A Show

Many emotions arise when work leaves the studio and hangs on a wall in public––joy and despair, pride and abjectness, fear and exhilaration, tremendous self doubt and anxiety, excitement and oh! "I vant to be alone!"––so many conflicting feelings, especially for me since I haven't had a solo show in NYC for over 7 years; this is my first since I began writing this blog. Work takes on a life of its own apart from its maker when in an exhibition; it becomes its own self, a physical presence out in the world. In my solo exhibition at McKenzie Fine Art, ending on Sunday, November 16, my work––textiles, drawings, and paintings––has been treated with tremendous respect, hung with a great deal of breathing room.

Are these the small paintings I work on at a table under my upstairs skylight? there's a kind of disbelief that they came from my hand. Installation photographs do not truly convey the sense of scale, just as photographs of the paintings don't give enough information about surface. The great thing about having a show is that your friends are able to finally see what those photos were hinting at. But then of course there's the fear: what if they don't like it? Having a show is exposing yourself.

A group of framed drawings are hanging together on a long wall, emphasizing their color notes.

In the rear of the gallery several more paintings are hanging.

Four textiles hang on a wall, with "Blue Ribbon", an illusionistic shaped piece, on a wall of its own. I was very pleased that Valerie McKenzie wanted to exhibit three of my several bodies of work, and I hope that they make sense together. When I'm working, it all makes sense because I'm doing it, but out in the world, what then? There is the pride and the fear. There are also the "great expectations". I recently reread Dickens' Great Expectations, a marvelous book and a fair warning against living for those expectations. Don't we all hope that we are declared geniuses, and isn't there always a little letdown when that doesn't happen, which it very rarely does? The trick is to not take oneself too seriously, and to be grateful, always grateful, for the good that there is in life. And I am very grateful for this show.

The best part of all was the opening, when I got to meet many new online friends for the first time, and see many old friends. I was very lucky in having a terrific photographer, Brandt Bolding, take pictures of the opening; this and the three that follow are by Brandt. You can see his beautiful photographs at his website. I think the photographs with people give a better sense of the size of the work and bring it more to life. The woman regarding the textile is another wonderful photographer, Carolyn Louise Newhouse.

A group of people look at the group of drawings. And my nephew's little son is more interested in the dog than in the art.

"Orange Rounds" between two heads, above two hands.

And me, for those of you who wonder what I look like, here I am looking very happy. Thanks Brandt for the photos, thank you friends for your support, and thanks to Valerie McKenzie for believing in my work.

Machines in Art

Francis Picabia, Pompe a combustible, 1922; ink and gouache on paper, 30 1/8 x 22 1/8 in. 

image courtesy MoMA

A few days ago, a Facebook friend, the artist Richard Staub, posted this beautiful work by Francis Picabia. During his Dada period, Picabia painted many machine pictures, often with an ironic point of view, using machine parts to stand in for human body parts. Pompe a combustible (which might translate as fuel pump) seems a more straightforward abstraction. Because I'm a painter of machines, I became interested in researching Picabia's machine paintings, and that of other artists whose imagery involved machines. I didn't find too many, so please add any additional names in comments.

Francis Picabia, Balance, c. 1919; oil on cardboard, 23 1/2 x 17 1/4 in.

image courtesy Wikiart

Like the drawing above, this work uses crisp, machine-like shapes to create its balanced composition.

Francis Picabia, Love Parade, 1917; oil on cardboard, 37 1/2 x 28 1/4 in. 

Image courtesy WikiArt 

In the animated forms, we can see machines as a stand-in for human interaction; which is male, which female? is that black apparatus at center strangling or hammering at its mate? The parade is loud and clamorous, and none too loving. The form is reminiscent of Duchamp's Large Glass, a masterpiece of the period, which is also a sexual encounter, its full name being The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.

Francis Picabia, Very Rare Picture on the Earth, 1915; oil and metallic paint on board, and silver and gold leaf on wood, 49 1/2 x 38 1/2 in. Photo courtesy Guggenheim Museum

I love this painting/construction; the forms are so beautifully satisfying. It's hard to imagine what it must have been like at the beginning of the Machine Age, when machines large and small were becoming pervasive and changing lives. Some saw it as a force for good; others were not so sure and had feelings of ambivalence towards it.

