Category: Uncategorized

There is no work of art so big or so small

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She used to drag her mattress beside her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from the speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window-or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so small  that it was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation.

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

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Inspiration comes when it wants. The secret is to sit and wait for it or bore yourself silly. When it does come it is fleeting and it’s brilliant. The moment is more real than any other moment.

I love the early stages of a painting. It’s muddy, sloppy and wet. It’s just a  bunch of ground work that makes no sense to anyone and not even me sometimes.

Almostfinnish current news;

Forced lockdown of a city. Militarized police riding tanks in the streets. Door-to-door armed searches without warrant. Families thrown out of their homes at gunpoint to be searched without probable cause. Businesses forced to close. Transport shut down.

These were not the scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic, but rather the scenes just over a week ago in Boston as the United States got a taste of martial law. The ostensible reason for the military-style takeover of parts of Boston was that the accused perpetrator of a horrific crime was on the loose. The Boston bombing provided the opportunity for the government to turn what should have been a police investigation into a military-style occupation of an American city. This unprecedented move should frighten us as much or more than the attack itself.                                                                                                             
Ron Paul

Apples make me smile

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“Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.”

                                                                                         Oscar Wilde

I don’t cook but I’ve been buying cookbooks lately.

Yes odd…but I did find that they do have some fun and intriguing facts. I’m all for new ideas these days. They have interesting ways to add fun and food to your next get together with family or friends or even just at home with the fam. My family would be very surprised if I showed up with a dish. I do have a bit of quiet adventure stirring inside of me these days with a touch of spontaneity and humor so this might be the change we have all been looking for. 

The latest book that I bought is called the Complete Party Planner (yes it is a cookbook) by Annabel Karmel and this is where I began. The above picture is just a snack I threw together with apples and marshmallows. Called ‘Apple Smiles’. Simple and easy I like that. This book has over 120 ideas.

I’d like to mention another book that caught my attention the first purchase and my catalyst to this whole cooking endeavor called ‘Apples’  by Robert Berkley. Ever since I have been in search for the  perfect apple. I can’t  believe there are so many different names for so many different apples. This will be a delight. I guess you can compare apple to apples.

It’s only a paper moon

I was hoping to say something profound while I collected my thoughts here.

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But I got nothing.

They say…

good artists borrow

and great artists steal.

I’ve been intrigued by some old postcard photographs from the 1900’s called ‘Paper Moon.’  They use an acronym RPPC meaning real photo postcard that originated during the dates between 1904-1918. There are a lot of these images taken with kids or couples; families and friends as they would get their picture taken with this life-size paper moon in the background. These photographs are still around and people collect them. The photographs are sepia maybe black and white or both I’m not too sure.  I like old photography to begin with the cameras, the color and the serious faces. I like the whole studio effects and the flatness and how desolate things can look.

 

I just love this idea and feel the need to explore this topic some more. I just want to bring myself back to that era. In the process maybe bring a good original idea back to life with a new contemporary perspective or modern-day version. I’m in the planning stage to do a painting with this theme. I already have the person and image in mind I just need to get the moon and person sketched out together on canvas. I know some photographs will follow in the mix. How hard could it be to make a paper moon? What does it look like it’s made out of is it wood, fiber glass or foam core?

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Of course I have to finish my painting in process before I start another…not.

I have so many paintings in process again.  Three that I can think of off the top of my head but I know there are a couple more tucked away.” The fine art of finishing a painting.” Some will need some serious time to get done and I don’t have any serious time at the moment. So they will have to wait until summertime when the days are long.  I thought if I worked smaller it would go faster but it’s just as much work to do a small painting as a big painting. So my creative process is divided but it is aways in play.

What’s next on your plate?

I have to laugh. I wasn’t very hungry the other night but my son made sure he let mt know that I couldn’t leave the table until I finished everything on my plate.

I stopped saying that.

*Just a note the flags are at half mast around here but it seems like they are always at half mast these days.

How many days does it take to finish a portrait?

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Day one: A friend of mine recommended me to someone who wanted a painting done of their cat. So I met them at Alterra coffee-house a neutral place where we could meet about commissioning a portrait of a cat named Bartholomew/Bart. We Looked at photograph’s, I said I could do this painting and then signed a contract I brought along.

