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Perhaps Like a Broken Record and Yet, Not

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Like a Broken Record and Yet, Not Back in the old days of technology I learned how to splice magnetic tape end to end to create an endless tape loop. A tape loop only repeats. The message is always the same. Back in the old days of technology I learned how to splice magnetic tape end to end to create an endless tape loop. A tape loop only repeats. The message is often the same. No. The message is always the same. Sometimes it is necessary to repeat to get a point across. Sometimes repetition is a weapon or a mantra, which is anything like a weapon. In those old days when tape loops were new to me, they seemed a fresh experience, hypnotic, white noise that could create a sound texture, something like a curtain or screen to filter out the world. When I work in my studio, I am alone with my brushes and colors, cut off from the world by a wall of sound. I hit the repeat button and no distracting thoughts or sound...
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Continuing to Paint While Waiting for Paint to Dry

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Worth Keeping That season Jackson Pollock finished thirty-two paintings. Thirty-two sounds like a lot to someone who made fewer. Paint only dries so fast and you can’t budge a wet canvas. When you can’t move a drying artwork, you must wait. My grandmother had one oven and only four bread pans. She also had six pie tins. There were decisions to make. Would she make six pies or four loaves of bread? Her pies brought a higher price. She needed the money. Does it really matter whether you paint or make pies? If you must sell them to live it matters a very great deal. For many reasons it is wiser to bake a delicious pie. If no one buys the pie you can always eat it yourself. If you paint you paint for yourself with perhaps that Hope someone will come along and give you something With which you might purchase a whole pie or slice. Yet, you paint for yourself otherwise you should be baking. Finishing thirty-two paintings in a season sounds like A slow month to me. Ho...
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Dizziness: for Your Phone

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To be viewed on your phone
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Four Photographs and An Unrelated Fantasy about Art, Galleries, and Artmaking

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Above Images starting at the top: Paris Metro, Jardin du Luxembourg, Brancusi's Studio, The British Museum A Teeny Tiny Art Gallery Long ago (in the late 1950s), as if in a fairytale, there was a teeny tiny art gallery in a teeny tiny place known as an "art world". The itsy gallery had what was called a stable of "Artists", which numbered a few too small to count on both hands. It was as if each of these empty, doghouse sized spaces with white-washed walls, was a fancy dog kennel. Every so often postage stamps would be licked and slapped upon postcards. These mailed cards and phone calls was how an aggressive person, calling herself or himself something other than "gallerist", would drum up the small group of aficionados for what was known as a vernissage, the varnishing of the paintings, which meant: "I, the talented artist do now apply a coat of varnish over my artwork, signifying that no further alteration...
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Upon Seeing a Standing Mattress : Bedtime Tale #3

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Upon Seeing a Standing Mattress When one sees an old mattress standing vertically, leaning against a brick wall or a dumpster, it makes little or no sense visually or otherwise. Guttural and mental reactions to a discarded mattress are never positive, especially when the smell floats like a putrid cloud or stains are visible, especially identifiable discoloration. Can one reach a point of neutrality regarding a used up bed to consider the function of this thing? It was designed with a purpose which it undoubtedly has served, a platform for human relaxation, a surface familiar with both pleasure and illness. This is a discarded object, used up and rejected, absolutely devoid of grace or beauty and yet, there is a sculpted shape, relaxed form, the way it bends, a distant cousin to van Gogh’s painted portrait of an old worn pair of brown boots. This cast off vertical object, fatigued bed standing perpendicular to its natural state, marking time until it i...
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Before the Garbage Truck Arrived

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Captured Before The Trash is Collected He'd walked down these narrow streets before, always as the darkness was slipping away, retreating to some place a little more to the west. It never really vanished, just edged over like a dense cloud, making space for the first sun beams. Daylight coming in and darkness leaving makes magic at their intersection. This morning in Paris would prove special. He'd been on this sidewalk many times, passed the large green trash bins so often. Most days the trash was rubbish. Still, he always looked as he passed, just in case. After all, he'd found wonderful toy fire engines, heavy duty clothes hangers, wooden canes, stacks of art books, lamps and mismatched shades. He'd even found a Noguchi Akari lamp, not in pristine condition, but close enough. The inhabitants of Paris discard the strangest things. He at times wondered if these people understood exactly what they had jettisoned? On those rare occasions when he spie...
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In The Louvre: On the Backside of Artworks

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A Backside Not Intended to be Viewed A side devoid of interest for others Some, perhaps even you, may think I spend too much of my time in the Louvre looking at the backside of artworks I find a good deal of joy in focusing upon the unintended focus, the backside, the brushstrokes, measuring with my eyes or hands the width of the bolts of canvas and their orientation in an enormously humongous history painting Ah, the flip side of this Roman portrait bust: Geometric Purity, Secret Proto-Modernism Unveiled "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!"
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