanced painting class once they found Fred. He had an amazing ability to always be there to take it up a notch. There was no end because as he often told us, he learned from the best. He conversed with Matisse, Van Gogh, El Greco and Guston when he stood in front of their paintings. “They talk to me,” he would say. And Fred loved to share what he learned. We were so lucky to have know him.
Every year the Creative Workshop would have a faculty show and Fred would show a new piece, something to blow your mind, but otherwise he was very quiet about his work. He was commissioned to create the sculpture shown above (please click on it for full photo) for Rochester General Hospital. Entitled “Omnipresent,” it was paid for by a wealthy donor and it originally sat in a courtyard where you could walk around the piece and experience the sculpture in space. The hospital expanded. The sculpture was moved to the Marion M. Whitbeck Garden, in a courtyard near the old entrance. The light that was inside the piece no longer shines. In fact it is not even wired as it was in its original location.
As fate would have it Fred spent some of his last days in this hospital and he visited his sculpture. He talked about the piece in our last conversation and we promised him we would do all we could to get the hospital to run an electric line to the sculpture. Maybe someday we will again see the light as it seeps out the artfully constructed openings.
Our friend, Alice, who was in the class when I first joined, emailed us this. “His words still ring around in my brain… when I paint or just in life… the wisdom applies to both life and art.” I’m quoting her because I feel exactly the same. It is our duty to duty to carry on with this wisdom.
Hank Ballard & The Midnighters photo sent to 4D Advertising when we were doing an album cover for them
My grandparents used to covert their garage into a porch in the summer. The car sat out in the driveway when we arrived for a visit and we’d sit around and talk in their garage. As I remember they even had a rug on the floor. As we rode our bikes down Panaview Drive to the hospital yesterday I notice a few houses with screens rolled up above their overhead garage doors, a couple of them right across the street from one another, ready to convert. This is how I’d like to spend my summer. Sitting on the porch as the world goes by.
Panaview changes its name to Norlane as you cross Bouckhart and there was a sign on that corner that read “Garage Sale Now.” We followed it down Norlane and it turned out to be the house with the pink bike strapped to a tortured tree. Our street is having a garage sale this weekend so we stopped in to check out the competition. I asked how much the pink bike was and the woman said $20. They had a box of Ukrainian records and some pictures from the old country and the sign in front of their house had “garage” misspelled. I photographed it for my sign site.
Well, our street sale turned out to have only two takers. Rick and Monica, across the street, are starting to downsize and we’re still trying to get rid of Peggi’s mom’s stuff. And of course we have a bunch crap so we plan to open our doors Saturday at 9AM.
But first I had to clean out our garage. I started by recycling a box of used padded envelopes. Some photos fell out of one, mostly Polaroids of the King All Stars, Fred Wesley, Hank Ballard, Cal Green, Country Kellum, Bobby Byrd, Pee Wee Ellis, Bubba Brooks, Bootsy Collins, Vicki Anderson, St. Clair Pinckney, Bill Doggett and Clyde Stubblefield. All single person close-ups. We did the album, cd and cassette package for After Hours Records and I think we used these inside.
There was a 35mm print in there too, the one above. Hank Ballard‘s girlfriend sent it to us I can’t remember if we did a separate record cover for him or what but I remember taking the picture out of the envelope and how it reeked of stale cigarette smoke. I have no idea why he is hanging onto an umbrella.
Our neighbor has a little project going on, one that requires a dumpster. I asked him if I could photograph their dumpster. He said, “What?” I repeated the request and explained that I photograph dumpsters. I said, “I have a collection of them.
We gathered today in our usual painting room at the Creative Workshop of the MAG. Most of us are long-time students of Fred Lipp’s and our week revolves around Tuesday’s class. A good percentage of the day class were there and our night class had a respectable showing but our teacher wasn’t there. He’s quite sick and we were meeting for two reasons: to discuss a tribute show in his honor and secondly, to determine how to carry on. I specifically did not say “carry on without him” because the gifts he gave us are ours to use.
As the group dispersed a few us were standing around taking about Fred’s teaching method. Bill Keyser was telling my father how he would have a list of things he was about to do and Fred would come by and say, “Forget about your plan. Look at your painting right now.” This in fact may be Fred’s most important point. Always stay open to what is on the page right now. “Painting is not a destination. It is an adventure.” Step back and look at the work. “Always address the worst first.” When the “worsts” are gone, your painting may be done.
I’ve searched my past posts and collected some of the lessons I am still learning from him. I find these truisms apply to most disciplines, certainly music.
The class was not about Fred’s work. In fact he rarely showed. The first thing I saw by him was a sculpture/installation in a Finger Lakes show, ripped open pieces of re-tread tires spewing at you from the corner of the gallery. It was sensational and it went on to the statewide exhibit in Albany. His class is called “Advanced Painting” and students work in collage, watercolor, acrylic, oil, drawing or sculpture. His methods are the same for all mediums.
There are no assignments. He rotates around the room addressing individual students as they work and pretty much says the same thing to each. He does not want you to talk first when he gets to you. “Don’t talk it. Show me.”
His stock of grey paper is his primary teaching tool. With this neutral grey he would cover parts of your work to show you what currently works. He’ll sometimes cover three fourths of your painting and tell you, “There’s your painting.
