More from the "Requiem for the Peten"

This last weekend the weather was amazing. The stuff that makes Erie very liveable if not an actual paradise. Unfortunately I wasn't able to take advantage of it to work on the beach as I was in Greenville, Delaware hanging a show at the Twin Lakes Brewery...the George Weymouth Gallery. Weymouth is a well-known painter/portraitist in the tempera tradition. Apparantly the gallery used to be his studio and the brewery owner is his grandson or something along those lines. The show is with Brian Pardini and includes his driftwood sculpture and 27 of my paintings from the 100 Views. The weekend was a bit tainted because right before I left I discovered that my beach sculptures had been damaged by the remnants of Hurricane Ike and then vandalized as well. Some of the stone was then stolen by a local guy. Upon returning to Erie on Sunday night I retrieved some of the stone, but there will have to be a reckoning of sorts so that this doesn't happen again. So with no new images from the Beachworks, I will revisit the Requiem works. The above piece is a 30"x40" watercolor of a felled tree, possibly a ceiba. It has been laying on the ground by the Great Plaza trail for years now. But in its initial felling the bole was a beautiful orangish-siena when wet and when set off by the greens it was particularly impressive.

This is one small panel from a larger painting called Root/Stone/Bone from the Requiem series.

The image comes from a child sacrifice placed in lip to lip plates and then cached in a building. The point of view makes it even more disturbing I think and the earth tones were a bit exaggerated to stay in keeping with the larger painting that it was a part of.

This is the most recent addition to the Requiem series. I particularly like the leaves which were taken from a little sketch that I did right outside the lab at Plaza de los Siete Templos while waiting for Oswaldo and the truck to head back to the casita. I had a small bottle of India ink and I used a twig to sketch a couple of leaves lying on the plaza floor. The sketch had to be quick before the leaves blew away. There was a wabi sabi feel to it and it was fun to translate it into color...Recumbant Figures.

I have to say good-bye to this piece. It sold in the Glassgrowers show. It has always been one of my favorites. It is a stucco mask from the North Acropolis and it shows up in many paintings, but I particularly like this one. The third mask over, the reddish one was painted shortly after visiting the Modigliani exhibition at the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo. I was blown away by this color that he used in a couple of reclining nudes, so I stole it and used it on this mask and it made the painting as far as I am concerned. I will miss it.

So these are some images from the "Requiem for the Peten" exhibit. It has been shown in Pittsburgh, Ashtabula OH, Erie, and Jamestown NY and I was getting ready to retire it, but the other day I put a few pieces up and now I think I want to try to get it out at least one more time. So I will send out another round of proposals.