Past Interiors

I saw this painting by Carl Holsoe (19th century Danish painter) online and was blown away.  I have done a few interiors.  Currently, I'm working on one of the Vineyard house.  I have lots of photos of that house.  But Holsoe's piece made me think of my Connecticut home.  We moved in when I was two months old.  I even got married there.  Sadly, the only photographs I have of rooms are full of people.  I love these people but they are blocking architectural details.  Had I known when the house was sold in the mid-nineties, that I would become an artist and want to plunder its riches, I would have taken better photos.  I do have a video of the house which I watched yesterday. Seeing the house again made me desperate to paint it.   I spent hours trying to capture still images from the video.  I was not successful.  The video is old and grainy.  Then again, so am I.

The Sisyphus Stairs

I know the title is not grammatically correct.  Probably should be the Sisyphean Stairs.  (For an ex-writer, my grammar is embarrassingly  fuzzy. )  These are the stairs I scrape every summer.  It was far more fun to paint them on canvas.

Looking for Mr. what'shisname

Given that I spend a good chunk of my day trying to remember where I left something, I should be thrilled with the Advent of the Search Engine.  I don't begin to understand how it works, (I'm still trying to understand how atoms  zing around inside solid objects).  Nonetheless, I use the search feature everyday.  Sheer indulgence.  I have a shelf of reference books from when I was a writer. They mock me with their dust.  I've read that you retain more facts  from reading a book than searching online.  I've forgotten where I read that.
The thing is, search engines have no loyalty.  They'll tattle on me and you to anyone who asks.  My blog site has a feature that allows me to see what word searches are directed to my site.  This week:  damien hirst flies, gold leaf, dragons, stair history, and (my favorite) raw chicken.  I'm willing to make a deal with the cyberdevil.  I will go back to using reference books if someone will invent a search machine that will find the really tough stuff, like where I've left  the instructions to the thermostat.

Professional Jealousy

 The other morning, in the slipstream between dreaming and waking, I found my mind was playing Van Morrison's "Professional Jealousy" over and over.  I tend to pay attention to what ever my subconscious offers up at this time of the day.  Sometimes it results in a good painting, other times, a waste of paint.   I work in a building with over 100 artists (should they ever show up at the same time, which, thankfully, is not likely).  Some of them are very successful, even in this lame economy.  Others, not so.  I try (some days more successfully than others), to embrace other artists' good fortune.  One of the successful artists is a good friend.    I can't be jealous because her success defies logic. It's almost unnatural.   She has friends who can't bear to hear of her latest sales, so she doesn't tell them.  Another friend tells me to never let on if you're doing well because people will hate you for it.  This is not a problem I ever expect to experience.  I try to remember what Diane Tesler once told me when I was bitter.  She said it meant that people were buying art and that was something which should make us all happy.

"Believing is Seeing"

This is a photo of a Teslertown (Kewanna), Indiana storefront.  I wanted to paint it as it has nearly everything I like in subject: peeling paint, odd shapes and most of all, major quirkiness. But the longer I tried to translate it onto canvas, the more I lost my nerve. You see, the cars are not a reflection in the window.  They are actually inside the building.  This raises all sorts of questions, like how did they get in through that  door.  Or, better, why are they in there? 
Which is a roundabout way of getting to the point of this blog.  A book review in Sunday's Washington Post featured Errol Morris' book "Believing is Seeing".  The book is based on his blog in the New York Times.  Quoting the review: "Facts matter in the way that photographs matter: They tell us something but never reveal the whole story.  Photographs edit reality: they conceal even as the reveal....A photograph 'brings time forward, but also compresses it, collapses it into one moment.'  It is a moment that is found in the image but lost to the present.  'Eternally trapped in the present, we are doomed to perpetually walk 'in front' of the past."

Seriously, Malawi?

I have been at this blog for a year.  I am not sure how one quantifies a successful blog.  It hasn't sold any paintings or brought in any  revenue, but I do enjoy flexing the writing muscle.  I was a writer for 20 years. When I discovered pastels, I abandoned the written word.  So after ten years of painting, I enjoy writing again.  I made the mistake of looking at my Stats page today.  From it I learned that Google has made liberal use of my images.  People from the Ukraine and Lativia seem very interested. Google's tag line, 'some copyright may attach' is patently useless.  My Traffic map shows that I am big in Malawi.  I have been to Africa, but confess I had to look Malawi up on a map.  I haven't painted any African landscapes.  Close as I came was this piece, Origins, from 2008.  I can't remember if I gave it away or painted over it.  But here's to you, Malawi....

Dancing on her Grave

The above photo from the Sixties shows my mother dancing a jig on her newly purchased grave.  Formerly Wampanaog Indian land, it is now home to many non-natives. My mother died a slow, debilitating death that made a mockery of  her zestful life.  I love this picture because it reminds me of the woman she was.  It's sometimes hard to erase the memories of her final 12 years when she was a decidedly different person.   It reminds me of something Cormac McCarthy wrote in All the Pretty Horses: "It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they are starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all."   I'm not young but, as I intend to be buried there as well, I hope it doesn't become an Indian casino.