painting

This way?

Or maybe this?

A bit of turquoise?

The changes are subtle but make a difference.

 Sometimes it's difficult to know when a painting is finished.

I am really getting into these dark paintings. Start with black and work out from there.

And then there are cats and flowers.

Everywhere.

Provincetown, looking, painting

I took my son Matt to Provincetown last week. He likes off-season beaches

 and art, and P'town has an abundance of both.

I showed him my favorite galleries, gardens and houses, 

and he showed me things I'd never noticed,

like this gorgeous bit of sidewalk inlaid with iron and glass.

What's the story behind that?

There's a garden filled with sculptures I love to view through the wrought iron gate

but I never noticed the stunning stone wall

studded with geodes, minerals, marbles, glass orbs.

Provincetown has given me plenty of painting inspiration.

I'm feeling good about the switch from acrylics to oils

and these most recent pieces. Some clarity is emerging.

orange roses, pink seas

Through the week I've watch the orange roses (here) go from debutantes 

to roses of a certain age.

 The color gradations knock me out.

These abstract closeups help me see them in a new way.

For me, that's what art does.

Yesterday, I finished a quasi-impressionistic painting of roses 

and painted this

and these.

It's been a hot weird week and it felt so good to break into something new.

I have a green land, pink seas series in mind

inspired by the peony bud in this post.

Peonies, they took over our lives for a while, didn't they?

around here, early summer

Every morning, I open a couple of windows for the cats. Having indoor cats has been much easier and better than I expected, but I do what I can to give them a bit of the outdoors. They love to nibble on wheat and oat grass, nap in the window sills and watch and listen to the birds, squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits. I'm sure they are smelling and hearing all kinds of things too.

This marvelous picture is from a video of a dog with his head out the car window. It's by Julie Andreyev, and is at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, in an exhibit of artist and animal collaborations. I went there to see the Turner and the Sea exhibit, which was wonderful. It includes maritime paintings by other 19th century artists, putting Turner in context. I particularly enjoyed the selections from Turner's sketchbooks and small paintings. When I was in college I went to London and saw his work for the first time. His skies and seas touched me deeply and influenced my own painting and the way I looked at art.

These are a couple of the small studies I've been doing,

 thinking about painting them big. Really big.

My favorite part of summer is sitting on the porch in the evening, 

reading and watching the light change.

I hope that you are enjoying early summer (or winter if you are on the other side of the globe).

Last night I went to see The Lunchbox, and recommend it if you like small, charming movies,

or, like me are obsessed with India.

Nova Supernova

In New York I jumped at a chance to see Meredith Pardue's show Nova, Supernova at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts. I tell you I did not want to leave that gallery, but to stay, surrounded by her paintings. That's the feeling I get sometime with flowers and certain landscapes (I really felt it in New Mexico) and the ocean. I want to inhabit, really inhabit that space, let the leaves, petals, water, pink hills, colors, become part of who I am. 

I have admired her painting via the internet, and expected it to be more watery, but they are actually quite textured. You can see a short vimeo of her working here.

all I want to do is sit on a verandah

I'm still painting all the greens. Sometimes flowers creep in. Sometimes I paint other things, but these are the ones that feel most fully realized, the most me. I'm working on some inspired by geography and topography that are different--no grids. Deltas, rivers, fields. Still plenty of greens.


Vocation
Sandra Beasley

For six months I dealt Baccarat in a casino. 
For six months I played Brahms in a mall. 
For six months I arranged museum dioramas;
my hands were too small for the Paleolithic
and when they reassigned me to lichens, I quit. 
I type ninety-one words per minute, all of them 
Help. Yes, I speak Dewey Decimal.
I speak Russian, Latin, a smattering of Tlingit. 
I can balance seven dinner plates on my arm.
All I want to do is sit on a veranda while 
a hard rain falls around me. I’ll file your 1099s. 
I’ll make love to strangers of your choice. 
I’ll do whatever you want, as long as I can do it 
on that veranda. If it calls you, it’s your calling, 
right? Once I asked a broker what he loved 
about his job, and he said Making a killing. 
Once I asked a serial killer what made him 
get up in the morning, and he said The people.