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Fernand Leger, Mechanical Elements, 1920; oil on canvas, 36 1/8 x 23 1/2 in. 

Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

Many of Leger's cubist paintings have figures interacting with structural elements in the compositions and feel very much in love with modern life; this painting focuses on abstraction arising from machine parts. It is full of life and energy.

Morton Shamberg, Painting (formerly Machine), 1916; oil on canvas, 30 1/8 x 22 3/4 in. 

image courtesy WikiArt

Morton Shamberg, Painting VIII (Mechanical Abstraction), 1916; oil on canvas, 30 1/8 x 20 1/4 in. 

image courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

Although I knew his name, I was not familiar with Morton Shamberg's work, so was very happy to find these strong paintings which use the shapes of machinery as pictorial elements, full of an understated dramatic presence. In their central positioning and flowing curves, the paintings are quite elegant.

Charles Demuth, Machinery, 1920; gouache and graphite on paperboard, 24 x 19 7/8 in. 

Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

I've long loved this drawing by Demuth, which looks more like an animated silo than a machine.

Ida York Abelman, Man and Machine, 1935-43, published by WPA; lithograph, 10 x 12 in. 

Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

In Abelman's print, a man seems subsumed by the machine, overpowered by it, yet his large hand grasps its side so perhaps he is in control. This is a dramatic expression of an ambivalent attitude toward the machine.

Charles Sheeler, Steam Turbine, 1939; oil on canvas, 22 x 18 in. 

Charles Sheeler, Suspended Power, 1939; oil on canvas, 33 x 26 in.

Charles Sheeler is one of my art heroes. His precisionist style, industrial subject matter, and use of his own photographs as source material brings his work close to my heart. His Power series was commissioned by Fortune magazine in 1938 to symbolize, as Fortune wrote "exquisite manifestations of human reason". Although the writers of the catalog Charles Sheeler: Paintings and Drawings, Carol Troyen and Erica E. Hirshler claim an unease on Sheeler's part toward the machines he pictured above, in 1929 he expressed optimism about industrialization while painting the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge plant:

Every age manifests itself by some external evidence. In a period such as ours when only a comparatively few individuals seem to be given to religion, some form other than the Gothic cathedral must be found. Industry concerns the greatest numbers––it may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression.

Walter Tandy Murch, Car Heater, 1957

Image courtesy Painting Perceptions

Walter Tandy Murch, Carburetor, 1957

Image courtesy Painting Perceptions

Walter Tandy Murch, Car Lock, c. 1962; oil on canvas on Masonite, 26 3/4 x 18 1/2 in.

Image courtesy Michael Rosenfeld Art

Walter Murch is a very interesting under-known artist who I was very aware of when in art school. He painted a kind of softened, viewed through a haze, still life, with machinery being one of his main subjects. Looking at his work you get a sense that the complexity of forms, and their unexpectedness, is what attracted him. Whether a force for good or ill, machines can provide compelling images with multiple meanings.

Fall's Luminous End

Yesterday morning I woke to a landscape lightly dusted with snow, the first of the season. By midday, with a little sun, the snow was gone, but it remained brightly shining on the distant White Mountains. Although it's not officially winter by the calendar, November is a month of transition toward it. 

The landscape has turned to gray with the hillsides bare of leaves; even the greens of conifers appear grayed. But many dried plants still carry light within them, even on a dull day. When I look out my windows, the tall dried grasses are swaths of warmth, and when the sun appears––only occasionally in November––they become luminous.

The crisp grasses sparkle with points of light....

....and they look especially vivid against a dark backdrop of woods.

There are wildflowers that look especially beautiful in the fall. The forms of milkweed pods have an architectural simplicity.

The seedhead of goldenrod glows white; the dark knobs left of black-eyed susan absorb light.

Flowers in the perennial border are long gone, but some plants still enchant with the color of their dried leaves. Amsonia turns a rich shining yellow.

I am ending with the black dried leaves of Baptisia. In Western culture black signals death, but these leaves are so unique in their coloration that they have a special beauty. They ask us to take pleasure in all phases of nature's journey, from the rebirth of spring through the suspension of life during winter.