Day two: I reviewed photos, did some sketches, e-mailed client back and waited for confirmation.

Day two: Confirmation from client, printed image and picked up canvas.

Day three: Did grid and started drawing on canvas.

Day four: Still drawing image onto canvas. This is a crucial part of the process getting everything right from the start although it all gets covered with paint.

Day five: I started with a basic under painting worked on background and went straight into the fabric.

Day six: I began with the eyes the most important part. I need to get the eyes perfect.

Day seven: Worked on the face of cat and whiskers.
Whiskers really helped painting.

Day eight: painted the ears.

Day seven: I needed to darken the pattern on the fabric. Darkening some fur shadows and added fluffy accents throughout cat giving it more shape and form so it looks like a 3-dimensional cat also filled in front of sofa.

Day eight: Worked on tail made it longer and changed background.

Day nine: Worked on the paws or the impression of the paw.

Day ten: Touched up shape of head and edges of fur.

Day eleven: Pushed more dark shadows and white areas.

Day twelve: Ears and ear hairs needed some work.

Day thirteen: I always keep coming back to the eyes.

Day fourteen: Worked on back leg, body shape and pattern.

Day fifteen: Finished. e-mail client confirm pick up date.

day sixteen: Went with hooks on back of painting/attached.

Day seventeen: Coffee shop 9:00 dropped of painting. Waitress walks by and says it’s brilliant. It catches me off guard. I laugh. They like painting. It was exactly what they expected.

A riddle wrapped up in an enigma

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I was working on a small postcard size sketch. It was a study more than anything. The interesting thing is now that I look at the pictures it is my natural tendency to turn the work on its side or upside down when I work. And even though it makes sense to me. For some reason when people come over and visit and it’s upside down they look at me and laugh and just have to ask why is it upside down? Of course I’m totally oblivious to the fact that it is until they bring it to my attention. As far as I can see it’s still in process so presentation is the last thing on my mind.

I learned this in school from one of my classmates. He would turn his work upside down to get a better perspective especially when something had to be symmetrical. Your mind could play tricks on you thinking it looked right but if you reversed the image you could see it in a new light.

Okay so it’s been a very trying week. There must have been some dark cloud hovering over effecting us all some way or another. I lost my muffler somewhere on the side of the road. The brakes on my truck went faster than I had hoped. My car definitely needed some new tires so we found this guy who would sell us some used tires for $40.00. Here he has another pair sitting there and said we can have those too for $40.00. We only had $29.00. He said you look like you could use them more than me and takes the $29.00.

I was just wonder how we looked? Were not poor maybe broke sometimes but not poor.

A riddle wrapped up in an enigma.

I need to start selling some paintings.

A bloody mary for breakfast?

I woke up to a winter wonderland today. We’re snowed in got about 8″ of snow over night expecting 12″ by the end of the day. Schools are closed and there are cars stuck or in the ditch everywhere. It’s a mess out there very thankful we still have power. I’m not going to work I have plenty to do here like finding my cross country ski’s.

In front of me sits a bloody mary, a bagel with cream cheese with a hint of almond and on the side an omelette with cheese, green peppers. Another bloody mary might be due or at least a beer chaser. This is a treat for us not a normal thing.
I’m checking my eBay and had a pretty successful week. I diversified a little and made some good choices aside from my usual postcards.

I was reading from a local newspaper called “Freedom Weekly” free news for free people. It has our national debt of 16,432,519,875,802.97 and it says under it…

“The way to crush the bourgeoisie (marxist term for the middle and upper class) is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”
Vladimir Illich Lenin

Do we ever learn from history? The president now says the sequester is going to devastate our economy, but George wills who I believe says 44 billion is less than 2% of the GDP budget. We’ll see what happens this week in Washington.

Painting wise…

I find myself vacillating between feeling that it’s really great and really horrible. One moment, I’m a genius creating masterpieces and the next I’m thinking I haven’t any talent, the work is vapid and I’m a complete idiot. It’s a constant process of doubt and assurance that drives you to do better.
John Alexander

Taking a break from painting the figure.

