seriously

worked for a sculptor once upon a time.  you know, he had a pit bull that loved to play fetch.  I took care of the dog one weekend when the sculptor went away.  nothing unusual happened.  he got rid of the dog when his little son came to visit.  of course the son was such a genius.  never heard what prompted the decision to get rid of the dog.  this painting used to be ovid but I was never that thrilled with the painting.

bergen

was a funny bird singing for hours in the middle of the night.  magpie was what it sounded like, a real derivative mocking bird type.  it was doing car alarms as part of it's repertoire.  might as well have been a mechanical bird... these just got revised from the former post.  today everything is up for grabs.

this is the end of the magpie from earlier.  it's been going thru many permutations

malta

surfing the web to find some images for Italian sculptor, Marisa Merz and a photo led me to an old review of the Venice Biennial, the Forbes critic was lamenting the fact that it was contemporary art, it had the Foxx news pander to it,  I don't understand it and I don't want to understand it. huh?

press

these are monoprints from the ancient era before I got back into the brush...  too revealing was my gripe.  didn't like to see that much about myself.  brush strokes were really annoying.  griffes were another matter.

somehow these were vague enough in relation to my personal narrative so as not to blow me out.  having things reversed and printed gave adequate distance.

yu yu yu

just stretched a 46" x 50" sheet of paper, got it done without swearing or tearing. only taken a year of doing it  yea!   these sumi are from Jan '09. not big, 11 x 14.   it's about to storm  now.  what the hell?

got the iTunes playing Rachmaninoff, Humoresque .  the fire truck just taking off like crazy.  got to put some of these old ones up...  I think there's about 100 pieces from jan '09 ranging in size from small to extra large... that's when I really got over the monoprint phase and started using the brush again.  for a long time any kind of sustained effort was thwarted

the storm is passing to the south of us I can see on the radar.  I thought we'd get a good electrical storm but NO!  this one, well.  a bit more of a contrast... there's a good flash!  and close too.

for a little drawing there's certainly a lot in this one.  kind of strange to look at these now because I have trouble accounting for much of what I see in there.

went to see the William Kentridge show at MoMA before it closed earlier in the month and was seriously awed by the force and presence of his drawings.  you can find the films on youtube...  I'd seen the Flute at the Met and then the Nose this year;  the theatre seems to dilute his talent, nothing there really prepared me for the impact of this show, maybe because I was not really expecting much, but that hardly works as a rule.

mi mi mi

been trying to get this up for some weeks.  I think it's from march.  there's one that goes with it, and it's even better but I don't really know where it is.

okay,  here it is.  not the most flattering photo but I guess it'll do...  this is a straight monoprint;  no brush on it at all.  unusual for me these days.

I don't think this has been put up yet.  there's a degree of transparency and a lighter mood than some of the other stuff on here lately.

no telling what they're going to look like for some times a week or more

ink ink ink .....  oink!

seems kind of fragmented and then, it seems kind of whole.

this is actually from this week so it pretty much makes everything else feel historical to me at least.  nothing else in this post older than March...  I guess that's a long time ago.

icelandic

this one happened on the way to realizing a painting I dreamed up this morning.   it's about 46" square.  was supposed to be a field of white with yellow X's...  but for some reason I wanted to put a black ground (mixed up a killer brew of blues and earth tones) on the paper and it just took off from there.  even tho I've been wanting to go large with one of these for a long time, it was especially urgent after making myself sick with a really sappy color one.  a revision that spun off into sugar bubble.

this is from the weekend.   a detail. something about the red really grabbed me.  this embodies the impurity of painting.  the lighter colors really got washed out.  I did a thing over easter (pastel) but it really isn't visible on the site.  I'll have to see about putting up a photo of it.

these sumi have been hiding for some weeks this one strikes me as especially sweet...

svoboda

"There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art. That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is 'impure'. It is the adjustment of 'impurities' which forces its continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden. There are no wiggly or straight lines..."  philip guston
kind of loose here.. was really trying to make this into something else but I finally gave in and let it go... I suppose that's always the fear... that it might actually turn into something

priority number one was getting february dated and separated from march.  I did manage to get that done.  wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.  this is a late march.  been going into april of last year and finding things that strike me as unfinished and taking them to the next level... that's sort of a blast.  have to wait to put anything up on here for the moment.

this piece is from last spring actually.  but just got minimal repairs and not too effective ...  you can see the white out on the lip of the the frowning face.  and on the brown of the next face over.  everything I could do for a while not to paint out the faces.  Oddly enough, when friends see the faces they like it, or seem to like it.  so it's kind of an automatic to try and get rid of the faces...  Parsifal on the brain this week.  never understood the story very well until the other day.  I don't know what...  Denial up til then?   I guess I'm still a bit mystified by it all.  the spear and the wound?  hmmmm...  It's not in the rep at the Met this year but there's plenty of stuff to listen to on youtube...  can hear a mourning dove out the window.  this is New York City for pete sakes!

okay,  this is end of march 2010.

le sacre du printemps

this dream I had the other night, was riding on a falling piece of concrete with a number or other unfortunate souls bracing for the impact but the thing actually landed like an aircraft and no one was harmed..  if you look closely in the lower LH you will see the back of Igor's head

stones

trouble staying out of the pottery business.  something about the textures...

got to get this one on the site. it looses something being photographed again but then, so does everything.

getting something clear in my heart oddly enough.  nothing I've got to post here reflects any of that.  F*ck!

this has managed to stay relatively uncluttered.  some of the latest are so dense that I can hardly get a grip on them

turquoise

february sumi are more or less revised, not dated. there's danger of mixing the march stuff up with the feb.  I think I've already lost track.

saw a painting at one show, a David Konigsberg;  Christopher Wool/Pierre Bonnard hybrid, certain poise to the piece..  there was one with a cat but the scale was disturbing,  and a painting with a gratuitous cat is seriously offensive.  everything struck me as decorative.  even the things that aimed high felt like art school.

of course that's not really such a problem if I just don't make any more sumi til I'm done with Feb.  did work on some old canvases this morning.