Does CPR work on aliens?

I had never heard of Davis Cone before. I'm not sure if he's famous or if I am only one of a handful of people who have ever heard of him. I was surfing the Internets the other day and I found his website here.

The image titled "Bad Axe In Snow" (the top) is possibly my favorite. I don't know why. The colors? The contrast? The way red, yellow and orange neon signs reminds me of the first night I ever spent in Manhattan when my two friends and I walked up and down Christopher street and stared goggle-eyed at the adult toy shops, our faces pale blue and green in the harsh fluorescent lights, which seemed to embody some kind of depravity I was unfamiliar with at the time but which was becoming altogether very clear? Something about the bright neon lights in that painting just rings true. About night time in Manhattan. I have no idea where the Bad Axe theater is, by the way. If it's in New York. 

So this is what I love about paintings by Davis Cone:

• the fact that he paints movie theaters. Movie theaters, places I loved growing up, where special things happened. 
• Cars date his paintings, make me remember parts of my own life. The same happens with the fact that his movie theaters have signs that say the name of the movie playing at the time, which is genius. 
• all the movie theaters in his paintings look familiar, because all movie theaters look alike or share qualities, and that makes me realize that he is painting something that everyone in the US will think looks familiar, and that is powerful
• that the people in his paintings are always seen from behind, or from a distance, or in shadow with faces obscured, is lonely and sad, like paintings by Edward Hopper, who I admire and also captured neon lights and harsh fluorescents very well. 
• the small towns look like so many places from my childhood, while the images of new york strike memories of adulthood, and so for me that is powerful also
• the striking contrast between light and dark
• his photo-realistic style captures people and cars in mid-movement, so that they are sometimes blurred, as they would appear in a photograph, so that there is a sense that one is capturing a real moment, something fleeting and mundane on the whole but that has been captured so lovingly here that it may seem as though he has validated and given importance to something otherwise irrelevant.

I have to be honest, I'm not into hyper realism. It has always struck me, somehow, as an exercise in futility (because a photograph would do almost the same thing) and a very impressive parlor trick (because a photograph would do almost the same thing). What is the point? Why? On top of that, the very fact that, although I'm not sure I could paint in this same style myself, I know what it would take to get it done. The hours. The agonizing. The looking back and forth, over and over, between a photograph and a canvas. The comparing of colors. The seconds spent holding your breath as you try in vain to limit your movement to only the tiniest, most precise flick of the paintbrush. Again. and again. and again. 

Seeing paintings done in this style usually has an effect on me that is similar to fingernails scratching a chalk board. It's like smelling someone's vomit and then nearly vomiting yourself. (being very dramatic here) It's a sympathetic reaction. 

SO I haven't posted anything on this blog in a long time. I'd like to fix that. Where did I go? I don't know. My last post was January of 2011. Although I kept painting for a while after that last post, my family took away from time I would have spent writing in the blog. And then there were other things. Financial stuff. Other stuff. And then last year, around this time, we bought a house. After we moved, my painting supplies sat in a corner in the garage for an entire year. One year.

A month and a half ago I got a text message from a friend. It was a funny conversation so I'm going to post part of it online: 

Her: How's ur vacation going????? U paint as a side job right????

Me: It's awesome and yes I do:)

Her: Nice! How much do u charge? I can text u a picture

Me: I don't know what my rates are--when do you need it?:)

Her: Well it's for my parents wedding anniversary and it's today. I dont need today whenever. I can send u the pic I want.

That's all I'm going to post. I don't know how she would feel about me posting this conversation, but I hope that most of you got the punchline... "It's for my parents wedding anniversary and it's today."

ahah. yes. I dont need today whenever. (clearing my throat) funny. 

I don't know what it takes to paint in a hyper realistic style, but I can tell you that I did do the portrait, I tried to make it as realistic as possible and it took me about 20-22 hours. Although my friend didn't expect me to produce the portrait that same day, I don't think she realized that it was, like, going to take the effort that it did. "It's for my parents wedding anniversary and it's today." nice. 

don't you love the bizarre things that come to you in text messages? Today I took a CPR training class with that same friend and I texted her this question: 

Does CPR work on aliens?

