“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley.” – Robert Burns, “To a Mouse” If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. Corollary: If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then. – Murphy’s Law “The violets in … Continue reading A Change in the Weather
“Summer was past and the day was past.Sombre clouds in the west were massed.” Robert Frost’s poignant poem, “Bereft” includes these lines, and they came to mind today, although in this case: “Winter was past and the cold was past. Fluffy clouds in the west were massed.” Spring has come, and with it the flowers of the season, the budding branches, the greening grass, the … Continue reading A Wild and Precious Life
Winter turns into spring or close enough now, and the impulse to get back to the studio grows stronger. An artist friend in Seattle was recently in touch and wrote me about the small collages he’s doing. I started thinking again about my own collages, the ones that got me going those years ago. The world situation right now is on my mind as well, … Continue reading Art, War, Poetry, and Spirit
The body here, which I found some now-forgotten place, was the inspiration for my series, “Celestial Bodies.” I was attending a marketing workshop for artists about how to sell the paintings when I heard the line, “You’ll need a body of work…” At that moment, words from an old tune ran through my head: “I ain’t got no body…” And I did, in fact, have … Continue reading A Body of Work and the Traces of Art
The name of this blog says it all: Art and Tulips They have long gone hand in hand for me, even before “The Colors of Jazz.” Painting flowers has never held much appeal for me because I know it’s impossible for me to truly capture their beauty except perhaps in a good photograph, so using photographs in collages has seemed the best way, for me … Continue reading When Tulips Are in Bloom Again
“…And when old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and when the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.” –Rabindranath Tagore As we continue to creep out of the pandemic during which so many old tracks were lost, I continue to hear from other artist friends and writers about their slow recovery from what’s … Continue reading Searching for Constants and New Tracks in our Artist Lives
It’s been a month and two days since I’ve posted here, and longer since I’ve actually completed a painting. I’ve been thinking about why that is. There are possibilities – of course. There are always possibilities. –We bought a house and we moved. Moving takes time and energy. First you find the place, then you pack your stuff and hire a truck. Then you unload … Continue reading Hibernation with Low Expectations
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted here, but they’ve been busy weeks with a new art studio in the works. Painting walls is not the same as painting canvases, and yet the tools are remarkably similar: brush, roller, can of paint. Okay, I don’t usually use a can of paint on my canvases, but you can’t do a wall with a tube of … Continue reading A New Studio for the New Year!
Today, serendipity and a sidestep from jazz. Serendipity was finding a wonderful image of this lily, a cobra lily, and recognizing that I wanted to use it right away. This is how art happens. Consider the Lilies is a one-off. I am not planning a series about flowers. But it was the right thing at the right moment and tells the right story, so who … Continue reading Considering the Lilies
And so it begins. Plato is rumored to have said (who knows who really said what back in the day?) that “The beginning is the most important part of the work.” Whether he said this or not, I have long believed it. It’s the first stroke on the canvas, the first words in a piece of writing, the first notes of a new composition, the … Continue reading Plato Had It Right
Art and Tulips 