A New Painting: "Circles, Light and Dark"

Circles, Light and Dark, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 9 x 7 1/4 in.

I shouldn't admit to this, but when I looked at this painting when it was almost finished, the title that kept popping into my mind was "Funny Face", and now you won't see anything else. But it's an admission that at times my paintings are humorous; the combinations of forms add up to an amusing set of relationships, which is fine with me. Painting doesn't always have to be deep-down serious; sometimes it's lighthearted. The making of the painting is always serious, in that I try to balance color, shape, form, light, into a convincing whole. The blue-green color comes from mixing heliogen green (I use a color paste from Kremer Pigments) and titanium white. The tint becomes a lovely aqua hue. 

Circles, Light and Dark detail

I enjoy the challenge of painting dark spaces behind the light planes. I figured out a couple of years ago that I could get a richer dark by layering color––in this case ultramarine blue, cadmium red purple, and heliogen (phthalo) green––than by using black. You'll notice in the photo a couple of wandering lines on the lower right; these are natural imperfections in the parchment.

Circles, Light and Dark detail

Balancing the deep spaces of the dark circles are the raised portions of the wheel. I have to play with warmer and cooler hues to make the light and shadow. There are so many things to think about while painting, but it becomes like habit, where you do things without thinking consciously about them. Which is not to say I'm unaware of making choices, or that I don't struggle at times and fail at times, but that much of the decision making is fairly intuitive, learned behavior from over 40 years of painting. William James argued that habit is a positive force, and I am inclined to agree.

A Delicious Apple Cake

It's apple season: the farm and orchard stands have shelves lined with bags full of all kinds of apples. Last year, when I had a huge bounty of apples from my antique orchard (this year they are resting, so no apples) I looked around online for a good apple cake recipe. I was lucky to find a wonderful recipe for Mom's Apple Cake from the site Smitten Kitchen. The recipe comes with a charming story about its origin, which you can read at the link. I passed the recipe on to my mom, who also liked it. This year I used Macouns, which are my favorite eating apple, while the recipe calls for McIntosh. This is a very large cake, making at least 10 servings, or maybe 8 if people are ravenous.

Smitten Kitchen's Mom's Apple Cake

6 apples
1 Tbs cinnamon
5 Tbs sugar

2 3/4 cups flour
1 Tbs baking powder
1 teas salt
1 cup vegetable oil
2 cups sugar (I use a bit less)
1/4 cup orange juice
2 1/2 teas vanilla
4 eggs

Preheat oven to 350º. Grease a tube pan. Peel, core, and chop apples into chunks, then toss them with the cinnamon and sugar.

Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together into a large bowl. In a separate bowl, whisk together oil, orange juice, sugar, and vanilla. Mix the wet ingredients into the flour mixture, then add eggs one at a time, beating after each one until the batter is smooth and well blended.

Pour half the batter into the tube pan. It won't look like much, but it expands a great deal in baking. Put half the apples over the batter, then the rest of the batter on top of the apple layer. The remaining half of the apples goes on top. Bake for about 1 1/2 hours until a knife tests clean; the apples will get deliciously caramelized.

This cake looks a big more disheveled than I'd like, and I'm going to tell on myself as to how I can do some dumb things in the kitchen. The tube pan that I have, given to me by my mother, has 3 metal tabs sticking above the rim so that you can put it upside down on the counter to let a sponge cake cool. So silly me (I didn't do this foolish thing last year) turned this cake upside down to cool. Of course, when I went back into the kitchen 15 minutes later, half the cake had fallen onto the counter. I tried to carefully put it back together using a spatula, then stuck it back in the oven for a few minutes, hoping that might be a kind of gluing process. It didn't really work: the cake fell a bit apart when it was cut, but it was still very delicious. I'm sure you'll enjoy it if you try this recipe; and thanks to Smitten Kitchen.

James Bishop: Monumental Subtleties

Untitled, 1980; oil on canvas, 76 x 76 in.

The paintings of James Bishop, in his recent show at David Zwirner Gallery, require long and careful attention. Their architectonic structure emerges slowly from the subtly brushed and pooled layers of paint. In this they remind me of the black paintings of Ad Reinhardt which are similarly reticent.

