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July 31, 2011

Photos by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved

Things are looking up for Leslie Ferrin (right) at the opening of Beauty in Decay , the fine new show at her gallery in downtown Pittsfield. She was about to pose for a picture with Gordon Chandler, whose work is on the wall behind them, when I took this. Besides Chandler's sculpture, the show includes the work of six photographers.

 

Michael Eastman certainly finds beauty in decay in the haunting photos above and below. The first is of downtown Cairo, Illinois, in 2004. In my photo the sky is distorted by reflections of photos and lettering on the opposite wall. Eastman illustrates the theme again (below) in the once elegant room in Havana with its crumbling ceiling.

The next two photos, by Williams town artist Nicholas Whitman, strike closer to home. They are of Pittsfield's Colonial Theater, then Miller Supply, before its restoration. When we first sat in the top balcony with its wood backed seats, my daughter Shannon had to hold on for dear life because this balcony, the top one of three, is in the stratosphere. But you get a great view of the stage.

 

Gregory Crewdson, the nationally recognized photographer, gives a sense of unease and dislocation in this shot of a trailer park in a drenching rain. Crewdson has taken many of his elaborately staged photos in the Berkshires, including one on North Street, Pittsfield, which hangs in the Berkshire Museum.

In cooperation with the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan, Ms. Ferrin is showing five Crewdson photos. They are production stills taken in the process of creating a final photo. Crewdson is like the director of a movie when he sets up his shots using a large crew and supporting cast. The photos in this show were taken in North Adams, Adams and Pittsfield from 2005 to 2007 as part of his Beneath the Roses series.

This four-section work is by Susan Mikula of West Cummington, whose pieces are pigment prints from Polaroid originals. Her photos in the show focus on GE's vanishing manufacturing facilities here.

Taken from the outside looking in is this barbwire encircled deer made of scrap metal by Gordon Chandler. The reflection of the parked car seems to round out the animals rear quarters.

Until Labor Day, the Ferrin Gallery at 437 North Street, is open daily from 11 to 5. Try to get to this show. It includes some very classy work.

P.S. One of the photographers in this show is Douglas Truth, a former Pittsfield artist, whose iPhone shots I somehow managed to miss altogether in the show. Here's one from the Ferrin website.

 

 

July 29, 2011

Part One

 

 

Photos by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved

This is the newest photograph in the series I'm doing on my mother. It was taken in Cuba where she and another girl had sailed with two guys in the 1920s.

Starting as a snapshot in myparents' family album, this picture was manipulated in the computer to add color and to remove hundreds of small black spots marring the surface.

The photo was printed on vynal by Massive Graphics of Pittsfield and applied to composition board painted black. It is a diptych and its overall size is 61.75" x 72". The photo appears rounded at the bottom because of camera distortion.

The photo above and the two below are details. They show what the major blowing up of the snapshot has done to the texture. I'm not sure who the man is.

 

 

 

Part Two

Photos by Shannon Nichols

A powerful storm blew through Pittsfield on Tuesday afternoon, downing a big tree in Paul and Shannon's back yard.

Not too many feet higher and the tree would have smashed into their house. As it was the top limbs inflicted some damage to the building.

Below is what you see looking the windows from the living room. More trees fell along their street.

I'm publishing this now. It's 1:42 a.m. and I'm too sleepy to proofread the posts.

 

 

 

July 27, 2011

Stephen Capogna, acrylic on canvas,  54" X 58", 2010. Photos by the artist/all rights reserved.

Thanks for having me as a guest artist on your blog.
My name is Stephen Capogna. I am 33 years old. I live in Hinsdale, Massachusetts, with my wife Bonnie and my daughter Emily. I grew up in Chelmsford, Massachusetts , and earned a BFA in painting from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2001. Shortly after college I started my own interior/exterior house painting business, which I still operate.

I guess my obsession  with golf balls started about 10 years ago, maybe a bit longer. It began in college with a random assignment in a color and design course. I did a painting depicting a golf ball on a tee from a bug's eye perspective.

Unlike the paintings show on this post, that one was quick and primitive. I kind of guessed what the ball would look like, so the dimples were randomly placed. The idea of using the balls as a subject came to me after taking up the sport as a hobby. I was fascinated by the precise arrangement of dimples on the ball, and the way that the dimples, which are perfect circles of different sizes, turned into ellipses by your point of view.

