Grace'sWedding

It's been a busy week. Full of STUFF to do, none of it having to do with Art. But I finally finished the card for Grace's wedding. It was a bitch, trying to get the background to bleed all the way to the edge. I tried it in photoshop, I tried it thru the printer and I finally just gave up, printed the image and will cut and paste it to the card.

Armadillo wearing a hat

More photos from the Museum of Natural History. Here we have a prehistoric armadillo, or relative of armadillo, wearing a little bone hat. Why did it evolve this little bone hat you ask? Maybe it lived in a place where rocks fell on it's head a lot.

And my inked in drawing for Tired Angel. I made the mistake of using a red watercolor pencil to draw the image. This red color is very intense and smears a lot so I'll have to cover over the red with white gesso or it will smear into every damn color I try to paint over it. Live and learn.

Tired angels and giant sloths

Here's the beginning of my new painting, Tired Angel. Just a drawing on canvas so far but we shall see how it develops.
In the meantime, I've been reading a book called The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. This is a pretty depressing, yet compelling story of what we have done to the earth and how long it will take, if ever, to recover or simply 'Digest' the mess we have made. It's keeping me up at nights. So one day last week I went to the Museum of Natural History to see all the giant mammals that are now extinct in North America. I was sorry to discover that the museum has 'modernized', meaning it plays to the lowest common denominator (but best paying customer): Kids.
The large, dull Victorian style hall that was crammed with skeltons of extinct mammals is gone, replaced with a whole floor that leads from dinosaurs to those mammals. Lots of interactive stuff but not enough actual animals! OK, I confess, I hadn't visited that old room with all the cases in maybe 20 years. Still, when I actually Wanted to visit it, it was gone. The new approach is interesting but controlling. The museum is pushing the information it wants you to have. But what if you have other questions?
ANYway, I did find the giant sloths. Here's one. They were maybe/probably wiped out by man arriving in the new world. They must have been quite tastyl

Woman with Frogs

This is a very small painting that I did for the BWAC auction. It's just 6X12 inches. The subject is based on sculptures and frescos I saw in Romanesque and early Renaissance churches. I painted the same subject in a painting called "Retribution" which a man bought to put in his office. I wondered about that: did he really look at the imagery in the painting. Besides the woman with frogs hanging off her breasts, there was Salome with the head of John the Baptist, a centaur shooting an arrow at a mermaid (another favorite of mine) and some devils hanging a man from a tree. You can see it on my website.

Special Delivery: final version

Here's the final version of Special Delivery. It's my favorite painting in this style...so far.
I spent one evening taking pictures of all the apocalypse paintings but I must say I'm a bit frustrated with the results. Is it my camera or me? Sections were out of focus and my placement of the lights was definately off: there were spots in the dark and spots with glare. YUK. Another thing to learn.

Franks and other deliveries

I wish I had taken a picture of the ugly phase. I guess I was painting too fast and I missed it. That manganese blue is hard to handle. It was so over powering. So I toned it down with some acra crimson to create a more purple color. I did use the managanese for the green. It's definately a blue-ish green but I'm working with it. The painting is all laid in except for the fun detailing and inking.

Here's another NY picture. The classic frankfurter vendor outside of MOMA. I wonder if the taxi's will really go on strike today. The whole thing mystifies me. Perhaps it has something to do with the Apocalypse?

More of everything

Here's a close up of some of the Serra wall that I saw last week at MOMA. Need I say that the texture and color are beautiful?



Here I've added the dark, or one of the darks. I'm using Manganese blue for the first time. I've mixed it with Napthol Red light to get this color. It will be interesting to see how it looks when I lighten it up in it's pure form

Start of Special Delivery

Here's the start of my new painting, Special Delivery. I may or may not leave the plane. Time will tell.

And here's where I've been in all this time. My sister Carmen visited and we went all over NYC. This is the Richard Serra sculpture at MOMA. It looks so much better here than it did when it was in front of a building many years ago. Then, in our pre-terrorist days, it was obstructive and just ugly metal. Now, it's beautiful, lyrical and almost delicate. An urban labyrinth. Contex is everything, as they say.