2010: art shows R us

In the beginning of 2010 I wrote - "Let is be a year of music!"  Instead for me 2010 was a year of Art. It was the first time in decades I showed my artwork in a Gallery.

,First I showed  a drawing called Aspects of the Self one drawing at the Frieght Street Gallery during their May Day Festival show: This was an amazing thing. No one had seen my work, except digitally, in years!

Later in May I showed one of my polymer faces during the Artwell Rocks show in Torrington. I was on a roll whoohoo!   The work was called "The British Invasion: 40 Years Later."

During the summer, at the request of Victoria Munoz, I brought three works to hang at Freight Street during one of her poetry Salons there. I brought my Dancing Poems collage, Hair's on Fire (an oil pastel) and  Water & Fire, a digital painting.

For Artwell's Landscape and Still Life in Septemeber, I brought three works I had finished recently, all oil paintings on canvas board: Between the Darkness and the Deep, Rural Free Delivery, and River of Sky.

I created a special work for Artwell's DaDa show in November. New Era: the Eagle Egg Shell Breaks, and a found art peice  called congress which consisted of twisted spring wires from an old couch.  It's been a good year!

In honor of the eclipse: Moon Madness Strikes

In honor of the eclipse: This column appeared years and years ago in the Ridgefield Press, back when I was a reporter there .

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Moon Madness Strikes Reporter

by Mar Walker

Some Ridgfielders had a perfect view of last Sunday's lunar eclipse.

``Did you watch the eclipse?'' I kept asking friends expectantly.

``Too cold.''

``Too late at night.''

``Saw one last year.''

Like many other disinterested parties around town,  I've always figured the stars and the planets could carry on perfectly well without me. And what I had planned for this particular event was to skip the whole thing and stay in bed.

Fortunately I was awake at midnight. On impulse, I put on some shoes and threw a coat over my pajamas. I was curious I guess, and it seems I've been cheating myself all these years. It's like the Grand Canyon was right off the porch and I'd never even looked.

Out the back door I went at a little past midnight. There was a bite out of the full moon already, just a little nibble really. It was a perfect night, utterly clear. The bright moon washed the night sky to medium grey and crisscrossed the yard with shadows. Bare trees swayed in parallel. Black limbs juggled stars in leafless hands like fussy husbands rearranging Christmas lights.

And of course there was music - the brook out back, full from the day's rain, murmured on its way to the Norwalk River. Over the scuttling of leaves and over the wistful sweetness of wind chimes on the back porch, ever so slowly, the round silhouette of Earth stretched over the moon.

As moonlight dimmed, starlight and darkness heightened. I felt cold and alive, shifting weight from one foot to the other, craning my neck like some fat bird in a courtship dance as I stared straight up.

My cat wailed at the backdoor to come out and as I turned, momentarily facing further North, I saw two bright shooting stars, one right after the other. The very long, very bright trails streaked down and I imagined I could hear the sizzle of air as they fell.

A little numb now, I ran into the kitchen and put on water for tea. I wrapped a scarf around my neck and rummaged around for a pair of binoculars. Leaving the tea to steep I went back outside.

What a revelation - with the binoculars I could make out the dark spots on the crescent of moon still showing. I studied a pale smudge to the lower right of the moon and found a cluster of stars. I focused on stars and found where I thought I saw one or two, there were entire flocks of stars drowned out by ambient light.

Alone under such surprising immensity, many thoughts came. About the fear this ancient sky-dance had once inspired. Once, before there were electric lights and television, it must have been a natural thing for men and woman to study the night sky, feeling its beauty, dwarfed by its enormity.

Now we hold nightly vigils before the TV's glitzy banality - consumer culture flashing across an 22 inch screen. What a contrast in pacing and depth when compared to an eclipse.   Our attention span is jaded by 30 second commercials. Our awe is reserved for special effects.

Instead of stepping outside and experiencing nature firsthand, we watch the highlights, rebroadcast to us as we sit on comfortable couches in warm living rooms. I know that I myself am like that. Most people I know are too.

A sudden noise caught my attention as a bright light appeared moving quickly along from the direction of New York. In the binoculars, red and white lights flanked the slender shadow of a jet. As it drew closer, low in the sky, I could see the glow of its engines spewing eerie white smoke, twin rockets in the dark. The sky is amazing and despite our drawbacks, we and our technologies are amazing too.

At one thirty a.m., when the moon had dimmed to a glimmer, and my hands had grown numb holding the metal glasses, I went in and drank my mint tea and rubbed my neck. I found if I lay flat on the floor beneath the kitchen window, body stretched under the table, I could see the moon easily without having to twist my neck. Lying on linoleum, bathed in the emerging moon, I fell asleep.

