(dim. unknown)
Bummer, wish I hadn’t destroyed this. I painted it a few years ago, photographed it and immediately painted over it.
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30″ x 40″
This painting, still in process, and its title are taken from a book that my mother read as a girl, given to her by her great grandfather, and now I have it. I’ve been enjoying the little illustrations and just yesterday decided to read some of text. Great little coming of age story, florid and earnest, it provides courage for the developing Victorian schoolgirl.
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Last weekend I found this oil on masonite painting of Whistler’s Mother at the thrift store. The face was no good, but the atmosphere was suitably somber. So I bought it for $2.50 and changed the face, added a gold leaf (really gold foil candy wrappers) in the shape of a face, a celestial phantom. And added “Darling” up at the top. The small “Ann” at the bottom is the signature of the woman who painting the original copy. I put black tape over her last name “Finkle”. So this is dedicated to all the Ann’s, Anne’s, and Anna’s in my life.
At some point I’ll get a better shot of this piece. Some of the detail is lost here.
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16″ x 20″ (NFS)
First is my mother as a girl, and then in a sundress pregnant with me. These paintings are from a couple of years ago, part of a large body of work, paintings accompanied by poems by Joan Fiset. See the rest of the series here.
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9″ x 12″
I’ll just keep on posting pieces as this Rilke project goes along, even though these are all preliminary, laboratory kind of work. Why not. It’ll keep the process light. And humor is hard to come by in this text, unless you think baby slaughter and celestial revelations are funny.
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11″ x 14″
I’ve got an acute interest in hand-painted food signs. When I travel, I photograph them, and have well over a hundred in my collection now from all over the country. Most of them are fun to look at, often really gross, and sometimes touching. They seem to say something about how “we” think of food. There are cultural/regional styles that I like seeing and which remain a mystery to me. I am considering starting another page here on the Work-a-day just for hand-painted food signs of North America.
Anyway, this is a watercolor I did today inspired by a painting I saw on an abandoned butcher shop in Pecos, Texas a few weeks ago. The original is by far the most narrative hand-painted food signs I’ve seen. It’s like an altarpiece.
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This is actually a brand new one (you can tell by the wetness of the yellow). I was thinking I’d revisit the Wastrels, but what emerged was more a precocious woodland child emerging from my ribcage. One just can’t tell until the marks start going down. The Genesis 2: 21-24 reference was more or less accidental. Or incidental.
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size unknown
Hm. I was digging through some image folders and found this painting that I destroyed a while back. Now I wish I hadn’t. That so often happens. I had completely forgotten it existed, which makes me feel like it’s addressing me directly, which makes me feel strange inside.
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11″ x 14″
The next five are also being exhibited at Warren Wilson for the month of Feb. They are excerpts from a rather large body of paintings from a few years ago called “Edelweiss” and part of a collaboration with poet Joan Fiset. The manuscript is called “How It Was With Scotland” and some of it can be seen on the GenPop Books site.
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I was asked to make images for a retranslation of Rilke’s cycle of poems about the life of the Virgin Mary. Having gotten to know the text pretty well, I have settled on brown ink and gold leaf as the medium. Turns out, gold leaf is a prissy and uncooperative as it is radiant and fantastic.
Nonetheless, it feels right, like the materials themselves resonate with (illustrate) the text, independent of the imagery. So here’s the first of several (perhaps many) semi-successful images documenting my self-education in the art if translating German into ink and gold. That’s a cow in the bottom right. Cherubs at the top. I’d like to post the accompanying text, but awaiting publication. Besides, if the images are any good, they’ll be fine on their own, that’s a helpful guage maybe. Apologies for the fuzziness of the photo.
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12″ x 16″
Another dusty little gem from on top of the closet. The surface and colors and subject, it looks like something painted in the 1940’s by somebody’s eccentric aunt who wore kimonos, drank heavily and might have been a lesbian and sometimes painted pictures. But strangely, it was painted by me just last year. Oh, and don’t miss the little ghost in the upper right where Manet’s nurse usually hangs out.
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Ha, I found this on top of my closet from when I was doing the “Edelweiss” paintings a couple of years ago, using photographs from the family albums as subject. This is one that I abandoned after much (obvious) struggle. Now I find it endearing and, perhaps even finished. Thought I’d post it on Work-a-day before stashing back above the closet.
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Charlotte Salomon, the German-Jewish painter, died at twenty-six at Auschwitz, but not before making 1500 gouaches that are riddled with text. The Opposite Day piece from yesterday is from a photo of her and her friends in grade school. What an interesting character she was.
http://www.jewishjournal.com/images/photos/yh_tt_salomon1_041307.jpg
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approx 13″ x 20″
from the memoirs of my great great Grandfather, written in 1932 on the death of his father:
“The next night, November 11th 1884, he died. For several weeks he had been kept alive by stimulants and artificial means; but seeing how useless, he begged at last that they be stopped so that his suffering might end and he be at peace. Just before he died I asked, “Father, do you know me?” – He gasped, “Oh my son, I do, I do!” They were his last words… Gently, tenderly and sorrowfully we laid him away in our City of the Dead, and then took up for ourselves the burdens of life, which he had borne for us so long.”
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Getting in the holiday spirit. This trailer painting, and the one that I’ll post tomorrow are dedicated to my friend Christian Peet. Every time I’d work on one, he’d call, so I think they are for him.
Photo quality is bad because this is painted with glossy house paint and oil, too much glare, too little patience.
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8″ x 27″
This one painted in response to this S. for B.’s passage by Frankie Rollins:
I said yes and there was argument
I said no and there was argument
I said okay and there was argument
I said do you think and there was argument
Any day can take on the tint of sorrow
There are more misunderstandings
than I ever thought possible.
I still let them break my heart
but you, forewarned,
might not.
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Been working on this one for a few weeks, hopefully will expel the phrase “Please please Pleiades” from my mind, been ricocheting around in there for a while. This is also titled “Half of What They Carried Flew Away”, from Andrea R. Those two lines collided and made this image.
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9″ x 12″
Last night’s Sorrow for Beginners painting. Another passage in the handbook. The chapter on how to __________ in a time of ____________ _____________. Carrying on with the two-day tradition, if you would like to write something for this image, the comments section is a tabula rasa, baby. Make yourself at home there.
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