Category: Studio Notes
-
Where does the time go? Midsummer art notes
Time flies while gardening at my Kingston cottage. Art is happening in its own sweet time, inspired by the natural beauty. Thich Nhat Hanh is reminding me to be here now. Catch me on Instagram and Threads for updates!
-
The future’s so bright… ! (end of year Art News)
Thanks to everyone who visited me at Gowanus Open Studios back in October! As I announced then, it was my final appearance in Gowanus (barring some cataclysmic rearrangement of the universe); all of my art and art-making apparatus have been successfully relocated to my new home in Kingston, New York. In this season of reflection,…
-
Studio Notes: Moku hanga progress!
Last spring I mentioned that I was rekindling a relief printmaking practice — specifically, Japanese woodblock (“Moku hanga“), and I have indeed been spending a lot of time on this over the past year or so. Printmaking is very process-oriented, and it can take a long time (at least for me) to get finished results.…
-
Common Grave: A Painting Project – continued
Part II: The Composition and the Process As I mentioned in my previous post, a ‘cult of devotion’ developed around the skulls and bones found in the Fontanelle cemetery. It is very much a religious, or at least ‘cultic’ site. And why not? Why shouldn’t all these remains, representing the lives of real human beings,…
-
Common Grave: A Painting Project
Part I: How it all started In January 2013, I had the good fortune of visiting the Fontanelle Cemetery – “Il cimitero delle Fontanelle (in napoletano, ‘e Funtanelle)” in Naples, Italy. This fantastic cemetery — really an ossuary — a repository of tens of thousands of human remains, is one of the more unique and…
-
Pinhole research – December chill
I’ve recently started up again with some explorations in digital pinhole photography. How this works is: you take a digital SLR, take off the lens and replace it with a modified body cap that serves as the ‘pinhole.’ (I don’t recall where I purchased the pinhole cap, but if you Google ‘digital pinhole – Nikon‘…
-
A new year well underway, Lifeworlds continues
Hello everyone from frigid New York City on this Valentine’s Day 2016! I’ve been retooling my studio set-up and finally (last weekend) completed the first* second oil painting of 2016 (and the next in the Lifeworld series). So here we have it: Lifeworld 36 continues the adventure. I’ve also been exploring the ever important topic of…
-
The Lifeworlds Project
Lifeworlds is a long-range painting project I started in 2012. The project started initially out of a desire to explore the square format in painting. The inspiration for this was not Instagram as one might easily suppose, but the square format Landscape paintings of Gustav Klimt. I then chanced upon the evocative term “Lifeworld” in…
-
Today’s image: new work in Project 365
Read more about the project here.
-
Project: 365
Back in October, I started a new, year-long project to document my ongoing practice of visual exploration. I think of this exploration as central to the work of the artist. I’m calling the project simply “365” and the end result (to the extent that a project like this ever ends) will be 365 small watercolors presented at this…
-
One last look back at winter …
Winter is decidedly on its way out in these parts, but I couldn’t resist giving it one last parting glance this afternoon as I reviewed some photos I shot near Ivoryton, Connecticut in late February. I’ve been a photographer from an early age, at least since my grandmother passed along to me my grandfather’s old…
-
Studio Notes – paysage planétaire completed
This is the final installment of my series of posts following the progression of a painting I started at the beginning of January – a “paysage planétaire” inspired in part by the work of Ferdinand Hodler and other painters from that era. So, in my last post, described the overpainting. Earlier this week, I put…