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March 30, 2007

Draky, 120"x92", was painted in 1966 with a spray gun.

I just caught up with the fact that one of my favorite artists, Jules Olitski, died last month at 84. He catapulted to fame in the 1960s. But by the time the Metropolitan Museum of Art gave him a one man show in 1969 - he was only the third living artist to have one there - critics had written his work off as purely decorative. "Visual Musak," one scoffed.

Olitski didn't fold. He just kept on painting. It helped that he still had the respect of many artists and collectors still bought his work. Somewhere in the late 90s his name started showing up in art magazines again.

"He was a large man with a large face, and looked as though he had known rough times," the Guardian said in its obit. "Yet his rambling personality never lost its innate sweetness."
His fame came as a color field painter as in Draky, at the top. One of the exciting things Olitski did was paint with a commercial spray gun starting sometime in the 60s. That resonates with me because I used to spray paint houses. I loved the way the paint seemingly flowed from your hand. It somehow made you feel magic, powerful. Sometimes I imagined it must be like firing an automatic. You even called the sprayer a gun. When I started painting, I wondered how I could use the gun to create art. The closest I came to trying was using spray paint cans like the graffiti artists. The two paintings I've inserted here are Dream of Isaac, 2001, above, and Night and Light below. Four paintings, four different periods of a long painting life.

Olitski also used sponges, mops, squeegees, brushes, monoprints. Later in his life he turned to landscapes although he continued to produce abstractions as well.

"The canvases were numerous because of Olitski's deftness, but also because he loved nothing better than to be in his studio," the Guardian said. "He worked all night, got up at 2pm, then started again. 'I'm an addictive personality. It's like when I drank. Enough was never enough.'

He is survived by his wife, two daughters from previous marriages, and a stepdaughter.

For a splendid obit go to: www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,2011614,00.html

In this 1982 beauty, 18"x80", Olitski used the dramatic brushstrokes he disavowed in the '60s.

March 29, 2007

Work in progress. Collage. 89"x38".

I'm making some progress on the angel wing for the Dresden Firebombing series. But piecing together the collaged sections took me a lot longer than I expected.

I had to recut a number of them to make them fit. Looking at it upright for the first time, I wasn't too happy with the upper quarter of the wing. I may rework that. Another slowdown. I do like the pieces in the detail below.

I spent a lot of time Tuesday pressing snakes of clay into the crevices between the wing sections to simulate the leading on stained glass windows. Yesterday I pulled the clay out because it wasn't adhering that well.

It was such a beautiful afternoon - the temperature must have been around 50 - that I hauled the wing outside to work on it. Still some snow in the pit. That's what we've always called the recessed patio outside my cellar studio.

Our first crocus bloomed yesterday. And the snow on the lawn is receding, unveiling grass that hasn't greened yet. In a way I hate to see the warmer weather. It means an end to my walks on Pontoosuc Lake. The ice is deteriorating and will probably be gone within a week.

The angel wing is far from finished. Yesterday I stained the wing with oil paint. Now I'll start applying glazes of fire colors appropriate for the Angel of Incineration.

Other things were going on yesterday.

In the morning a friend and I went to the Williams College Museum of Art. Its galleries are crammed with good shows ranging from Andy Warhol, to Carrie Mae Weems to Jeffrey Crewdson. Then Susan and I had lunch.

Towards evening as I was stepping off the front porch, a hawk pursued by a half dozen crows dipped down along the roof line in an effort to lose them. He was just a few feet over my head. All I could see was his underside. They all settled in the trees in the woods across the street for a minute and then the chase resumed. A hawk can kill and consume a crow. But crows band together to keep that from happening.

Then I drove over to Home Depot to pick up some rivets. On the way over I saw a young woman in a pickup gesticulating wildly with her hands as she talked to the driver. I couldn't see her face. Was she recounting a bad day or giving him hell? On the way home, I saw that a house with a checkered history had been demolished. It was a place where the Fire Department had set a controlled fire for one of Crewdson's photo shoots. This is a detail from the photo that resulted. (See my January 9 post for this shot in full and two other Crewdson pieces.)

Not only had this house been scorched by flames, it had been the scene of a violent crime. A distraught woman sliced her children's throats a dozen years ago. They were seriously wounded but survived. It was good to see the house go. I wonder how the children - I think two were hurt - and their mother are doing. I wonder how your life goes after something that horrendous.

