I Remember

Image Courtesy of Brooklyn Memories; the website is a treasure trove of old Brooklyn photos.

When I was a child, lo these many years ago, our yearly trip to the Jersey shore was an exciting adventure. There was no Verrazano Bridge, so we took the ferry from Brooklyn to Staten Island. I remember my mother making sandwiches for the trip, which now takes little over an hour. Back then the distances seemed enormous and the trip lengthy; the destination, Bradley Beach, thrilling. I was just at the shore visiting my family, and because I go there rarely, the old memories filled my thoughts. Like last year, when I wrote about it, I remembered Joe Brainard's wonderful book I Remember, and want to give a brief attempt at an "I remember" of my own. 

I remember the generous porches, and that one year from a porch like this my friends and I played Robin Hood, the raised porch being perfect for dramatic climbs and hidden princesses. 

I remember having crushes on the lifeguards, especially Donny; they were so beautiful, so strong, so wonderful. I remember being made aware of Vietnam and counterculture by a lifeguard on the Second Avenue beach whose name is lost to me. He showed us issues of underground magazines such as The Realist and Ramparts, very unexpected during the lazy days of summer. I believe that my political consciousness was awakened during those summers. 

I remember the poles connected by ropes that demarcated the safe swimming area. 

I remember learning to ride the waves on my father's back.

I remember splinters from walking barefoot on the boardwalk.

I remember the cool sand in the shade under the raised sections.

I remember the delicious feel underfoot as I walked from the gritty cement sections of sidewalk to the smooth slate. On some days it was very hot so I tried to walk on as much cool grass as possible. 

I remember coming home with sandy feet, and legs, and a bathing suit full of sand, and standing in the outdoor shower to wash it all off before going into the house.

I remember, not this small bandshell, but the large pavilion of my youth, a structure built on the boardwalk out over the beach. There were teen dances held every week, opportunities for youthful anxieties and dancing the lindy, the twist, the mashed potatoes, with my girlfriends. 

I remember pinball at the penny arcade, body pushing against machine, trying to keep the ball in play. I wasn't very good at it. 

I remember "fishing" in the lake separating Bradley from Avon. My father would fashion a net out of window screening tied at four corners with string. We'd lower it into the lake and catch guppies (were they actually guppies? I don't know but that's what we called them), watch them flop around for a couple of minutes, and throw them back.

I remember, when this park had swings, swinging back and forth with a friend and loudly and happily singing "Feelin' Groovy". We were feeling young and childish, since we were already an ancient 17 or 18 years old. 

I remember the treat of family dinners at Vic's, with their great pizza and thick tomato sauce on spaghetti.

I do not remember healthy food at the beach or on the boardwalk. I remember candy apples and cotton candy and salt water taffy and Pez and Good Humor bars, especially Strawberry Shortcake. 

I remember the entire family loaded into the car to go to Spring Lake to feed the ducks, and to drive around looking at the beautiful houses....

.....not only in Spring Lake, but also in Deal, where grand houses elicited oohs and aahs from us. They seemed of another time, almost fairytale-like. It was only years later, after painting images of Victorian architecture for several years, that I realized how important those drives were in giving me a subject for my work. Nostalgia for childhood summers, as I wrote in the blog post "Nostalgia as Inspiration", colored my artistic development. I can still remember the awe I felt seeing these houses, and I hope the sense of wonder never leaves.

A New Painting: "Shadowed Triangle"

Shadowed Triangle, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 9 1/8 x 6 3/4 in.

This image is a fairly simple one: horizontals and a big diagonal making a triangular shape. But that truncated triangle is parallel to the picture plane and is attached to a cylindrical volume which recedes, so that adds a little complication. There was also the question of what color to paint the shape on the lower right. In "real life" it was a grassy background, but I didn't want to use green since it would be too close to the shadow colors. I tried a red but that didn't work. I ended up with a dark green-blue, which I think sits back in space where I want it but isn't too demure. 

Shadowed Triangle detail

Then there's the always tricky task of making paint look like light and shadow. I have this odd desire to be, at the same time, an abstract painter and a naturalistic one; it's a continuing and fascinating challenge.


*I'll be away for a few days; see you sometime next week. 

New Fruits

According to the botanical definition, peas are a fruit. From Wikipedia:

In botany, a fruit is a part of a flowering plant that derives from specific tissues of the flower, one or more ovaries, and in some cases accessory tissues. Fruits are the means by which these plants disseminate seeds.

