Seeking the Sublime in the Everyday

   I'm a little early this week to greet you on Thanksgiving morning. Here's my drawing titled Happy Thanksgiving which you can still see at Chase Bank, 302 West 12th Street at 8th Avenue--it'll be there until next Tuesday, the 30th.   I'm re-posting my message from Thanksgiving 2018.     This is the south facing side of the American Museum of Natural History on 77th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. I took some liberties here; you can’t actually look in the windows and see the great herd of elephants.  They stand in all their glory in the Hall of African Mammals.  While I’m grateful that they are preserved for posterity I can’t help knowing that those beautiful creatures would have much preferred to live out their lives.   I imagine the terror they, especially the baby, felt as the guns roared—maybe his mother died first and he was left alone. I’m appalled at pictures of hunters gloating over dead animals.  I often s...

 Well, maybe what I'm really talking about is--if you put a thought out in the universe the universe very often talks back. Take what happened with my map of the world which my mother bought for me in the marketplace in Istanbul. It was a wonderful trip; here we are-Jessie, Mom and me. People would look at us and say-"Are you related?"  Why, yes, we were-are. And this is a wonderful memento. I framed it and hung it on the wall of my office/studio and look at it everyday.  And then I remembered!  This came from Turkey!  And so did Saint Barbara!   So I had a giclee print made and I'll place the copy within a drawing and make it part of the Saint Barbara project.  But I didn't know what the writing said, and what if it was something horrible?  So I wondered how I could find someone who reads Arabic. Where to look? I casually mentioned this quest to my friend, Bill Buice, and he said, "My cousin is an Arabic scholar!" Before long I had a full sc...

 One of my favorite pieces is now hanging where you can go see it in the Abingdon Square branch of Chase Bank at 302 West 12th Street at 8th Avenue in Manhattan. New York City's Outdoor Sculpture The building is the New York Chamber of Commerce at 65 Liberty Street.  Paul Goldberger, in The City Observed , calls it "too precious to be significant" and that makes it perfect in my eyes.  do you recognize the sculptures?  I'll pull out a few. This is the Sherman Monument, for the Civil War General William T. Sherman, situated at Grand Army Plaza, 59th Street at Fifth Avenue.  I love the sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and I love this piece.  I love drawing it. And I've taken a few liberties.  Here's the Sherman Monument Visiting the New York Public Library. Here's Saint-Gauden's Admiral Farragut, a work said to have changed the course of American monumental sculpture.  And Saint-Gaudens is called a "master of human psychology, able to conceptualiz...

I brought my geraniums inside this week; in past years I've just let them die in the fall but I've decided to try to keep them over the winter.  I love having them here in my studio--they keep me company!  I can't name one favorite flower, but I am very fond of geraniums--they're sturdy, they smell good and I do love pink. Besides, one geranium is made up of a bunch of tiny blossoms--E pluribus unum! Across the street from us is a construction site--a building that once was a garage, then a photographer's studio and restaurant and now will be a private residence if it ever gets finished.  I once asked a worker standing in front of it what they were doing and he said, " We're Building America." Well, I wish they'd hurry up. Everybody swears that that's as high as it will go and I really hope so.  I don't want to lose our view of the Empire State Building--what a friend's little girl re-named the Entire State Building.  Whenever I glance...