Stephen Capogna, acrylic on canvas, 60" X 72", 2011

About four years ago, I began a series of drawings depicting the journey of a golf ball from tee to cup. These drawings were done on hot pressed watercolor paper about 10 inches by 14 inches. I used only primary pastel pencils plus black and white to achieve the desired color. This series took about two years to complete. There were 10 altogether.

Stephen Capogna, acrylic on canvas, 60" X 60", 2011

Once I finished I decided to make 10 paintings based on the drawings. I also wanted to go large. I have always been fascinated with Chuck Close's paintings. Especially his earlier photo-realistic portraits. So, in 2010 I began the large golf ball paintings shown in this post. This time I wanted to make sure everything was precise.

Stephen Capogna, acrylic on canvas, 54" X 58", 2011

I started by researching the type of grass used on golf courses. Then I grew my own miniature fairway and putting green so I could photograph each stage of the golf ball's journey.

To photograph, I used a Casio high speed digital camera which can record video at 410 frames per second at pretty good resolution. After viewing the footage I would pick a single image to work from for each painting. I also decided to paint the series with an airbrush for a more photographic look.

I begin by outlining the image in Adobe Illustrator using the ellipse tool, which I then print on heavy card stock and cut out by hand to use as a template. The process is very labor intensive but really pays off. Each template is numbered and refers to a master template showing where each dimple is located.

Using templates, masking tape and the airbrush, I begin the painting process, working from background to foreground.

The paintings shown here are the first five I've completed.

Stephen Capogna, acrylic on canvas, 60" X 72" , 2011

 

 

 

July 25, 2011

Photos by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved

As time marches on so does the Girl in White. At this stage, the skin on the leg on the left jumps out at you and so does her leading red shoe. I'll tone them down. Then I think the painting is pretty much done. I've been presenting this painting in phases as work progresses. As a point of reference, painting when I showed  it to you last on July 9 is below.

You can see that I added a lot more writing to the painting. I guess adding is the wrong word. The words were already there under the layer of black paint. Let me backtrack a little. The current image was painted over an old painting that was part of my Jeanne d'Arc series. I had written a tribute to Joan of Arc in French and in green across much of the canvas. This week I sanded, scrapped and scratched to expose some of the words.

I like the effect. I plan to try writing underlying messages on the next painting I paint over.

Here are two detail shots of the painting, which is six feet high and almost four feet wide. See the lines going across the section of the painting below. Those are the grid lines I had laid out on the canvas to serve as guidelines in painting in the model.

What surprises me about this piece is that I started it at the beginning of July and now the month's almost over and it isn't done yet. I've been working on some other pieces at the same time. Still it upsets me when something I think will take 10 days takes three times that many.

 

 

 

July 23, 2011

Photo by Riley

Pittsfield Contemporary, a juried show featuring work by 12 artists, opened last night at the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts in downtown Pittsfield and I had a great time talking to people, one of my favorite pursuits. The conversation above was with Michael Vincent Bushey, a printer whose art books were a standout of the show, and my daughter Shannon.

Twelve artists who either live or work in Pittsfield were chosen for this exhibit which requires that the pieces utilize words. That's because the Word X Word festival is one of the sponsors. The others: the city's Cultural Development Office and Pittsfield Contemporary.

Riley Nichols

Here are three people I like a lot, Susan Phillips, Babbie and Linda Baker Cimini. Behind them is one of the centerpieces of the exhibit (seen below), a humorous, dramatically framed painting by Phil Bastow of a little  pig who turned the tables on the man who planned to eat him.

Grier Horner

Riley Nichols

One of my favorite pieces is Mike Carty's tribute to the poet and writer Charles Bukowski. (For a better look at that piece see my July 19 post.) Below, Jay Elling, in the purple shirt, explains his piece Hood Rat, composed of tacks and yarn on a map of the city. The tacks and yarn chronicle a bike ride Jay and some friends took one night. He had charted the trek - I think it was more than 10 miles long - so that when the coordinates were traced out on the map they would spell Hood Rat.

