What you are looking at is an art studio on the move.  This fall, major changes will happen in that space in the country where I love to paint.  The ceiling will be painted white, another skylight will be added to the four already on the roof, new shelves and other storage systems will be built, and the concrete floor will be cleaned and sealed to a bright sheen.  We aim to improve the quality of the natural light (I have learned all I can from the struggle with very weak light) and provide more space in which I can store completed and new canvases.

To do all that, I need to empty the studio; yes, empty.  Every item needs to be packed and put into storage, or tossed.  I have handled, during the past few weeks, countless books from a variety of fields and interests; files from my old teaching days; photographs and letters from many, many years ago; an endless array of art supplies; and all those things that one couldn't decide about that just ended up in the garage (i.e., the former garage, now studio).  Thankfully, good friends have helped.  Nonetheless, this has been lots of hard personal identity work.  With every box I pack, I ask myself:  What does this object say about who I was, who I am, and who I hope to be?  Yikes!  Imagine weeks of that.  And I thought this was just the place where I painted. 

Making the packing bearable is the small space I left for painting.  I refuse to put away my essential brushes and paints until the last moment, when the painters and carpenters crowd me out.  I have kept a little safe spot. 

Some of the painting I am doing these days, in that very spot, is a series called "the Wishes of Early Fall." This is a great time for painting fruit.  The shapes and colors are wonderful.  And luckily, I am able to do these small paintings quickly enough to eat what I paint.  The timing of the painting seems to coincide perfectly with the timing needed for ripening:  The fruit always tastes better after it has been painted.  Canvases that are for now stacked against the walls have inspired abstract backgrounds, and that favorite antique French kitchen cloth can't keep ourself out of my work.  

        There are many rituals connected with finishing a painting.  It begins with the decision that the painting is indeed done.  For that, there is a lot of looking at the painting:  as is on the easel, on various walls in the studio, from a seated position and a standing position, in different kinds of light, in reverse form in the mirror, upside down.  All of this activity is usually accompanied by a large cup of coffee or tea.  

         Once the "It's done" decision is made, there is the ritual of where to hang the painting in the studio while it dries.  Hanging takes a number of tries with hammer and nails and the inevitable moving around of pieces that are already on the wall.  It is so nice to see the new painting off the easel and in a temporary but suitable location with friends.  

        Then, there is the ritual of clean up.  I like to start from scratch when I begin a new painting.  That means all signs of the just finished painting are removed.  All of my brushes are not only thoroughly cleaned but put back in their official holders. Every bit of paint is scraped off the palette so I can start with fresh color.  The easel and other furniture are put in a corner. 

        When the painting I have just finished includes fruits, vegetables, and/or flowers, if that painting has taken more than a few days, there is one more very special ritual step.  I gather together all of the fruits, vegetables, and flowers  that are looking not quite as wonderful as they did when we first began the work.  They often have bruises, signs of sagging and withering, a deadening of color, and a scent that is a little too strong.   I put them all in a paper bag and, on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Saturday, I drop them off at the Union Square Market on my way home from the studio.  The Market has a special area for composting with large containers for deposits.  It feels just right as I drop into the composting bin those many beloved apples, pears, cabbages, and other objects that I got to know so well.  I can't imagine just throwing them away in the ordinary trash.  They stay alive as they go into the making of compost or "black gold" that will help other vegetables, fruits, and flowers thrive.  As compost,  those still life objects have a life beyond my painting.  I like that.  As Ula and I walk the rest of our way home, we feel like we've done good work.   

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.

     As I watched a New York City Center performance of Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty  ballet, I wished my eyes were bigger so I could take in more of what was on stage.  I wanted more of that phenomenally glorious dancing, 

and more of those inventive, breathtaking sets.

Given Bourne's skill at making dance not only serve but enhance the music, seeing more would have meant hearing more of Tschiakovsky's magnificent music.   Given Bourne's ability to tell a good tale through dance, music, and staging, seeing more would have meant learning more from his new version of the Sleeping Beauty story.  Sitting in my audience seat, I was happily with all senses open in the hands of a master.

     There is lots to say about how unique Bourne's treatment of this ballet is (this is definitely not the Sleeping Beauty you know).  Let's just focus here on one narrative twist: the one that involves a Count Lilac who is King of the fairies. He is also a vampire.  In the original ballet, this central rescuer role is played by a queen fairy-no vampire). Count Lilac is the one on the right in the first photo.

This change in character allows Bourne to bridge what is often a confusing gap in story line (i.e., how can sleeping beauty's young lover whom she met before the curse takes effect still be around after all those 100 years that she has been sleeping?).   Well, if that young lover has become a vampire through his contact with Count Lilac, then  ...  I think you can fill  in the blanks.  Vampires are not Bourne's only choice of the gothic, dark, and creepy over the classical, light-filled, and hopeful in Petipa's original 1890 choreography.    With lots of wit and comedy, there are several visits in this performance to the evil side.  As I watched, I wondered if vampires and amazingly louche downtown club goers were, in 2013, our major romantic choices.   I fear I have some cultural catching up to do. I might have missed a lot by letting the recent vampire craze escape me. 

Reviewing the images I have posted here, I need to add that although there is lots of darkness (one reviewer noted that instead of pink tutus in this production, we get fairies wearing costumes that are the color of bruises), there is also lots of light.  The ending is upbeat and then there is that amazing Baby Aurora (Baby Sleeping Beauty) played by an absolutely charming puppet, controlled as in Bunraku puppetry.  She is filled with light and hope and gumption.  There is a theatrical saying that if you dare go onstage with a child or a dog, you are sure to be upstaged.  This puppet in her cuteness and responsiveness upstages even the most awesome dancing.