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Painted today. Taking a seriously needed break from painting the figure. There’s freedom in not having any pencil marks or guidelines to follow on the canvas. The pure artistic desire to just paint. Taking the time to figure out on your own where everything belongs, how it visually looks and how it all relates.

I always start with the under painting. I use raw sienna and prussian blue and a little white for a change basically establishing my value study as I covered the whole canvas with paint.

I am working from a photograph I took some time ago in North Carolina while we staying at the Hilton. It was a summer night and we would stroll down the boardwalk. The evening lights and water reflections were a delight to be around while we would watch the sun set and then stop at a nearby bistro for a local beer and southern platter. Our little get away from the party at hand. The ocean breeze was so warm.

“The boardwalk in Charlotte” I have a few other photo’s so this could turn into a series. When I finish this one I’m hoping to bring it down to the local coffee shop called Smith Bros located right along Lake Michigan/one of the great lakes. Some very interesting array of artwork is on display there and some by a couple of friends I have unexpectedly come to know by chance. My work is not on display at this time because I had a piece disappear with the owner from another coffee shop that closed it doors unexpected. Stolen in other words…we take our chances as artists not like it’s worth a million dollars yet. There are a couple of other galleries that have pop up in Port Washington lately I need to inquire.

The creative process is alive and well.

The new year has started and it’s already been a month into it leaving me only eleven months to go. My outlook for this year looks good. The creative process is alive and well. My mind has been actively slipping back and forth on a number of different ideas But I am taking time to really think them through before I dive into any one. Preparing the ground work consumes a lot of my time so I want to make sure I’m in it for the long hall because without me nothing gets done.

I scraped off my artist palette. It was full of thick dried paint that had been sitting for at least a year. It was excruciating painful as I removed it in thick increments leaving thin shaving and dust everywhere. I dread cleaning my palette but this was ridiculous. I usually clean it more regularly but under the circumstances its been a rough and neglected year. although just the act of cleaning it is very promising and warrants a bit of quiet excitement.

I thought about doing a 365 day project but my mind and life does not work that way. I admire all those that can and do art everyday it is only beneficial to the artist and the creative process. Unfortunately I’m still working on a couple of paintings that I started 3 years ago definitely is on my bucket list.

To show my most honest interpretation of me as an artist I have to not only show my work which is the end result but my thought process. This may require me going shopping sometimes for some creative inspiration, maybe going out for a specialty beer and conversation, a touch of photography my never-ending love and my accounts about the process as a whole. In the end little excerpt from what I digest on a weekly basis from what I hear and read in a magazine, a book, the newspaper and or the internet. My thoughts come when I can identify and pull out the things that have some relevance or impact on me as an artist. At the end of the day giving me some commonality with the world in which I live.

I’d like to leave you with a favorite that keeps me inspired.

“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with words and notion, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by mind at large-this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone.”

Aldous Huxley

The Doors of Perception

Picasso’s Genius Revealed: He Used Common House Paint

I thought this was an interesting article about Picasso the artist we all love and/or hate.

By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior Writer | LiveScience.com – Fri, Feb 8, 2013Email0Share558Share24PrintRelated ContentView PhotoAmong the Picasso paintings in …

Pablo Picasso, famous for pushing the boundaries of art with cubism, also broke with convention when it came to paint, new research shows. X-ray analysis of some of the painter’s masterworks solves a long-standing mystery about the type of paint the artist used on his canvases, revealing it to be basic house paint.

Art scholars had long suspected Picasso was one of the first master artists to employ house paint, rather than traditional artists’ paint, to achieve a glossy style that hid brush marks. There was no absolute confirmation of this, however, until now.

Physicists at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Ill., trained their hard X-ray nanoprobe at Picasso’s painting “The Red Armchair,” completed in 1931, which they borrowed from the Art Institute of Chicago. The nanoprobe instrument can “see” details down to the level of individual pigment particles, revealing the arrangement of particular chemical elements in the paint.