I found this poem, and many others I love on this Tumblr. It reminds me of me. One day I will make a list for you of the many jobs I've had. It's raining in Lowell; out the studio windows I see smokestacks and freight trains. Inside I look for more greens.

flowering fleeing

And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,
Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree.
It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self-shattering power,
And it was all aimed at me.

What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?
What is being? What is truth?

Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,
All hover and hammer,
Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.
It is now. It is not.

           - Osip Mandlestam, 1937

The last known poem written by Mandlestam, shortly before being sent to a Gulag camp by Stalin, where he died in 1938.

                                

we are the night ocean

 So many birds stop by before it snows. I fill the feeders and scatter seed on top of the old snow, watch them swoop in, cluster, chatter. It's bitter cold again and I'm reading a wonderful book, Body & Soul by Frank Conroy. New York in the 1940's, a lonely, neglected young child prodigy taken under the wing of a neighborhood music store owner. A book filled with heart and soul.

I'm going to have tomato soup with grated cheddar cheese in it for dinner, while the rest of the family eats Cuban pork sandwiches from leftover pork Bob made last night. (I have never acquired a taste for pork.) I have some good clementines too.

Whenever I post something personal (like family pictures) I have to overcome the urge to remove them, and then I usually put up another post the next day, a more impersonal one---birds, books, mugs of tea...

We are the night ocean filled
with glints of light. We are the space
between the fish and the moon,
while we sit here together.
                            
                                   -Rumi

we are stardust

My son Matt's paintings

take me to distant galaxies.

pine needles, fragments

 I've been painting evergreens, lots of them. A large canvas divided into grids (again) with two or three trees in each square. I started out simple, but I keep adding layers and thinking about all the ways we see them--close up, at a distance, layered with other trees, in the forest, against a house, in the house...soft needles, sharp needles, spruce, pine, fir, cypress, juniper...

When I paint something realistic I'm more interested in the idea of the thing, the sense of it, than the thing itself, so it becomes semi-abstract (or semi-realistic) like a quick glimpse out the window or a memory, or a line in a poem. Edges, fragments.

One of the things I like about painting-- I don't have to think, (beyond simple questions of color and composition). I'm completely absorbed in the moment. Like a dance or jazz--improvisation, meditation.

the gorgeous nothings

Solo retreat in Provincetown--long walks, good art, crazy sunset, interesting conversations.

"Provincetown is, always has been, an eccentrics sanctuary."

                                                  -Michael Cunningham

Green. I can't stay away.

Each little square is an exploration.

Also,

The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shaccochis. Great book. Read it if the description makes it sound like your kind of thing.

New Directions is publishing reproductions of Emily Dickinson's writings on envelopes. The Gorgeous Nothings.

Jellyfish are taking over. And, Inside the mind of an Octopus. 

moss, olive, khaki, etc.

I'm working on changing my online habits--thinking about how I use the internet, and how it uses me. What I dislike the most about the world wide web, and what scares me, is how rapidly it has consumed so many aspects of my life. Rebecca Solnit articulates my feelings in  this wonderful essay. 

"That bygone time had rhythm, and it had room for you to do one thing at a time; it had different parts; mornings included this, and evenings that, and a great many of us had these schedules in common." 

But I've missed this place, this web log--and it feels like an actual place, and not just words and pictures on a screen. I picture a spiderweb with tiny dots on it--I'm one of the dots, and you are one too.                        

And Seamus Heaney died. I felt such a connection to him, through his poetry, his love of language and nature, of mournful beauty. Last spring  I wrote about the frog pond and how it brought to mind his great poem Death of a Naturalist. 

Recently, when I realized the raspberries were blackberries I thought of Blackberry Picking. 

"...red ones inked up and that hunger
sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots
where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots."

The last time I posted paintings, Steve commented, "I'm really motived artistically by seeing these. I suddenly want to see how much red I can add to the greens before they're no longer green. Moss, olive, khaki, etc." 

Despite my passion for the color green, I didn't see that I'd been painting mostly brighter tones, that I'd missed an entire family of shades. I thought about that the next time I painted. (Thanks, Steve.)

I keep looking, and there's always something more to see.