2016 Blue Figure Drawings with Blue Figure Paintings part 2

some versions of Pastoral #2, 48 x 48", o/c, 2012

some versions of Pastoral #4, 48 x 48", o/c, 2012

Woman in the Reeds, 1 through 4, each 22 x 22”, Flashe on Arches, 2016

This was a group of paintings that survived.

The ideas in these paintings became the above drawings.

4th Western Lagoon, Blue Figure, each 22 x 22”, Flashe on Arches, 2016

Blue Figure , Western Lagoon, 68 x 68”, o/c, 2016-17

So this piece of writing if I take it a part, a bit-- may yield something else.

My work is metaphorical-- of a thought. 

The figure, the thought, the idea-- 

or Ideal, is emerging 

from the reeds or mind.

The bleak winter into a spring,

is the process of each new idea. 

We reach for the summer 

of each thought or aspiration-- 

then necessarily 

fall back into another round.

I like to see this metaphor 

as the Earth itself 

going through its daily round.

There is a beauty in this thought, 

and a search for truth, 

and finally justice.

I go through my mind 

searching 

in some way each day, 

the idea differs and shows 

some new aspect of itself. 

I see it as poetry.

I see poetry 

as a search 

for some kind of truth.

2016 Blue Figure Drawings with Blue Figure Paintings

Last week I got an email that a show of the Blue Figure Paintings was to be canceled because of the Corona virus.

My Gallery in Atlanta was sending back the first of the paintings pictured below. I hoped to make some point before all this passed.

I had been making 22 x 22" drawings for some time the size was becoming a motif. I felt the drawing did something to illuminate the process and evolution of my ideas supporting the paintings.

drawings, Western Lagoon, Blue Figure, #3, each 22 x 22", Flashe on Arches, 2016.

SB Lagoon, Night Studio #1, 84 x 84" o/c, 2012

There began a cycling or revolving of the drawings.

I wrote something on a Facebook post that seems to explain this to some extent. This to me is not didactic as there is a subtlety that  keeps shading and changing.

"I feel strange posting through all this. ( protests and looting in Manhattan and other cities)

My work is metaphorical of a kind of thought. The figure, the 

thought, the idea-- or Ideal, is emerging from the reeds or mind. 

The bleak winter into a spring, is the process of each new idea. We reach for the summer of each thought or aspiration-- then necessarily fall back into another round. 

I like to see this metaphor as the Earth itself going through its daily round. 

There is a beauty in this thought, and a search for truth, and finally justice. 

I go through my mind searching in some way each day, the idea differs and shows some new aspect of itself. I see it as poetry."

3rd Western Lagoon, Blue Figure, B/W each 22 x 22”, Flashe on Arches, 2016

Western Lagoon, Reeds #1 and #2, 60 x 60”, o/c, 2016-17

I make a lot of paintings and my studio is always packed. Stacking is always happening. The juxtapositions start to be what I am seeing.

20 Years, an ending or a new beginning. Something has changed.

Something has changed. It has been two months here in Canaan, NY. I have been ok through all of this pandemic. Worrying about the city and the deaths. I saw a report of a hospital worker taking it upon herself to lay a daffodil on each coffin. Worry now extends to the millions out of work and the mismanagement from this President of the whole of it.

I realized that this would be the end of my routine, which for twenty years I was-- off to New Mexico, and my summer studio and new paintings.

I thought I'd review it and see it's shape as something to take forward. This is roughly what I did twenty years ago. The western idea of landscape, from my show at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in a waning Soho, to my residency at Joshua Tree, where I spent a month alone in the desert. My direction was all being questioned.

In 1999, back from teaching in Santa Barbara, I visited my friend John McCracken in New Mexico.

I was asked if I would want to house sit for another month or so. I said yes, and soon was asked also by Richard Tuttle and his wife Mei Mei whom I knew through friends, if I'd like to continue at their place on an extra ordinarily wonderful mesa. I found a studio in Abiquiu to work, and soon was asked if I'd be interested in buying the old coffee house, for not much more than I was renting it for.

New Mexico was new to me though I had passed through many times on my way to teaching in California in the 80's. It was always friendly and I liked the hispanic people and their colorful lives in a sometimes rather bleak landscape. I was busy exploring everything with plain air landscape paintings. I'd go back and paint these places and they became ideas for large blown up studio paintings.

One painting of a river bend became the background for a big figure painting. Later I saw John Sloan had painted it in the 1920's, a big rock at the bend was still there, and that it had a name, Trujillos Hill.

That sets the scene for 2000.

Paul Olsen a friend from NYC said I could use his barn in Madrid to paint in also. My studio in Abiquiu was small and soon I traveled the hour and a half or so to Madrid to work, I finished the first New Mexico paintings there and then soon after began the Madrid paintings.

I had been starting things, in the smaller Abiquiu studio in gesso and acrylic paint, not wanting to breathe any more turpentine fumes. I was finishing them in oil in Madrid, NM and then for reasons I have forgotten,  they were finished in NYC.

Some were shown in 2002 with Steven Harvey at Salander O'Reilly Gallery.

This caught the attention of Gerald Peters and I was in a show with Paul Resika and Gregory Amenoff, at his Gallery in Santa Fe in 2005.