I don't think she thought it was nearly as funny as I did because I could barely contain myself just thinking about it.

Anyway. 

So I hadn't painted in an entire year, and I hadn't painted a portrait of human figures in much longer. probably 12 years. I don't often go around showing my friends my paintings, because I don't always paint in a style that's realistic and to that matter I don't always know how to tell if paintings are any good. But the portrait of my friend's parents I knew would have an effect on people. I knew I could show that painting around and they would understand exactly what they were looking at, and whether or not they liked it. Whether or not it was "good." Plus, portraits impress people if you can do them right. So I hadn't painted a portrait in a long time and it turned out pretty well and I had to do a little boasting, so I showed it to a couple people.

So one of my very good friends is a 75 year old man who believes that no song or piece of music written after 1930 could be rightfully classified as music. I knew he would like the portrait. I showed it to him, and also the portrait I drew of walt whitman in high school.

He seemed impressed, which was the goal. I try not to make boasting a habit but there's nothing wrong in a confidence booster every 10 years or so.

He told me that he thought that most artists would, if they could, paint realistically. That any painting style that is not realistic is covering up for general incompetence. I had inferred that he felt this way based on previous conversations (this is a man who possibly questions whether or not the Beetles could be classified as musicians, although he does get a kick out of the "material girl"), which is why I very much wanted him to see my paintings, so that he would know that I do have that ability, to paint realistically, even if I don't always choose to use it.

And that's when we started talking about Davis Cone and Chuck Close, and of course my friend had never heard of these people. I showed him the paintings.

I really don't care for work by Chuck Close, probably for reasons relating to the aforementioned fingers on chalkboards and vomit and all that. I mean, I'm ok with the work. his paintings. I do see some value in these pieces that look like photographs because the paintings have themselves become like an excuse to look at these ordinary-but-weird faces.

The best example of this that I can think of is his painting of "Mark", who I have always thought of as "man with face like rat".

Afterall, under what other circumstances would I spend any time studying a face that looks like that, unless it was painting 8 feet tall and made by some kind of mad genius? Yet when I look at his hideous clothes and wide open, innocent eyes and I have to stare at him. and wonder if he's perhaps a serial killer still living with his mother. that's what he looks like to me. If I passed this man on the street I wouldn't look twice. I wouldn't even want to.

So that's the value of paintings by Chuck Close.

But Davis Cone. Ahh.

The word that comes to mind is "loving." Lovingly rendered. Beautiful, beautiful paintings. Movie theaters.

My last bullet point in the list at the beginning of this post (which is slowly turning into like a combination dissertation and endless biographical monologue), wherein I gave some of the many reasons why I liked paintings by Davis Cone, said this:

• his photo-realistic style ...(blah blah blah)... so that there is a sense that one is capturing a real moment, something fleeting and irrelevant on the whole but that has been captured so lovingly here that it may seem as though he has validated and given importance to something otherwise irrelevant.

I decided to recap that for you because this post is like the length of a dickens novel and if you've actually made it this far, you've probably forgotten what I started off talking about in the first place. I appreciate hyper realism in this case because there's some feeling that the time he spent on these paintings, which must have taken hours and days or years, has given weight to the subject. That some things are worth spending the time on. That some paintings, even if you could have just taken a photograph, are worth painting because the subjects themselves are worth the contemplation. The time. That making a painting in this way implies a tenderness for the subject. It's like a love letter. fuck yeah. 

There's this other guy, also a very realistic painter. Jan van Huysum. They've got some of his paintings at the Getty museum, which I have been to several times. They say that he only worked from live subjects and this man lived in the 1700's and he painted a lot of flowers, which means that he would sometimes take years to complete a single painting because he had to wait for flowers to come in season and other related complications. Here's an example of his work, I believe it's at the Getty: 

I get in trouble with the security guards at the Getty around this one painting by Mr. van Huysum because he painted--I shit you not--a fly on one of the flowers. So I can admire this particular detail, I get right up against the painting with my nose like within centimeters of the canvas, and the security guards say it's is too close and they make me back off.

