Moonblog 2025
This isn't really about the moon, I started out calling it a moonblog because I had an enthusiastic and youthful ambition to make a new homepage image twice a month on the new and full moon. The home page shows a featured image —sometimes freshly minted, sometimes seasonal, sometimes from years past— along with improvised ruminations, something like a leisurely blog. Previous years’ entries are here for your perusal; see the links, below.
The sharp-eyed visitor will notice that the year 2020 is entirely missing. I'll let you guess possible reasons for that. Also, 2023 seemed to dribble off into the sunset in late March. I can honestly blame Covid and a general sense of losing track. This year is already off to a slow start; good heavens it's almost September! I think what I'll do is add some hits from the past to fill in most of this year. I'll pick up the regularity in good time, perhaps with a more realistic schedule.
Pluvia
This image is from a series called Pluvia, seen in its entirety elsewhere on this site. This series and its cousin, the Helios series remain favorites of mine. They're small, a bit crude and evocative of paintings done at least a few centuries ago. Done on scraps of cotton muslin, they seem to resist the domestication of framing or matting. These paintings also have a hidden quality of sudden vividness invisible to a speedy, impatient mind.
New Moon ~ August 23rd, 2025
Spans (work in progress)
Some months ago I started an experiment in composition: taking a small rectangle, about postcard size, and dividing it into three areas. The exercise continues and has led to some off-ramps. This one is obviously more than three sections but it makes its way toward another phenomenon: areas that are not fixed as either space or solid, sometimes referred to as figure and ground. If each area can exchange itself for either space or solid, it activates the surface in ways that can enliven the viewing. It's an oldie but a goodie.
Waning Gibbous Moon ~ May 26th, 2024
Cuerno Verde Dyad
A few days ago I was up on Mt. Greenhorn in southern Colorado, one of my favorite places on our planet. To the casual visitor it's a homely and scruffy place – messily lumbered over the past century, far less spectacular than it's younger neighbors in the nearby Sangre de Cristo mountains, and not boasting enough height to attract the kind of atheletic scramblers trotting up and down the Colorado mountains. Some say it's one of the oldest mountains in the western hemisphere. So she's like an old crone unlikely to give up her secrets to anyone in too much of a hurry but inexplicably tolerant of the occasional abuse of ignorant intruders.
There were still patches of snow all around last week, wildflowers and grasses were already making good on the June sunshine, and water was on the move. These photographs use the compositional form of dyads, sometimes called diptychs, of paired squares. This is one of many possible variations of a practice I call Window Shopping. Square format digital cameras are a handy means of composing and arranging images, which are then paired either plausibly or not. The result is often more than the sum of its parts. The example here is a conservative example made while enjoying salami and cheese on a nearby boulder smoothed by uncountable millenia.
New Moon ~ June 4th, 2016
Sofa Triptych, 2nd State
Here is another example, a continuation of an earlier Moonblog post announcing the beginning of a series of sofa paintings. The earlier image and some description will fill you in on that. Meanwhile, I'll probably continue with this and change the color scheme, possibly quite a bit. But meanwhile, this one has a slightly haunted, turn of the last century look to it that appeals to me. Furniture is capable of absorbing so much human weirdness over time. And an old, worn out couch can be such a sad blob of a thing. I once saw a mountain of discarded couches and upholstered lounge chairs behind a Goodwill thrift shop in Pueblo, Colorado. And when I say mountain, I'm not exaggerating. The sight was such a strange blend of comical and tragic. Anyway, I like the way this painting is going; in real life it's almost life size. The effect is charmingly peculiar.
Full Moon ~ April 21st, 2016
Dragonfly
This dragonfly is a work in progress, something for an upcoming exhibition at Virginia Tech. The alert visitor to this website will recognize at least two recurring themes here: one is insects and the other is the folio, the appearance of an open book. In this case the book seems to be very old, possibly several centuries old. It may not be apparent on your screen, but this would be a very large book; it's 42 x 56 inches. The look of three dimensionality is actual; the two halves are stitched together with jute twine, which has the appearance of some kind of leather. There is no special meaning assigned to any of this, but I would say that I'm guided by a mysterious process of being attracted to particular visual impacts, in this case it's the visual impact of a very old book. By the time a book has made its way through the centuries it develops signs of wear and tear – spots, discolorations, wrinkles, rips and a relaxed sense of settledness into what it is. Why dragonflies? According to the website, Dragonfly-site.com, “The dragonfly, in almost every part of the world symbolizes change and change in the perspective of self realization; and the kind of change that has its source in mental and emotional maturity and the understanding of the deeper meaning of life.”
Well, then. I honestly had no such thing in mind, but I'll take it! I have several of these dragonflies in the works right now. I'll be putting them up in a new section as they develop.