 

Grier Horner

These beautifully executed pieces are by Julie Wosk. The one on the left states "You are Secretly Being" without completing the sentence. The woman's eyes led me to decode the missing word as "watched." But Julie said that there is no official answer.

Max Moy-Borgen

Here's one of my favorite painters with his favorite wife. His painting on the left uses words taken from the poet Ed Ochester, his brother in law. The painting at the right is a portrait of the artist as an old man, but not as old as he is now, which is 76.

 

Grier Horner

Above are three small paintings by Rebecca Weinman. Although there are no words in the paintings, the pieces are inspired by Mrs. Havisham in the Charles Dicken's novel, Great Expectations.

I'm bowing out with Michael McKay's three-dimensional wall piece. Unlike the other pieces in the show, words were the whole thing in this piece. It is a quote from Don DeLillo's novel White Noise. McKay collected the letters by doing grave rubbings, then cutting them out and rearranging them.

So McKay uses gravestones to make a piece about a plunging plane about to enter the jaws of death - only to get a last-second reprieve when the engines restart. What could be more appropriate. It's a really well thought out piece.

If you live in Pittsfield you probably are already aware of this man's way with words. He and his wife Monica are the artists who entertain drivers with the clever word posters they put up in the windows of their second-floor studio at the corner of South and West Housatonic streets.

Grier Horner

 

 

 

 

July 21, 2011

Photos by Grier Horner

It's 2:24 a.m. and I'm having a nice time. I'm listening to The Run Out Groove on YouTube, having an occasional swig of Triple Sec and looking at my photos of Lucy MacGillis paintings. As the Groove's singer, Meredith, belts out "I ain't got no money, but I sure got a whole lot of love, " I'm looking at Lucy's small painting above and feeling very mellow.

I'm feasting on the way she handles paint. Those brown eggs. That orange bowl. They're amazing. So is most of what she does.

In her 11 years living in Umbria, Italy, the Pittsfield native has built a life as a self supporting artist. In Italy she has been rehabilitating an old stone house, painting its interiors with paint she mixes herself from lime and natural earth pigments to create warm grays and ochres that echo the paintings - and become paintings themselves. To see what I mean, here is her kitchen (below) with its view of distant hills.

Her kitchen isn't going to make the pages of Dwell or Architectural Digest but it could very well find its way onto the wall of a museum.

Thirty of MacGillis's paintings are currently hanging at the Hoadley Gallery on Church Street in Lenox and a lot of them have been sold already. The show ends August 2 so there's still plenty of time to take it in. A disclaimer: Lucy's parents are friends of ours and we've known her all her life.

But Keith Shaw, the BCC art professor and Eagle critic, is a disinterested observer and here's his appraisal in the July 14 edition of Berkshires Week:

"Her paintings operate on two aesthetic levels. One is the timeless poetry of rural life, narrated with an endearing Italian accent. But there is also the facture of her paint surface. Color, texture and paths of brush and knife weave together a beauty beyond descriptive representation. This is the pure language of paint irresistibly casting its tactile and visual spell."

Lucy MacGillis and her son Vito

The Hoadley Gallery sells an assortment of ceramics, jewelry, clothing, pottery and art. So paintings often don't get a wall of their own, as you can see in this painting of MacGillis's house and Fiat (below). This is MacGillis's 12th show at Hoadley and it is an annual outing that has been good both for the gallery and the artist. Not to mention the viewing public.

Here are some words from the painter, taken from the catalog you can buy for $12:

"I have also built a small terrazzo directly outside my studio...I am surrounded by earth tones here, terracotta earth reds and earth greens and the almond trees have a deep brown terra di siena bruciata...what always surprises me here is how magical even the most banal objects become in this light."

 

 

July 19, 2011

Valvoline for Raol Coutard by Edward Pelkey

The 4th annual Pittsfield Contemporary Art Show opens at the Lichtenstein with a public reception this coming Friday from 5 to 7. Hey, don't miss it. I'm in it - see the photo below - as are some other pretty hot artists.

Among them are Edward Pelkey, whose Valvoline for Raol Coutard is shown in the top photo; Mike Carty, whose Bukowski Tribute is below my painting, and Michael Bushey, whose Ashes V is at the bottom of this post.

