Moonblog 2021

B-25 In Progress, detail

This is an early stage development of a large, multi-panel painting of a B-25 Bomber. This detail shows two out of nine panels. The finish will look nothing like this but I was intrigued by the naturally occurring color scheme of the canvas scraps on a previously painted and hurriedly gessoed surface. The panels that make up this painting have a long history by now. They have been in use since before the turn of this century. X-ray imaging would reveal several decades of false starts, indecision, bad ideas, and ordinary duds. This is often how paintings happen. It builds a surface quality resembling the lined visage of someone who has been around the block a few times.

Full Moon ~ December 18th, 2021

Bartlett Pear

Pears again! It's been interesting to re-visit this mode of painting, which I've not done for some years now. There was a conceit in art schools (there still is!) that you must make art that's never been done; you must be completely original. This view has infected more artists that you could shake a stick at, and it explains why there is so much tedious art being cranked out these days. What if we had that same regard for food, that it must never be repeated? Some things are worth doing over and over. I like this pear. Nothing new, really. It's 20 x 22 inches.

Full Moon ~ November 19th, 2021

Pear November

I mentioned in a recent post that I was interested in re-visiting a mode of painting from some decades ago, a certain kind of ordinary depiction of ordinary things. Fruit often fills the bill. When you look at any fruit or vegetable you soon discover that there is nothing ordinary there. Sometimes I buy fruit as much as to look at as to eat.

I've probably told you this story before but in the mid 1970s I took an evening life drawing class with David Sipress. This was at Mass College of Art in Boston and it would be many years before David became a regular cartoonist in the New Yorker magazine. We had homework assignments to draw fruit as a way of honing our ability to see shape and light. One of my classmates brought in a pencil drawing of a bowl of pears that almost made me pass out. It was so plain and luminous and sensuous. I never learned this student's name but her drawing changed my painting life for many years to come. I've had a special affection for pears ever since. I finished this one just yesterday. It's 20 x 22 inches, part of a warm-up for a much larger commission.

New Moon ~ November 4th, 2021

Santa Rosa Plums

I was doing some unpacking in the Mountain Water studio recently and I came across this paintng from the mid-1990s. Looking at it provokes a kind of marvel. I think, "How in heaven's name did I do that?" I can remember that during the time of doing this painting I was deeply unhappy and finding much solace in painting. The paintings from that time have a focus and subtlety that I would like to re-visit. Perhaps it is the unhappy times in which we find ourselves.

Lawrence Weschler writes poignantly about Vermeer, the seventeenth century Dutch painter whose luminous paintings were produced during a period of terrible social chaos, and how these paintings still emanate something transcendentally peaceful centuries later. Perhaps it's a bit puffed up to compare these plums to Vermeers but the alchemy of beauty spawned by life's melancholy may be the same. And the painting: it's acrylic on unstretched canvas 18 ½ by 21 inches.

Full Moon ~ October 20th, 2021

Brewster Buffalo

Here's a print of a Brewter Buffalo, a fighter plane from the Second World War. These planes were manufactured in Long Island City, NY. They are sometimes labelled "The worst fighter plane of WW II" and the American pilots didn't like them - they were quite heavy and not maneuverable enough in air combat. The Finns did quite well with them against Soviet aircraft. The Finns, more worried about the Russians than the Germans, cast their lot with the Nazis. A strange sight indeed to see American made planes decorated with swastikas. (If only our veterans of that war could see America now; you can be sure they would be cracking some heads together right here at home.)

This image is made as a monoprint on a gelli plate with secret, patented additions. It's about 6 x 10 inches.

New Moon ~ September 6th, 2021

Dream Room #4

This image is from a series of watercolor studies – intended as trials for larger diptych paintings. I did actually make one of the larger versions later, which has spent most of its long life in storage. It was 1988. I did a lot of these smaller versions, about 5 by 12 inches, as quick and easy color studies. Looking back at them now they seem freer and more experimental than the “finished” version. I've found that making “finished” work all to often results in an over-starched version of itself, overloaded as it can be with expectation and self-conscious vexation.

New Moon ~ September 6th, 2021

Flora

A photograph of some of the spontaneous growth along the road at Mountain Water earlier this summer. I'm intrigued by arrangements of color, texture, and form that show up without effort or artifice. This can occur in any number of surprising places — from a pristine mountain meadow to a rotting cardboard box on a cracked sidewalk. Or an old city wall with the amazing stains of human habitation. 

Full Moon ~ August 22nd, 2021

Himachal Pradesh

This is another of a series of doctored gelli prints. I'm thinking of calling these “retronyms”, a word that actually means something a little different from how I'm using it. Retronym here means something named later, for example, after some accidental marks seem to look like something. They can look surprisingly intentional. It can save a lot of work!

I'm calling this one “Himachal Pradesh”, a state in northern India in the Himalayan foothills. There was a terrifying landslide there a few days ago caught on video. Huge boulders racing down a hillside destroying a footbridge over a raging river. Several tourists died when their car was crushed. Among them was a beloved young doctor named Deepa Sharma, who moments before had tweeted triumphant images of herself in the mountains.

Full Moon ~ July 23rd, 2021

Bosc Pear, recovered

An ordinary pencil rendering of a bosc pear on previously prepared paper. The preparation in this case is a discarded Gelli® print. Gelli prints are made from a plate made of gelatin, the “real thing” made by a company called Gelli Arts. My friend Kalen Meyer first showed me this method a few years ago. Even though it's very easy to learn, I get a lot of discarded attempts that end up being great drawing surfaces. The sheets have the feeling of having already gone through their annoying formative years, that they've seen a lot already.

