My "Little" Painting

I'm trying to work smaller, so here we have an 18 X 36 painting. But I'm sort of stuck on the imagery of it. Maybe you can see some light pencil work I put in, but I'm not committed to anything yet, except the inked in lines. It's hard for me to think small and to draw small.
Beast in the City is the working title.

Morgan Library's Van Gogh show in NYC

I went to the VanGogh show at the Morgan yesterday. It is there till January. Lots of letters, sketches and paintings. There was a booklet to read the letters in translation. Actually, you can see seven of the letters with the sketches and the translations on line at:
>http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/exhibOnlineThumbs.asp?id=OnlineVanGogh<

Reading the letters was like hearing Van Gogh speak in his own words. It was pretty exciting for me after what has seemed weeks of caregiving, to hear intelligent conversation...even if it was one-sided. He wrote, over the years, about wanting to paint the starry sky. He finally did it in the last year of his life.

"But when will I do the starry sky, then, that painting that's always on my mind? Alas, alas, it's just as our excellent pal Cyprien says, in "En ménage" by J. K. Huysmans, the most beautiful paintings are those one dreams of while smoking a pipe in one's bed but which one doesn't make. But it's a matter of attacking them nevertheless, however incompetent one may feel vis-à-vis the ineffable perfections of nature's glorious splendors."

Linda's sculpture

I've been taking it easy but my sister Linda sent me these images today of some new work she's doing. WOW!

Watercolors

After going to the Brooklyn Museum with Andrea to see a show about watercolors, I've been feeling inspired for the last few days to make these little sketches.

Edgy Painting

Simon, from the ArtAnon group, brought up the issue of the edges of paintings. Hey, I hardly even measure my paintings, much less remember to include medium, and such. But in the case of my recent work, I have so been working on the sides of the paintings. In fact, this is both tedious and fun at the same time....not sure how that works. This canvas has a rather deep side to it, 1 1/2 inches, so I had to do quite a bit of work on it.
And by the way, the whole shebang is 30 X 40 inches.

Cruely to Animals..the end

I dragged my feet, but finally I've completed Cruelty to Animals. I was disturbed by the amount of blank space in the painting and fixing that became a lot of fun, as you can see if you compare the previous post and this one. I painted in the same way that I used to draw as a child, making up a story as I went along. I love the end result. The words, if you can't quite read them, are: Beatum Beastia, Beastia Tui and, at the bottom, tit pro tat.
One day, I took a long walk with my sister. We saw these lonely piers.