The analysis showed that Picasso used enamel paint that matches the precise chemical composition of the first brand of commercial house paint, called Ripolin. The researchers were able to compare the painting’s pigment with those of paints available at the time by analyzing decades-old paint samples bought on eBay. [9 Famous Art Forgers]

What’s more, the detailed study, which used X-rays to probe the painting’s pigmentdown to the scale of 30 nanometers (a sheet of copier paper is 100,000 nanometers thick), was able to pinpoint the manufacturing region where the paint was made by studying its particular impurities.

“The nanoprobe at the [Advanced Photon Source X-ray facility and the Center for Nanoscale Materials] allowed unprecedented visualization of information about chemical composition within a singe grain of paint pigment, significantly reducing doubt that Picasso used common house paint in some of his most famous works,” one of the research leaders, Argonne’s Volker Rose, said in a statement.

Art scholars think Picasso experimented with Ripolin to achieve a different effect than would’ve been possible with traditional oil paints, which dry slowly and can be heavily blended. In contrast, house paint dries quickly and leaves effects like marbling, muted edges, and even drips of paint. Still, experts couldn’t be sure house paint was the key to Picasso’s look without proof.

“Appearances can deceive, so this is where art can benefit from scientific research,” said Francesca Casadio, senior conservator scientist at the Art Institute of Chicago. “We needed to reverse-engineer the paint so that we could figure out if there was a fingerprint that we could then go look for in the pictures around the world that are suspected to be painted with Ripolin, the first commercial brand of house paint.”

The scientists detailed their findings in a paper published last month in the journal Applied Physics A: Materials Science & Processing.

http://news.yahoo.com/picassos-genius-revealed-used-common-house-paint-155124899.html;_ylt=Ap0DcsWQgEwSGIHvhxzBPm3zWed_;_ylu=X3oDMTJtcTZjYXRiBG1pdANIQ01PTCBvbiBhcnRpY2xlIHJpZ2h0IHJhaWwEcGtnA2lkLTMwNDY2NTcEcG9zAzYEc2VjA01lZGlhQkNhcm91c2VsTWl4ZWRIQ00EdmVyAzE2;_ylg=X3oDMTNqb3BsYjNuBGludGwDdXMEbGFuZwNlbi11cwRwc3RhaWQDMmI5YjFjMDItYTZmNC0zNzcwLWIzOWQtMDQxOTI3NTg2NmM1BHBzdGNhdAN1LXMEcHQDc3RvcnlwYWdlBHRlc3QDaXB0Y19za3lzY3JhcGVyX3JlbGF0ZWQ-;_ylv=3

Galleries set the stage with food, wine and music.

Galleries set the stage with food, wine and music. Inviting the public to participate as special guests as they mingle, engage in conversations and share ideas. And of course…meet the artist.
It’s a funny thing all the time and work it takes for artists to line up a show that when it comes down to attending the opening reception it’s a sudden…dreaded obligation. Personally I could never get comfortable with just hanging around and mingling with my family much less with a bunch strangers and I consider myself seasoned. The questions? Like what does one say at these things? What does one do? How does one look? If I dress modern I should have dressed more retro and if I dressed retro I should have played it safe with contemporary. At my last show I saw that we had some commonality of wearing tweed referring to the other artist that shared my show so I was thinking I was safe.  

Most artists that I encountered defy the stereotype that we know as unsocial and are usually eager to talk about their work and themselves as they stand in the fore front. I am so stereotypical when it comes to talking about my art. I can talk about anything even the weather for hours but when it comes to my work which I’m passionate about I’m short, succinct and all preparedness is nowhere to be found.So I was reading about some artists that go to great lengths of being late, or not showing up at all and or last having someone else show up in place of them. My first thought was why didn’t I think of that. I have to admit I was a half  hour late for my show only because a bridge was out and the road was under construction so I had to take a detour in a city that I’m not too familiar with anymore. Did I mention it was also raining. The other artist was fashionably late an hour. 

Most importantly what I discovered was that no one buys anything unless they have an emotional connection to it and that I’m the one that needs to make that connection happen for them. So some where and some how? I need to work on getting my passion across to the viewer and forget about sounding esoteric or elite.More often than not people want to see the artist only a few want to talk to them.
I want to conclude by saying I must have done something right aside from showing up because in the end I had finalized a couple of sales during my Danceworks showing in october 09.