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.

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. 

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.  

The Compact Muon Solenoid detector (of course)

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

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. 

Painting Reality

 

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

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. 

These days (1)

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?