Paintings for the Gallery One artists' group exhibition at the Elle Design Studio

It has been a crazy, busy summer! But I am in the studio again... and also framing some favorites!

Elle Design Studio in Chester, Connecticut (elledesignstudio.net) exhibits the art of Gallery One Connecticut artists (www.galleryonect.com).  I am a new member of Gallery One, and will be participating in "Meet the Makers" on Sunday, October 9 with sculptor Deborah Hornbake. I am really happy to be showing here and with this wonderful group of artists... It is really good to see artwork displayed in this showroom as it should be: around sofas, tables, chairs and the surroundings of real life. The gallery now has four from the group of paintings and prints pictured below, so I thought I would also show photographs of them to you... so that you can choose the ones you like best.

This first group is composed of acrylic and collage paintings, with the first two on wood and the second two on paper:

The painting above, "After Watteau," was also featured in the KYSO Flash fall issue (2016).

The next painting is called "Stereoptical Study XIII: The Harley Wall."  The reference to the Harley Wall comes from the painting underneath this painting, where I had drawn a mythical graffiti'd wall that I imagined might be found in the Mission in San Francisco. As I painted over it, the work deepened, as a wall with layers of paint and posters might. The word "stereoptical" in the title comes from the two sides here:

The next painting, on paper, comes from being able to sketch in Emily Dickinson's bedroom as the "new" wallpaper (an artist's design for what might have been there) went up on her walls. This work was shown at the Emily Dickinson Museum (her Homestead) on September 1, 2016.

This next painting, on paper, is the oldest; it comes from our stay awhile ago in Ireland... The rooftops were lovely and this advertisement was on a wall in Cork, where Murphy's brewery is. The painting is called "STOUT."

The next works are all digital prints. I make these by first painting, drawing or photographing an original work on paper. Then I incorporate that into an iPad application, Adobe Sketch. I paint, then, and ask a local print shop to make the final piece. The first two works were shown at the Emily Dickinson Museum and are influenced by her work and my time sketching in her home. Here is "Exhilaration" and then "Midsummer Night's Emily' (my painting of Emily began with the only known daguerrotype of the poet, and I then drew her as I imagined she might look as she matured).

These last two are "The Sheykh and the Gazelle" (the first of the tales in "A Thousand and One Nights") and "For Vincent and Jasper."

Now I am returning to the studio...

Classic portraiture vs. Cubism and Francis Bacon and David Hockney....

We were travelling in Dublin, spending time with our daughter ... found a lovely little easel:

This easel sits in my studio and supports my plates for my prints. But it was very likely created to carry out into the landscape... and so I was thinking... after Constable, after Turner, after Renoir and their forays into open-air painting, come the questions about one-point perspective, posed by Picasso and Braque, that were answered by Cubism. But Cubism is mostly about human-made objects (pitchers, guitars, newspaper headlines) and fruits and sometimes faces... but very seldom about landscape... trees are harder to "square" and reduce... So if Cubism is in part ditching perspective, and staying indoors, then, when it does deal with organic things and with humans, isn't it also jettisoning the one view of the face, the classic portrait (like this terrific picture of Sir Hugh Lane by John Singer Sargent):

(This is a page from my journal where I taped in a postcard from the Hugh Lane Gallery, which also has recreated Francis Bacon's studio in its entirety -- and lovely mess).  The face in Cubism is broken into facets... David Hockney has said that "all drawing is collage" and in that sense, then, maybe Cubism was inevitable... the artist is always making choices: what to add or subtract, what to priveledge, what to shade or make whole... where we see and what we see from that angle... And Francis Bacon (in my notes in my journal picture above) says that "Half my painting activity is disrupting what I can with ease" (Picasso said something like this, too) and "I see every image all the time in a shifting way and almost in shifting sequences."  I think we all do, now... the permanent legacy of Cubism. Not a style, but a way of seeing.