Of course, in the kitchen, peas are a vegetable, but I thought I'd show some botanical fruits from the garden in this post, whether we treat them as fruits or as vegetables on our dining tables. It's the height of the pea season right now, and I'm spending time picking, shelling, and blanching peas for the freezer, a real treat during winter.

The zucchini are beginning to form, dwarfed by the magnificent squash flower.

In our short growing season here in Vermont, we can't expect tomatoes until late July or early August, and that is only for the early varieties, like these delicious Sungold cherry tomatoes.

The cucumber has a smaller flower than the squash, and its tiny beginning is decoratively spiked.

These baby bell peppers still have the remnants of their flowers on their surfaces.

With a similar flower to the cucumber, the itty bitty melon is beginning to swell. If the flower is pollinated, it will grow into a delicious hybrid honeydew, Orange Honey. If not, it will wither away.

There have been lots of bumble bees and wild bees and other pollinators in the garden, so I have high hopes for my squash and melon crops. This is a tiny pumpkin whose flower has not yet opened. When I look at the spiny surfaces of pumpkin and melon and cucumber, I think that these prickles must have evolved to protect the fruit.

And here are two fruits that we eat as fruit: raspberries, not yet red ripe.....

.....and blueberries, closer to being ready to pick for fresh eating, for desserts, for jam, and for freezing. So much potential in the garden, so much to look forward to eating!

And to round off the fruits growing at my house, a very small mushroom, the fruiting body of a fungus,  whose tiny spores have the same purpose as the larger seeds of the fruits and vegetables above: life spreading and perpetuating.

Ralph Coburn: Distillations

Reflections, Seine River, c. 1950; ink on paper, 10 1/2 x 8 1/4 in. 

I rarely write about artwork that I've seen only in reproduction, but sometimes I come across a catalog with contents so exciting that I must share them. Before I saw any of Sheila Hicks' miniature weavings in a gallery, I fell in love with them from the catalog Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor, and wrote about the work here. I was recently again smitten by work that was new to me in a catalog, in this instance the early paintings and drawings of Ralph Coburn, a Boston based artist and designer born in 1923. The simplicity, clarity, and immediacy of the work are in perfect tune with my sensibility, as is its modest size. The catalog title is Ralph Coburn: Convictions; Architecture, Chance and Choice and was published by David Hall Fine Art in Wellesley, MA, where I'll be having a show in the spring of 2015, focusing on my textiles and drawings.

Automatic Drawing, c. 1950; ink on paper, 8 1/4 x 10 1/2 in.

Coburn began his studies in architecture school at MIT, but realized he was much more interested in painting after meeting several students from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, one of whom was Ellsworth Kelly; the two artists began a long friendship. Coburn became interested in various avant-garde ideas, such as the automatic drawing above. I like its direct and fresh line and intense color.

Landscape Motive, Paris, 1949; india ink on paper, 10 5/8 x 8 1/4 in.

I find myself totally charmed by Coburn's abstracting of the world around him. He made several trips to France between 1949 and 1956, when Ellsworth Kelly was living there. If you see a relationship between his drawings and Kelly's it's because they spent a lot of time together talking about art and about their work. In Landscape Motive and Reflections above, the simple irregular elements are perfectly balanced, but in an offbeat and unexpected way.

Sign, 1949; ink on paper, 10 5/8 x 8 1/4 in.

Coburn looks at the world and sees shapes that energize a surface, and sometimes have a humorous attitude.

Landscape, Paris, c. 1951; ink on paperboard, 10 3/4 x 8 1/4 in.

Three black shapes, with the light of the paper, and we feel a surging space.

Abstract, c. 1949; watercolor on thin tissue paper, 10 1/2 x 8 3/8 in.

Abstract, c. 1950; oil on paper, 10 1/2 x 8 1/8 in.

These two abstract works, looking like they were painted with a quick movement of a wide brush, have a powerful, direct presence that belies their small size.

Composition, c. 1951; oil on paper, 12 x 9 1/2 in.

Composition is similar to the two works above in its minimal elements, but because it's approached in a much more precise way it has a different character. A circle hovers between two openings, a solitary being/becoming.

