studio index

Found Painting(s)

2011-12-22T20:57:00.003-05:00

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.

Sketchbook (of late)

2011-12-21T13:11:00.000-05:00

Shape made of movement

2011-12-08T14:58:00.001-05:00

Structure amidst/in color

2011-12-03T19:40:00.001-05:00

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

Basil Beattie and Claude Viallat

2011-12-02T11:31:00.001-05:00

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.

Jen Omaitz

2011-11-25T16:43:00.001-05:00

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

Al Taylor

2011-11-22T08:24:00.001-05:00

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

Learning to (read, look, name, invent)

2011-10-31T08:27:00.001-04:00

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

Pattern and color

2011-10-30T20:21:00.001-04:00

Sergej Jensen

2011-10-18T07:08:00.002-04:00

Are these good? I keep going back and forth.

Lauren Lopez Salazar

2011-10-10T21:09:00.003-04:00

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!

Abstract painting in space

2011-09-16T09:25:00.001-04:00

Planet with two suns....

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

2011-09-07T08:51:00.001-04:00

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.

STUDIO CRITCAL interview

2011-09-06T09:58:00.001-04:00

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.

Found Order (kitchen)

2011-09-01T17:54:00.002-04:00

Ann Toebbe

2011-08-31T12:39:00.000-04:00

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)

2011-08-31T09:23:00.000-04:00

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.

Studio View: Christopher Thomas

2011-08-17T14:05:00.000-04:00

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.

Baby land

2011-08-16T12:10:00.001-04:00

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.

The Compact Muon Solenoid detector (of course)

2011-08-01T09:04:00.000-04:00

No baby yet.
Oh the ideas this image gives me for the studio...

Within an ephemeral present,

2011-07-25T13:14:00.002-04:00

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.

Painting Reality

2011-07-22T17:36:00.000-04:00

So thrillingly beautiful... a link to the article here.

These days (3)

2011-07-20T09:18:00.000-04:00

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)

2011-07-20T09:11:00.000-04:00

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.

These days (1)

2011-07-20T09:06:00.000-04:00

A number of things are happening these days. Firstly, I am nearly 38 weeks pregnant--meaning that at any moment, my second son could arrive. Everything we do is therefore punctuated by a quality of expectation and wondering--is this the day?

Studio video

2011-06-23T13:38:00.000-04:00

Two UNCG graduate students made this video of me this past year--finally found where it was posted on youtube.

Helen O'Leary

2011-06-23T13:36:00.000-04:00

Two images from Helen O'Leary's recent show at Coleman Burke Gallery. I particularly love the second image's matter-of-fact crustiness.

Mark Grotjahn

2011-06-10T06:06:00.001-04:00

Intrigued by the fact that these paintings by Mark Grotjahn are on cardboard--wish I could see what the impact of that is visually, wish I was standing in front of this instead of wondering. But they still look great.

Annie Lapin ("I'm trying to make objects that I don't undertand.")

2011-06-09T10:00:00.003-04:00

Another great one from New American Paintings--

Iva Gueorguieva

2011-06-09T09:59:00.000-04:00

Love the way she is pulling collage into painting...

State of the Studio: tape ball (and some of what it generates)

2011-06-07T20:17:00.000-04:00

Some things in progress...

Instances of Disorder

2011-06-07T08:52:00.002-04:00

As ever, the collision of order and disorder permeates my daily life and my studio life.

Louise Erdrich Quote #2

2011-06-07T08:31:00.002-04:00

And now the second quote...about being a writer and having children. As there are so few instances of women talking about being artists and mothers, and as I am nearly 8 months pregnant with my second child, I am very interested in any meditation on the link between making art and motherhood.
"By having children, I've both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. [...] With a child you certainly can't be a Bruce Chatwin or a Hemingway, living the adventurer-writer life. No running with the bulls at Pamplona. If you value your relationships with your children, you can't write about them. You have to make up other, less convincing children. There is also one's inclination to be charming instead of presenting a grittier truth about the world. But then, having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I'd have written with less fervor; I wouldn't understand life in the same way. I'd write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I'd probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I'd have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I've made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor."

