Seeking the Sublime in the Everyday

 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 ...

I love my neighborhood, the Far West Village. In our early days here a visitor said, “Wow, you live in the Boonies.” We moved into our home in 1981. It was only two blocks from where we had lived but Washington Street was a line of demarcation between the brownstones of the Greenwich Village Historic District and the factories and garages of our new block. It was remote and industrial but the building had an elevator and we were expecting our second child—who turned out to be Sam.    I’d had it with lugging toddler Jessie, the stroller, and the groceries to our third-floor walk-up.    In those days, Skippy peanut butter came in glass jars, and I was mortified that Jessie repeated what I said when I dropped an extra large jar and it smashed. Our new block stood between two elevated roadways. To get to our place you walked under the    viaduct line of the NY Central Railroad, dodging what the pigeons roosting there dropped on the street. It was now di...

    Yesterday was the birthday of my friend, Valerie Bessette.     She and I went to High School together. Val was petite with silvery blond hair.  She played the Good Witch Glinda in our High School production of the Wizard of Oz.   The next year she played the lead in Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen.  Her character carried a tiny dog wherever she went, but nobody in Vermont has a tiny dog--the closest we could find was a forty pound poodle.  Val made her entrance buried under that dog with perfect aplomb.  And that was her way--she could handle anything.     The summer we were twenty-one I was languishing in Stowe with a bad boyfriend, a pile of debts and no plans for my future.  Valerie came home from New York City where she’d been going to Parson’s School of Design.  She was living my dream life.     She suggested we take a day trip to an art gallery in the next town. Just ge...

In church last week the lesson was the first Psalm: it says that the righteous are "like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and its leaves do not wither."  One of the hymns we sang had a line about a whale roaming the seas and an eagle soaring the skies. You know how something just grabs you? those two images reminded me of this quote: "Whether it be the soaring eagle in his flight, or the open apple blossom, the toiling work horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak,the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun,  Form ever follows function and that is the law. Where function does not change, form does not change." Who said that?   Louis Sullivan, 1856-1924, called the father of modern architecture.  He believed, and acted upon that belief, that a building must be solid, useful and beautiful, and designed from the inside out, with its purpose ...

This is one of my favorite drawings because it covers many of my obsessions; architecture, in particular Beaux Arts, New York City, baseball, the Yankees, (that's Babe Ruth) animals, angels.  Well, those ladies cavorting on the roof don’t have wings, but they might be angels.  I put then there to fill an empty space then decided they were too prominent so I shaded them.  There are always decisions to be made and I never plan ahead beyond a vague pencil sketch.  I like to let a picture evolve; sometimes there are nice surprises and sometimes there are disasters.  I never know. Does my perspective look a little off?  My Dad once said to me, "I like how you get things a little wonky." The Elephant House at the Bronx Zoo stands at the head of Astor Court, a series of Beaux-Arts pavilions surrounding the sea lion pool.  The red brick buildings are adorned with sculpture to tell who lives inside.  Thi...