New Moon ~ July 9th, 2021

Vintage Saab Sedan

There is an earlier Moonblog post with this same painting at a previous stage. I was recently reunited with this version; it had been included in what we were calling our “Dadaist” exhibition at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. The show was mounted as the pandemic was suddenly catching peoples' attention; there was no opening, and as things quickly went into lockdown mode the exhibition space itself was closed. The work spent itself in isolation for a year and then we took it down.

The show also included a series of landscape color experiment paintings done in the 1980s that had never been exhibited. Those paintings languished unseen for over thirty years and finally were hung in a locked building unseen by anyone. There is a kind of purity to it, don't you think? The Saab painting here is a triptych, acrylic and surface textile attachments; it measures 26 x 66 in.

Full Moon ~ June 24th, 2021

Pitcher Drawing on Recovered Titanic Stationary

This is a pencil drawing on what is being called stationary recovered from the Titanic. This is of course, another fraudulent claim. The evocation of a drawing on ancient, distressed paper is, however, plausible. I suppose this could be related to the kinds of tricks deployed by magicians, politicians, and spiritual sophists; all woven in persuasive yet baseless feasibility. This can be a lot of fun or quite dangerous in ways that are evident in the daily news cycle and throughout history. 

New Moon ~ June 10th, 2021

Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening

The title here is from the well known poem by Robert Frost. Maybe an odd choice for the beginning of June but hey, it's been a crazy year. This is another of a series of chance operations I've been doing with gelli prints and secret manipulations. The results are mostly outside of any control on my part. So the title here refers to whatever comes to my mind when I look at the result. I usually let the prints sit for a day or two or even a few weeks before giving them a title. I can claim that I meant to do what you see.

The various parts here vividly convey trees, branches, pools, drifting snow, even some animals; but the parts never coalesce into a coherent “picture”. This mimics something of the way that the Cubists broke down seeing into moments of perception that generally do not cohere as an optical “freeze”.

Full Moon ~ May 26th, 2021

1959 Dodge Royal Lancer

This is a work in progress, another item from the “Decaying Murals of the Ancients” series. This one has undergone quite a few permutations in the past two years and I wouldn't say it's finished yet. During the image research for this I marveled at the size and weight of cars during that time. Some of them weighed over two tons! Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the suburban assault vehicles on American roads today weigh about the same as 1950s sedans.

I suppose my attraction to these cars is pretty much the same as my interest in the fighter planes of the Second World War: aerodynamic, strangly stylish, seemingly invincible. Decaying Murals of the Ancients. This one is three panels, acrylic on canvas, 26 x 60 inches overall.

New Moon ~ May 11th, 2021

Mont Blanc (detail)

This could be a depiction of the famous Mont Blanc, which straddles the border between France and Italy; it's the highest mountain in the Alps. I say this could be a depiction of Mont Blanc because it's actually a detail of a paint rag pulled from the wastebasket. I've lately been interested in naming otherwise abstract images using impulsive impressions. “This looks like such and such.” It's another form of play. You could call it deception or fakery. I prefer play. Or maybe playful suggestion. Some of my teachers at Mass College of Art would have been horrified by this idea. Abstraction should never refer to something other than itself, they might say. Well, that was half a century ago, and now look where we are. Losing oneself in an imaginary snowy mountain scene using a found piece of stained cloth might be a momentary antidote to discouragement.

Full Moon ~ April 26th, 2021

P-47 Thunderbolt

Here's a painting of a World War II P-47 Thunderbolt fighter plane. This painting appears in an earlier form on this site. I've lately been re-visiting and re-working many of the paintings in this series. One reason for this is seeing that some of them needed more work on the surface, the roughness of which is not entirely apparent in a digital format; or I may have not liked the color of the earlier version. The second reason for the re-workings is to add the star insignia. This is to denote the American origin of many of the planes in the series. In the 1930s there was a poisonous spread of fascism in Europe and Asia, led by arrogant and deranged men skilled at whipping their people into a misinformed froth. Not unlike our own time. So adding the star insignia calls on an earlier time in the USA, a national facing down of global fascism.

Working on these feels like a way to invoke a certain American mythology of our having been a decisive force in that war. It gives me an idea for a film: The ghosts of American World War II veterans come back to the America of the twenty-first century to sort things out with present day American nazis.

New Moon ~ April 11th, 2021

Chance Operations

This image is from a series of prints that make use of the accidental behaviors of plastic wrap, block printing ink, and air pockets. It's a kind of chance operation in which the results are quite unexpected and sometimes strangely inviting. The twentieth century composer John Cage made much use of this in his work and commentary. Someone once asked him, "If you don't like the result [of a chance operation] do you change it?" He replied, "No. I change my mind."

These prints seem to me to be free of artiface or intentional meaning. Even the arrangement of parts occurs without any guiding “aesthetic”. And yet the shapes can be so specific. To what, I'm not sure. Perhaps specific to themselves. The form also mimics the color and arrangement of Dutch etchings from the 1500s. Or Chinese landscapes from the same period and much earlier. 

Full Moon ~ March 28th, 2021

Grumman Hellcat

I seem to have wandered away from any kind of website maintenance for quite a few few months by now. It's more like a year and half come to think of it. We're still in the thick of a pandemic, with a bit of hope that it could abate in the next several months. Meanwhile, I'm back at the website trying to remember how to use html and all of it.

I've been away from painting, too; but now easing back into it. This painting of a Grumman Hellcat is a re-working of an earlier version. I added the star insignia and changed the color scheme. While working on these paintings of World War II planes I find myself doing a lot of poking around online to find out more details. I was reading last week that when this plane - the Grumman Hellcat - appeared in the Pacific theater of the war, the Japanese pilots were, like, "Holy Crap". Of course, they only revealed this some years after the war was over. It seems this was quite a formidable fighter plane.

New Moon ~ March 12th, 2021