Portrait of the Artist as an Old MaN

April 29, 2012 (expanded version)

Photos by Grier Horner, Except Where Noted

Sohn Fine Art in Stockbridge yesterday opened its First Annual Community Arts Exhibit to benefit the IS 183 Art School's photo department. Every opening should have a moment of hilarity like the one above. Gallery operator Cassandra Sohn, a photography teacher at the school, and Susan Geller break out in laughter. Ms. Geller, whose face is bleached by light from the front window, has a picture in the show. Leo Mazzeo's Hot Buttered Clock is at the top right.

Nineteen artists are exhibited in the show which will be open through May 7. Below Dr. Joel Curran, an artist, looks beyond this beautifully ominous work by Eric Korenman.

Peggy Reeves and Karen Lee are beneath Ms. Reeves' photo, Leaves and Trash. Between their heads you get a glimpse of

Three Slim Boys Shirtless in Montevideo by Maurice Peterson. To the right is Susan Sabino's Magnolia. And to its right is Ken Green's Seth.

Photographer Scott Barrow, one of the judges for the show, is at the right. In back is Chelsea McNaay, a sophomore at Bard at Simon's Rock, an intern at Sohn Fine Art.

This is Patrick Barry's stunning Grand Tetons. Below is Susan Geller's Wedding in Grand Central.

At one point Ms. Sohn, Savannah Spirit and Barrow gathered on the sidewalk to decide on the winners. Click here to see the list.

Elke Mahoney reaches for the sunglasses on the head of her mom, Hope Sullivan, executive director of IS 183. Below Elke, already interested in accessories at 22 months old, transfers them to her own head and smiles when they're fashionably in place.

Here is a self portrait with Denise Chandler's From the Little Shop of Horrors in the background. Ms. Chandler's photo was picked as a winner by both the judges and those attending the show.

This is a fine show and a worthy cause and I look forward to seeing Ms. Sohn's Second Annual.

April 28, 2012

Photos by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved

Here for the 823 time, plus or minus, is the model in the black gown. I keep making changes to it on the advice of my art advisors.

This is the previous version. As you can see the gown and the background were both darker. This created a situation that overemphasized the arms so much they jumped out at you visually. The solution - assuming I have solved the difficulty - was in lightening the background and the dress. In addition I slipped a Joker into the model's hand.

I've added some greenish black to the dress and repainted the background. The painting is oil over acrylic and is six feet high. Tess Giberson is the designer of the dress.

April 26, 2012

Photos by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved

This is the Music Hall in Tarrytown, N.Y., the theater where Babbie and I had our first date. She was a junior at Washington Irving High School and I was a senior. The year was 1952. We saw a double feature. Afterwards we had ice cream at Pincus's, which is still an ice cream shop, and walked around town playing follow the leader.

When I got home I woke my  parents up and told them, "I'm going to marry Babbie." And in 1960 we were married at the Second Reformed Church there. Two years after that we had the first of our three children, Shannon. That's Babbie and Shannon on the beach in the photo below.

Here's Babbie all these years later when we were in Tarrytown celebrating our anniversary. This pond is on the bike trail that runs along The Lakes. Babbie remembers dipping her feet in the pond as a girl.

 Down by the Hudson this new condo building is rising near another complex that recently sold out. If you lived in one of these glass encased units you could see this view of the Tappan Zee Bridge, below. When I was a lifeguard at Kingsland Point on the river, I used to watch the bridge going up. We've held up better than the bridge. It is going to be replaced.

This is the weeping hemlock in the front yard of my family home in Tarrytown. It's foliage used to sweep to the ground, forming a room inside. After my mother's death my father and I scattered her ashes under the tree. When he died that same year, I scattered his ashes here. They were only 58 years old.

Except for the cars, Tarrytown's downtown - this is Main Street - looks almost the same as it did when we were kids.

That was so long ago. But many of the Tarrytown memories are so vivid, as are my memories of Babbie at that time. For me it all started when Ralph MacKinnon and I were watching the band practicing for next Saturday's football game, in which we'd both be playing. Babbie was the drum major.