A fly! Who would make this gorgeous painting of these amazing, vibrant flowers, only to put a fly on it?  What kind of man, what kind of painter, does that? What maniacal artist is so OCD, wants his paintings to be so realistic, he's willing to mar it with a fly? Or maybe, what sense of humor drives a respectable person to do that? I'm not even sure what about this fly impresses me so. Perhaps because I've never seen anyone bother to put a fly in a painting before. Perhaps because it looks just like a real fly. 

I could talk about this for days. About realistic paintings and the potential value of painting realistically. 

Since I painted my friend's parent's portrait, I've been working on a few other projects. I started painting some pictures of cows, for one thing. The picture below is titled "Purple and Clarence". Because that is the name of the cows. 

My best friend growing up, who is now the person I share my life with, had this obsession with cows when we were in middle school. She made up this whole story line about this group of super hero type cows, and named the group the Good Cow Brigade, and they (the Brigade) did battle with the evil cows, lead by the most evil cow of all, Chompy. The good cow brigade was so influential in our middle school years that I still call my mom "moo" and she still calls her dad "doo", and there is still a stuffed animal cow named Tuscany sitting on our bed. 

Cows are very special to us. And I love their box-like bodies. their vacant faces which seem prideful and disinterested. Their unmoving bulk. And painting them is particularly enjoyable, especially the ones with black on them. I love black, but only on cows. Of course I have to make the black myself by mixing blue and brown--I haven't a tube of black paint anywhere in the house. Inky, dark. Bottomless. 

The painting of Purple and Clarence I like because it of its soft, chalky quality. and I like the fuzzy edges around the cows, as if it all were a dream or a memory. an illustration of some idyllic, breezy field. 

Here's another painting I did recently:

It's not done yet. But it's close. This cow might be named Coffee. Or Craig. 

And then there's another project I'm working on, one that isn't coming as easily as the cows, and that's paintings of cactus flowers.

This is my first one. It's 20x20 inches (much larger than the cows, which were painted on small canvases) on gallery wrapped canvas. Oil paint, applied with paintbrushes and a palette knife. 

I'm painting cactus flowers because I think they're beautiful, and because I think they're even more beautiful when you contrast them against the cacti themselves, which are prickly and...uninviting. 

I'm not sure where to go with this one. I feel like the flower could use some work...it's relatively realistic, but in the middle of all this unrealistic chaotic color. What's a girl to do? Does anyone read this blog anymore? if so, can you give a suggestion?

I need to go. It's late. I barely slept last night. I've started binge-watching Downton Abbey on netflix. it's a great show. I'm going to go watch it and get some painting done. Also, I just finished watching the second season of the Sherlock show on the BBC. Please tell me some of you have seen it and that like me you re-watched the last episode of the second season like 4 times because you were trying to figure out the great mystery at the end. And that the reason you love the show so much to begin with is because you love the original stories and you think that this tv show manages to be a brilliant mixture of old stories and new portrayals of them. Then I will know I'm not alone. 

New Work

Since the end of the summer I've had a lot less time to paint. But it's the new year, and I'd like to be a little bit of a new me, making more time out of no time. I have two new pieces in my Etsy shop since Jan. 1--eggs and beer. The beer didn't retain its head during the painting, so had I added ice cubes to the beer, it really could have been tea. It was a dark red beer from Trader Joe's called Jumping Cow Amber Ale.

Below is the big piece I'm working on as a part of the New York City series (see Patchwork City).



This is a memory of our first apartment in New York, now almost ten years ago. We moved to NYC from Boston in August. I spent the July beforehand packing up our stuff while the family member I was moving with spent the summer in the Bronx getting a crash course in teaching in low-income neighborhoods. It was so miserable--everything was so miserable. I couldn't get a job in New York (I couldn't even get an interview), yet I had signed a lease for an apartment, promising to pay an astronomical sum in rent. I didn't want to leave Boston, that I had come to love, and I didn't really know if I liked New York (turned out that I basically didn't), and we were moving to Harlem, and let's say, I didn't fit in there.