Louise Erdrich Quote #1

2011-06-07T08:26:00.001-04:00

In high school I fell in love with the books of Louise Erdrich. I recall writing a paper on one of her first novels, Love Medicine. I actually haven't read much of her writing of late, so I can't vividly recall why I loved her so much. I do think it had to do with her being one of the first writers who helped me see that it is possible to phrase something in the most particular of ways--in a way that no one else does, or has ever thought of before. This inclination toward invention has grabbed hold of me ever since.
My mother sent me this week's Writer's Almanac; Louise Erdrich is quoted extensively. The first quote I have to record here involves book-love, which I very much relate to:
"We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif—books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at beside, to be dutifully examined—to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can't imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is."

Instances of Order (Alexander's hot wheels)

2011-06-06T10:08:00.002-04:00

Everyone's oddness

2011-05-23T08:34:00.002-04:00

Yesterday evening I happened upon the below entry from Anne Truitt's wonderful, wonderful journal Daybook. (I read the book for the first time the summer before my freshmen year of college and have perused it periodically ever since as it is a wealth of thoughtfulness about being an artist.) I record this passage here because she writes what I experience as I move through my days between the studio and the home--so much of life and living for me is remarking on how amazing is this color against that one, in the context of a room or a person or a collection of everyday objects. Just yesterday I took pictures of a bowl of shelled fava beans, (which will no doubt find there way here soon) not because the bowl of shelled fava beans was in and of itself so remarkable (though I might argue for the remarkble-ness of fava beans actually, tossed with garlic, olive oil and parmesan) but because my eye loved the settled repetition of their piled up shapes, as well as their pale green color. Somehow those fava beans relate to painting for me.

From Anne Truitt's journal Daybook:

24 October
I opened my eyes a moment ago into the maple leaves outside my window. Almost simultaneously with the act of identifying them as these particular leaves and thus placing myself, I saw them as paintings, an arrangement of values.
The other afternoon when I was entertaining my daughter Mary in her bath, she asked me whether I thought artists were "just born that way." I said I thought they might be. "How?" she asked. I said I didn't know, but that there was rarely a time when I wasn't half-consciously translating what was around me into terms of art, that as I stood at the door--for I was on my way out when this exchange took place--I had been absorbing her brown body against the white tub, the yellow top of the nail brush, the dark green shampoo bottle, Sam's blue towel, her orange towel, and could make a sculpture called Mary in the Tub if I ever chose to. These elements arranged themselves into proportions of color, the weights of which gave me the meaning of what I was seeing. Mary and I laughed, partly out of the pleasure of talking to one another and partly out of the wry recognition of everyone's oddness.

Summer collages

2011-05-23T08:09:00.000-04:00

A couple of the collages I made at Hambidge....

Summer--finally...

2011-05-20T08:36:00.001-04:00

It is 8:15 as I write.

I am still in my walking clothes. Chris is making an omelette for us both--with broccoli from the garden. Just-cut broccoli is a revelation; I didn't know it tasted that much better than broccoli in any other state of being! We have no place to go but our studios today.

It is our summer--finally. Grades are posted, classes are ended, so the business of full-time studio work can really begin. Last week I returned from my third residency at the Hambidge Center for the Arts, a fitting beginning for summer. I focused on small collages, and so I spent a lot of time sitting at the desk pictured above. From my perch in Hambidge's light-filled Garden Cottage, I made a slew of collages which have helped me think through how to approach some bigger paintings I think, some bigger collages too--we'll see of course. For now I can breathe deeply and relish this season's beginning.

Inspiration of Late: Rochelle Feinstein

2011-04-10T18:00:00.001-04:00

Love the looks of her show, up now.

"Far from being fully accounted for

2011-03-22T12:53:00.000-04:00

and catalogued, it deploys and poses problems in several dimensions. In short, it is an 'open' situation, in movement. A work in progress."
Umberto Eco, "The Poetics of the Open Work"

Inspiration of Late: Yifat Gat

2011-03-17T14:42:00.001-04:00

In a lovely turn of events, Yifat contacted me through Facebook--to let me know of a post of my work on her blog. I then came to know her enigmatic-while-being pointedly-precise images through her website. Again, there are many more treasures than this one...

