Thursday, December 22, 2011

Found Painting(s)


While packing up a Christmas gift to send off to Florida, I ended up with these two images--love the simple, graphic quality of these matter-of-fact objects/found paintings. 

Saturday, December 3, 2011

Structure amidst/in color


From a "sculpture" I made with Alex today--am thinking of new painting structures.

Friday, December 2, 2011

Basil Beattie and Claude Viallat

These days are tough ones for me in terms of studio work.  I still have not figured how one nurtures an infant AND nurtures a studio.  All in due time I tell myself, as the remnant of baby vomit on my shoulder wafts through my nostrils.  I think this current reality makes finding new (to me that is..) painting so wonderful, so soul-feeding.  Basil Beattie (top) and Claude Viallat (bottom) came to my attention just today.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Jen Omaitz

Delightful painting/collage/assemblage by Jen Omaitz.  Look here for more work.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Al Taylor

I came across the work of Al Taylor today.  More wonderful images can be found here.

Monday, October 31, 2011

Learning to (read, look, name, invent)



My first grade son brought the-above sheet home from school last week containing lists of words.  I love these lists!  (And I can't help but think there is an equivalent studio exercise for me here.)  He continues his immersion in the remarkable state of "learning to read and write."  As I watch him gather more and more words EACH DAY, I try to recall my own state of in-between--the in-between of not-knowing and knowing what words mean.  I do remember first grade some and I do remember feeling giddy about the elaborate, never ending gift of being able to read words, and then whole books!

My second son is in his own place of discovery--no less wonderful to behold.  I watch him as he stares at his own hand.  He gets that this hand is his hand I think.  But he is still trying to unlock the mystical connection between his hand and his hand moving where he wants it to move.  Every day yields a little more progress on that front.

Both remind me of the importance, and the poignance, and the hard work of existing IN the in-between of not-knowing and knowing

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Monday, October 10, 2011

Lauren Lopez Salazar



One of my former students is on a major roll for her first semester of graduate school.  How absolutely THRILLING to be so inspired by someone who started out in beginning drawing with me!  

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Julie Heffernan ("To my mind, so called old master work is really an individual...who wants to see something clearly.")

Here's a great new video of Julie Heffernan in her studio on Gorky's Granddaughter today.  I had the extreme good fortune of being at Penn State when Julie was a teacher in the painting concentration, so this video takes me back to the wonderful intensity of those classes with her.  She makes painting sound like the world it is--a heady, intoxicating thing for any young painting student.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

STUDIO CRITCAL interview

I am so pleased to be part of the blog STUDIO CRITICAL--and love that my interview entry is just above one about Blinky Palermo in my blog feed.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Ann Toebbe



I found these images of Ann Toebbe's while looking over Jered's show.  In posting them I realize how rare it is for me to post anything representational on this blog.  But the fastidiousness of these images and their over-the-top sense of exuberant (but kind of wonderfully clumsy) color and pattern grabbed me.

Jered Sprecher (new paintings up)


I just saw images of Jered Sprecher's upcoming show at Steven Zevitas Gallery.  I'm truly delighted by his demonstration of the depth and endlessness of formal play.  For a painter (at least this painter), seeing these is a great way to start the day.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Studio View: Christopher Thomas





My husband's studio is definitely a source of energy and encouragement to me often, but especially of late.  Here are some recent pics of what is happening out there, in the building just beyond my own studio. 

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Baby land

Two weeks ago today this little guy arrived--my baby boy James Timothy Thomas.  We're slowly figuring each other out.  Even now he sleeps sprawled across a pillow on my lap as I type out on the porch.

There has been no work in the studio obviously--as I'm just taking life moment by moment, or trying to at least.  But nothing changed my studio practice more than the birth of my first child over six years ago, so I wonder how this little person will make his presence known in my creative life.  

Monday, July 25, 2011

Within an ephemeral present,

we return through memory to things, places, and events in the past in order to find purpose and direction in our lives.  Meaningful time is elliptical time.

From Vigen Guroian's The Fragrance of God

As I wash my six-year-old son's infant clothes in preparation for the infant son I have yet to meet, I slide back and forth between this present moment of expectation and the first moments of Alexander's life so long/but so short ago.

Such a collision of living and remembering yield the sort of snippets of color and pattern and shape and visceral experience I gather in the studio--fragmented panoplies that start and stop, compress and expand into orders all their own.  Abstraction is the longed-for underbelly of this life I live and love--the longed-for unseen I try to eke out amidst the adamant/fluid present. 

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

These days (3)



And lastly it is high production time in the garden.  100 degree temps make being out there brutal (and let's not even talk about what the heat is like when one is 38 weeks pregnant!) unless it's early morning or evening.  So as Chris notes, the garden is exploding crazily and with significant abandon--it has long killed all our attempts at containing its sprawl.  Still, underneath and amidst the chaos, he's pulled dozens of carrots and hundreds of beans.  In between the studio, time with Alexander and preparation for the baby, we are doing our best to preserve the surplus--freezing and canning in sporadic bouts of intensity.   

These days (2)






In the time before my second son arrives, I am trying to make use of time in the studio.  I've been inundated with ideas about how to collapse collage and painting and so I've been making a lot of things, a lot of experimental stabs at working through this phase of comprehension.  When my first son was born, my studio turned over in the best way--and indeed, it seems that I'm heading there once again.