verlaine
got that pink shirt altered. I had a chance to wear it and I opted for black. got a nice breeze thru window. like to think about my feet being massaged. yeah. a nice foot massage. walked all over town earlier. just looking. maybe bought some essentials. had some ice cream. this painting (50" x 46") started out pretty simple.
rimbaud
haven't worn a pink shirt in a while. didn't even own one for the last few years. found one on sale for a fraction of retail and couldn't resist. now I got to get the sleeves shortened.
it's something of a crap shoot every time I try reworking one of these. this certainly reminds me of something, but I can't put my finger on it.
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 horrible 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.
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?
bamako
after reaching the frustration point on a new one I decided to attack a much too subtile painting (50 x 46") from early april. I suppose this is a collection of borrowed items. 
US Striker, Landon is the hero of the day. this large painting (after six or so revisions) has got a little homage to picasso at the bottom I see now.
ovid
this is kind of an old monoprint (2007). reminds me of a story that Coyle told about running into trouble during an underwater salvage operation. some extraterrestrial helped him out and left a candy bar in his diving helmet.
spill
'the object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.' Alberto Giacometti. (50" x 46")
donna elvira
after DQ I thought I was nearly invincible but super human powers didn't include reading the label on the bottle of medium. was struggling with the wrong stuff, might as well have been Kryptonite. once I came to recognize the problem with the medium, I managed to pull this out of the fire.
don quixote
yesterday I had to get going again after a break of 8 days or more. part of that was going to visit friends in MA but coming back working wasn't immediate. confusion mostly. honestly, none of the faces were deliberate, I only noticed them once I got it up on the screen. detail below is from the revision that got me going. I like photos of it but in mid april I wrecked a unique happening on the way to this. guilt and remorse most likely what hung me up. for that reason....
infernal
this thing went thru some distinct stages... at first it was Arcadian and fanciful, then it turned into a Bacchanal and finally this somewhat sinister... it's about 46" sq.
this is what it looked like before.
and this is what it looked like before that...
en sourdine
I had some kind of a dream about the spine last night. the front of the vertebrae were expanding and I saw a lot of muted color. and then I woke up and had a seasonal vision; A wallpaper pattern of buds and branches triumph over winter. this one's taken me longer than all the other panels put together I believe. temptation is to make it into one of the others but it just doesn't quite go that way.
this acrylic on linen was started in nov. of 08 and has been going thru revisions every couple of months, this may be it?
inward/outward
not sure how long this has been around now. either one of these. about a week I guess. since the end of last week. it's a bit of a contrast and I have to confess to having forced the issue maybe a bit. top one is later, I tried to make a companion for the first panel, marais which was futile. I decided to let go and let things bump into one another and overlap. stay out of the riviera look of this next one.
the palate expanded past my sense of good judgement and then some. can't bring myself to paint any of it out. I will be punished for this.
utopia
what did I dream about last night? oh, It started as rehearsal for a Molière play, we were working our way thru the first act and I really wasn't in command of the lines and I started making them up which was making the other actors real uncomfortable and about then an audience materialized and I was alone on stage and the actor was late making the next entrance. not sure what else. started this and another panel this morning. I'm remembering what it was to do the first one as I get into more of them... just cuz you feel it, doesn't mean it's there ...
marais
had a narrow panel of paper left from at the end of the roll and had no idea what to do with it, 50" x 21" something said to stretch it and see what happens. didn't even tape it up straight. put some washes on it and then I really felt like going at it. much more of a release than I was expecting and quite enthused with the prospects of more in this vein... there's no more paper at the shop like that and now I have to go all over town to find another roll of that stuff. washes and acrylic.