March 28, 2007

Wandering through the warrens of galleries at MoMA on Saturday, I stumbled into two old friends, The Sleeping Gypsy (above) and The Dream (bottom), both by Henri Rousseau.

I hadn't thought about these paintings in a long time. They are hallucinatory, big and brilliant. They are magic. At 11 p.m. when I started this post, I realized I didn't know anything about Rousseau. So I looked him up on Google. Like his art, his life was fascinating.

He was a toll collector in Paris supporting nine children when he started painting seriously in his early 40s. At 49 he quit his job to spend the rest of his life as an artist.

Largely self taught - today we'd call him an outsider - he exhibited at the Salon des Independents from 1886 until his death in 1910. Ridiculed by most critics - "M. Rousseau paints with his feet with his eyes closed" - Rousseau was unswervingly self-confident. According to the Tate Modern, he never doubted he'd land a canvas in the Louvre. And in fact his Snake Charmer entered in 1937, followed 10 years later by War, a staggering piece.

But his work was also the subject of admiration. A young artist, Félix Vallotton, called his early jungle painting Surprise "the alpha and omega of painting." Rousseau did not return to the jungle theme until the last years of his life. Never having left France, his lush foliage was inspired by a botanical garden in Paris and his animals came from books and postcards.

Picasso found Rousseau's Portrait of a Woman (1895) in a Montmartre shop and bought it on the spot for next to nothing. Picasso said it "grew inside me with an obsessive power...." and never parted with it.

Strapped financially, Rousseau used cheap, student-grade oils. But there was nothing cheap about his work or his imagination or his impact on art. Henri Rousseau died in 1910 at 66. According to Wikipedia, "Seven friends stood at his grave in the Cimetière de Bagneux: the painters Paul Signac and Otiz de Zarate, Robert Delaunay and his wife SoniaTerk, the sculptor Brancusi, Rousseau's landlord Armand Queval and Guillaume Apollinaire who wrote the epitaph Brancusi put on the tombstone:"

We salute you
Gentile Rousseau you can hear us
Delaunay his wife Monsieur Queval and myself
Let our luggage pass duty free through the gates
of heaven
We will bring you brushes paints and canvas
That you may spend your sacred leisure in the
light of truth Painting
as you once did my portrait
Facing the stars

The Dream, Henri Rousseau, painted in 1910, the year of his death.

March 26, 2007

Jeff Wall's photos are big, beautiful and hyperreal. They are currently on view at MOMA in Manhattan. This one is In Front of a Nightclub, done in 2006. Below is Mimic from 1980.

Because they are epic-sized light boxes, these things glow. They are transparencies illuminated by fluorescent lights from behind. You can't get the sense of them from a book. But the computer screen does give a fair approximation of their luminosity. Except the screen shows them small. And these are not small. Some of them are 16 feet wide.

When you walk into a room and meet Mimic face to face, you could be walking up the sidewalk converging on the three characters. If the photo were mounted at floor level, I'm sure it would have that impact.

Here's this rough-looking guy giving the slant-eyed salute to a man of Asian origin and you're in the middle of it. It was only when I got home that I caught up with the slur. And I misinterpreted it as "the finger." The act adds content to something that already had grabbed me by the throat by its you-are-there illusion.

The nightclub scene is luminously beautiful. You're standing across the street looking at these kids hanging around.

These photos that seem so real are not. They're staged. And that always sets off controversy among art lovers. For one thing, these are people he hires to pose for his pictures. For another, the setting in the nightclub shot is a fabrication. Reportedly he got so frustrated with problems trying to shoot the real nightclub that he had a replica built in a studio and took the photos there.

If you're pulling in $1 million per picture, and are, seemingly, in all the major art museums in the world, you can do things like that.

Wall, a 60-year-old Canadian, along with Cindy Sherman (see February 3 post) and a few others were in the forefront of the movement away from documentary photography. Collectively they helped bring photography, which had been languishing in terms of dollars paid, into the stratosphere. One of their offspring is Jeffrey Crewdson who I wrote about on December 6.