Roma Torre in her television review of this production advises all New Yorkers who missed it to catch the Amtrak train to Washington D.C.  The ballet begins its run at the Kennedy Center on November 12th and goes through the  17th. Roma is right.

Comments to this and all posts are much appreciated.  

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.

        Painting helps you open your eyes very wide and really, really look at something.  You can catch something amazing with your eyes wide open like that.  It happens anywhere.  Wonderful recent examples of great seeing in the theatre happened for me in the puppeteer Basil Twist's recreation of his piece Dogugaeshi at the Japan Society, and the director Robert Lepage's Blue Dragon at BAM.  

     Twist stretches the definition of a puppet.  In his hands,  common objects like window frames and countless rectangular panels of beautifully patterned and painted paper become puppets.  He creates living collages.  In Dogugaeshi, Twist builds upon a stage mechanism that commonly provides background for traditional Japanese puppet theater.  The audience views a succession of intricately painted screens.  Each pair of screens opens to reveal yet another pair.  My favorite part of Dogugaeshi comes near the very end.  Here, pairs of screens snap open in a very long and very rapid sequence.  Twist draws the viewer speedily into his theatrical space.  I felt like I had been taken miles away from my seat by the time we reached a pair of screens that opened to reveal a strip of very bright white light.  That strip grew to become a full rectangle of light.  As if that wasn't enough magic, I was stunned again when the puppeteers entered the scene.  I knew that the final rectangle had to be small.  After all, it was miles away.  Nonetheless, I was shocked to see how in relationship to the puppeteers, it was minuscule.  The puppeteers loomed so large.  So, the screen had to be very, very, very small; or maybe, the puppetters are giants after all.

     Lepage's revisiting of the painter character from his famous Dragon's Trilogy, after a twenty year absence, is also visually stunning and unique. Lepage, like Twist, provides us with gorgeous screens that open and close, come and go; and there is that same blue whirlwind in which the viewer feels caught.  Given my interests in portraits and ideas about self and identity, especially the idea of a dialogical self,  I would have to pick as my favorite moments in this piece those about and when the young Chinese painter snaps a photograph of herself with her iphone immediately after a phone conversation.  She captures an image of herself at emotionally charged moments that she then transforms into large self portraits.  We see these portraits as they hang in an exhibition that Lepage presents as one of his many extraordinary scenes on his two level stage.   But there are so many more favorite moments.  Lepage tells a simple story about three people:  the middle age male painter who is now running a gallery in Shanghai, his long estranged wife who has come to China to adopt a child, and the young woman painter who is represented by the gallery owner and is his girlfriend.     He tells their simple story by using very high tech stage mechanisms and setting it the midst of currently high stake geopolitical realities.  While leaving the theatre, I overheard another audience member say, "It's banal, the story is banal."  It don't think her word is right, given the importance of the big questions Lepage raises through his close look at three lives.  I wish I could have quoted Lepage's own words to her:

                             My main preoccupation is what are we about right now ? With simple, everyday life stories, 
                      there are hints of the big picture.  How do you make that resound?

     Words are never enough.  For images and more words on Basil Twist, click here to visit his website, www.basiltwist.com.  There is a great deal of information about Robert Lepage on the internet, click here for a site, http://lacaserne.net/index2.php/robertlepage/ that is a good place to start.
      




        

At left is a reproduction of the oil painting, Still Life with Fruits and Bread, 1641 by the Dutch painter, Pieter Claesz.  I saw it up close at the wonderful Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College.  The image may be clearer if you click on and visit the Center's website: (http://fllac.vassar.edu/collections/medieval_renaissance_baroque.html).

Claesz is a master of still life painting. He presents a highly naturalistic scene yet his work is filled with symbolic references.  His objects reflect the grand and glamorous but also remind us of the inevitable passing of time (the watch in this painting and the nuts cracked open),  and its link to human mortality (many of his paintings include a human skull).  When I saw this painting at Vassar's gallery, I was struck by the extraordinary technique, the amazing use of light and dark, and of course the reflections seen on the metal and glass surfaces. I am fascinated by what we see both "on its own" and through something else. 

This reproduction of Claesz's painting has hung in my studio for nearly three years.  One recent day, it made it's way off the wall and came to pay a visit by my easel.  I set up a new still life and enjoyed how Claesz's work inspired my  choices.  

Letting Claesz be my guide felt easy in many ways, like a simple matching process.  The white cloth, some of it smooth, some of it bunched up,  easily fell into the foreground.  The  bunched up part provided a nice painting opportunity. I could capture folds and creases through contrast of lights and darks and subtle variations in color.  I set up the middle and back ground to be darker in tone.  I filled the middle ground with lots of objects, many many more than I typically include.  With those, I aimed to capture the same spirit of hospitality that Claesz invoked, welcoming guests to a party with food and drink almost ready for consumption.

But then, the connection with Claesz began to weaken.  Try as I might, I couldn't put in as many objects as he had without the painting becoming oppressive.  And I couldn't make it as dark as he had.   Three hundred plus years have done a lot for lighting.  Our eyes are not accustomed to seeing things in such a dark space as his.  And then there are those specific objects.    I couldn't imagine serving and or painting Claesz's roasted bird, with lumps of fat under the crispy skin and head and feet still attached.  Also, the symbolic value of many of his items would escape most current viewers.  I doubt that anyone looking at my pistachio nuts (right lower side of painting) would think of the passage of time and mortality.    

So, along with the many links across the long sweep of the history of still life painting, there are differences.  I think we can celebrate both.