I was all about these ink extravaganzas and this is somewhat after the fact, the last one before is from september I believe. can't even decide which way it goes or how it's going to finish. looks like a mad doodle except that the dimensions are 36" x 46"
electra
this really wasn't something I was going to do much with and then the other night I just got a bit lost in it. It was a birthday card reject taped to the fridge for a while. kind of a kitschy really, but so what.
here's the cool and warm. I don't think I've posted this before. I'm not really sure when I started this. I think it was a still life at first with the less is more approach, now it's gotten to be more and more.
not just trying to see how many divergent pieces I can get into one post. it's just the way I'm working right now. Hard to know what to say about this business. kind of reminds me of some of the things I painted in HS before I had any kind of an inner life.
there were some paintings about washcloths because I was seeing things about then I thought were interesting. this color ground makes me thing of them even though I don't thing there's any that survived out of the one that I painted. This never was about a washcloth. saw one thing I thought of changing but now it's just too late. this had some kind of a hole in the center. I was pretending my heart was an adjunct, that it never was truly affected. (what is the mechanism to disengage the heart?)
another revision, it's got a bit of action in it.
prelude
this painting just got a face lift. I decided last night that I was just pretending that some of these paintings were finished (or presentable for that matter) and it's time for the revisionist to go into action. the bicycle helmet as one friend pointed out, nov 29. seems like I'm having an easier time letting the paint do whatever.
okay, there's an olive w/a pimento somewhere in this painting (can you find it?). I've been wrestling with this rascal off and on for almost a year now. finally did enough work on it to call it a draw. I had a rule at one point that no painting should take more than 20 minutes. I sold one (not my very favorite but one I liked a lot), a portrait of an aristocratic teen-age girl, a haunting generality, with a muted mustard color ground and neutral tan shadows. I'd mixed the tan thinking it was the most amazing color I'd ever seen until I realized where I'd seen that color before.
another revision. this was dismalady dec 4th, another ill-advised post. It maybe didn't suck as bad as anything ever. but i knew it was a problem.
animal cards
just mailed these off to my sister's kids, S/D/N/J made some drawings from photos on the internet and then picked out some to make into cards. wasn't my intention they should come out as blue as all this? but that's what happened. Cat and dog pictures has been a pet peeve of mine but seeing how much fun I had w/the project I'll have the reevaluate my snobbiness. I guess the dog was the most problematic, it was the last one and I was tired.
steiner
Had an experience listening to Leonard Cohen singing Suzanne on youtube last night. not what I was looking for, I'd been listening to Heinrich Neuhaus playing Brahms. that was sublime. got a link off twitter for a hysterical comedy routine, had to look at some reality bites from the 60's. Orson Welles was the reason I got there. he was trying to maintain a dignified façade with a particularly rude reporter. that seemed to be the theme, Leonard Cohen was trying to be cheerful as some 60's reporter was asking why he never changed his name. made me think of Leslie Howard who changed his name from Steiner.
there was a clip from a Canadian film made in '83 called 'I am a Hotel'. it had Cohen singing Suzanne. there were subtitles in Dutch/Flemish. much too intense. was more crushing than hearing Jacques Brel sing 'Le Pays Bas'. when I started these paintings they seemed really cheerful...
collision
pile up. there's about 3 other pieces I worked on over the weekend. the others are not done, got hung up on the surface of things and forgot to let things go in and go out.
this one got dashed off in oct. the toughest thing about this was wondering how it happened. mostly posting right now so there's color on the top of the page...
dismaladies
I was revising this for a period of 2 weeks with left over paint from other paintings, it struck me as hopeless, til I took a good look at it today. okay, there's pretty much no real reason to get upset about this piece, it's just a drawing with color. But it feels like an ambush, or I wandered into a cul de sac.
some way to reconcile doing this kind of thing and pretending it just doesn't happen. it might be the reason I haven't worked in color in a week.
what is a hotel painting? well, a painting that's been painted to hang in Hotel room. or in the hall by the elevators. it's my impression the ideal rests somewhere between Kinkade and imitation Dubuffet. Hard edged and sappy colors. Are you a sinner? there's a Gideon Bible for redemption and a painting to bring some poetry to the experience. they compliment one another, make everything fit together nicely.
having trouble staying focused. there's the aroma of raw chocolate wafting over me.
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- Wrenbek: Posted on Syniadau: "Cats in Belgium ... and less important matters" ... http://bit.ly/aTWkpD September 5, 2010
- Wrenbek: Man Creates a Frankencam Using an iPhone and Canon SLR http://t.co/4CCGPOI via @petapixel September 4, 2010
- Wrenbek: France looses to Belarus 0-1 @ home. that's got to hurt... September 3, 2010
- Wrenbek: new post 'Rameau' on my website: http://neilconrad.com September 3, 2010