Untitled, 1980, detail

If you enlarge this photo, a detail of Untitled, you will see the exquisitely balanced color relationships, bringing a gentle light forward; the horizontal band is slightly brighter than the vertical, indicating a delicate shift in the space. The structure seems to be part of the canvas itself; when I was looking at the show, I kept equating the depicted architecture with the architecture of the canvas stretchers. I like this: it moves the space of Bishop's paintings from their physical selves, human-sized, outwards to monumental architectural constructions.

Maintenant, 1981; oil on canvas, 76 x 76 in.

Embedded within a beautiful gray is the slightly warmer color-shape of a childlike house. Bishop's colors turn paint into atmosphere, and into a particular quality of subtle light, where things must be espied through dimness.

Closed, 1974; oil on canvas 73 1/8 x 73 3/8 in.

In Closed, the light is golden, and the structure is seen through a warm haze. In an interesting video interview with James Bishop at this show, he talked about his early art school experience at Washington University beginning in 1950: the school was very conservative, starting students out drawing geometric solids and then slowly moving on to figure painting. Bishop said "I have never regretted starting at the beginning; you have to start somewhere." And: "the indispensible thing is seeing, and drawing is the best tool to do that". I see his nearly-hidden architectural structures as a paean to drawing as seeing.

Early, 1967; oil on canvas, 76 5/8 x 76 1/2 in. 

In this earlier work color covers only half the canvas, with the structure of horizontal and vertical bars contained within it. 

Early, 1967 detail

The painted edge is uneven, fluid, so the color seems to float above the white ground.

Having, 1970; oil on canvas, 77 x 77 in.

The linear division in Having are more clear and present than the structures in the paintings above. And yet, they are still very subtly expressed, with the same quality of form within delicately colored light.

Untitled, 1962-63; oil on canvas, 32 x 39 1/2 in.

This painting has such zinging color relationships: the red and green in the center are quite harmonious as they sit atop the ocher, but then a surprising pinkish red tops it all off. I love the subtle and atmospheric color of Bishop's paintings of the '70s and '80s, but this painting points to another direction he might have taken. In the video interview linked above, when Bishop was asked if there were any painters who influenced him and could he name them, he replied that he couldn't because there were hundreds; he simply loved painting.

Untitled, 2012; oil and crayon on paper, 5 1/8 x 4 3/4 in.

In 1986 Bishop turned away from the large square paintings on canvas and began to paint small works on paper. He remarked that "you surprise yourself more often on paper". There were four very small works on paper in the show, each with a simple central structure.

Untitled, 2012; oil and crayon on paper, 5 x 4 5/8 in.

The sheets are irregular, the paint flowed on and not always covering the surface; the color appears embedded in the paper. With these small pieces, James Bishop has created a more intimate, meditative experience. With all his work, we must pay close attention in order to see what is there.

Fall Color: What Remains

We're almost into November, the month of subtle grays in the landscape, but there is still color after a mild October. The spirea alongside my front steps is full of blooms.

The lavatera in the vegetable garden survived the frosts of mid September and has been flowering cheerily since. These flowers are such late season gifts.

A few flaming leaves hang on to the blueberry bush.

Although most of the shrubs and trees are now bare of leaves, some remain, such as the rich red ovals of the Bridal Wreath spirea.

In the woods and on the tree covered hillsides the reds are gone; what remains is golden yellow. The beech leaves stand out amid the gray in their gold-moving-toward-warm-brown hue.

Of course there are still the dark greens of evergreen conifers, colors that will last through the winter, looking beautiful in contrast with snow. Right now there is the contrast with occasional splashes of warm yellow, from birches....

....or from a favorite tree, the tamarack. Tamaracks are unusual in that they are deciduous conifers; they turn a deep gold in the fall, then lose their needles. In this landscape view, the pointed spires of tamaracks are in the middle ground; in the distance the rounded yellows are birches.

I love seeing these trees in my lower field; there is something completely magical about a tree with needles and cones turning yellow.

It is nature surprising us, as it does again and again. Each season, and each transition between them, has its wonders and delights.