Both of these cars are for sale on Lamar Avenue around the corner from my house.   The nose to nose juxtaposition won't stay like this for long because the seller is always switching up the display of the five or so cars on his lot.  What a pair! I want to do a painting with a lot of white, some dark green and then a line of blue and orange in the lower third.  Sometimes the world just spoons it out.  Thanks world.   

mirandaland

the watchmen, 2009, encaustic collage, 36x48.

vessel in vain, 2010, encaustic collage, 18x24.

we were lost before we began, 2009, encaustic collage, 30x30.

My friend Miranda Lake's lush encaustic collages tell the story of man's relationship with nature.  We manipulate, destroy, rebuild and destroy all over again as nature struggles to adapt and evolve the best it can out of the wreckage.  Sometimes it wins, sometimes it loses and then sometimes it's horns on a typewriter. 
 

Her home in New Orleans is an extension of her work.  It's a prop shop for her imagination and a cabinet of curiosity.      

 

 

On the left is my dog Gracey and on the right is the one and only Mr. Whipple. 

I couldn't resist. 

so much color

I spent much of last week going back to the basics, practicing the scales of art making, doing sit-ups and side bends.   I made color charts. 

I haven’t done this in many years.  My color theory teacher in college was the amazing Larry Edwards, and although I’m sure we made these in his class, I was too spastic then to hold on to them.  Who knows what happened to anything I made in that class.  So fast forward to July 2010, to a square unassuming industrial building called Flicker Street Studio, where a group of folks got together to break colors down with Nancy Cheairs.  We met four times and each time after settling in and getting to work, you could barely hear a pin drop for almost three hours.  The silence was surprising and beautiful. 

After weeks of hardly even an overcast day, with only spits and teases of water from the sky, clouds finally rolled in, thunder clapped and rain poured for hours.

"...there are a class of workers who are artists, who take up the full promise of being workers.  They go into their own factories and they get to externalize what humanness means."  iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Lane Relyea, from Bad at Sports, episode number 39 iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

I recently listened to this interview again and was struck by his definition of the artist as 'worker', part of the citizenry, a full participant.  It made me think of Diego Rivera spending months at a time on scaffolding.  Admittedly this is a romantic impression, especially considering Rivera was one of the few artists who gave so much 'humanness' to the proletariat. But the truth is I am a hopeless romantic, especially when I consider why I choose to spend much of my life in this particular ‘class of worker'.

 Please rain soon.  Thank you.

okra on paper

These dried okras, a long thin variety that I don’t know the name of, were a donation from my friend's harvest from last summer.  She gave them to me about a month ago for the seeds, but I waited a long time to break them open because they looked so nice lying around the house.  It didn't matter if they were on the kitchen counter, in the studio, on the old wood desk, wherever I put them I'd think, "this might just be the most perfect shape".  They were also fun to fiddle with - tactile, excellent for spinning around between the thumb and index finger, and they made a loud rattling sound from all the seeds inside.

the fourth of july just off lamar avenue

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I had to make a u-eee to get a picture of this beautiful bike.  He built it himself and was rightfully proud.  The mandala in the middle is my favorite part.  That and the tight lines of the spokes on the white wall tires.  

burgling myself

Whew....it's been a good work week.  Studio visits, drawing, painting, walls filling up, hours passing without realizing it, waking up and raring to go.  Even though I'm on a roll, I came to a point yesterday when I stopped dead in my tracks as my mind went totally blank.  When the echo chamber brain sets in I start sleuthing around stacks of sketches, sketchbooks and accordion files to steal from myself. It’s always nice to rediscover an idea.