On moving day I was up at dawn, and I had almost not slept the night before, and I was still packing when the movers arrived. Over the course of the day the moving van sat double-parked on Hanover street and as it did it collected traffic tickets, and the movers were so slow, and while they took many breaks and sat in the shade of the back of the truck, I made hundreds of trips up and down the iron staircase to my walk-up apartment, and in late afternoon they finally left with almost all my possessions and I closed the door on my first apartment. I had in hand a big box of plants and a rolling suitcase with a few things to keep me for the night. I took the China town bus into Manhattan and arrived late, but I had not been given the keys to my new apartment. For a week I'd been asking the management company of our new apartment to mail me the keys, and they hadn't, in keeping with their behavior over the duration of our time in that apartment. The man who represented the management company--Lin S********--acted so magnanimous when he told me that he would meet me at the apartment late that night to give me keys, despite having theater tickets.

I think of this painting as "Waited With Keys". The figure at the door is standing beneath the scaffolding that they never took down in the year we lived there. That same scaffolding used to electrocute people who touched the metal railings because they'd wired the lighting incorrectly.

This piece isn't done yet. I've been working on it since last September. Like Patchwork City, this is a 30x40 canvas. The brown and green combination is (to me) like the color of a threat or some poorly disguised enemy, which is in keeping with my memory of that night. And from behind all the windows I hear loud music and loud people and strange languages. Clutching my box of house plants. Showing up in an unwelcoming place, with no keys, hoping he would be there.

Bouguereau and the Real 19th Century

I just found the most fascinating article. Bouguereau and the Real 19th Century

There's just so much I could say about this.

This article is really long and many people will probably not go to the trouble of reading the entire thing (if any of it). The basic premise:

1. Academic painter William Bouguereau was among the greatest 19th century artists that the art world had never heard of (until at least after 1990).


2. Bouguereau's work was lost to history due to a massive conspiracy of art dealers out to make a great deal of money. By defiling Bouguereau's reputation and aggressively marketing modern art, said art dealers caused Bouguereau's work to all but disappear from museums for 50 years. (Note the point of the conspiracy was not really about Bouguereau/defiling Bouguereau, but it was about marketing a product, namely modern art.)

The author is, by the way, a HUGE fan of Bouguereau. A quote from his article, describing his first encounter with a Bouguereau painting:

I walked into the Clark Museum to see their thirty Renoirs, and after leaving the Renoir galleries walked out into a major hall, at the end of which was a painting that grabbed me body and soul. It was a life-size painting of four water nymphs playfully dragging a mythological satyr into a lake against his will. Frozen in place, gawking with my mouth agape, cold chills careening up and down my spine, I was virtually gripped as if by a spell that had been cast. It was so alive, so beautiful and so compelling. Finally, after about fifteen or twenty minutes of soaking up wave after wave of artistic and spiritual ecstasy, I started to take back control of my consciousnessÖ..my mind started racing with unanswered questions. My first thought was "I haven't felt this way about a work of art since I stood before Michelangelo's David."

I know what he means, that feeling he's talking about, the sensation of being floored by a piece of art on the wall. I wouldn't put it that way, for fear of sounding...well...kinda nutty (admit it, "spiritual ecstasy" is just kind of goofy sounding). But I know that feeling.

[It's that holy shit feeling. Song of the Lark, by Jules Breton gives me that feeling, that sensation. You can't tell by the graphic on the website if you click on the link I've provided, because you'd have to SEE this painting to understand, but it's the sun--Jules Breton captured, really captured--the sun at dusk, when it's big and indescribably red/pink/orange. With oil paint, I'd have though it was impossible. I could stare at this painting for hours and wonder and think and explore ideas and imagine myself in the place of the woman in the painting. This piece is hanging in the Art Institute at Chicago, and I recommend you go there at least once in your lifetime. I'm digressing.]

I'm not going to comment much on the conspiracy theory in this article except to say that I think it sounds a bit outrageous. Artists, like writers and musicians, come and go in popularity. This seems natural to me. I'm not an expert in art history--the most I know about modern art history I learned in Peter's Contemp Trends class, and David's Modern Art History. And that was something like 10 years ago. However, this is another quote from the article:

Do we really want the works of Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning to be representatives of the best of what mankind can produce? They are a crude hoax.