"One of us should be going out with Babbie," Ralph said. Two months later one of us was. Over the years there was a time when we almost fell apart. But we didn't and we still have a great time. Maybe not as heady as the days when we were teens holding hands and playing follow the leader in Tarrytown. But its a deep, relaxed and, at this stage in our lives, reflective connection.

April 24, 2012

I got Issue 2 of the print version of Style.Com in the mail yesterday. (I wonder how many guys in Pittsfield have a subscription) and in it was this picture of Anja Rubik (which I rephotographed for this post). I was struck by how cool, calm and collected the super model looks despite the grave injustice she has suffered.

Most authorities credit Erno Rubik, a Hungarian sculptor and architecture professor, with inventing the Rubik's cube in 1974. But after extensive review of that claim, I conclude the inventor was actually Anja Rubik. Maybe next year I will win the Pulitzer for investigative journalism for this report.

Deprived of the fame and fortune that was rightfully hers, the 28-year-old soldiered on and has won, through modeling, what she was so cruelly deprived of as an inventor.

It's amazing how gracefully the willowy Rubik has taken this. Many people in her situation would have become bitter and disillusioned. I mean, after all, I believe the cube is the world's best selling puzzle, and for that matter, the world's best selling toy.

Perhaps her success as a model has ameliorated the pain. Although in the 2011 shot below by

Gianni Pucci/GoRunway.com she looks like the unfairness still gnaws at her soul at times. Below that photo is one of the cube itself.

I used to play with one and I think I solved it once or twice. But I never understood how I did that. It was purely a fluke.

Some people, however, have the science down pat. They give it a few spins and it's done. The fastest of these Rubik's geniuses - or is it genii - is Feliks Zemdegs, 17. The Australian teen broke the world's record last June when he solved the puzzle in a blazing 5.66 seconds at the Melbourne Winter Open. Here's a YouTube video of that effort. Like many champions, he makes it look so easy. I wonder how Anja feels when she watches it.

April 22, 2012

Photo by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved

I didn't have to go far to get this shot of the setting sun. It was taken from a dining room window and is framed by the trunk and branches of the large birch in our side yard. I can't figure out what the white rectangle in the lower left is.

April 20, 2012

Photos by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved

Hats off to Curator Susan Cross, the architect of MASS MoCA's new show, Invisible Cities, for assembling this beautiful and stimulating exhibit. Teamed with John Bigger's Cartographer's Conundrum, Invisible Cities gives the North Adams the one-two punch on the second floor that more than makes up for the dullness of The Workers that filled the first floor so long.

My favorite piece is Diana Al-Hadid's magnificent Nolli's Orders above. If only it were surrounded by water, Anita Ekberg would have been perfectly at home splashing in this pieces shadow. From the museum's brochure I take it the ancient Roman fountains weren't the inspiration. Instead it is called a "fantastical city scape. And it calls attention to the Venetian windows in the buildings at the base.

Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain in La Dolce Vita.

A high-heeled woman examines a small section of a monumental wall drawing, The Melting Pot, by Miha Strukelj of Slovenia.

These suspended pieces are the work of Lee Bul of Seoul. Susan Cross writes that they "recall model of both Modernist utopias and futuristic, sci-fi fantasies."

Mary Lum, one of two artists in the show who lives in North Adams, did these untitled paintings based on a series of collages she made while living in Paris.

This airy rattan city was made by Sopheap Pich of Cambodia. Cross says that the pointed, conical sections can stand in for bombs. Nixon bombed Cambodia in a secret second war while we were fighting in Vietnam.

The ominous title of this piece, With No Way Out, seems to me at odds with its beauty and lightness. The artist Carlos Garaicoa, born in Havana, lives and works in that city and Madrid.

All told the 10 artists in this show are a United Nations of artists. Cross says the title comes from Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities in which reimagines Marco Polo's conversations with Kublai Khan during the Italian's travels - real or imagined - through Constantinople, Persia, Tibet, India and China during the Mongol general's reign.

April 18, 2012

Photo by Kathryn Scott Osler, The Denver Post

Denver Post photographer Craig Walker yesterday won his second Pulitzer Prize in three years for feature photography. The former Berkshire Eagle photographer captured journalism's highest honor for his intimate and insightful series of 49 photos on a Iraq war veteran, Scott Ostrum, who suffered a severe case of post traumatic stress when he returned home. The Denver Post said it was only the fourth time that a photographer working solo had won twice.

