Beware the Ice of March

Despite the Equinoctial cavorting of the sun, Winter seems loath to abandon its grip. This week we have had 5 consecutive days without topping 25 degrees and with lows in the teens. This is no way to welcome the Spring. On a weekend, waterfront walk, I shot some nice icicles...say that 5 times really fast. And if it wasn't for the sun and the crystal I would be cursing the weather gods, because my endurance of the cold is wearing thin and without the beauty, there would be nothing to recommend this last week. I finished another bigger painting this week, 2' x4' in size and pretty complex. I continue to play with white and on this piece, I really liked the result. I think this one is more successful than the last one in doing what I wanted it to do, but I'll have to spend some time away from it before I can make a final call. For three weeks or so it was pretty consuming, so I can't really see it just yet, being still immersed up to the eyeballs. I submitted it to the Spring Show, which I have not had much luck with as of late, so if it doesn't get in, the time away will be enough to clear my head I would imagine. I also did a second little piece from some fungus images I shot on Presque Isle a while back. I like the result and the colors feel nice. I wonder if Georgia O'Keeffe ever did anything with fungi. It seems to me to be a natural direction for her to have gone.The weekend's weather is redeemed by some beautiful teeth of ice biting the shoreline.

New Work from February

I just finished a new painting a couple of days back. It took up most of my painting time in February and I'm not sold on the results. I wanted to do something that was connected in some way to some of the sculptures from the beach...try to marry the two concepts in some way. I will need to look at it a lot in the next couple of weeks to see if it's telling the truth. I wanted to continue the experiments with white and the stick pattern had some promising qualities so I went with it here. In real life it is 48 " long and 24" tall and when you look at it there is a nice rhythm created by the seemingly randomly overlapped sticks. If you give it a chance it is even somewhat mesmerizing, a quality that works for me. I get a similar feel when looking at the better Jackson Pollock paintings. Along with this rhythmic Brownian movement of the sticks, I tried to create some tension between the shallow depths implied by the darker "stones" in the lower left corner and upper right quarter that appear to be under the "sticks", and the darker circle of sticks and the patch of sticks in the lower right corner that are more ambiguously situated. In the end I think it does what I wanted it to do, I just wonder, if with that said, it is interesting enough to give a damn about visually.



In a regards to the marriage, here are some stick images from the beach that suggested this painting. In a totally unrelated matter, Josh, I enjoyed very much reading the bit you wrote about Aleksander and Poland that Norb appended to his last writing.

Waiting for the End of White

Greetings Minnesotans. Thanks for the BD wishes. All goes well here as I advance towards decrepitude.
As of late I have been working with white a lot. Some years ago I became familiar with Kasimir Malevich's white paintings and at first I didn't know what to make of them, but after seeing a few in real life I was fascinated by the subtlety. Jasper Johns' White Flag is another brilliant work in white. And one of my former students, Justus Cotterill, has been doing these great paintings involving sharks/boats/water/shacks that are like white-washed Richard Diebenkorns. Beautiful...beautiful. Of a sudden I think I just came of age when I could really understand how spectacular white could be. It was all just good timing, so I've been working out some things with white. On the weekend while down at the beach it became really clear where all of this was coming from, a little epiphany on whititudness.

I haven't been down to the beach much this calendar year so far, as the conditions haven't been great. The few times I went down there just wasn't any mojo. Lots of wind and bitter temperatures, but not much in the way of mojo. This weekend I went down just to see if the snow was doing anything interesting to the stones...not much luck. But here is a shot of the stones in the snow and then one from the summer for comparison purposes.

I got one small piece done in February and a second much larger piece close to completion. Both images are part of the Pattern Recognition Project. This one you might recognize from Fungi and Games. I like the way it turned out. I'll post the bigger piece next week.