Nevermind that the author of this article misspelled Pollock's last name. He also called him a hoax. Earlier in the article the author really laid it all out with these couple paragraphs:

Bouguereau was incredibly productive, painting an average of sixteen to eighteen paintings per year during his prime. But his dealer Goupil had a list a hundred deep, of wealthy collectors waiting for his work. Everything was sold long before it was finished. Dealers for these great academics sat biting their nails waiting helplessly for the products they needed to sell. Well, what kind of business is that? Any good business man knows that if you have ten of something and can sell two hundred, that you'd better get out there and find the other one hundred and ninety so that you can meet the demand and maximize your profits. But with the demand of the works by a specific artist, you can't go anywhere else except to that artist.

What a great solution Modernism had for this problem. Dealers welcomed it with open arms, and as the Academy and Salon fell into disrepute, they were the ones who took over the direction of art, and their advertising dollars made sure that the press played ball. So they celebrated artists and art forms where supply could keep pace with the demand that they were creating. Bouguereau painted eight hundred and twenty-six paintings, and fully seventy-five percent of them are master works of the highest level and half of those are full blown masterpieces. But it was still only eight hundred and twenty-six paintings. Alma-Tadema only produce four hundred and thirty-five during his life.

Do you know how many works were produced by Picasso? -- more than eighty thousand.

This seems to be the heart of the article. According to this author, you've been duped. Your artistic tastes have been shaped by art dealers who wanted you to prefer modern art--which could be realistically produced much faster and in greater quantities than traditional paintings. Furthermore, you've narrowly escaped being cheated out of a rich artistic history that was buried for half a century but that is slowly making its way back into museums around the world.

My 3 favorite paintings--I have them listed on my blog as "This is what I'd take if I had to live the rest of my life on a desert island and I could only take 3 paintings"

• The Song Of The Lark, Jules Breton


• Mariana In The Moated Grange, Sir John Everett Millais


• An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, Joseph Wright of Derby

All of these pieces are very realistically rendered, traditional paintings. In fact, John Everett Millais was even mentioned in this article as one of the unfortunate 19th century artists whose career was covered up by the modern art scandal. If I had to choose favorite contemporary artists, I'd probably pick some of the backwards, retroactive American artists like Edward Hopper. And if I had to choose favorites among painters who don't work representationally or who don't place an emphasis on representational art, I wouldn't be picking anyone from the New York School or any of the other famous art crowds. I'd be picking some of the people whose blogs I follow now--artists who have benefited from the invention of modern art. And while I was never on the Modern art bandwagon in terms of my favorite artists, I would never believe for a second that contemporary, non-representational art is not really art, or that it is somehow less than other conservative, traditional art. This reminds me of the man at my office, a very good friend, who says that all real music was written before 1900. We talk about modern bands and he says, "that's not real music". And like that, he writes off about a century of music because he thinks it's noise.

But, back to this issue about the validity of realistically rendered art vs. unrealistically rendered or non-representational art.

I can paint and draw very realistically.

Here is a charcoal drawing of Walt Whitman I drew in high school. Note, uber realistic. I'd show some examples of my paintings from high school too but I don't want to bother my mom to dig them out of storage.

I don’t draw--or paint--this way anymore. I love the artists who do, but I don’t. Why is this?

I don’t like the painstaking process of looking back and forth between the model and the canvas. I don’t like to worry that something likes "just a little wrong". That one eye might be slightly higher than the other eye, that the color of the skin is just a little too pink or the mouth looks unnatural.

I love paint. I love the dribbles and textures. I want not to worry about the "rightness" or "wrongness" of an image. Furthermore, I resent the idea that a drawing can be right or wrong/good or bad, just based on the accurate placement of an eye or an ear. I don't want the art I make to exist on such a quantifiable scale. It feels childish--the notion that accurately rendered art is good just by virtue of looking like its subject.

To his credit, the author does not imply that Bouguereau is good simply because he has the technical facility to paint accurate looking people. The author's point is that Bouguereau is a master because he paints great artistic themes with great accuracy. The themes are an important part of the painting. I'll come back to that.

There is a certain attitude, something that bothers me, a kind of bias against realistic representation in art, as if those artists who still wish to work representationally are missing the point. I believe--and I do think I'm right--that I would have struggled more with the art curriculum at my college had I continued to paint and draw as realistically as I did before I entered college. That my art professors would have perceived this as a kind of failure to thrive. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'd have been just as successful in school had I continued to draw meticulously, painstakingly, painfully accurately as I did when I was younger. (there was at least one student in my program--a non-trad, and I no longer remember his name--who drew phenomenally accurately and who I recall was somewhat revered among faculty and students). Or, maybe one does need to let go of accurate representation in order to explore, even if one does eventually come back to accurate representation, after a period of experimentation.