The award was for Walker's "compassionate chronicle of an honorably discharged veteran, home from Iraq and struggling with a severe case of post-traumatic stress, images that enable viewers to better grasp a national issue," the Pulitzer board said.

"Scott Ostrum is the one who deserves the credit on this one," Walker said. "He shared an amazing story with us, and I was honored to be part of it."

In the photo above, Walker beams as he learns of the award while his wife Jamie Cotten Walker, also a photographer, raises her arms exuberantly. I think I was almost excited as she was when I learned the news yesterday afternoon. Below Walker hugs his son Quinn while talking with his mother on his cell phone.

Photo by Aaron Ontiveroz, The Denver Post

Photo by Craig Walker, The Denver Post

The picture above is Walker's telling photo of Ostrum driving to a Boulder bar to meet his girlfriend on April 30, 2011. The stitches in his neck were from his attempted suicide earlier in the week after the couple had an argument, Walker noted in his caption. "It spiraled out of control. ... I was so full of rage," the veteran said.

If you take a look at the full photo essay, which was published on-line only, I think you'll be as amazed by its intensity and scope as I was when I first saw it and posted about it on January 11.

Click here to see photos of Walker celebrating with his family and the Denver Post staff.

Photo by Denver Post

In this photo Ostrum holds Walker's son during the newsroom celebration, demonstrating the bond that developed between the two men during the 10 months Walker tagged along with Ostrum to tell his story.

Walker said the last year has been the best of his life. He married Jamie Cotten last summer and their son was born this year.

As the associate editor of The Eagle, I worked closely with Craig Walker. For the nine years prior to joining the Post, he shot for The Eagle and we became good friends.

On the special projects he developed at The Eagle - including one on the last six months in the life of a woman with AIDs - Craig spent major blocks of time with his subjects. What resulted were exceptional photographs, shots that were both telling and humane, full of art and soul.

At the Post, the flagship of the chain that owns The Eagle, he has not only covered Denver and Colorado but has had assignments in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait and Palestine and has come under fire.

April 16, 2012

Photos by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved

MASS MoCA in North Adams opened its intriguing exhibit, Invisible Cities' with a reception last evening. And the photo above is my contribution to the art of receptions. The juxtaposition of two fashionable women's legs create a puzzle that it may take the mind a moment to sort out. If the picture's blacks were on a white background, you'd have an abstract expressionist piece of art along the lines of a Franz Klein or a Robert Motherwell.

I wish I could say I spotted this four-legged configuration when I was shooting at the reception. I can't. It was only when I was looking through the 104 photos I took that I noticed it and isolated it.

Did you see the movie Blow-up? In it the photographer discovers a murder by blowing up a photo time after time until he sees a hand with a gun poking out from the bushes. This blog is Blow-up in reverse (and on a lower-case theme). First I'm showing you the end result of the blow-up process at the top. Below is stage two in narrowing the final picture down. And the last photo shows the entire photo the image was taken from.

The fantastic space objects hovering in the gallery are by Lee Bul who lives and works in Seoul. The artist's "imaginary environments reverberate with the dynamism and chaos of urban life while presenting models of cities that may have been or could be," as the museum brochure in the hands of the woman at the far left says.

When I first saw this shot my eye immediately went to the smiling man in the gray shirt who is about to extend his hand to the guy approaching his group from the left. I only noticed the legs as my eyes moved to the right.

On the wall are new paintings by Mary Lum, who lives and works in North Adams. I have to go back and take a serious look at them.

