Grant Wood Fan Girl

Sometimes people ask me if I have a favorite painter. That’s impossible of course … like having a favorite color. Oddly (given my training) Americans make a good showing on my “favorites” list. Cecilia Beaux, Whistler, John Singer Sargent, all the Ashcan guys, particularly Hopper, Andy Warhol ….. So I can’t say who ranks at the top of the list. However, I can say with absolute certainty who was there first — Grant Wood. In fact, the first piece of art I ever had framed was a poster of “Dinner for Threshers”. I actually saw this painting as some point in my early twenties … not absolutely certain where, but it must have been in Minneapolis at the “Regionalist Vision” exhibition in 1983 … or some subsequent location of the show …. NY or DC.

Here’s work in progress for Garden. The Dragon is basically finished. Have to admit: I’m crazy about my Dragon!!!! … have already started another (small) one …. portrait of Dragon surrounded by spring flowers. Taking today off from studio painting (house painting instead) …. but will work on Adam and Eve tomorrow. Every artist has a secret … something forceful, not always obvious … the evidence of which is hidden in their work. So if you feel an “American Gothic” reference in Adam and Eve … that’s no accident.

Dragon Love

Those of you who know me know I’m a big fan of love. I’m guessing most of you have never been to a Christian Science church … but if you have, you’ve surely noticed three words behind the alter — God Is Love.

Love is a feeling, yes … and a delicious one! But moreover, it’s a force … the most powerful force in the universe. Love is creation itself … in the language of my faith, it is the energy that expresses Mind in matter. So Valentines Day is always a Big Day for me, and I try to spend it creating … expressing Mind in matter.

Working everyday this week on Garden, specifically … my Dragon … I’ve kind of fallen in love with him. He’s a warrior … so he’s got some menacing teeth … and lots of fluid movement … like beautiful plant underwater, moving with the current. He’s the protector of the planet.

Today I’m so thankful to be able to paint him … his anatomy has been established, and his head is pretty far along … today he gets his golden scales … a mesmerizing repetitive process that will leave me completely exhausted. Lots of numerology in my Dragon, but not to worry … I’m won’t count the scales. Like Adam and Eve, he has a magic pearl, three, of course … and I’ll work on those too. Yes, Dragons have Magic Pearls … which gives me a perfect excuse for putting spheres on paintings … gotta love Magical Realism …. aka Unseen Architecture. I’ll listen to Cloud Atlas while working …. my favorite love story.

Painting Dragons

Have to say that today was one of the most otherworldly I’ve ever had in the studio. Dragon painting.

I’ve been working on Garden, and today was the time to advance our Chinese Dragon. Crazy, but I want him to FEEL real in this painting. Given the source materials at hand, I can either reproduce a sculpture of a Dragon, which won’t feel like anything but a sculpture,

Or I can extract an essential feeling from all the sculptural forms I’ve seen, and launch into DragonWorld. Sounds Nuts … right … but that’s what I did … I thought, ‘if these sculptural forms depicted something alive …. how would it feel?’

Never done that before …. here’s the product so far …

"The Garden" by John M. Williams

I just love my writer-friend Johnny’s interpretation of Eden mythology. I can’t find a photo of Johnny, but he modeled for me for the Creepy Auntie character, so here’s a drawing of him … sort of. Thankfully, it doesn’t look much like him …. but he did turn out to be a great Auntie! Here’s the link to his blog, and the story, “The Garden”:

https://johnmwilliams.net/the-garden

Everybody always asks me about the Garden.

It was real. I guess. No way to prove that now. And very beautiful, of course. I didn’t know that then—you have to know what not-beautiful is first.