Inspiration of Late: Garima Saxena

2011-03-17T14:33:00.000-04:00

Of late I've been having these moments of intense visual love! I think the world is looking out for me--giving me amazingly inspiring things to see just when I need them most....
One of the biggest delights recently has been seeing the collage-marathon of Garima Saxena posted on her blog. I love the frank willingness to try anything and to show us that really so much more is possible here than we thought. I've just picked out six here; there are many, many more to see, and I urge you to go look now!

Teaching, teaching, teaching

2011-03-16T12:37:00.001-04:00

Yesterday was the first day of crits for a Variable Topics in Drawing Project--a 300 level drawing class I teach at least once a year. My students have worked on these mid to large sized collages for over a month at least, and they've done a wonderful job translating the still-life they set up into various interpretations of reality. I asked them to think about how one might present multiple views of any given view of reality, and they embraced the challenge with gusto!

From the top: work by Marilyn Barr, Elizabeth Weiland, Sara Phillips, Scottie Bottenus, Ashley Jones and Ivana Beck.

Oh, I should say that these are all about 4'x5' in dimension.

Writing, writing, writing

2011-03-16T12:23:00.001-04:00

Spring is arriving in North Carolina. While fall is the spectacular season in Pennsylvania, spring is our dramatic time in central NC. Nearly every tree is in bloom!
I continue to write, write, write--making progress day by day on my tenure dossier. I do look forward to a more balanced studio schedule soon, but until then, I thankfully see this row of purple plum trees as I work.

W.S. Merwin in coversation with Michael Silverblatt

2011-03-07T09:40:00.002-05:00

Michael Silverblatt: I have a final question. It would once have been impossible for a poet to easily accept the invitation to be a country's poet laureate, this country's poet laureate. It certainly once would not have been possible for you. What makes it possible now?
W.S. Merwin: When I was invited to do it the terms of it were--we talked about that--and I was asked whether there was a theme that I would want to have to string the whole thing on, and I said, yes, if I accept to do it that will be one of the main reasons why I would do that, and the theme would be something I want to talk about. My words won't change anyone's behavior but the connection between the human imagination, which I think is the one really distinctive thing that humanity has, not intelligence or language--both of which are dubious in different ways, but imagination--the thing that allows us to sit here in the Palomar Hotel in Los Angeles and be distressed about the homeless people and Darfur and the whales dying of starvation in the Pacific and elated by a little girl getting a prize for playing Mozart in China when she's seven years old. Other animals have this quality but it's not primal in their lives. It's not the center, and it's what makes us. Each one of us is here in our imaginations seeing the world a little bit differently. I think this is our great talent. It's the source of compassion and it's the source of our respect for the rest of life and for our, oh I would say more than that, our gratitude for it, our love of the rest of life. And if we don't have that, we are in every sense deprived. We're narrowed down to little selfish blobs destroying the world around us and in so doing destroying ourselves.

Meghan Brady

2011-02-01T13:07:00.000-05:00

I just discovered these paintings by Meghan Brady--love their unexpected use of color, shape, movement, composition. They are jarringly right, like proof that walking around akimbo all day is really the way to walk.
The top image is Untitled (yellow), oil on canvas, 40.5"x30", 2010 while the bottom image is called Jackrabbit, oil on canvas, 18"x14", 2010. You can see more at her website.

Notes from Artist Statements: 2001

2011-01-27T15:01:00.002-05:00

2001

•In painting, I am interested in the body’s immobility. But I look to a bodily stasis whose cause is rooted in reverie or fascination.

•The whole body apparently turns toward the place of fascination, or what I call the longed-for object, and then remains there, transfixed and longing.

The perceived vastness justifies the longing but never explicates it, and so longing continues.

I am human, and I want something palpable, and I want to make images, so first I image the body’s stillness.

Secondly I imagine what is seen. A sort of explosion. A clearing space. A never ending area. Maybe the place at the top of a great height. That which should not go together goes together.

My paintings move alongside these experiences.

Notes from Artist Statements: 2000

2011-01-25T12:41:00.000-05:00

•“Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible.” Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

•The world is stranger than we know.

•A kind of landscape appears, an odd order. The paintings are a personal grace, moments when all the flickering observings deign to coalesce, before scattering and mutating once again.

