On Sunday, Lou Reed died.

On early Monday morning, a young man in our building's elevator listened to Lou Reed's music through his ear buds.  The sound was up high. All of us with him on the elevator could hear it, but no one of the five people on the ride complained.   It was our own private ceremony to honor Lou Reed's passing.

                                               "A bit of magic in everything and then some loss to even things out."
                                                                                                               Lou Reed, from Magic and Loss

Later that Monday morning, I used my ear buds on the train to listen, start to finish, to Lou Reed's Magic and Loss album.  A wonderful collection of songs said to be his response to the deaths of two friends, it seemed the best of his work to listen to now.  Attending as carefully as I could to all the words and all the marvelous sounds, I mourned our loss of Lou Reed.  As a piece of art, his album also helped me to to do more.  As I listened, I grieved for all those others I have lost,  thought about my own mortality, and tried to engage the impossible idea of death itself.  Thank you, Lou.

Since his death, many New Yorkers have shared their favorite Lou Reed stories.  Here is mine.  Several years ago, buying a coffee in lovely funky cafe on Hudson Street,  I spotted Lou Reed at a table eating his breakfast.  Seeing him wasn't such a surprise.  He lived in the West Village and was often on the street.  It was what he was eating that stopped me in my tracks:  Scrambled eggs.  I had been certain that Lou Reed was a fried eggs kind of guy --- and not the over easy eggs, but the two large bright orange yolks staring you right in the eye eggs.  I had been wrong.  Lou Reed ate fluffy, very pale yellow eggs with his toast. 

Having misjudged the kind of eggs to connect with Lou Reed, maybe I could do better with a painting analogy.  Actually, I need to try out two.  Twenty-five years ago, no question, I would have linked Lou Reed with an Egon Schiele self-portrait, actually several Egon Schiele self-portraits, but here is just one.

But today, given his long productive life and what many have written about that, it's a Picasso painting that best represents for me the spirit of Lou Reed.  It's Picasso's Boy in Blue from 1905.  There is a celebration of the person,  seriousness, strength, quiet, and glory in this painting.  Meyer Schapiro writes that this is Picasso's depiction of his own transforming artist-self.  I think the painting is big enough for us to see in it the celebration of other artists, artists like Lou Reed.

           This is our garden in its last stages.  After a spring and summer filled with color, we have settled into lots of browns and greys with occasional yellows and oranges from decaying leaves.  This is clearly the time to take out the rake and the pruning shears and to cart away what were once lively, growing things.  But wait.  I love the garden when it looks just this way.  It is subtle and mysterious.  It draws me in to appreciate things that are spent and on their way out of their earlier way of being.  Every year, without fail, I take out the pruning shears only to put them away again.  I say to myself, "This perennial plant can stay a little longer. I like the way it looks now."  This year it was the plant with yellow branches in the middle of the first slide that led me to take out and put away the shears.  Simply put, I love these dying things.  Maybe Freud wasn't all wrong about the death instinct.

           So, what do I do if I am not doing those fall clean up chores?  I let the garden stay the way it is and do a sketch.

At each of the stages of the painting process, it is good to take a photograph of the work.  It helps a lot to look at the photo in between sessions, when I am away from the studio and before I take up the painting again.  I sometimes see things in the photograph that I missed when I was in the studio.  I also need to confess that although there is something special about the product of the final painting session, I become very attached to and like to look at each of the stages.  In fact, unless I fall in love with what happens in those very early stages,  especially the very first, I am not going to like what happens later.  If love doesn't happen in the drawing, the message is to start a new painting.

This slideshow presents five stages of a painting I am calling  Pears and Shapes.  I am hoping it will be the first in a series of paintings that let viewers see painting as a kind of meditation.  I will keep you posted on how that goes.