Ready Made Composition, Manipulated, and Composition Derived from a Ready Made Image,

both c. 1950; oil on printed magazine page, 11 x 4 3/4 in. and oil on paper, 12 3/8 x 9 3/8 in.

Sometimes Coburn's visual world included images found in advertising: here he painted over an ad found in a magazine, then he did another painting using just the negative spaces. The results have a  surreal quality.

Blue, White, Teal, c. 1955; oil on canvas, 39 7/8 x 34 in.

I like the flip flopping of positive and negative spaces in Blue, White, Teal. In reproduction, the dark areas look black, but must be dark blue. I like how the teal-colored shape sweeps up in a curve to end in the upper right corner, the only curve in this otherwise angular work; it pushes the eye up and out, then it is drawn back into the white crevasse.

Collage, Sanary, 1950-56; paper on paperboard, 7 1/4 x 7 1/4 in.

Coburn also worked with collage, as in this lively small piece. I get a sense of it being built, as though it was a city plan.

Arranged by Choice Composition, c. 1951; india ink on eight panels, 16 x 32 in. overall.

I love Coburn's open mind, his playing with ideas and techniques. This work, made up of 8 eight inch squares, is meant to be moved and changed.....

Sixteen Panel Moveable Composition, c. 1965; plastic resin with magnetic tape on metal-backed frame, 12 x 12 in. This shows two variations. 

.....just as this piece is. How wonderful to have a work that isn't fixed, but can be manipulated, and be constantly rediscovered. 

Lake, 1953; oil on canvas, 24 x 24 in.

With Lake, we are back to the distilled landscapes, abstract forms found in the physical world. Coburn has perfect pitch when it comes to placing shapes on a surface: their relationships are in refined tension, the spaces between so carefully considered. The works I've illustrated are only a few of the many that I admire; what a treat it has been to discover Ralph Coburn's work.

New Hooked Wool Drawings

2014 #11, hand dyed wool and egg tempera on linen; 3 panels: 11 x 5, 11 x 10, 11 x 5 in. 

When I was working on the studies for this group of hooked wool drawings, I seem to have had crossed straight lines in my mind, because these 3 new pieces have straight lines with shapes appended to them. In this triptych, the first I've done, the straight line moves across the 3 panels, demarcating differently colored planes in each hop across space. Colors are primary (though not pure hues) for the hooked areas and secondary for the painted ones.

2014 #12,  hand dyed wool and egg tempera on linen, 16 1/2 x 17 7/8 in.

A line moves from a square to a rectangle, with triangles full and empty above and below it.

2014 #13,  hand dyed wool and egg tempera on linen, 15 x 12 in.

Two simple deep pink rectangles and two of linen are lined with lime green, and a blue square marks their meeting place.

2014 #13 detail

I continue to be interested in the varied textures of linen and paint and wool, how they relate and how they change the space and the physical presence of these pieces.

What If.....?

Pierre Bonnard, Bather, 1935. Image courtesy WikiArt

I remember being stunned by Bonnard's late paintings in the 1998 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The color was brilliant and shimmering, and of a peculiar intensity; it was from this world but pushed beyond it, past the everyday.

Pierre Bonnard, Nude in the Bathtub, 1935. Image courtesy WikiArt

The paintings of bathers were especially compelling, along with the late self portraits. The woman in the bathtub seemed to hover between life and death. The woman pictured was always Marthe, Bonnard's wife and long time partner and muse. In his book of essays, The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa, Michael Kimmelman suggests that Bonnard's noticing of Marthe on a Paris street may have profoundly influenced his life and his work:

By one of those accidents of fate, in 1893 the painter Pierre Bonnard was walking down a street in Paris (or so the story goes) and he spied a young, elfin woman alighting from a tram....He followed her to work (it turned out that she sewed artificial pearls onto funeral wreaths). 

For the next half century, as Bonnard's biographer, Timothy Hyman, has put it, Marthe became "the defining figure of his life and work". Her increasing nervousness, her misanthropy, her jealousy and hypochondria conspired to determine what became their solitary and circumscribed life together. And that life, in turn, shaped Bonnard's path as an artist of ecstatic and inward-looking vision. 

Of course Kimmelman points out that no art is defined by any one thing, but he does believe that Bonnard's meeting with Marthe, and their life together, was a strong influence on his painting:

...[Bonnard] dated the birth of his painterly identity to shortly after they met. Had he walked down another street that day, or had he looked the other way when she stepped off the tram, or had he not pursued her....he might have met another woman and pursued a different life.