•“The human imagination is spatial and it is constantly constructing an architectonic whole from landscapes remembered or imagined; it progresses from what is closest to what is farther away, winding layers or strands around a single axis, which begins where the feet touch the ground.” Czeslaw Milosz, Where I Am

Notes from Artist Statements: 1999

2011-01-24T17:24:00.002-05:00

February 1999

•“These fragments are the disjecta membra (scattered parts) of an elusive, coveted and vaguely scented knowledge.” Guido Ceronetti, The Science of the Body

•My work habits suggest nailing down, when really I am more interested in what is left elusive.

•“strange speech”

•I realize I am attracted to the notion of strange speech because so often what arrives as the material for my making is garbled and clipped. A bit of. A nuance. A moment. The forms are usually made before they are known—almost always in fact. And so in effect, I work in the dark. The struggle comes in the fight between wanting to name them and letting them be long enough so that I may eventually observe a glimpse of what these things really ARE.

Today I tracked down all the artist statements of mine I could find. My gathering is in response to the fact that I begin writing for tenure this semester...a long, long process of combing through and compiling ALL I have done as an artist and teacher over the last five years. For now I am focused on writing my "creative" activities statement--the statement all about what I make and why. A useful way to begin seemed to be a stab at reading through everything I've written about my work since graduate school, and I must say the activity was gratifying. I realize that despite the change in appearance, my work has consistently grappled with the same themes and ideas, over and over and in different ways, for the last eleven years at least.

Above I post sections pulled from a first year graduate statement. The "struggle" remains the same; the quest for "strange speech" is constant.

New Slow Year

2011-01-05T11:13:00.001-05:00

I lazily enjoy my final week of winter break, as on the 11th I return to teaching. And so the days are full of syllabi writing, walking along the frozen, cracking ground of North Carolina winter, kimchee making (my husband is on roll and these jars are truly lovely--I will post pics soon as they are infinitely aesthetic and worthy of contemplation by any painter) and reading--The Cookbook Collector, Water for Elephants, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and waiting at my bedside...The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

I am not one to make resolutions, but this year, this spring, I am hoping to preserve stillness in my life--somehow, somehow?! How?!! Over the last year I've become attuned and quite clear on what non-stillness feels like in my head and in my body. Stillness feels infinitely better, is infinitely better in terms of quality of living/being. A good friend sent me a chapter from Scott Russell Sanders book Conservationist Manifesto. The chapter is called Stillness, and it is perfectly prefaced by this quote by Blaise Pascal:
I have concluded that the whole misfortune of men comes from a single thing, and that is their inability to remain at rest in a room.

Why do I feel compelled to write of stillness on this blog--a studio blog? For me the ability to "hear myself"--which is another way of naming what I mean when I think of holding onto stillness--has long been linked to who I am as an artist. In the days when I was a voracious journal-writer, I often noted the change internally when I was away from my journal of the moment--I couldn't hear myself very well. I knew the difference between really hearing myself, and not hearing myself, and I knew that not hearing myself impacted the joy and connection I held for making things. I still make things whether I hear myself or not, but when I settle enough to sense the inside cadences of my mind, I open out into the knowledge that what I do has legs extending further, deeper down into those questions asked by men and women for all of time--who are we? Why do we function as we do? Why do we tingle with such wrenching human poignance?

Drawing/Cooking/Santa

2010-12-29T13:56:00.000-05:00

He wanted to meet in the real world

2010-12-20T20:54:00.000-05:00

the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him. They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured.
from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

When I read this passage I felt I'd read an exacting description of my relationship to the images I seek to make.

Final/From Representation to Abstraction

2010-12-03T11:58:00.001-05:00

I had a particularly strong beginning drawing class this semester. They moved swiftly through all the usual drawings, finishing what is typically the final drawing a couple weeks early. So we got to try out some higher level thinking for the last project. They grappled with the potentially unwieldy and unlimited possibilities of turning facets of representation into abstraction. From deeply rendered drawings of cork screws and car engines, tea kettles and chopsticks they made lovely and highly individual abstract charcoal drawings. I was so pleased yesterday when I saw them all gathered together on the wall.

Andrew Masullo

2010-12-02T10:02:00.004-05:00

I love these funny paintings at Feature right now. I am reminded of how insular good abstract paintings are, how strange they can feel when encountered in the course of a day, today--and how grateful I am for the way they collide with my typical pace. These make me come to a screeching halt so I can just look, because these are what I want to look at right now.