Wall is a theorist whose statements about what he's doing confuse the hell out of me. Most theorists do. But you don't have to understand the academic underpinnings to admire his work. Not everyone admires it. He's pounced on by some for forsaking his early theories of what photo-art should be. There are others who are saying its only in recent years when he started shedding theoretical baggage that his stuff became worth looking at.

"He's a resolute modern artist with a longing for the past, a radical softie," says Richard Lacayo, a Time Magazine blogger (time-blog.com/looking_around). "And if you're drawn to his pictures at all, and sometimes I am, it's probably because, by way of those practices, he offers pleasures that painting has largely left behind."

Pleasures like beauty and the willingness to tackle a slice of life. Lacayo cites author Milan Kundera's concept of "the immense mysterious power of the pointless."

If you read pointless as ordinary, it's a concept that could be comforting in analyzing our lives.

Babbie and I went to see Wall's stuff Saturday. Leaving the gallery, leaving the gallery, I had a nagging feeling the works' technical perfection may undermine it's potential for emotional connection.

 

March 23, 2007

Occasionally Riley and I paint together, to my delight. Riley and I made this painting one recent afternoon after school. She named it Swirling Wind.

Riley, my 7-year-old granddaughter, got the idea to do our version of Starry Night by van Gogh from a children's book written by my niece, Betsy Ochester of Pittsburgh.

Knowing Riley liked to paint, Betsy had sent the series she wrote called "Mica and Magellan Art Explorers." Riley got all excited about them. She was talking about the Renaissance and Impressionists, etc. One of the things Betsy does in the books is suggest paintings kids might use to create their own and understand how an artist actually painted. Riley was fascinated by Betsy's van Gogh project. So Riley and I sat down one afternoon, Riley's school clothes covered by one of my painting shirts, and started to paint.

After we had the sky and moon and stars in and what Rile sees as the swirling wind, she said, "Let's do the mountains next."

She did them herself. Then we turned to the tree, which was a joint project. So here's the result of about 20 minutes late one afternoon. The book with the van Gogh project is "Mica and Magellan Art Explorers: A Box of Paints and the Sound of Color." It may be hard to find a copy now but one of that series is still available through Amazon and you might find it in your library.

March 22, 2007

Black cat with red Katz. This is Evalene with a poster of Alex Katz' Red Coat.

Evalene is about 11 years old. She used to live with Michael and Greg but we inherited her years ago. She is very vocal, especially about wanting to eat. She also yowls when she's about to jump into bed with us at 5 in the morning, waking us up.

Somehow her grand entrance almost always amuses us. Otherwise, she is a lovely cat. She used to get puncture wounds in her flank. The vet said she wasn't fast enough to get away from some other cat. She always seemed fast to me.

Sometimes in the house she'll suddenly bolt across the room and end up three rooms away. And then she'll repeat that mad dash.

Anyway, she's my favorite - and only - cat. And Katz' painting of his wife Ada in a red coat and hat is one of my favorite paintings. I admire the sophisticated simplicity of the work and the jolts of color. Over the years he's done lots of paintings of Ada, many of them outstanding. In the process you see her age gracefully as in Ada Navy Coat, above left. His night paintings tend to be wonderful, too. Here are two of them. (I tried valiantly to get the pictures on the right and left to butt up against each other. But after a dozen tries I gave up and let the type run wild.)

March 20, 2007

Today you get a mini tour of my studio. Above is a painting of Anita McFarland. I've been repainting the original, done around 1998. It's not finished yet.

She is the same model I used in Anita and the Polar Bears (You can view it under People on my web site.) That was the painting that went up on a billboard in 2005. My photo, Anita at the Parking Lot, has gotten a lot of hits on the blog. In my Dresden Firebombing series I've been painting over old paintings. This was to be the latest sacrifice. But I kept looking at it and I couldn't do it. At this point Anita has been repainted except for her hair, as has the red door.

The scraps of cardboard propped up against the painting are from the piece on the right. It is based on a giant glass angel wing made by Nicole Peskin (See the February 15 post in the archives).

Instead of glass, mine's going to be paint on canvas. This will be another piece on the Angel of Incineration. Like the other angel pieces this one is collage. I cut out pieces of cardboard to serve as the stained glass sections. Then cover them with canvas. You can see the raw cardboard at the top right.

