Seeking the Sublime in the Everyday

  In writing about Yellow, how could I have neglected to mention my granddaughter, Sunny?   Then look who I found on Facebook; a Yellow Warbler by photographer Peter Riley, a friend of my brother Rob.  So I'll start with an addendum to last week's post on Yellow. Last Sunday in church we celebrated that ancient ritual The Blessing of the Backpacks, to herald the new school year, always a wonderful time of beginnings and fresh starts. And I could use a fresh start.  It's been a little weird in my studio this summer; this is the view from my windows. Remember, we're on the fifth floor. Our building's facade is undergoing a legally required resurfacing.  Sometimes these guys use a jack hammer.  I'm told they'll be finished soon. I'm not sure if I can blame the intrusion and racket for my ennui.  I began a new drawing with high hopes but it's going nowhere. There's nothing wrong with it but after I started I realized that it's a rather poor imita...

 In the past year I've participated in several art shows, and I want to thank my friends who organized and curated them, and either invited me or accepted my submission. Beth Barry, Roni Sherman Ramos, Yvonne Lamar-Rogers--do you hear me? There was a problem--all these show's had size limitations and I'd been working exclusively in a 24x18 inch format like this; and some even bigger like this; The large expanse lets me get in a lot of detail. But I really wanted to be in those shows, so I opened my folder of rejected works and pieces that I liked but didn't know what to do with. And I came up with this, and these.   I was really happy and I wanted to do more pieces like that but oh, no.  I'm all out of that starry sky and the billowing waves. And that's why I've gone back to my beloved Art Students League to make raw material for my work. Here are my new copper plates, covered with acid resistant ground, although we don't use acid any longer-the solvent ...

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...

I said last week that I'd share with you another of our grandfather's great works.  Here it is. The Float There it is in the background, with my Dad and little brother Robby, throwing stones in the bay. .  It was  a wooden platform with a ladder and diving board that sat upon empty oil barrels.  Here we all are enjoying it on a beautiful calm day on Peconic Bay.  It sat high above the water so you could swim under the barrels and come up beneath it, where everything had a green hue from the reflection of the water, and your voice echoed off the empty barrels.  It was a magical place.  Unfortunately, it was quite top-heavy so it could turn over with too many people on it, but that was exciting, too. Launching the float every spring was a huge job.  Here's how Uncle Dan describes Float Day. "The Float was kept on the beach without barrels during the winter. The putting in the water days and the taking it out of the water d...

Happy Birthday to George Washington. When that other George, King George III of England, was told that at the end of his term of office President Washington would relinquish power and retire to his farm in Virginia, he said, "Then he's the greatest man in the history of the world." Yes, the father of our country was a great man but not perfect, because, oh, yeah, slavery. It's hard to love Washington as whole-heartedly as we love Lincoln. "Merci, Monsieur le Marquis.  De rien, Monsieur le Presidente."  In this collage,   General Washington expresses his thanks to the Marquis de Lafayette for his help in winning American independence.  It's a statue that stands in Place des Etats Unis in Paris. A French coq and a Louisiana heron look on. The snow-covered trees are a reminder of the winter at Valley Forge. In a New York Times op-ed this week, Alexis Coe, author of You Never Forget Your First, A Biography of George Washington ,  says that ...

Years ago my  teacher, Leo Manso,  looked at the little book in which I was making notes and pasting random images and said, "This is a playground for you." I took him at his word and kept at it.   Eventually I started working on my yearly appointment books. Last week I browsed through 1999 and found a celebration of Vincent Van Gogh.  In that year both the National Gallery and the Los Angeles County Museum held major exhibitions and they must have spent a fortune on their advertising; the magazines were full of these gorgeous reproductions of his paintings.  I really went to town.  A playground indeed. Then I made this collage with several etchings and a drawing.  It's titled "Claude Monet Greatly Admired the Work of Vincent Van Gogh"

Sometimes an image really grabs me.  Like this painting,  Tobias and the Angel.   by  Andrea del Verrocchio  1475 I just dug this out of my files. I found it years ago in one of my favorite places in New York--a treasure, really, the picture collection of the New York Public Library.  It's a magical place.  Say you want to look at pictures of mole rats, or shoe fashions in the fifteenth century, or Byzantine architecture. You just walk in with your library card, ask the librarian, who knows exactly where you should go and writes down the shelf and file numbers--you find a fat folder and sit down at a table to leaf through a pile of pictures, some of them decades old.  I  know you can do the same thing on the internet but there's something about holding those papers in your hand. You can take them home, too. I must have been looking for pictures of angels and came upon this painting.  I was knocked out by the energy of these t...