Blog Archives
Q: What’s the most unusual place you have exhibited your art? Was it worth it?
A: In 2004 I exhibited in a group show that was hosted as a fund raiser for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Artists who had had breast cancer were invited to present our work. The show was titled, “Art of Survival,” and was held in a breast surgeon’s office in West Long Branch, NJ. I had absolutely no expectations of selling anything and reluctantly participated, thinking, “More people are likely to see my work in this show than would see it in my studio during the same period.” Who could have foreseen it, but I sold a $15,000 painting to the surgeon who had organized the exhibition!
Sadly, several years later, the curator of the exhibition informed me that Beth, the breast cancer surgeon, had died from the same disease.
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I recently began a 26” x 20” pastel painting tentatively titled, “Shadow.”
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
A: I continue working on “Enigma,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 20” x 26.” The title for this piece suggested itself as I was driving to my house in Alexandria, VA. I was listening to Lady Gaga’s current album, “Chromatica.” Her song “Enigma” came on and I thought, “That’s a great title for my painting because some areas of the ‘face’ are my own personal enigma!” They’re rather dark in my reference photo so I don’t yet understand what is happening there visually. But I will figure it out. I always do!
This is the second time I have titled a pastel painting based on a Lady Gaga song. It was “Poker Face,” from her debut album “The Fame.” My painting, “Poker Face,” was completed in 2012 and is number 24/45 in the “Black Paintings” series.
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Pearls from artists* # 418
A Remedios Varo Plate from “Science and Surrealism”
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
… both Surrealism’s birth and infancy coincided with probably the most momentous period in the history of physics. The first Surrealist text, written by Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault and titled Magnetic Fields, deployed the spontaneous technique of ‘automatic writing,’ which supposedly allowed direct access to unconscious material. It appeared in 1920 but was written in the previous year, coinciding with the expedition led by the English astrophysicist, Arthur Eddington, to observe the solar eclipse from the island of Principe off the west coast of Africa. It was this journey that proved predictions set out in Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (1916) about the gravitational deflection of light by the sun. Eddington’s experiment led not only to Einstein’s instant, mythic status as the ‘new Copernicus’ and the swift popularization of Relativity, but more specifically its appearance in the early theoretical writings of Surrealism’s principle spokesman, Breton, which helped lay the foundations of the movement. Breton’s subsequent manifesto texts of 1924 and 1929, extending his discussion of what he deemed the narrow, restrictive logic of Western though, can be situated within the same historical context that bore the revolutionary discoveries of quantum mechanics, culminating in 1927.
“Sibylline Strangeness: Surrealism and Modern Physics,” by Gavin Parkinson in Science in Surrealism, published by Gallery Wendy Norris
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I am continuing work on a large (58″ x 38″) pastel painting tentatively titled, “Blocked.”
Comments are welcome!
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