On the Feeding of Parisian Birds Ecoute bien mes petites oisoux Like the cat who does not live with me You cannot count on me to feed you To toss stale bread or offer bowls of water As I am only passing through your life as you Pass through mine If you catch my eye by the way you flutter past And I reward you with a morsel, or don't, That is just the way it is for us both

Big Blue Miracle Machine Clouds, puffs of smoke, Creamer swirling in coffee, Tea leaves in an empty cup, A face in the flames, Visions in a crystal ball. When we catch sight of serendipitous patterns We are looking into a miracle machine. How completely predictable is our world. How completely random is our world. When one defines “miracle” it is usually said To be a once in a million occurrence, The unexpected. Something that shouldn’t happen. Examples cited are usually big miracles, Such as the dead come back to life. Smaller events, such as a snowflake falling In the Sahara, are every bit as miraculous. Take a quarter out of your pocket. Toss it into the air. Probability tells us that it will land On either the "heads" side or the "tails" side. If you flip the coin ten times it is supposed To land on heads five times and tails The other five times. This usually doesn't happen in a small test. But after a few hundre...

Fantasies on a Carnac Theme The Continuity of My Painted Carnac Series While I long ago walked amongst the standing stones in Carnac, it is not these erect boulders that spur me to depict them. It is the underlying concept of the creation of these row upon row of rocks pointing unexpectedly skyward that provokes me to my two dimensional fugue. Sixty-five hundred years ago huge boulders were dug from the earth and dragged some sixty kilometers to the site of modern day Carnac, in Brittany. Upon reaching their destination they were set into the ground in an unnatural manner. Gravity wants stones to fall flat, not point to the heavens. More than three thousand rocks stand in eleven rows. They are known as The Alignments. As with all prehistory, no recorded story exists. How long it took the massive boulders to be set in place is unknown. The task must have lasted generations, massive undertakings of long duration and cultural importance, predating such communal structures a...

The Parson Weems Tale of Helen Frankenthaler You remember Parson Weems Who placed a hatchet In George’s mitt Helen chopped no cherry tree In Central Park I cannot tell a lie Yet took her box of colored chalk Clutched with baby fingers Drawing one line One continuous colored line All the way home On sidewalks and streets From the front steps of the Metropolitan Museum At Fifth and 82nd To the canopy of her Park avenue home At 74th Young Helen scrawled That single line Point six miles long Did her tiny back ache From bending over to draw? Eight skinny NYC blocks 82nd street along Fifth avenue To 74th where she made a right angle Then two lengthy blocks between Fifth across Madison And ending at Park avenue Would her parents have asked Where her new box Of chalk had gone? Parson Weems might tell us She used one piece of chalk Or the entire box But anyone who has used chalk On a sidewalk would know This tale is chalk poetry .......

Some Frown Upon My Stories Some dislike my stories Yet they admire my paintings Others look away from my visual art And prefer the words Rarely do others appreciate both The word jumbles and the colored splotches There surely is a numberless gang that Cannot stand anything I do Still, far and away are those countless beings Whom I have shared nothing with While he is appreciative of neither My cat likes being petted But, nobody doesn't like Sara Lee...

Dead Folk Talking About Painting Long dead and recently gone painters wave to me as I walk through galleries in this city each wanting to say something Their messages enter my eyes and I take from them what strikes me and always it goes into my pocket for future reference I look and in a sense listen with my non-hearing parts and each time note that I might or will make my own reply to these old painters I have just ordered rolls of heavy duck canvas to paint upon, unsized, big ass rolls, the same rough canvas used for sailing ships Perhaps one might in this century be painting on some aerospace fiber or on the air itself It might seem so old fashioned to consider applying ideas to unfurled cotton, as if painting on cave walls Yet, I ordered, via the internet, the thickest and widest roll of cotton duck as tactile and substantial as canvas can be and yes, it had been years since I rolled out a painting surface beneath my feet on the concrete wareh...

In the Back of the Local Pottery Barn His latest one-man exhibition was held in the rather large storage room of the local Pottery Barn. Refreshments were served during the opening. Lunchables and boxed wine were available at cost, in the alley, as the Pottery Barn had no liquor license. The Drawings and collages he had created were produced directly upon the kraft cartons circling the room, floor to ceiling. All sides of the cardboard boxes, not only those facing the center of the room, had been decorated, marked, painted, or drawn upon. Perhaps the number of boxes was more than a hundred. No attempt was made to obscure the lettering: MADE IN CHINA. The cartons were not empty, but heavy. Inside these decorated cartons remained the articles, goods, and saleable wares. Black stenciled labels indicated the contents. I picked up several boxes and peeked at the drawings on the underside. The value of each artwork included the cost of the enclosed products, at retail price...

