Seeking the Sublime in the Everyday

In the spring of 1970 I heard about a school that has no entrance requirements, where you could just go and work in a studio and all the teachers are artists who look at your work and advise you, but you mainly work on your own.  They had classes all day and evenings.  Well, that seemed kind of sketchy, but my life was kind of sketchy at the moment so I looked into it. It was The Art Students League of New York.  I gave them a call and the lady on the phone said, “Just come on in, you can sign up and start today.” Wow. That seemed too easy, but I went to check it out. 215 West Fifty-Seventh Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue.      I walked in that beautiful door and was hit with the smell of art--oil paint and turpentine.  It’s still perfume to me. At the office, I was handed a catalog and told, “Just walk around, visit all the studios, talk to the monitors, make yourself at home.”  The monitor is the tea...

When our beautiful library lions were dubbed Patience and Fortitude it was not meant as a compliment.  Critics thought they lacked regal splendor. Compared with other lions around the world they may seem a little relaxed;  But I love them just as they are. My friend, June, reminded me that Fiorello Laguardia, in the midst of the Great Depression, said what was needed to get through that terrible time was Patience and Fortitude. What will it take to get through our present terrible time?  Patience and Fortitude, sure.  What else? We've been through many crises, and each time we come through we think, well, that's over and we learned how to cope  And then something else happens.  It reminds me of when Jessie was two and I couldn't get her to leave the playground without a battle when it was time to go home for supper. I hit upon a plan. I said, "I'm leaving now,"  and walked away.  She ran after me crying "Don't leav...

Happy Earth Day! My friend, Samantha, said, "I think this quarantine is really Mother Nature telling us, 'Now, go to your room and think about what you've done."

You are all so smart, and kudos to your Civics teachers!  Yes, this is the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, rendered in license plates on display at the Smithsonian Institute.  Conceptual artist Mike Wilkins created this in 1987 as a celebration of the bicentennial of the Constitution. The Smithsonian posted this  Background Information for Teachers Preamble  is an artful arrangement of personalized “vanity” license plates from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The plates are organized alphabetically by state, beginning  with Alabama and ending with Wyoming, and all contain  shorthand text phrases. Read collectively, starting at the top  left corner, a pattern emerges: artist Mike Wilkins has utilized 51 license plates to phonetically render the 52 words of the  preamble to the U.S. Constitution. The words of the preamble are some of the most important in our nation’s founding documents, helping...

It's about a month now that we've been staying in.  How are you doing?  Getting a lot of reading done? If you're looking for a new read may I offer some suggestions? On April 11 the NY Times published "Plague through the Eyes of Writers", by Dwight Garner.  Step 1, from Kingsley Amis?  Drink wine in quantity. Another quote caught my eye: "The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one."                                                      Barbara Pym, "Excellent Women" I went through a Barbara Pym period; in the autumn after we lost Larry I was teaching, I had a two-year-old, and we were renovating the loft that would become our home, in a race to complete the work and move in before my due date to deliver Sam.  I sought refuge in Ms. Pym's novels, where women just carried on and th...

For some reason, my post didn't go out as planned this morning and that gave me a chance to read the New York Times. the headline says, "It's terrifying" More than 16 million people have lost their jobs and New York's death toll from the Corona virus is higher than in any country.  This quiet time is a luxury for me; I'm thinking of everyone who can't say that. My friend, Leigh Behnke, painter and instructor at School of Visual Arts, is wrangling 65 students scattered over India, Indonesia, China and the US, keeping them focused, encouraged, and working.  Here's Leigh at her neighborhood's evening celebration and thanksgiving for all the workers on the front lines.                                                                                photo by Renee Monrose, from a...

I've started work on a new project but I've made a few false starts.  Maybe you'd enjoy a peek at the process.  It's not exactly sausage making but it's not pretty. As a follow up to my book of Christmas Carols I'm illustrating just one carol--People Look East.  this is the one that inspired the whole project but it's copyright protected so I didn't include it.  For forty bucks I was entitled to make 200 copies to share with friends. that was too much of a limit on the book.  --so I'll just make it into a Christmas card. So here's how I started. Verse two says "Birds tho you long have ceased to build, Guard the nest that must be filled."  I like the birds but not the composition; everything's squished into the lower right corner.  A teacher once told me, "IF you make a mistake, don't erase it, let it show you where you want to go."  However, there's no fixing this composition. Do over. Better, a...