Mine alone is worth the price of admission. You get in free. I'm very pleased to be in this juried show. After three solo shows in 12 months in 2009-2010, I was afraid I wasn't going to be in any this year.

Then along came the tribute to Sol LeWitt at MASS MoCA, which I was in, and now this. The words in my piece come from Oh By the Way by my sister's husband, the poet Ed Ochester. The poem appears in his book The Land of Cockaigne. My second painting in the show, Gunrunner, Artist's Statement, uses my own words.

Thin Cool Veil of Blood by Grier Horner

The other artists in Pittsfield Contemporary are: Jay Elling, Jennifer Kimball, Joel Curran, Julie Wosk, Lisa Merullo, Michael McCay, Phil Bastow and Rebecca Weinman. All are artists who live or work in Pittsfield. For the first time Pittsfield Contemporary has a theme. Work in it incorporates words to tie in with the 3rd annual WordXWord Festival, a celebration of words spoken, written and sung, to be held in downtown Pittsfield August 13-20.

Bukowski Tribute by Mike Carty

The exhibit is sponsored by the city's Office of Cultural Development, PittsfieldContemporary.com and WordXWord. It will run through August 20. The Lichtenstein is open Wednesdays through Saturdays from 12 to 5 p.m. The art center is located on Renne Avenue, which parallels North Street between Fenn and Eagle streets. I'll see you there.

Ashes V by Michael Bushey

 

 

July 17 , 2011

Meat Market , 2003

There’s a greatness about Thornton Dial that has been obscured by his label as an outsider artist, a label that deprives him of recognition as one of the best artists of our time. It is starting to be discarded now following a retrospective of his work at the Indianapolis Museum earlier this year.

“Because Mr. Dial is self-taught and illiterate, he has generally been classified as a folk or outsider artist. But that pigeonhole has long rankled his admirers, because his work’s look, ambition, and obvious intellectual reach hew so closely to that of many other modern and contemporary masters, from Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg to Jean-Michel Basquiat,” wrote the New York Times critic Carol Kino in response to that show. Time Magazine critic Richard Lacayo came to the same conclusion in reviewing the same exhibit.

“What he does can be discussed as art, just art, no surplus notions of outsiderness required....And not just that, but some of the most assured, delightful and powerful art around,” said Lacayo.

 

The Coming Dawn, triptych, mixed media on canvas, 72"x140"x10"

“The power and clarity of his work measures up to any artist of any color in the last decades,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, the director of the museum. (Dial is African American.)

Dial, 82, came to public attention late. About 20 years ago he was put in contact with Will Arnett a collector, scholar and promoter of Southern outsider art.

Cows of Japan, mixed media on canvas, 78"x58"x9"

Dial was born in a cornfield in Alabama and grew up poor and virtually unschooled because his family needed him to work from an early age. Eventually he landed a job in the Pullman Sleeping Car factory and worked there until the plant closed in 1981, leaving Dial,
then in his early 50s, jobless.

"It was probably the best thing that ever happened to him,” said his son Richard. “ He kept getting up at 7, going into the backyard and making something.”

Broken Levee, 72"x92"x9", 2006

(Looking at a picture like this just doesn't give you a full appreciation of the painting, which is a 3-D marvel. Take a look at this video to see what I mean. Isn't it amazing? Here's another, Jesus Christ is in the Coal Mine.)

Jesus Christ is in the Coal Mine, 105"x76"x8", 2008

And he made a lot of things.

"My wife told me, If you don't get this junk out of the house, I'm going to leave you," Dial has said.

His wife was not alone in her antipathy toward the fruits of a husband’s labor. Babbie hasn’t gotten to the point of leaving - at least as far as I know - but she isn’t happy about having almost 500 paintings taking up space in our house.

Note: The images in this post were taken from the website of the Bill Lowe Gallery in Atlanta where Dial is currently being given a major show.

Note 2: If you've been frustrated by not finding new posts since July 11, I plead technical complications. If you haven't been disappointed by the lack of new posts, my heart is broken.

 

July 11, 2011

Photos by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved

My granddaughter and Michael concentrate on the Sorry board in this mano-a-mano game yesterday. Michael used to be a bike racer so besides playing games we're watching a lot of the Tour d'France during his visit. Me? I can't usually be roped into anything more complicated than War.