I'm excited about trying to make the thing look like stained glass. The panels will be in shades of red, orange and yellow, with some blue and green and amethyst thrown in. The background will probably be the night sky like the one behind it.

March 18, 2007

Babbie says my face is getting puffy. This picture makes that obvious.

Look at the hoods over the eyes. Where did they come from? I didn't used to have them. In fiction have you ever come across a good guy with hooded eyes?

What's causing it? Age? Too much wine? She puts her money on the latter. Alcohol made John Cheever's face puffy, his daughter Susan wrote in Home Before Dark. Babbie cites that as evidence. I'd like to think it's age. I can't write like Cheever and I don't drink like him either.

The bags under the eyes have been there a long time. But those three skin eruptions, didn't used to be there either. As far as the rest of the face goes, I've covered up the evidence. What the hell.

March 16, 2007

These were our glory days at Washington Irving High School in Tarrytown, N.Y. Starting at the left, Bob Kisken, Grier Horner, Lee Nemlich and John Lyden. The snapshot was taken at a track meet in 1953. We were all seniors.

God, how I loved those crimson and black track warm-up suits. And how I loved track. I also played football and that was great too. Contact felt good. But a team sport carries a lot of responsibilities. I worried about fumbling or dropping a pass. In track I relaxed. It was spring. If I had a bad day it wasn't the end of the world. I high jumped with no shoe on my lead foot, theorizing that would give me greater lift. And I was a hurdler.

Lee, a standout football lineman, could really make a shot put sail. He was a portrait in power as he spun, uncoiled and unleashed that steel ball. It would land way out there, beyond everyone else's. I recently told Lee that when I see the kids practicing the high jump at Taconic I'm tempted to try one last jump. Lee emailed this message:

"If we are ever on a field standing next to a high jump pit and I see you taking off your right shoe, I will tackle you!  Thereby, saving you from greater bodily harm while satisfying my lifelong urge of just one more tackle."

The urge dies hard. 

John was a sprinter, who also played basketball and football. I don't like baseball but I loved to watch John go back to pull in a long fly ball. He had the grace of a Joe DiMaggio. John, Lee and I all went to Brown, where John was captain of the basketball team.

In high school, I was good friends with all three but I hung out with Bob. In college we went our separate ways. Now I talk with Bob frequently and get together with Lee several times a year. It's great seeing John at WI reunions. An interesting footnote: John, Lee and I all married high school sweethearts - and are still married to them.

Now when I walk laps at the Taconic High School track, this jumper who was the high scorer on his track team, gets passed by power-walking women. Some of them are my age. As they stride by I say "Hi," like it doesn't bother me, and then do my best to keep up. In vain. I don't understand how they walk so fast.

A sad note. One of my best friends, Ron Mills, died yesterday. He had been sidelined by Parkinson's for several years. Ron and I were reporters together at the North Adams Transcript back in the '60s. He was a kind and gentle man with a wry sense of humor and a Faulknerian sense of patience. Stubborn, too. He didn't back down.

Once he almost got me and Arson Davignon into a barroom brawl because he stood up to some jerk at the bar. Arson and I were trying to get Ron out of the place. He wouldn't budge. The jerk finally backed off. Years later at a dinner party at our house, Rory and I went out on the porch for a cigar. Ron lit up at the table. Charlie asked him to put it out, gave him a short lecture on second-hand smoke.

Babbie often tells the story of how Ron, who I think had just met Charlie that night, calmly and without saying anything continued smoking. The women in the room tried to act as if tension wasn't mingling with the swirling smoke. And Rory and I puffed away on the porch obliviously.

Ron was from Moose Jaw, Canada. His family will place some of his ashes there, so he will become part of the plains that were so much a part of him.

March 14, 2007

Here's the latest self portrait of the artist as an old man. You might call me an urban iconoclast. I wear stressed threads and pile on the man jewels. Not every 71 year old wears cardigans.

Not too many fashion role models up here in the wilds of Western Massachusetts. What I do is turn to T for help. T is the New York Times Style Magazine. It was in last Sunday's paper. Take a look at page 163. It's not numbered but you can count back from page 161, which is.

From the start I should be up front with you. Not everything in this photo is authentic. The tattoos are not real. The dog, Willy Boy, is not mine.