I'd like to point out a few things about the organization that published this article. Art Renewal Center, Artrenewal.org, has a mission statement, including the following:

• To promote a return of training, standards and excellence in the visual arts.


• To provide responsible views opposing those of the current art establishment when warranted, especially as expressed in critiques of current art exhibitions, and in aesthetic philosophy.


• To disseminate the rich artistic heritage of 2500 years of accumulated knowledge in creating traditional, realistic images touching upon universal and timeless themes.


• To advance the understanding that Great Art begins with great themes and expresses them poetically through mastery of all aspects of technique.


• To repudiate the idea that development in art requires destruction of boundaries and standards, pointless emphasis on 'newness,' or pursuit of the bizarre and ugly as ends in themselves, and to expose as artistic fraud those works conceived only to elicit outrage.

Did you notice that? The use of the word "themes"? Let me talk for a minute about Bouguerau's themes. The author of this article wrote:

It was the artist's goal to show humanity as beautifully real and ideal as possible, encouraging all to strive for such ideals. The message is: Mankind is good and life is good.

This reminds me of Keats' line about truth and beauty.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

I love all the Romantic poets, especially Keats. I've been to the Keats house in Rome and I've looked at his death mask and studied that lock of his hair and I wrote papers about him back when I used to write papers for classes and I've read his poetry and I love Keats. But I cannot escape the nagging worry that this particular statement is just fluffy b.s.

Truth and beauty are not one and the same. There's not even a lot of overlap.

Still, if you study the paintings by Bouguereau, you'll note several consistent characteristics from one piece to the next:

1. most/all the subjects are beautiful
2. most of the clothed women are outdoors and barefoot (and most of them are women), but there is no dirt on their feet
3. the female portraits feature accessories for the women (water jugs, sewing projects), but they're never doing work

This is kind of nitpicking, but its indicative of something greater going on in these paintings. These pieces have nothing to do with reality. The lofty themes expressed in these paintings are far removed from brutal, visceral, beautiful life. And, frankly, with some exceptions I find most of these paintings to be two-dimensional (as in, lacking in depth of content). There's no conflict here. No grit, no dirt, no strife. This romantic portrayal of ultimate beauty is just one limited vision of a multi-faceted universe.

As are all paintings. I suppose there's no way that any one painting could encompass all the good and bad, right and wrong, all the greatness and terror in the universe. So coming back to the mission statement of this organization...

On the one hand, Art Renewal Center seems to be making a very rigid claim that traditional art is superior to modern art (and what else could they mean by saying things like "promote a return of training, standards and excellence in the visual arts" and "creating traditional, realistic images touching upon universal and timeless themes"?).

It probably goes without saying, but I disagree. You can't measure the artistic superiority of one movement or period of time over another. Art is not moving in the wrong direction or a bad direction, and while I appreciate historical art, the current state of art is not regrettable or inferior.

Still. The Art Renewal Center's mission statement does touch on one thing about modern art that bothers me, which I will just very briefly bring up and maybe talk more about later because I've already spent waaayy too much time writing this. The modern art/contemporary movement has spawned the modern idea that art can be made anywhere at any time and it can be made thoughtlessly, casually, unintentionally, and this idea kind of haunts me. That art has no limits, is not defined. But I guess that's a different post.

Patchwork City

This is a 30x40 canvas, which is nearly as big as I can get. I have no idea what I'm going to do with this painting--I don't know if I can put more atmospheric art up on my walls, but storage is a problem. And since space is an issue, I have only a small, fold-up table-top easel, and that can't hold more than 40 inches of height on a canvas.

All the same, I'm trying to figure out how I can make the next 30x40 canvas more affordable. I'm doing another. I think this painting says more than I can articulate on the subject of my former home.

