Soon after you enter the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea, you find yourself in total darkness.  You hear the sounds from the film of the jazz session that you are there to see, but you have no sense of where to walk.  It is like being underwater in a pitch black sea.  Then, your eyes adjust.  You start to make out forms that look like walls and you spot a corner you need go around.  Once in the viewing room,  it is still dark but a large movie screen helps you see and not step on the bodies on the floor.  You join them and you are part of a wonderful treat.  This exhibition consists of a film by Stan Douglas.  It is his creation of a 70s era jazz jam session, set in his recast of the once famous recording space in midtown Manhattan known as the "Church,"  with ten wonderful musicians in period dress.  All of the instrumentalists are terrific, but the four drummers are the snarliest and happiest.  The film lasts for 6 hours.  You probably won't stay for all of that, but you will stay longer than you might have originally planned.  Jazz musicians say they go to some special other place when they play.  This film helps take you with them. 

The David Zwirner Gallery is at 533 West 19th Street.  The film is there for viewing (it is fine to pick it up at any point)
through February 22.

And it was!  It certainly was. 

I try to spend the major part of each day in the painting studio.  Not enough painting time sends me into a real funk.  If I can't be painting, whatever I am doing better be good.  Yesterday's theatre trip was.  Yesterday's performance of the Shakespeare's Globe production of Twelfth Night did only great things for my mood.  

Mark Rylance and all the other wonderful actors, the amazing words that I heard more clearly than I ever had, the set, the pre-show in which actors put on their costumes, the music, the lighting, the curtain call were brilliant.  And, of course, the candles.  When you enter the theatre, you instantly smell the beeswax from the burning candle chandeliers over the stage.  The smell is warm and inviting.  Something in this production for every one of the senses.  It was Kandinsky's ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art.  I was not so far from painting after all. 

        There is a wonderful exhibition of small, very small, pieces of art at the Dodge Gallery.  For this show, the painter, Chuck Webster, selected and brought together 53 works and 41 named artists.  The connections between the pieces are not instantly obvious, but just spend a little time looking at them and you will generate all sorts of links.  I have become accustomed to gallery spaces hung only with huge paintings.  There is something very special, restful, and intriguing about being in space where I had to look very up close at each of the pieces displayed.  One seems no bigger than one square inch.  Magic happens here.

            The Dodge Gallery is at 15 Rivington Street in New York City.  The show The Age of Small Things is there through February 23, 2014. 

            It happens in some paintings.  I put off and put off changing a piece of the canvas that I am working on.  Then, I finally do it, I make the change. And voila! Instantly, all is so much better. 

            Here is the longer version.  I am working on a painting and all seems to be going well, in the right direction.  But there is some small part of what I am putting on the canvas that calls out to me in a not happy voice.  It says:  "I am not quite right, I am not fitting in with the rest." So, I stop and I check.  I remeasure, I check the color and its value, I reassess the light effects, I consider this part of the painting in relationship to all the other parts, etc.  And I can't see what is wrong.  Since I feel okay about the whole, and I don't want to spoil what seems to be going well, I tell that little voice to be quiet.  I go on with the painting as is.  I work on the painting in several sessions.  In just about each session, that little voice speaks up again, and again I do the checking but leave it.  Finally, in a session close to the final one, I decide to go for it and trust the little voice.  I muster up the needed courage, pick up the brush closest to hand, take up some paint that seems good enough in color, and I boldly and definitively go in and change that part of the canvas (this week, it was an antique French bottle in a still life arrangement that was calling for help).  And it works (that bottle needed to be taller and broader in the neck)!  That part of the painting is better and so, of course, is everything else.  Everything is up a notch.  What is amazing to me is how quickly it all happened.  All it took was making the change.  After all that hesitation and fretting and checking and rechecking, a quick and strong gesture that breaks the pattern and brings in something new makes everything better.  my mood included. 

                I think this is about more than painting.