Willy Boy has scary pale blue eyes. Sometimes he looks into the house through the windows. It can be a little unsettling to walk into a room and there's that massive head with those pale, piercing eyes. But it isn't us that makes him drool. It's the cat.

You should also know that there are costs, personal and economic, in dressing like this. The way groups of people part when I approach you'd think I had leprosy. The Chamber of Commerce doesn't want me to join even though it's touting the Berkshires as a creative economy. Look at me. I should be the poster child - or poster old man - for the creative economy.

Another thing, the chains around my neck aren't just heavy. They chaff your neck. And believe me, don't run when you're wearing them. They hang down so far they hit where it hurts.

And if you think I pick this all up for peanuts at Greystone Gardens and Pittsfield Supply, you're wrong. These outfits contribute to the U.S. economy. Let me give you a rundown. Number (N)ine brown jacket $2,750, vest $650, and plaid scarf, $450. All at Number (N)ine New York, 431 Washington Street. Ann Demeulemeester Men Pants, about $565. At Barneys New York, Saks Fifth Avenue. Yohji Yamamoto scarf (over shoulders). Undercover boots. Good I make a lot of money painting.

 

March 12, 2007

This is a wolf tree in the woods across from my house. It's on the trail to the beautiful field where I would love to build a house.

I call it a wolf tree. But I may have my terminology wrong. It has five trunks. It was beautiful in the woods yesterday. Warm. Sun. Dramatic clouds. For a winter that started off without snow, the snow's still fairly deep.

I like the openness of the woods in winter. I feel claustrophobic in the woods in summer, although I'm not as bad as Rabbit in John Updike's Rabbit Run. My late friend Tom McAlpine called it dendrophobia.

Talking about fear of the woods, I wonder when the bears come out of hibernation. Babbie told me she saw big footprints with big claws the other day. I came across a bear in a tree not far from the one in the photo four or five years ago. Max, my dog, kept him busy and I took off.

On the phone yesterday Riley told me the bear would be more afraid of me than I would be of him. That would be more reassuring if she wasn't 7 years old.

Max is buried at the edge of the woods he loved. I dug a large, deep hole for him and wrapped him in a blanket. He left a hole in our hearts.

Muslim tradition, I read yesterday, calls for wrapping the dead in a shroud and burial without a casket. There is something elegantly simple about that. But I don't think it is allowed in America.

March 10, 2007

Doug Keyes' photo of the book Full Moon by Michael Light.

Doug Keyes, a photographer, had a brilliant idea. He would capture whole books in single photographs. Keyes calls this series of photos Collective Memories.

The photo at the right is from the book Full Moon that Michael Light did from NASA photos of the moon. And here on the right is Keyes' photo of artist Ed Ruscka's book They Called Her Styrene. The shot at the left is from that book, to give you an idea of how Keyes transforms a work. Talking about what he does, Keyes says his photos reveal, or conceal, a book's contents in a single image. He does it with multiple exposures of what he considers the pertinent pages of each book.

So he gives you a whole book in one take. But of course it is not the book. You can see his work by hitting photo-eye | Explore Art Photography.

 

 

 

 

March 8, 2007

I snapped this shot as we were driving through Windsor yesterday. And as usual when I go through that mountain-top hamlet I had a pang of regret about what I refused to do for Joan Bird.

This must have been 30 or 40 years ago. I was a reporter at the Berkshire Eagle and she was the paper's correspondent in Windsor. Pittsfield was trying to take a large chunk of beautiful farmland along a windswept ridge there for a reservoir.

Joan kept urging me to come up with a photographer, take a look at the land with her and write about the resistance in town to this project. I asked her why she didn't do that herself. She said it would make much more difference if I did it because I was a pro.

But I was pigheaded and refused to do the story. I felt that Pittsfield needed the reservoir and had a right to take the land.

Time passed and Joan Bird, a charming woman, died young. Her death dramatized for me what a jerk - and lousy reporter - I'd been on this issue and what a good story I missed in the process. By then the whole issue had gone by the boards and the reservoir was never built.

Errors of omission, like those of commission, can haunt you for a lifetime. But that's nothing you don't know already.

March 6, 2007

These are the mountains seen from the YMCA's upper soccer field above our house. I took the shot about 5 yesterday afternoon. It was windy and about 20 degrees.