I tell people I hated New York, but that's an oversimplification. There are a lot of problems with New York. It's really hot in the summer, window air conditioning units take all the fun out of life, bugs and rodents are everywhere, neighbors are crazy, and even in the expensive restaurants, the tables are all but piled one on top of the other because there's no space. There's no space, and everything is old, old, old. Rent is high, pay is crap. Grime in the subways, grime in the apartments, grime in the air. There is no dirt like New York dirt. It's impossible to keep anything clean. The floors are uneven, there is no storage space, and the evening commute is noses to arm pits through all of midtown.

And actually, some of those things were attractive features. You know. It's kind of Romantic, all those layers of dirt revealing layers of other things. There is no place more real than New York. It's a really beautiful and really hateful city, both of those things at once. I miss it.

I try to tell people how it made me feel, but I don't know how to articulate that kind of roar, then I start to ramble and it comes out very negatively and I don't really want it to, and I think people have all heard that same story before. So I say I hated it, and that's part true. My bitching aside, awful things happen there.

What We Never Talk About

Tonight's painting.
16x20

Graffiti Face

The above painting, which I am calling Graffiti Face, is another painting I made from leftover paint on my brushes at the end of my painting sessions. There's actually nothing I don't like about this painting. The muted, dirty colors, the accidental nature, the patchwork-y deposits of color, the fact that to me, it's a face painted on a concrete wall.

I want to paint more like this, but whether I could do it again to my own satisfaction, I mean, whether I could reproduce this particular style and make not look contrived is questionable.

I also painted two limes tonight (see below). The very minor challenge was to paint them and retain the appearance that they were in a bowl, without painting the edges of the bowl. I'm pleased with the way it turned out. I bought these limes from my avacado man. I love limes. I love their thin skins and they way they fit in my hand. Unfortunately, I don't usually eat limes. I use them in drinks and in guac from time to time. I guess I'll have to use these in a beer.



I also painted the avocados I bought from my avocado man. They were delicious when the painting was done.

fun with still life paintings

I'm sure I've painted still life subjects in the past but I have no memory of it. They weren't memorable experiences. Recently I saw some paintings by an artist, I don't know her name, they were just still life paintings, but there were lots of them. The sheer number of paintings this artist had painted, all of them still life subjects, all of them very ordinary (the subjects), was impressive by itself. And then, they were beautiful (the paintings) too. I mean, they were extraordinary because the subjects themselves should have been banal and instead her attention and care made them striking in their ordinariness.

I saw what she had done and I thought, I want to try that. I want to paint ordinary things and make them beautiful. I started with food--it's the classic still life subject, right? I painted white eggs in a white bowl. Something about the luminosity in this painting--the cream colored egg shells and gray blue paint--makes me squeal (privately, to myself).


8x6

I loved the first one so much I had to do it again.


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This satisfied my egg thing. I'd like to point out that I've noticed that both the egg canvases have a very pleasing weight, and if I bang on the underside of the stretchers with an open, flat palm, the canvas makes a low, deep, gong noise. I wish I could remember where I bought these two canvases.

So then I painted tomatoes. I cut it open because the fleshy, greeny, dribbly parts on the inside are the best part.


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Then I took a break from the still lifes and switched to a landscape. Love the colors.


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And then I did a cantaloupe going bad in my fridge.


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So then the cantaloupe thing didn't go the way I wanted it to and I became frustrated. It was 5:00 in the evening. I cleaned up everything to quit for the day. I was looking a the clock thinking, great, I can quit early and get everything else done that I need to do tonight and go to bed at a reasonable hour (1:30?--who needs sleep). But I kept turning around and looking at the kitchen table, the sunlight falling on the table. I do most of my painting at night--not so great for still life paintings. It's good to paint in natural light, but tomorrow I go work and I won't get home until I've already killed most of the daylight. That seemed like a terrible shame. And I have these carrots. I bought them just today. If I don't cut off the green parts and put them in fresh water today they'll get mushy and I can't eat them then, but if I cut off the green parts they won't be nearly as fun to paint, and that's actually why I bought them in the first place. So, I dragged all my painting materials back out and set everything up and this was the last painting I made.


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The carrots are my favorite. It's a heavily textured painting. Plus,...it was a total surprise. It started off going so badly. I wish I had a better picture, but it was dark by the time I finished and I get poor quality photos at night.