Philip Pearlstein, Female Nude on Yellow Drape, 1965. Image courtesy Betty Cunningham Gallery.

Lois Dodd, Wild Geraniums, 1967. Image courtesy NY Times.

I'm a Brooklyn kid, so when it came time to go to college, Brooklyn College seemed the logical choice. There I studied with Philip Pearlstein and Lois Dodd, among others; it was there that my path as a representational painter was laid out. But what if I'd gotten on the subway into Manhattan and gone to Hunter College instead, along with a good neighborhood friend of mine?

Robert Morris, Untitled, 1967-8, remade 2008. Image courtesy Tate Gallery.

Tony Smith, Untitled, 1962. Image courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

The emphasis at Hunter was on abstraction, with the faculty including Robert Morris, Tony Smith, Ralph Humphrey, Ron Gorchov. I believe I would have been a very different painter, one with the same sensibility, but a very different style. Instead of a late, slow turn toward abstraction, I might have begun there. Who knows? It's fun to think how a single choice or action could have changed our lives. The singer John Hartford wrote a very funny song about the role of chance, which you can hear at the link: "I Would Not Be Here" ..."if I hadn't been there"....which goes on and on and on, back and back.....because of this and that and that and that; it becomes absurd. So perhaps it's best not to think about it. 

At the Frost Place

Up a gravel path, past the lupins, is a modest white house perched on a hill. This is The Frost Place, where Robert Frost lived with his family for five years, from 1915 to 1920, and for 19 summers thereafter. In 1976 the town of Franconia, NH, where the house is located, bought the farmhouse and land and established a board of trustees to oversee what became an "educational center for poetry and the arts".  Frost had first visited the White Mountains in 1907, staying in the town of Bethlehem; he said about the area that "there is a pang there that makes poetry".

There is a beautiful, expansive view of the mountains from the front of the house, a view that was probably more open when Frost lived here.

Behind the house is a trail through woods that was started in 1997. This land had been meadow in Frost's time, but has since grown up in woods.

"Mowing"

This is the "Poetry and Nature Trail": as you walk on the path you can stop and read poems written by Frost while he was living here, poems with nature as their theme. I have a friend who was just telling me about how much she loved using her scythe; when I sent her the poem "Mowing" she felt that he "nailed it once again". 

To read all these poems, click on the photos to enlarge them. 

"Putting in the Seed"

For me he nails it with "Putting in the Seed", the "watching for that early birth/....

basil seedlings

....When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,/The sturdy seedling with arched body comes/...."

He captures the magic, the Love of it.

"The Sound of the Trees"

At my house the sound of trees is often one of storm, but their blowing and rustling is indeed more beautiful than many other noises that come from human activity. For all their activity the trees are immobile, stalwart, not like us with our moving on.

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

"The Road Not Taken"

Many of the poems on the trail are famous ones, poems we think of when we think of Robert Frost. It was a pleasure to read them in this setting (and would have been even nicer if the swarms of bugs weren't so intense).

The staff at The Frost Place worked to establish native wildflowers along the trail and manage the forest. Then in 2007 two terrible windstorms undid all their work, so restoration work has been ongoing.

"Nothing Gold Can Stay"

A lesson from storms, from seasons, from life, is perfectly expressed in this brief poem, one that tugs at my heart. Through nature, Frost touched on deep human feelings.

A New Painting: "Light Fingers"

Light Fingers, egg tempera on calfskin parchment, 6 x 8 in.

This painting was a clear lesson in how something so seemingly simple can be so hard to get right. I wrestled with the greens for days, making them lighter, darker, warmer, cooler; wiping off the shadow color and starting again: the shadow was too dark, too light, too cool. Each time I thought the painting was finished, I'd walk away from it for a while to get a fresh view, or leave it overnight, and see that the balance of hue and value was still off. One of the challenges was to get the upper part of the painting, including the horizontal plane, to look as though it was in front of the lower part of the painting and to do that with "hue, value, intensity" of color, a rallying cry of my former teacher at Skowhegan years ago, Gabriel Laderman. Those three qualities of color can be endlessly adjusted, balanced and rebalanced. Finally, I think I pinned down those greens.

Light Fingers detail