For the past couple days we've been having snow squalls. One yesterday afternoon was as intense a snowfall as I've ever seen. It didn't last that long. During the night it's supposed to get cold, somewhere down about zero by dawn today. And as I sit here typing the wind is making its presence known.

Back to the walk. I saw the cloud formation below just after crossing the street from my house. On its reverse side the sign says Slow Children. Whenever I see a Slow Children sign I giggle to myself. It's childish, I know, but it never fails. This one is on the drive up to the Y property. That drive is called East Acres Road, as is our street which splits off of it. While there is only one house on the Y's branch of East Acres, the streets split personality has occasionally sent firemen roaring up the wrong street in emergencies.

March 5, 2007

That's Babbie about to enter Simons Market up around the lake. She wasn't picking up Bud or Coors Light. She was after a Sunday New York Times.

The crook in the left side of the photo is from the Odyssey's windshield pillar. The wind was blowing pretty hard and it was snowing. I was shooting from the car, as I had been all the way down from Manchester, Vt. We had gone up to have brunch with Lee and Jeanne, great friends from Washington Irving High School, at the Equinox House. Very fancy. Very good. And we had a wonderful time.

Babbie drove back. And for the first time I played my photographer hero Todd Hido, shooting pictures from the car. (For Hido, see January 7 archive.) I restrained myself and only took 41 during the 75-minute ride. We rode most of the way in snow squalls. Bottom left is approaching the highest spot on the Bennington bypass on Route 7. The one at the right is on the same road. The sun-blocking strip at the top of the windshield caused its blue-green sky.

March 3, 2007

Cindy Sherman, Film Still #3

Cindy Sherman broke ground in the late 1970s with her untitled film stills, 69 black and white shots in which she was photographer and model.

They made her famous. I keep wondering if I would have understood this was a breakthrough artist if I had seen them then. Probably not.

The Museum of Modern Art thought so much of this group of photos that it bought the whole collection in 1995 for $1 million. So why am I writing

about this now? Well I got interested in Cindy Sherman's Film Stills because I kept seeing them mentioned but didn't really know much about them. Then I saw her book The Complete Untitled Film Stills being auctioned on photoeye.com. It was a signed first edition with an estimated value of $1,100 to $1,300. So I turned to Barnes & Noble and got the book, unadorned, for about $40. At the right are stills #7 and #58.

So this was the first time I'd seen most of the photos. At first I'm afraid I was under whelmed. But I kept looking and I think I finally got it. Here's some of what MOMA said when it showed them in an exhibit sponsored by Madonna:

"Sherman began making these pictures in 1977, when she was twenty-three. The first six were an experiment: fan-

magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blonde actress, played by Sherman herself...The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen (#3) and lounging in the bedroom (#6). On to something, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway (#7), the luscious librarian (#13), the domesticated sex kitten (#14), the hot-blooded woman of the people (#35), the ice-cold sophisticate (#50), and others. She eventually completed the series in 1980. She stopped, she has explained, when she "ran out of cliches."

Sherman has said she uses herself as the model because: “I myself don't know exactly what I want from a picture, so it's hard to articulate that to somebody else - anybody else. When I'm doing it myself, I'm really just using the mirror to summon something I don't even know until I see it.”

She wasn't always the one taking the shot, although she set them up. Among her shooters were her father and Robert Longo, an artist who she lived with at the time.

 DSSS

March 1, 2007

Sometimes you're lucky to get a single shot you can use from a whole mess of photos of one of your paintings. But yesterday, after working on the face a little, I got a lot I liked. Don't ask me why, but I like the one below with the glare.

So I'm going to show you a few of this latest version of the Angel of Incineration. I want you to be able to see what the surface looks like, which is hard with the full picture because the painting's so big. (For reference the full painting's at the top of the February archive.)

What you have at the top is a section that is about eight inches wide. You can see the hieroglyphics I applied if you look closely at the eyes and the nose. In other paintings they jump out more but I wanted to tone them down here.

The face itself was created by rubbing my fingers over sections of the red paint to let a little of the underlying gold shine through. Maybe I should add that the angel was sketched on gessoed canvas, cut out and attached to the stretched canvas. Below are two more details. The one on the left is a section of her wings.