The sky above Pontoosuc Lake was graced with this unusual cloud sale the other day - I just typed sale when I meant formation - because a librarian mentioned to a man returning books that she had just been to a great book sale.

When Babbie an I walked down to the lake the evening of July 3 to see pre-4th fireworks from the West Shore, this scene was far more interesting than explosions in the sky.

The driver of a white van had managed to immerse it in the lake while trying to either launch the boat or bring it up the boat ramp.

A firetruck was there along with two tow trucks. When one was having trouble pulling out the van - its boat and trailer still attached - the other backed down the ramp and lent a helping hand.

Finally they got it out. I suspect the van driver had had better July 3rds.

Published 9 hours late because of access problems.

 

July 9, 2011

Photo by Grier Horner/ All Rights Reserved

She isn't ready for the runway yet. But she's getting closer. As you can see  if you look at my July 5 post, I've worked on the face. It's starting to take the look I want. I may give her an eye patch covering the unpainted eye. I like the way you can see the grid lines and in places the painted-over lettering on the old painting.

 

 

 

 

July 7, 2011

Cy Twembly, Untitled Painting [Say Goodbye Catallus, to the Shores of Asia Minor][A Painting in Three Parts], 1994

Cy Twombly strode the labyrinth of 20th century art without bowing to the current fashions or losing the ecstasy he found - and gave others - in painting.

The painter, who died July 5 in Rome at 83, stuck to his love of Greek and Roman history and in paint translated the stuff of antiquity in ways that made him entirely modern.

One of those painters who drew the criticsm - "my kid could do that" - I think he found an exultation in summoning up his inner child to apply paint, pencil, crayon to vast surfaces, and working them not only with an explosive intensity but with a keen intellect and a knowledge of history.

Cy Twombly, TheFire that Consumes All Before It. Philadelphia Art Museum

I know first hand what Twombly's art can do to some people. Years ago I walked into a room devloted to a series of his paintings called Fifty Days at Iliam, a 10-part series dating from 1978 based on Alexander Pope's translation of The Iliad.

It was one of those rare moments of - what would you call it: ecstacy? Zen? Total absorbtion? I only know that I had to sit down and look and look. Despite the emotion and scribbles of the work, I felt a deep deep serenity. For me that was the Holy Grail of art. Would it happen if I reentered that room? I'm almost afraid to go back, fearing it wouldn't.

Trombly spent has adult life in Italy, marrying the daughter of an art collector, an interesting decision because after World War II America had replaced Europe as the place where art was happening. But the geographics didn't mean he was out of the flow of innovation.

In fact, as Simon Schama argued yesteray in The Daily Beast, his passionate explorations of

myth and fantasy deserve to be celebrated for transcending the confines of modernism.

All the conventions that modernists were supposed to abide by—the wipe-out of history, narrative, and cultural memory; the self-containment of abstraction; just so much color and shape on a two-dimensional surface; the obligation to hard-edged geometry—were for Twombly feebly antiseptic acts of self-denial.

Laurence Mackin wrote in the Irishtimes.com yesterday "His paintings had grand themes of death and gods, but also sex and more prosaic, if no less vital, concerns," Laurence Mackin wrote on the irishtimes.com yesterday. "His work was cutting edge, but drew on ancient sources for inspiration and definition."

Twombly was a Virginian, whose father pitched for the Chicago White Sox for one season. Also interesting, as so many things about Twombly are, is the fact that a woman kissed one of his paintings on display in France, leaving a red lipstick stain on the white paint. She told the French news agency AFP that Twombly had "had left this white" for her.

Here are a few more of his paintings.

Untitled, black housepaint and crayon, 1970. I loved his blackboard paintings.

Lepanto, one of 12 panelts.

 

Cy Twombly, Roses, in a 2009 show. In old age he had turned at times to flowers, but what flowers they were. Photo by Reuters

 

 

July 5, 2011

Photo by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved

The painting is underway.  It feels good to be "pumping paint" again as my friend F.X. Tobin (see photo below) puts it.  For the last couple months I've been concentrating on photography. I decided that I don't have to drop one to do the other. So here's the first painting I've tackled in a while.