Speaking of the movie Blow-Up, which I always considered so modern, it comes as something of a shock to me that I saw it 56 years ago. So most of you probably never saw it. I've added this Rotten Tomatoes synopsis of the movie:

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's first English-language production was also his only box office hit, widely considered one of the seminal films of the 1960s. Thomas (David Hemmings) is a nihilistic, wealthy fashion photographer in mod "Swinging London." Filled with ennui, bored with his "fab" but oddly-lifeless existence of casual sex and drug use, Thomas comes alive when he wanders through a park, stops to take pictures of a couple embracing, and upon developing the images, believes that he has photographed a murder. Pursued by Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), the woman who is in the photos, Thomas pretends to give her the pictures, but in reality, he passes off a different roll of film to her. Thomas returns to the park and discovers that there is, indeed, a dead body lying in the shrubbery: the gray-haired man who was embracing Jane. Has she murdered him, or does Thomas' photo reveal a man with a gun hiding nearby? Antonioni's thriller is a puzzling, existential, adroitly-assembled masterpiece. ~ Karl Williams, Rovi

April 14, 2012

Photos by Grier Horner

Marion Grant's exhibition, Roots, Fruits & Greens, is a feast for the eyes. It opened last night at Gallery 25 across from the Barrington Stage on Union Street. The cherries in the Herberg Middle School teacher's painting above are luminous.

It is no coincidence that Grant's painting produce. "You might say growing vegetables is my obsession," her statement says.

"In any given year, I may grow enough onions to stock a restaurant, potatoes sufficient to nourish a small

hamlet."

Nourishing the walls of Mary's Carrot Cake, a bakery known for its mouth-watering wares, the show and its locale are made for each other.

Here is part of the scene last night. From the center going right are Ruth and Milton Bass, Scott Taylor and Marge Bride, whose show Let There Be Lighthouses opens tonight with a public reception from 5 to 7 at the Marketplace Cafe on North Street. "I was worried no one would come," Grant said. But the space was packed with people.

Here are some more examples of Grant's work, which can be seen from noon to 5 on Thursdays through Saturdays for the rest of the month. I love the richness of her colors in the painting above. Grant, who at one time was a fixture on the Berkshire Museum staff, also does landscapes. Most of the paintings in this show date from 2011 and 2012. Reflections in the glass covering the red onion below show the photographer and part of the gallery.

Jill Groff, center, is talking with Mary McGinnis, proprietor of the bakery, and Leo Mazzeo, who is involved in the gallery and is the lead coordinator in the First Fridays Artswalk being inaugurated downtown on May 4.

April 12, 2012

Photo Montage by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved

Yesterday I hung around with the Old Eagle Gang - what's left of it - at Mary-Jane Tichenor's funeral and we talked about how they threw away the mold after they made MJ and stuff like that.

The mold thing's a cliche but in MJ's case it's true. I never met anyone like her.

She died on Easter at a party with her daughter, son and daughter, grandchildren and great grandchildren. She had been having a wonderful time.

The front-page obit said MJ was 89. She had carefully guarded the secret of her age. Sometimes that had unexpected consequences. Once when she fell and hurt her leg while doing a story at GE, Dusty said, he had taken her to the emergency room and later went with her to the pharmacy to fill the prescription she had been given.

Dusty took it in. The pharmacist plugged the information into his computer and the computer would not approve the transaction. It's balking at the date of birth, the pharmacist told Dusty. Dusty went back to the car and told MJ that the age she had given the ER doctor didn't match her insurance company's records.

"Look. Just write your birth date down on the prescription, fold the paper up in a wad and give it to me," Dusty suggested. "I promise I won't look."

MJ gazed at him skeptically but did it and he gave the wad of paper to the pharmacist who unfolded it and punched in the new number. This time it passed the computer check with flying colors and MJ got her medicine.

The group gathered in the chapel loved that story.

When Donna spoke she said a funeral service might not be the best place to bring up what she was about to bring up but it was something worth remembering in a celebration of MJ's life.

"She had a great bod," Donna said.

That was true. As was the fact she was a fashion plate. As was the fact that she was still reporting in her 80s, which must have put her right up there with Mike Wallace for longevity.

For years MJ was the Eagle's social editor. At functions she would take notes on a pad with a plastic cup of white wine balanced precariously on one end of the pad. She wrote long stories about galas, about who was there and what they said. Occasionally people would write letters asking why the paper wasted space on such "trivia." Pete Miller, the late owner of the paper, knew better: almost everyone read MJ's stuff. At times MJ regarded her articles as social satire.

Don't think I'm gilding the lily. MJ could gossip. She could be haughty. She could be a pain.

