In the wake of all the little quakes and big ones to come, here is an offering.
In the wake of all the little quakes and big ones to come, here is an offering.
This is the summer of endless elegy. The forms and colors of winter persist even as the sun comes out for a day or two and temperatures climb above 70. The newly planted vine maple is already turning red and I have not yet gone swimming. Only the foxgloves have been jubilant; this is the year I realized they aren’t weeds and let them go wild, a pearl and purple trumpet section playing throughout the garden.
This transfer print blends the layers of sunlight past with autumn’s melancholies. The echinacea laid its stems at my feet last October. The sunlight came from my favorite yellow wall at 85th and Greenwood, photographed in 2009, recently graffitied with a luscious red heart and then abruptly painted beige. I am glad I captured its past life in my archives.
I am focusing on transfer prints exclusively right now, enraptured with the tools of the camera and the newest version of Photoshop. I am in that place where you try absolutely everything and sit back dazzled, and then subtract ninety percent of the possible, in search of the necessary. I’ll be moving back and forth all summer between two very different themes: the garden, and the street. The hard urban surfaces seem to need the antidote of what grows from the watering can and dirt. See more of these images in the gallery The Natural World
This weekend Pratt Fine Art Center holds its annual gala fund raiser at Bell Harbor Conference Center. If you would like to preview the art and find out who won the awards come to the (free) opening at Pratt Exposed this Friday from 6-9 PM at Bell Harbor. And if you plan to come to the auction but haven’t gotten a ticket it’s not too late! You will get to see art and artists all dressed up and biting their nails (the artists, that is.) I have contributed a print from a series called Werkspace, inspired by the printmaking studio at Pratt.
Oh, Phoebe, talk to me some more, you don’t have to go…..
So many years and moments of my life were lived to the sound of your soaring voice. I made this image in memory of you last night, while listening to The Poetry Man. You will be missed.
Pastel and photographic collage transfer print on Arches 88.
The other night I went to a concert of Choro music at The Chapel, a hidden gem of a concert venue. My friend Jere Smith, an artist in good standing at the good Shepherd Center, introduced me to this exquisitely calibrated performance space. Phenomenal acoustics and an architecture of reverential mystery: you don’t forget your listening moments here. I was completely swayed by Choro Loco and it’s dedicated cast of musicians on clarinet, accordion, guitar and triangle. I have never seen a clarinetist undulate like smoke– who knew this was a sexy instrument???
I got into that music space, where notes take color-shape and the 1930’s blend with 1910 and future-perfect and perfect-past in five languages. Remembrances of tango, waltz, polka, and sophisticated new-music grooves all interwoven into a heady eutophia — that’s utopia mixed with euphoria in case you haven’t yet been. Soon I pulled out my cell-phone, and started photographing in the low-res light. Herewith the first three prints in a new series called Choro: Listening to Music. All source material: Droid photos. Alcohol gel prints on Arches 88.