Drawing with markers: An odd little sheep

Okay I admit this cross-eyed sheep is slightly silly, though it's fun. It's something I drew with markers when I was in college. Of course that was in the stone age!  HAHAHA, I used it recently on an All rights reserved notice on my Picasa web slideshows. More on that later.  

I think it represents me - sort of odd but colorful in a squirrelly kind of way! hahaha!  though these days I am no sheep to be herded. I am more the puzzled dragon, fire contained within, ready when the situation calls for it. Or a feckless flea - hopping around pointlessly. Depends on the day.

Painting: one last tweak on Blue Velvet - the cat

What did I change in this painting?  Yes!  The cat didn't fit. No cat I have ever known would sit with its back to two persons as they approached it outside. Most cats would skitishly prepare to run somehow, then look back to see if they were still approaching, stopping if the people involved made a friendly noise. With everything else so delicately poised, it seemed wrong to me to have the cat so solid and seated. So I fixed it. The lines work better now as well with the cat's tail leading to the arm, leading to the faces...  Note the cat above and the cat in the version below.

The original drawing was called Bad Date as I mentioned in an earlier post. As you can see, it was energetic and threatening. Needless to say, the feeling of this painting is a gentle one, and does not follow the sketch. See my earlier post for commentary on that change.

Attack of the pie brigade

Thanksgiving goes from one extreem to another. There might be 35 people or just one. All you need is a semblence of a meal eaten with appreciation.

In 2007 and 2008, my mom and I broke with tradition and went to a local diner for our meal. This year my cousin who had moved to PA has moved back here, and one of my mothers sisters has moved back from Florida. My cousin's sons and their families were not visiting this year. (One is overseas, the other is on the West Coast.) So it was a small crowd and a meal featuring some high fat but really delicious food. Our gathering including five actual relatives and three folks the cousins invited who are not relatives. One of them is Chef Johnny who deboned the bird and stuffed it with chestnut sausage stuffing. My cousin's husband basted it with brandy and cooked it on a grill outside. Oh my. Chef Johnny spiced up mashed sweet potatoes and doused green-beans with almonds and amaretto.  My family always fears there will not be enough, and so there is always WAY too much. When one is trying to avoid cholesterol  - it seems almost an assault to sit with a mousse pie to your left, cream pie to your right, etc etc. The following video is an account of dessert.

Going WAY back here - my first oil painting

I have always been a fan of brown in all its zillion permutations with raw and burnt umbers and siennas rich as compost.

This is my first oil painting. This was painted during a Painting I class with Robert Alberetti at Western CT State U - decades ago. The actual painting mildewed and was tossed out. All I have is this rather blurry snapshot - which I scanned into the computer and digitally signed in Picnic.  The wonderful thing about Mr. Alberetti's still life setups was that the objects were all so beautiful and compatible. My rendering of them is forgettable but forgivable considering it's a first attempt.

P.S  - the blurry snapshot does it a service in my opinion, i.e. it looks nicer in the photo.

Inspiring pastel demo with Clayton Buchanan

Pastel artist Clayton Buchanan gave a local workshop last week. Wow. Now, first I have to say that I don't work with soft pastels much or ever. I work with oil paint and oil pastels, occasionally watercolors, collage - yadayada.  But the way this artist talked about what he was doing, and the way he was doing it shed light for me on the process of "seeing."  Check out his website, by the way - his finished works are gorgeous.

His method was at first baffling. He'd stare at his subject, then stare at his chalks. (a familiar enough process). He'd suddenly pickup one and make a little mark here or there on the paper. At first the results didn't seem to make much sense or form a picture. It was just little squiggles or patches of color. But after a while the subject emerged from the chaos of color into a recognizable and accurate picture.  During the process a roomful of 30 people sat silently watching for an hour and a half.  There was a ten minute break, and an occasional question shot out by onlookers - but mostly these folks, all artists,  watched intently.  And it was worth the wait!   He also had two great handouts about using pastels and using them for portraits. The event was put on by SCAN.

Mr. Buchanan said we should try to see our  compositions in terms of "plains of light and shadow," and to try and see those plains in terms of color rather than value.  That really hit home for me. I am currently working on a bunch of paintings. One in particular features two men sitting on a bench in the early sunlight. I am trying to apply these ideas:  "Plains of light an shadow" and color rather than value . I think these ideas will allow me to move forward with this particular picture in a different way than before.