It was not a good idea to get on her wrong side, Richard told the congregation, reminding them that after one local industrialist had a run-in with her she wrote in a subsequent piece that he appeared at the gala in a "rented, brown tuxedo."

MJ was a tough cookie, and people talked about that. She drank and smoked and live a long, long time. People talked about that. MJ had an unusual way of speaking, sort of a society voice and phrasing, I guess. Gae could do a wicked imitation of MJ that always broke me up. But Gae wasn't there to make us laugh because Gae's dead, too. In fact a lot of the Old Eagle Gang - of which I'm a remnant - is no longer with us.

In her later years at the paper, when it cut out the social beat as part of its staff reductions, MJ hung on and did business stories and hard news stories and any other kind of story she was assigned.

She once in all her well-groomed glory covered an uprising at the jail.

"I walked through the cellblock and the prisoners were yelling things at me and I just kept my shoulders back and looked straight ahead," she told me. She wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of rattling her.

Once when a truck went through the ice at Pontoosuc Lake, MJ was on the scene in high-heeled boots and a fur coat, getting the story. Once she got a big story that a major employer in town was being sold the next day. I killed it because that company's lawyer told me it wasn't true.

"How long have we known each other?" the lawyer had asked me. "Thirty years? Have I ever led you wrong on a story?"

He hadn't. I killed the story. The next morning the company called a press conference to announce it was being sold.

I find it hard to think that someone would use the friendship card, the straight-shooter card to show off for his client. But he did. And he's very successful.

MJ, if you read this, I'm sorry.

MJ loved The Eagle but there were times the Eagle, in its recent guise, did not treat her well. She took that in stride and soldiered on.

Which reminds me of another story told yesterday about the time years ago when her husband's lover and MJ went to lunch to talk things over. The other woman told her how much she wanted her husband, and, I imagine, that the feeling was mutual.

"Then take him," MJ said with a sweeping gesture and strode out of the room.

Now MJ has left the room again. But she leaves a corps of people who cared deeply about her, people who will be fondly telling MJ stories for years to come.

 

April 10, 2012

Photos by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved

I've done more work on this painting, Number 14 in the Runway Series. Up above is the newest version. I hope it corrects the                      flatness in the body - knees to ribs - that was a problem  with the earlier version, shown below. At first I was going to heighten

the contrast to shape that section. But under the influence of Whistler I decided on darkening the dress instead.

 In addition to working on the gown, I worked on the hair, face, arms and shoulders.

In the shot of the torso below, you can get an inkling of the thickness of the paint. The gown is by the fashion

designer Tess Giberson. You've probably noticed that for the last few posts I've been having trouble controlling the margins. The sentences want to run all the way across the page now. And I don't want them to. Help, Marita.

April 8, 2012

Photo by Grier Horner/ All Rights Reserved

Friday night the moon was full and I took it's picture. I dragged my tripod out into the yard. It looked pretty spectacular through

Woody and Rose's silver maple next door. There was a low cloud bank over the addition - its skylights silver - on the back of their

house.

It looks like the camera as a bonus discovered a new terrestial body below the moon and green. Perhaps it was a prop

left over from the violent Korean movie Save the Green Planet. My shot below shows how the full moon illuminated

the side of our house. The shadows are from the same silver maple from the top picture.

Oh, one more thing. April 6 I wrote about my Pecha Kucha performance that has been posted on youtube along with those

of a dozen others staged at the Berkshire Museum on March 8. Right now mine is not exactly going viral. It's feeling

pretty neglected with only has 44 hits. If you get a chance, take a look. You'll get my end of a phone call

from a caller identified (by me) as Gizelle while the photo below showed on the screen.

April 6, 2012

Photos Curtesy Berkshire Museum

The Berkshire Museum has just released the videos of Pecha Kucha Night at the museum last month. One of the                                       dozen people making short Power Point presentations that March night was me. In Pecha Kucha, which originated

in Japan, you show 20 slides and have 6 minutes and 40 seconds to talk about them. That's me talking about one

of my racier shots of young women in New York City.

The young woman who made the video took the scene from an angle as if I was right in front of the screen. Below is how the same scene looked taken almost head on.