Facebook doesn't do this, nor email or my blog...or any other blog for that matter.

Our woodstove makes me stop--with its emanating heat pulling me/all of us in.

Other things that still:

Alexander's little hands reaching for me as he wakes--and their warmth

baking

sketchbook work

raking leaves

folding laundry

soup making

singing old hymms

walking Benny

abstract painting/alexander's hands/baking/sketchbook work/leaf raking/folding laundry/soup making/old hymms/walking benny

Eva Hesse Spectres

2010-11-30T11:03:00.002-05:00

I've never seen this image of Eva Hesse's before--it's from a show at the Hammer Museum in LA.

I don't think I'd be who I am without Eva Hesse's work.

It is wonderful to be confronted with something truly amazing and indescribable--I feel the fullness of living when I see images like the above.

Eva Hesse, 20"x20", oil on canvas, 1960

Tamra Hunt and Lauren Lopez (top image is Tamra's, bottom image is Lauren's...)

2010-11-30T10:53:00.001-05:00

The Womens' Abstract Painters Group, Climax, North Carolina

2010-11-30T10:52:00.000-05:00

Since August, I've been meeting monthly with two former student, who also happen to be wonderful abstract painters and wonderful women. Tamra Hunt and Lauren Lopez bring their work from the month to my studio for viewing and discussion. Both are amazing, and I anticipate great things as they continue developing their painting language. Here are a couple views from our meeting this month.

Dots/found painting

2010-11-30T10:45:00.000-05:00

Last week (in the middle of the night no less) the massive mirror in our bathroom fell off of the wall. I cannot begin to describe the surreal reality of being jolted out of sleep by a sound both monumentally piercing and instantaneous. I also cannot adequately describe the experience of opening the bathroom door to a room bathed in shards of glass.

There is little good about the experience really--save for the fact that I find the rather large, now-revealed dollops of obviously ineffective glue on our wall interesting aesthetically and materially. I like the idea of a painting buried in the fabric of domestic life.

Fall paintings (stripes, stackings and new color realizations/understanding)

2010-11-22T13:03:00.002-05:00

Some recent paintings from this fall...somehow amidst its craziness, paintings were made!!!!

Half-eaten line, cobbled together

2010-11-16T09:52:00.002-05:00

I made some long black lines on paper awhile back--they've been hanging on the wall as my original intents for them changed and I had no need for them yet. But the other day, I took them down and discovered one of them had been eaten--from the bottom. I saw no trace of the insect, save some iridescent trails along the back of the paper. I know ultimately this is not a good thing at all from a practical paper-filled studio standpoint, but of course I love the half-eaten line.

In the studio...

2010-11-16T09:48:00.000-05:00

The very beginnings of a wall collage.

I love Hilma af Klint!

2010-11-10T10:39:00.001-05:00

Painting/color/shape

2010-11-02T10:12:00.001-04:00

Red and red (painting)

2010-10-19T10:02:00.001-04:00

In an attempt to keep Benny the dog from eating the wings off of Alexander's toy planes while I was outside in my studio, I devised an elaborate pillow/blanket covering scenario--which in the end was more interesting to me as an oblique reference to painting being a blanket/film over a substrate/support.

Source wall

2010-10-19T09:57:00.003-04:00

Order to disorder

2010-10-19T09:56:00.003-04:00

Negative Space

2010-10-19T09:56:00.000-04:00

From Sigrid Sandstrom's artist statment regarding the literal activity of laying on layers of paint:

2010-10-07T14:04:00.002-04:00

The cumulative activity of adding layer-upon-layer, is the evidential aftermath of mental engagement which in turn insinuates and provokes the next painterly response.

Her website.

Stripes and color

2010-09-24T12:57:00.001-04:00

I look at fashion because of images like this...from Prada's women's spring/summer 2011 show. All I can think about is painting.

I love Suzan Frecon

2010-09-17T12:25:00.002-04:00

cathedral series, variation 5 (closer), oil on linen, at David Zwirner right now...

