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"Artists Respond to War" at Castle Hill

June 23, 2008

Time of War: After the Incident

Daniel Heyman, a well-known printmaker in the Japanese tradition and teacher of many workshops here on Cape Cod, was the juror for this show, titled "The Artists Respond to War", at the Castle Hill Center for the Arts. My piece is a drypoint embedded in wax from the Time of War series. called "After the Incident." The show is quite interesting and very varied. My personal favorite, which I sadly could not manage to photograph acceptably, is a dense, explosive painting on paper by Julia Salinger that manages to convey fear, confusion and untethered violence.

Robert Henry at the Provincetown Art Asso. and Museum

July 20, 2008

Voyeurs I

Voyeur II

The Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM), a venerable but up-to-the-minute institution, hosted a memorable opening Friday night for a retrospective of the work of Robert Henry. Bob, and his wife, artist SelinaTrieff have been mentors and inspirations to a couple of generations of working artists here on the Outer Cape and in New York where they lived during the winters until just a couple of years ago and Bob taught at Brooklyn College, Immensely generous with their time and insights, the couple were both students of Hans Hoffman after WW II and while their painting styles have little apparently in common with each other or with Hoffman, for that matter, both share with him a dedication to the life of art and to passing the light on to future generations.

Be Calmed

Bob's painting has never stayed still for long. He has moved from the abstract to the figurative to the symbolic and back, avoiding pigeon-holing. The PAAM show spans several decades and all of those genres, although it is, really, genreless. My favorites are probably the "Voyeur" series, paintings that show groups of people peering in through the brightly lit windows of a house at an interior that cannot be seen by the viewer. While the subject matter could easily be frightening in a spooky science-fiction kind of way, to me they inspire pathos. The voyeurs are the eternal outsiders drawn to a life they can never have.

Looking and Listening

Many of Henry's paintings have involved water and he has a wonderfully facile way of working the surface of the painting to create the illusions of roiling waves. In "Be Calmed", a boatsman rests deliciously, oblivious of the mayhem breaking around him but, somehow, not touching him. It's a wonderful sentiment: we have it in our individual power to shut the mayhem out.

This show should be seen by anyone near PTown - or anyone who can make it.

Jen Bradley at Schoolhouse Gallery

July 2, 2008

Jen Bradley

I love this work, at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown. Jen Bradley starts with toile. Never heard of the stuff? Well, if you were not in Barbara Bush's class at Smith or are not a devotee of haute WASP Upper East Side interior decoration, you may be excused. Toile (that's "twahl", since it's French) is a pattern found in fabric and wallpaper, often in blue and white, featuring images of 18th century upper class women and occasionally men in romantic pastoral settings or refined drawing rooms. So Bradley starts with these and quietly inserts images of gorillas in exactly the same tone and color, as if they were just coexisting in the same space. So you have the hyper-refined ladies (swoon) confronted by their evolutionary ancestors. To me, the message is that we are less separated from the gorillas than we would like to think, but there are other possible ways to look at these, too. Are they a comment on the artifice of art? (It's no coincidence that the two words share a common root.) On the thinness of the veneer of civilization? Your thoughts?? And by the way, Barbara never graduated from Smith (my alma mater,I will confess) - she dropped out to marry W's father. What a throwback.

The Abdominal Treeman

July 4, 2008

I see all

This guy lives in the front yard of our vet's office in Eastham, MA. We differ on this: Mr. Weiss finds it cute/child-friendly and I find it nightmare scary. This undoutedly reveals a great deal about our psychological health. Your vote?

A Regular Painting

July 1, 2008

Desparately in Search of Title

This is the closest to a regular painting I've done in many moons. Meaning, it's oil paint on canvas, with a few embellishments like shredded cheesecloth, but that's tame by current standards. As you can see, I have been infected by seaside colors, or maybe I just like blue and green and sand color.

Ellyn at the Left Bank Gallery in Wellfleet

July 1,2008

Left Bank, Wellfleet

My work at Left Bank

I belatedly got over to visit my work at the Left Bank Gallery in Wellfleet, the next town down the Cape. The Small Work Gallery on Main Street is one of three on the outer Cape owned by the redoubtable Audrey Parent, who manages to make it work even in hard times. Running a successful business out here where the season is about 12 weeks long, is a real accomplishment, so hats off to Audrey and let's all go buy art!

The Women of Iceland

June 29, 2008

Those Iceland gals clean up good

Among the other artists painting with me at Castle Hill last week was a foursome of women from Iceland who I just loved to pieces. Two of them have studios in an old 40-artist building that reminded me, as too many things do, of the late lamented Millenium Art Center. Every year they do an art trip - last year was Florence and this year Truro. And what could possible come after Truro? Anyway, we did some trading of art at the end of the week and I invited them to our hovel and they invited me to come to Iceland where they promised to show me "a really good time", (which I'm sure has entirely different connotations to non-native English speakers.) Anyway, Iceland sounds pretty terrific and I'm definitely going to take them up on the invitation. No joke, folk. Next June in Reykavik!

A week sniffing glue at Castle Hill

June 29, 2008

Title anyone??

I just finished a week painting with odd and toxic substances at Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Truro, our fair city. Bonney Goldstein, a terrifically brave and free spirit, encouraged shredding, tarring, shellacing and otherwise beating the crap out of canvas and board. One of them is now out on my deck so that I can see what happens as it weathers in the elements for a couple of months. I haven't really painted painted in about 5 years, so I thought it would be fun to get those muscles working again. The piece here is made primarily out of tar, with the addition of solvent and shellac. Yummy! I had to take it home in my car and by the time I got here I'm pretty confident that the fumes were in brain damage territory.

Dog is my co-pilot II

June 29, 2008

This car practically steers itself

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