If you're a glutton for punishment, you can watch me on YouTube. To see anyone's or everyone's video try this link. The museum plans to hold these nights four times a year. The next one is June 14. After watching my gig you're probably saying, "I could do better than that." And you probably could. To give it a try in June contact Craig Langlois at the museum. The first one drew an audience of about 100.

Looking at this picture makes me think of the Wizard of Oz scene where a gap in the curtain lets Dorothy and crew see the great and powerful magician for what he really is. When he realizes this he says:

"Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! The Great Oz has spoken!"

In my case I'm doing the wolf howl from the Werewolves of London to start my segment off. That's me with the wolf.

The other presenters shown on video are: Langlois, Peter Garlington, Clover Bell-Devaney, Lesley Ann Beck, Chris Post, Dina Noto, Mark Pedrotti, Mary McGinnis, Tessa Kelly, Leigh Strimbeck,

Megan Whilden and David Hyde.

April 4, 2012

Photo by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved

This is the next piece in my series Remembrance of Things Past in which has focused on computer-altered photographs from my parents' photo album. This is from a shot taken in Cuba in my mother's youth.

In turn the photo reminds me of her secret history and the diplomat she rendezvoused with often after her marriage. That man, Henry Villard, was hospitalized in World War I with Ernest Hemingway in Italy.

In his old age VIllard wrote a book, Hemingway in Love and War, in which the Red Cross nurse Hemingway fell in love with reminded me of my mother, who was also a nurse.

The portrait at the top was made from this picture, which is itself a blown-up detail from a photo from the album. It must have been taken in the late 1920s.

My father often told amusing stories about the embarrassments he endured as a country boy who moved to New York City after college. But I can't remember my mother ever telling a story about her life before she married my father.

Another print I've made of my mother in Cuba.

She would talk about marrying my father two weeks after she met him, scandalizing both their families, I think. She'd talk a little about Henry Villard, a diplomat from her past. They tried to meet once a year for the rest of her life. She told my sister and me, when we asked about him because we'd come across pictures of him in the album, that she hadn't married him because she was afraid their children would look like him.

I don't buy that. Actually, he was a distinguished looking man who served at one time as the ambassador to Iran.

Years after my mother died I learned that Villard had been hospitalized with Ernest Hemingway during World War I.

In his old age, Villard coauthored a fascinating book Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky. Agnes von Kurowsky was the Red Cross nurse who had taken care of both of them at the hospital in Milan.

"Everybody fell for Agnes, but Hemingway fell hardest," Villard told People magazine in an article in 1996. (It's short and worth reading, as is Villard's book.)

Chris O'Donnell and Sandra Bullock in the movie In Love and War.

Von Kurowsky was the inspiration for Hemingway's heroine, Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms.

She didn't like her characterization as Lt. Frederic Henry's passionate lover.

"I was not that kind of girl," von Kurowsky would say. In her farewell note to Hemingway she wrote, "I am still very fond of you, but it is more as a mother than a sweetheart." At the time he was 19 and she was 26. Hemingway was devastated.

When I read Villard's book, I kept thinking I was reading about my vivacious mother. Her relationship with Villard must have been a deep one to warrant the annual rendezvous.

I think of that period as her secret history.

Coincidently, the book by Villard and Fred Nagel was made into a movie

In Love and War in 1996. Sandra Bullock played Catherine Barkley.

Dimitri Villard, Villard's son, developed the screenplay with New Line Cinema. He said of the project:

"We didn't want to do a biography of Ernest Hemingway. I was convinced that if one looked at it from a different point of view, that of a woman torn between following her heart and following her head, it was a great, classic love story."

April 2, 2012

Photo by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved

Caught in this hole in the sky are two clouds at war. The wide open jaws of one are about to snap at the beak of the one charging in from the right.

Confrontations like these end quickly because clouds are shape shifters.

Even though I've shot hundreds of photos of clouds, I seldom get ones this dramatic.

Switching from the heavens to the hell of statistics, I was happy to get my blog's stats for the 12 months that ended March 31. In that period the blog continued to rack up more than 1.5 million hits.

At the same time there was a significant rise in the number of people who visit the Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man. For a string of months the figure had dipped below 200. But in February it climbed to 222 a day and in March to 248 a day.

Whether you're a regular or occasional reader, thanks for tuning in.