This Quiet This is one of those moments when I am surprised at how peaceful the world can be How rare to not open my mouth and fill the air with the sound of my own voice I can spend these rare moments with my brain switched off, as it is when I am in the studio hovering over a blank sheet of paper begging to be touched Waiting patiently for those particular marks that may happen when The world hushes itself and I am looking

Laying Down Paint Hard Yes, high energy Like a performance Afterward Feeling drained But smiling inside Laying down colors During the output Of energy, you are Caught up in the flow You are not thinking About doing the dishes Or paying bills

Loose Pages Gathered by the Housekeeper I probably seem to be hung up on Pollock, right? The more I dive into his work the deeper the dive. That is due to several issues that Pollock created himself. For an artist of his time making fifty paintings in one year was being prolific. In most other years he did not produce many. So, fifty was his peak year of production. If one makes so few it would seem you could line up all fifty artworks and place them in order of creation. Then, once in the sequence of creation one might better appreciate his changes, his thought pattern, his growth, his development, his creative evolution. That should be easy, one would mistakenly think. One looks at Pollock and thinks there is nothing much to learn, it’s only about drips. Ha! Pollock made decisions that makes it difficult to grasp this sequence of creation. He stopped giving his works titles as they were an obstacle to looking at the painting. They blocked the viewer, by suggesting...

Paint Job The nice part of no Regular paycheck is: No confines No deadlines Sometimes the Only reward Is the way the Colors dry

The Ready Hammer “It takes two to make a painting One to paint The other To hit the painter over the head When it's done.” This quote was supposed to be Or so I thought Attributed to Renoir William Merrit Chase, the American Painter is quoted similarily "It takes two to paint. One to paint, the other to stand By with an axe to kill him Before he spoils it." I’ve never found the Renoir Quote in print It is possibly A fiction Concocted by an art dealer Or curator wishing to claim A role in the creative process The gist of the assertion Is that a painter applies paint And a second entity Genie or genius or Fiction Tells him when to cease What a curious sweet fantasy An artist creates something Out of thin air There is no one nearby No critic, no curator No hammer No hachet No axe No Muse swinging a club I paint alone in the studio A brush in one hand My other fist firmly grasping A rubber mallet

The Bunny and the Squirt Gun He was only four years old, holding grandma’s big puffy hand as they walked through the gigantic, yellow, canvas tent at the annual parish carnival. Outside were rides- a Ferris wheel, a merry go round, and small roller coaster. Oh, do not forget the pony rides. Ah, the aroma of ponies. Inside the tent were games - cake walk, ring toss, balloons and darts, and the game where he would soon win a live black baby bunny: the fishpond. The fishpond was a game of skill for little kids or maybe chance or was not even a game. Grown people never seemed to try their luck. Yet, he found it to be worthwhile. A woman put a bamboo pole into his small hands. He grasped it tightly. He had been fishing before. On the business end of the pole was a fishing line, really just a piece of string with a loop where a hook should be. He knew that real fishhooks could go through your finger and come out the other side covered with blood. This was kid-safe fishing, no d...

Oilcloth, Mainly Striped, Says: LOOK AT ME!........... LOOK AT ME!......... BUY MY FRUIT! Leaving Not So Empty Handed While I only occasionally buy anything at the street market I always walk away with something. However, I am disappointed, this season, to have found none of the Rambo Franc apples. I have not left the market with a Rambo Franc in hand. Only the apples with the big names, but that’s fine. My focus is upon the striped oilcloth of the booths, how it buckles and parts. I like how light sometimes passes through it and how the old, much-used cloth ages and wrinkles, turning darker where it cracks. I love the red and white, the green and white, the blue and white, the yellow and white of the oilcloth. Colors are paired with white. There is never a red and green nor blue and yellow table skirt or apron. The potatoes come and go. Fish laid out on melting ice are as transient as the ice. Apples vary as weeks pass. Only the striped oilcloth is a ...

There has Never Been a Deader Carrot Leaving the Parisian Street Market Along Boulevard Raspail I saw On the sidewalk before me This sad squashed vegetable A flattened orange root In an unappetizing state I did not recall if the French gender The carrot feminine or masculine Sans doubt this vegetable is past tense ungendered I took this miserable picture What else was I to do? The word CAROTTE turns out to be feminine I just verified it: La Carotte C'est une carotte morte She is a dead carrot She is the deadest carrot ever Elle est la carotte la plus morte jamais photographiée Millet's Gleaners wouldn't give her a second look

Concerning Lampshades and My Problem with Kimonos While I was born in the town where Thomas Alva Edison grew up and my babysitter had a convoluted connection with Edison by marriage, my seeming fascination with lampshades has nothing to do with lightbulbs. Yet it is interesting to point out that the invention of the lampshade is perhaps the first secondary contrivance to follow the birth of the electric lightbulb. A lampshade is a simple contraption and serves a limited purpose. Edison’s initial version of the lightbulb, was either on or off. It was an uncomplicated choice of very bright light or no light. The lampshade, not an Edison “invention”, modulated that light. Let me leave the subject of the bulb and its brightness and cut to the lampshade and its shape. The usual shape of a lampshade is a truncated cone. A smaller opening on top and a larger diameter ring on the bottom. The smaller ring allowed the heat generated by the bulb to escape. The larger diamet...

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...

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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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...