New Moon ~ February 8th, 2016 Tibetan New Year
Trois Coquillages Tropicaux
These three watercolors of a conch shell came out a few weeks ago in my Naropa watercolor class. It's part of proliferation, a practice that I encourage anyone to try. The idea is to set aside a bracket of time during which you do an unreasonable number of pieces. In our class, we try to do thirty paintings during a three-hour session. With setup and cleanup we really only have about two and a half hours. In previous years I had us doing fifty in a class session but too many people had nervous breakdowns. Thirty seems more doable for most people. The practice is designed to wear out the fear of messing things up; in this exercise there just isn't time to worry about it. It's also a good opportunity to practice repetition, a good way to work things out by making subtle changes in how you go about the same moves with the same colors and the same composition, which I've done here. Try it some time it's fun.
New Moon ~ April 14th, 2018
Mitsubishi Zero
I read in the news last week about a woman in Austria who was unharmed but frightened out of her wits when a hand grenade exploded in her woodstove. Apart from breaking the glass in the stove's door, the stout little stove contained the blast. An investigation revealed that the grenade was left behind from World War II and had over the years become completely enveloped in a tree, which was then cut down for firewood.
I've been reading Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, a detailed account of his 1867 excursion to the Mediterranean and the Holy Land. His descriptions of various horrific Old Testament battles – especially in what is now modern day Syria and Palestine - leave this contemporary reader wondering what's in the water over there.
What is left behind after a war? When does it later explode? The endless tangle in the Middle East is a five thousand year old re-cycling of a few tenacious grudges. The Holy Land indeed. And what could any of this have to do with a blue-green painting of a Japanese World War II fighter plane? Maybe nothing. Or maybe recycling scraps of cloth into a benign and strangely beautiful image of an obsolete, “enemy” machine of war could help to pacify seeds of vengeance.
Full Moon ~ December 6th, 2014
The Minor Hoax of Robert Guillaume Homme-d’Épeler
One of my responsibilities at Naropa University is to maintain a Tokonoma in the visual arts studio. I like to refresh the artwork, which features pieces from working artists, including faculty and students, on the new and full moon. This past full moon caught me unprepared so I chose a piece of my own. Not wanting to be seen as a shameless self-promoter, I assigned the painting to an invented character named Robert Guillaume Homme-d' Épeler. This is what it says on the accompanying description:
“This is a painting by Robert Guillaume Homme-d'Épeler, a Parisian artist who spends part of each year in Colorado. Sometimes critically derided as a throwback to another century, Homme-d'Épeler is known for his lugubrious depictions of objets ordinaires - ordinary objects - anything from tools and fruit to fruit and tools. Never apologetic about this, Homme-d'Épeler has drawn provocative parallels between this kind of painting and the upper reaches of phenomenology, both in modern physics and the ancient traditions of the east.”
Inventing this was enjoyable and surprisingly easy. It made me realize again that fraud can be a way to engage the world. It's what we're doing most of the time anyway, isn't it? A few years ago I was in a similar tight spot with updating this part of my website (which I also refresh on the new and full moon). At that time I wrote about having stayed on a remote island off the coast of Scotland called Ishfindatl. If you google “Ishfindatl” it actually shows up! In fact it's the only thing on the web by that name right now.
Full Moon ~ March 16th, 2014
Hutchinson's Island
There aren't many wild places left along the coasts of Florida. Hutchinson's Island still has a long stretch of beach bordered by mangrove swamp and palmetto groves. Many winters during the 1980s and 90s we visited my wife's parents there. It was a productive time for watercolors. I also have fine memories of those visits. I've always admired my parents-in-law for their effortless glamour; and escaping the dank New England winter to visit a steamy, sub-tropical island always seemed too good to be true. This place in Florida seemed to me to be the fruition of my parents' generation. They got through the Great Depression, fought and won the worst war, raised their families in a time of prosperity, and then settled into hard-earned retirement. The palm grove in this watercolor is now gone, washed away in hurricane somebody; my father-in-law Jim Anderson died on Monday at 94. He and my mother-in-law Janet have been living with us this past year, so we had the honor and duty to accompany him to his final exit. A decorated veteran of the Second World War, he was wonderful story teller, a down to earth friend and family man, and a personal hero to me. His life, and all of our lives, like the thin barrier islands off Florida's Atlantic coast, are only temporary; and appreciating the inexplicable accident of our encounters ends up being the stuff of life itself.
New Moon ~ November 24, 2011
Beetle Restoration
More beetles. I produced a number of beetle paintings for two shows this past summer and fall. I'm now working on a suite of them for display at the Garrison Institute in New York in January. This one here may be in progress, I'm not sure. Surprise seems to be a both exciting and unnerving feature of creative activity: the work at hand starts to become autonomous; it might begin going in its own direction or taking on qualities that are not what you had in mind at the start. It's easy to miss the enjoyment of this if you're stuck on your original idea. I'm calling this one Beetle Restoration for the moment. It reminds me of reconstructed ancient pottery that you see in museums. I've always admired the way archeologists carefully restore broken items after digging them up. Ordinary household objects take on a kind of renascent beauty. These new beetle paintings are similar to work I was doing earlier this year: deeply textured with canvas scraps, cheesecloth, and godknowswhatelse. They are all 28 ″ x 32 ″
Full Moon ~ November 28th, 2012