Silence and drawing

2010-09-16T10:54:00.002-04:00

This past summer I was given the opportunity to spend a week largely in silence, at a retreat center in rural Pennsylvania. I sensed the week was what I needed after a particularly frenetic couple of months, but I was not really sure how time spent without speaking to other people would help. In the midst of the silence, I understood how fast I was living internally, and how an interior moving at the speed of highway 95 is not conducive to the kind of living and looking I desire. I emerged in place, and firmly so--to a degree I had not ever felt before. The greatest gift was a moment during a walk down the most remote of Pennsylvania backcountry roads, ever reminiscent of the kind of country I grew up in as a child (and have come to believe is the most beautiful soul-feeding country on the planet--at least for my soul). While walking I had the deep sense, nearly visual, of my life in parts--and for a moment all the pieces of that life appeared as they are, deeply--revealing precision and order and rightness. The pathos of life and living endemic to being human did not disappear, but perspective lit the whole view with, of all things, calmness.

I write about that week now because thankfully I feel the silence seeping into the rest of my life, even when I am moving and talking and, as I so often am, teaching. I understand, newly, how teaching drawing is not just a method by which techniques for convincingly portraying reality are transmitted, but rather, a chance to work with others in slow pursuit of stopping long enough to simply see what is in front of one's eyes. While a graduate student, I wrote "the world is stranger than we know" in a sketchbook. I don't remember where I found the phrase, but I loved it because my Pennsylvania-born eyes saw the words to be true of the calla lilies growing behind the California apartment of my grad school years. Now I see that things/places/people/spaces don't need to be exotic to be singularly strange, notable and arresting. Things can merely be what they ARE--and simply seeing what is is strange enough.

A student brought me an extraordinary book of Ivan Albright paintings two days ago. At the start of the book is a foreward by Jean Dubuffet. He writes, There are few pictures as alarming as those of Albright. Because what they represent to us belongs not to our accustomed world. Or rather, and this is what baffles so utterly, we see in them objects that we easily discern to be those which surround us but which are nevertheless unknowable. Never have we suspected that these objects could be clothed with such an aspect. This strange aspect is so impressive and has such convincing authority that no possibility is left to us of doubting the fixed reality. It is the reality of our customary views of things that we are as soon called upon to question.

Gerald Davis

2010-09-09T17:15:00.000-04:00

Oh, and then on Sunday, I would go back to New York to see these paintings, by another friend and former classmate of me and Erica's...Gerald Davis at Salon 94.

The above painting is courtesy of Salon 94 and is Baby Worries, 22"x30", 2010.

Hamlett Dobbins and Erica Svec

2010-09-09T17:10:00.000-04:00

Two of my friends have openings tomorrow night. If by some miracle of time and space I could head up to New York to see Erica Svec's show of recent paintings at Larissa Goldston and then down to Memphis to see Hamlett Dobbins's new work at David Lusk Gallery I most certainly would. This is work that excites me and makes me want to RUN to the studio to make paintings.

The top image is Hamlett's, courtesy of David Lusk Gallery, called Untitled (for L.Y./E.I.E), oil on linen on panel, 18"x16", 2010.

The second image is Erica's, courtesy of Larissa Goldston Gallery, called Eyes and Thighs, oil and acrylic on canvas, 62"x54", 2010

Maurice's drawing box

2010-09-08T11:20:00.000-04:00

Maurice, one of my graduate students, is the owner of this fantastic drawing box.

Kelly O'Briant

2010-09-08T11:18:00.000-04:00

I traded a painting for this lovely tea pot made by my friend Kelly O'Briant. As Chris and I are avid tea drinkers, I couldn't resist the great shape and design of this pot in particular. I love seeing it in our kitchen each morning upon waking.

Red and Green

2010-09-08T11:12:00.001-04:00

The tomatoes are done--I pulled them all out of the garden this weekend. The okra appears far from done, though I must admit I wouldn't be terribly sad if it were through with growing either. I am ready for butternut squash, kale and cabbage. And apples are calling to me at our Saturday morning farmer's market.

Christopher Thomas (Third)

2010-09-03T10:16:00.001-04:00

I believe this is a drawing for an eventual painting.

Christopher Thomas (Second)

2010-09-03T10:11:00.000-04:00

Another one from this summer, watercolor on paper, full size image and detail.

Christopher Thomas (First)

2010-09-03T10:10:00.000-04:00

As it turns out I am married to an artist--a very good artist. I love his recent paintings and as I always put work I love on this blog I'm posting a recent painting and a detail. The painting is a large (3'x4' roughly, maybe bigger) watercolor on paper.