So far the painting isn't as dynamic as the sketch underneath it (see my July 3 post), but I hope to correct that.

Also, the face is flat and has a long way to go. The hand and legs need work. The dress, I think, is off to a pretty good start. For better or worse I'm painting - and it feels good.

This is my studio. You can see how I roll bunches of paintings up and store them between the joists. Other paintings are stacked against the walls. The boxes in the background hold paintings from the Scarlet Letter series. I sold a lot of them. The only time I ever went small. But I still paint large. Go figure.

See the yellow rope above the painting? It's holding up a free standing, six-foot high storage structure hidden by the painting. There are so many paintings stacked against it that one day it started tilting alarmingly. So I drove a nail in the beam and roped the cabinet into an upright position again.

Speaking of F.X. Tobin, that's him below celebrating the 4th as Captain X.

 

Photo by Lisa Tobin

F.X., a Pittsfield native from a well-known family, is an artist living in Tempe, Arizona. He does some wild paintings in the Pop Surrealism realm. Take a look.

 

 

July 3, 2011

Photos by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved

It felt great to sketch a figure onto canvas again (above). It's the first time I've done that in half a year or so. During that time I've been concentrating on the Killing Fields series and photos of my mother, neither of which has required any conventional drawing.

It's been nice out so I've been able to work outdoors under my canopy sheltering "The Pit." I have to remember to show you a photo of the summer studio.

If you look closely you can see that I divided the canvas into a grid and did the same on a smaller scale with the photo I pilfered from the internet. It's an old technique useful in transferring a small image to a large surface. I numbered the squares for easy reference and am inclined to leave them in.

My intent has been to do the painting in acrylic. But while I was sketching this in I thought about doing the thing in oil pastel. I'll sleep on it.

In addition I'm thinking of adding a snarling wolf on the right side. We'll sleep on that too. While I was outside photographing this work in progress, I took some shots of our flowers, too.

 

These are cosmos. A bee is extracting honey from the flower on the right.

Here's a clematis climbing up a post in the back garden. I love the color.

And here are yellow primroses mixed in with lavender crown vetch on the side of the house. Babbie's Uncle Tylie urged her to dig up some of his to plant in her garden. That was years ago. They have thrived and their blooming is a pleasant reminder of  her late uncle. We were both very fond of him.

 

 

July 1, 2011

Yesterday was my birthday. This is the shirt Babbie had made up for me. I took the picture on Photo Booth this morning. Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler. For those of you who haven't had six years of French, that's Let the Good Times Roll.

I've love that in French or English. You know that Lake Charles, Louisiana, has the right attitude when you go to the visitors center and inscribed on the door are the immortal words Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler.

That used to be my governing motto, in thought if not in words. I lived for parties. I like to drink too much, way to much, talk too much, laugh too much, flirt too much. What I didn't like was the hangovers. So with the coming of age I started easing off the drinking to end the awful next days and to face the fact that that type of partying was no longer age appropriate.

So now I just drink a little too much. And I've found the good times can roll in less frenzied ways. One of those was my birthday party last night. It was Babbie, Riley, Shannon, Paul and me. And I had a wonderful time.

 

I also got some great presents, like the T-shirt and a video  my granddaughter made for me. That's Riley and Me in the frame above. I thought it was an appropriate shot since my head was cut off in the top photo too. I also got some "body nourishing wash"  studded with gold bubbles that I can take into the shower instead of bar soap. Among the other presents was a yodeling pickle. You have to hear it to believe it.

I can hear everyone sighing in disappointment so here's a face shot taken this morning.

 

One interesting thing that's happened in the last year or so is that my nose is turning purple and swelling a little a la W.C. Fields. My dermatologist, who writes novels on the side, tells me it's not from drinking.

I worked on a painting for a while yesterday. My first new painting in a while since I've been concentrating on photographs. It's going to be part of the Runway Series. But at this stage it's background. Wait a minute. I have to go out and take a photo of it. Here it is. First a closeup and then the whole thing.

 

 

 

 

This painting is going over an old painting to try and alleviate a problem we have in our house: What do you do with 500 paintings. This won't decrease the number but at least it won't add to it.

PS I was 10 hours late posting this blog because when I tried to do it last night I kept falling asleep at the computer.

 

 

 

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