Many of Fred’s students say “he taught me how to see.” More importantly, I think he teaches us to trust our eyes. We already know how to see but we don’t trust it. If you have doubts about something in your painting that would be your eye talking. “If the question comes up, the answer is yes.”
Fred can be brutal. In many sessions the first class was the last we would see of a new student. He was brutal because he was honest and painters who did not want to learn left.
We visited Fred in the hospital last week and I asked him if any of his students had brought their paintings up to his room. He got a good laugh out of that one. A painting was never done until Fred pronounced it “done.” And it was just as often sooner rather than later than you expected.
Learning is a lifelong process. I’ve pulled these thoughts from my posts over the years. This link will take you to a page with all the posts on Fred.
There is no replacing Fred Lipp. He is one of a kind. He has been a mentor in every sense of the word and I am not alone. He packed the lecture hall at the MAG last summer with his presentation on spacial constructs, a comparison of three paintings from the MAG’s collection by Hans Hoffmann, Josef Albers and John Koch.
His daughter wrote that Fred is “the essence of art.” His ideals will live forever.
William Parker quartet performing at the Bop Shop in Rochester, New York
The 2015 Jazz Fest is still a few weeks off and we can only hope that we’ll see and hear something as good as the William Parker quartet at the Bop Shop tonight. They had just played in the relatively nearby cities, Pittsburg, Erie, Detroit and Toronto, and were returning to New York via Rochester. Their performance in the store was rather like musical chairs, the drummer, Federico Ughi, excluded. Daniel Carter played three saxes, clarinet, flute, trumpet and piano. Watson Jennison played piano, soprano sax, flute and recorder. He is a painter as well. And Parker played a rather small upright bass, tuba, a deep wooden flute and another small horn. Now close your eyes and imagine them playing all those instruments in one hour-long song.
William Parker quartet performing at the Bop Shop in Rochester, New York
When they came up for air William Parker told a long joke about guy named Skippy who knew everybody, Robert DiNiro, President Obama and the pope. The joke, as he told it, had no real punchline but it sure cleared the air. From there they played a beautiful folk-like melody. Danial Carter played clarinet, Watson a recorder, the drummer played the toms with mallets and Parker played a large wooden flute and sang these lyrics.
“Death has died today
God is in here
And the devil wears a big ol’ grin”
“Miniture Fairy Garden” sign at Case’s Garden Store on Norton Street in Rochester, New York
I spent the better part of the last couple days reworking my “Funky Signs” site, installed a new template, “Hipster” by Precrafted. It’s one column, infinite scrolling and mobile friendly.”
The sign above is so good it might not even need a snarky comment. I spotted it near the cash register in Case’s Garden Store over on Norton Street and added it to my to do list. I have two hundred signs up there and about a hundred in the kitty.
Three women at crosswalk near Robert Indiana’s Love sculpture NYC
Funny thing happens when you first hit the streets in New York. You want to photograph everything. Every person you see looks interesting. Not like you want to hang with them but maybe just take their picture and stare at it when you get home. And then after a few days everything and everybody looks rather ordinary. A bit of fatigue sets in from the overload of stimuli. Maybe if we hung around for a few more days I would have just the right amount of discernment. But we had to be back for our Margaret Explosion gig.
Here’s a song from last week’s show. We have one more Wednesday night at the Little and then we’re off for the summer.
We were maybe an hour and a half out of the city headed toward Grand Central on a Metro North train making last minute plans to hook up with Duane when he got out of work. He had some shopping to do in the East Village so he suggested meeting down there. It occurred to me that we would be in Greg Highlen’s neighborhood so I emailed Greg (he and we are some of the only people I know without a cellphone) and he said he could meet us in Washington Square Park. I was able to text Duane back minutes before we went underground and magically all three parties found each other near the fountain under the arch in the park.
It was a gorgeous day, sunny and cool, like one of those trippy Spring afternoons in Dunn Meadow on IU’s campus. Duane and Greg had never met but hit it off and between their conversations Peggi and I talked Bloomington ’69 – ’72, the years we hung together.
When I first met Greg he was an art major living not in a dorm but in his studio in one of the Fine Arts buildings. He talked of the trailer as a creative hub and despite downsizing his art collection has hung on to a copy of Rich Stim’s “Trailer Tails.” By chance we ran into Greg in the Village in the early eighties but hadn’t seen him since. Now he’s on top of the art world, living in the same fifth floor studio apartment for the last thirty eight years.
Before we met in the park I joked that we looked exactly the same. We didn’t but we sure acted the same.
I like how the word “Lake” comes before the name of the lake in Great Lakes naming conventions. I’m guessing this is a Native American custom but then that doesn’t add up when you think about how the Finger Lakes are named.
We crossed into New York State at Niagra’s Fort Lewiston Bridge and took the northern most route, 18, the “Seaway Trail,” back to Rochester. Mostly orchards, cobblestone houses and dairy farms sometimes right on the lake, it is a beautiful drive.
Olcot, an old resort town, park on the square and funky summer cottages, is especially dreamy. We sat at a picnic table overlooking the lake and watched a screen door on a bed and breakfast blow open and then slowly blow closed over and over. Like a mantra.