Sketchbook work

2010-09-01T15:23:00.001-04:00

I spent the day working in my sketchbook. I followed tangents. I made up silly rules to follow--and then abandon. I examined one color against another, one texture against another, one shape in relation to another, etc. Ultimately I exercised my looking--good preparation for a return to my newly renovated, now up and running studio.

This morning

2010-08-25T08:23:00.001-04:00

was rainy and dreary. But my son, with gusto in his heart and determination in his stride, walked up those school bus steps. I promptly started to cry as the bus pulled away, but really I cannot be happier inside. He has taken to this world with excitement and confidence in who he is. He heads out with curiosity and a delight in the prospect of learning to read (as then he can "take books everywhere" he tells me, while I nod in complete understanding at that wonder upon wonders). He knows to say thank you and please and he knows to help those who might be a little sad today. I am so proud to be his mother.

New studio phase

2010-08-20T13:35:00.000-04:00

It's been about a year since I first cleaned up the unused garage just off our house so it might become my studio. The space has really good bones--solid, wood paneled walls, a built in work table and rafters that will be perfect for an eventual lighting update. But first we needed to get rid of the garage door and cover the main working walls with drywall. This all happened in the last month and what a difference! I am thrilled with all of the new light streaming in through the big glass door, and I am so happy to have good tackable wall space again. Now I can get some new collages going with a lot more ease.

Melting

2010-08-18T21:00:00.004-04:00

An older drawing on paper--from Fall 2009. I am seeing it anew of late though. Of the pile of images made at that time this one has risen to the top.

I am back to writing syllabi (two down, one to go) and I'm hoping desperately to grab a few moments in the studio before the semester begins next week. Maybe, just maybe. Though realistically this notion will not happen. As Alex is no longer in his summer program, Chris and I are back to balancing our work day with a lovely, energetic five year old who has just one week left until he begins kindergarten. We go about our days normally, with an eye toward preparing for the start of all our schools. But in some way we are all also waiting/dreading that moment when Alexander will disappear onto that school bus...which will then drive on down the road while I stand still, watching, no doubt feeling just about ready to implode.

I am not sure how the above image turned into a post about me imploding. But then if this blog is anything it is an attempt to see what happens when an ostensibly formal abstract image is placed right next to these lived (visual) moments of a life/our lives--a pile of orange carrots, a yellow school bus with black stripes, my son's red hair.

Before and after

2010-08-17T19:25:00.001-04:00

It's been a lot of days since I've posted.

Not a lot of studio work has happened because the studio has been under renovation. Principally, the garage door was taken out and a glass door with screen was installed. In addition two major walls were covered in drywall. I suppose one has to be be a painter or an artist keenly interested in tackable walls to appreciate how wonderful these changes are to my studio. I finally got everything back to working order today!!!!! (Just in time for classes to resume next Tuesday.....)

A Gate At The Stairs by Lorrie Moore

2010-07-25T13:40:00.003-04:00

I go through phases of reading--phases where nonfiction seems more real to me and more necessary, and so I just read nonfiction. I was in a nonfiction phase in graduate school and in the five years (roughly) following that time. When my son was born I found it hard to get much reading done at all as I went to the studio while he slept during the day, and at night my head was too tired to do much more than watch old episodes of Lost or The Wire with the help of netflix.

Of late I have been in a fiction reading phase. For now memoir or actually-happened fact does not call me. Invention and story are the draw, as I want to settle my painter's imagination in my own work or in the worlds created by writers. I don't leave my own space when I travel to a work of fiction that holds me, but instead step along an ancillary path that gives me more of the information I crave. Last night I finished reading Lorrie Moore's A Gate At The Stairs, a book narrated by one of the most captivating, resonant, humorous and smart female characters in recent fiction. Why are there not more of these in contemporary fiction? Or maybe I just need to read more. Here's an excerpt from the book that reminded me of many a late night with book in hand in an old home without air conditioning:

Every night I lay in my bed, staying up past ten, reading. The light from my lamp attracted insects through the holes in one of the screens, and by eleven I would look up at the ceiling and it would be crawling with bugs, small, medium, and large, light and dark, all collecting up there in omincous flocks as if awaiting Tippi Hedren. Once, a leggy winged albino think landed on my book, and its oddness fascinated me, though I soon slammed it between the pages. Once I awoke in the middle of the night and could see that through the crack in the door and the badly settled frame there was a long sliver of light from the hallway, and fireflies could enter the room; they sparkled in and out like fairies, as if the door were nothing at all, as if there were no separating this room from any other space. They were like visions, really, but ones I'd not had as a child, when I'd slept through the night with a depth and stillness that was no longer possible.
p. 290 from A Gate At The Stairs by Lorrie Moore

I've been away from home in the last week and will be gone this coming week too, so I will not be posting much, if at all, until the start of August. I am very fortunate to be heading to a retreat centered on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.

Pure summer

2010-07-10T19:07:00.002-04:00

Orange diagonals surrounded by a radial white grid

2010-07-10T19:06:00.000-04:00

(We have about a million carrots in the garden right now.)

Dear Ross,

2010-07-09T17:38:00.002-04:00

Just completed a picture (Picture?)--the last stages of doing it was a 24 hour bout--so many images and structures painted out--They do not satisfy now. Something is happening to me and I do not know what it is.--As I look at it now, after some sleep, it feels so compressed--ordained and remote. Yet it is so simple to look at. No--it is not simple to look at all. It is as if now for all the mind--whose thoughts are pinned--riveted down--but it moves the mind--IN A NARROW RANGE--moves, not roams. The least--almost nothing for the eye--just enough--one even doesn't need to "look"--too unnerving. When I am away from it, my thoughts revolve around the image. Where has it been before, masked & hidden. I think I have known this image all my life but did not make it visible before.

-Philip Guston in a letter to Ross Feld from Guston in Time by Ross Feld

When I read Guston's wrangling with words I feel relieved. Often I struggle to put words to what I do in the studio and feel like all I can do is cobble together a bunch of phrases and dashes. There is a strange sort of verbal inarticulateness that characterizes the attempt to write out a visual process, and I wrestle against that inarticulateness--I desire verbal equivalents, or at least clarity! But here the inability to say what is felt when making a painting is utterly beautiful. And all I can think at the end of reading is that yes, he nailed it, that is exactly what making is like.

I am thinking about my friend Melissa too, as I write this out--as I believe she will know what I am trying to say.

OF

2010-07-08T15:05:00.001-04:00

Window (fifth notable image from the last week)

2010-07-07T11:31:00.000-04:00

My mother is able to find the neatest things for children--of late she brought us these window decals, and Alexander was quick to turn our panes into see-through abstract paintings. Another collision! Here I am intrigued by the melding of home life/domesticity with a formalist abstract language redolent of Kandinsky.

Cows with color (fourth notable image from the last week)

2010-07-07T11:24:00.000-04:00

Our home is surrounded by fields that are periodically grazing land for cows. The latest batch of cows arrived while we were away and, with each new day, are moved systematically around the field to enjoy fresh grass. Yesterday morning they munched away behind the clothes line, and I was struck by the collision of animal life with these two rectangles of color hovering in front. I don't quite know how the essence of such an idea would make its way into an abstract painting but the thought interests me.

Fourth of July Feast! (third notable image from the last week)

2010-07-07T11:19:00.000-04:00

We celebrated the 4th with good friends who have a gift for making and assembling extraordinary feasts! I had to take a photo of our beautiful appetizer plate--all food from Jerusalem Market, a nearby Middle Eastern market.

Green and Red (first and second notable images from the last week)

2010-07-07T11:14:00.003-04:00

I've been silent here for a time due to a trip to the beach last week. Two images from our vacation...one of the palms we passed each day en route to the sand and water and of course a shock of sandy red hair bent over some recent new discovery.

In the studio today

2010-07-06T20:41:00.003-04:00

Orange/Blue

2010-06-24T16:05:00.000-04:00

From Sara's Columbia home of color!

What does an abstract painter draw from life? In little orderly rows?

2010-06-24T16:02:00.001-04:00

Dragonflies, of course.

Details from Columbia...

2010-06-24T16:00:00.002-04:00

Sunday/morning/last day

2010-06-20T08:25:00.001-04:00

Saturday drawing/collage

2010-06-19T16:31:00.001-04:00

Sketchbook/Columbia

2010-06-19T16:29:00.002-04:00