The best part of it, I would say, was the part—and I honestly don’t know how long it lasted—before I met your mother, because the best part of anything is anticipating it, and believe me, in those days I shivered with anticipation constantly. Of what, I didn’t know, but that was the joy of it—not just that something was missing, but deliberately missing, and it was up to me to fill that hollow place with whatever I could devise. That was how I knew the Garden wasn’t all, and I went looking. Since there was for me no way to distinguish between finding and inventing I found myself looking for something I already knew within me. I imagined her, or felt her, can’t say which, but I could say her now, because whatever I was in pursuit of had calved from me, or me from it, and we were entities. I could have poured my energy into realizing that part of myself. But I chose not to. One thing you can say, she got me up and looking around.

In my forays through the secret ways of the Garden I could always sense when I was near her, but it was a long time before I saw her, or materialized her—how can I know?—and then that moment: when I came around a curve in the path and saw her standing there, waiting. Nothing I have ever seen in my life could rival that first vision. She was as real as me, this exact, perfectly other thing, and I could see my own wonder reflected in her eyes, and could sense her wonder at whether she was imagining me.

I had never felt, and will never feel again, anything like the feeling when our bodies first touched, and interlocked like two halves of a whole. I wish I could, and not merely remember it. But you can’t ever feel anything again, even Paradise, only know that it had its time. You will have noticed this yourselves. It is our fate.

People have made up stories about a snake, but if there was a snake it was the one within us: our leaving the Garden was inevitable and foreordained the moment we faced each other. And the best thing that ever happened to us. I welcomed it—the chance to define what I was through challenge and toil—to develop the higher powers, ingenuity, creativity. Not that life, especially in the early days, was easy. It was not. Looking back, I don’t know how we survived. I’ll spare you accounts of what we ate in those early days. We made shelter for ourselves, and learned to find and grow good food, and had many years—long years, some of them. We saw you children grow up, and really didn’t know how to proceed in finding you mates—never mind that. We multiplied. We submitted to time, and after so much of it I could barely see the woman I had first seen that radiant day in the Garden in the woman before me now who had shared my life. As always, I could see the reflection of the same thoughts in her eyes, and of course there was no way to see ourselves but in those mirrors.

Love? Well, yes, love, but it took a while for that word to crystallize, for the need of it to be clear. And now we have taken love to its very end.

All these knowledges—of love, of time, of loss—and now the greatest of them all, just ahead.

The blessing inherent in us from the start.

Beauty. The Superpower.

I’ve been sketching, and thinking, and reading, and thinking, and yak yak yak all day about beauty. I believe it is powerful, yes. And I say that all the time. But that’s all rubbish if we can’t say why …. what is it that beauty actually does to make the world better?

I have a thought that seems …. well …. it seems to be possibly a useful step in the right direction. Here it is: Beauty is so pleasing to us that it opens our hearts. It transforms us just enough to allow us to see something new … or hear something with fresh ears … or consider a new perspective. It unravels our architecture just enough to let in a new ray of light.

This is a sculpture of a dear friend … Meg Winston … I’m envisioning one for myself here in Lockhart.

Art in a Time of Catastrophe

It’s exhilarating to be lost in symbolic thinking woven into the painting I’ve been calling “Garden” over the years of on-and-off work on the project. An admittedly ambitious undertaking, the Garden of Eden metaphor in this painting has to do with the fall of man, of course … but building on the separation of man from God, is the crisis of separation of man from nature … our disunity with the earth. Always intended to be a comment on our damage to the planet, Garden expresses the potential destruction caused by human supremacy … perceived and irresponsible supremacy …. over the earth. I want to tell this story, and also call on beauty to save the day … reunite us with nature … to grip us and reawaken our divine connection to the natural world. For me, this is the role of art — to bring out our better angels.

Using the auspicious Chinese Dragon symbol, rather than an evil interpretation of the serpent, is intended to convey hope … and faith in the superpower that is beauty. I’m using the Huanglong Dragon, which is yellow, and symbolizes both divinity and the earth. I’m hoping to use the butterfly floral pattern in Eve’s dress, and the plaid structure of Adam’s shirt to connect to a sort of wallpaper construct for the background. The figures and the Dragon will be rendered realistically, and the unifying nature pattern will be more abstracted and stylized, symbolizing our unity with nature, and even though it has dropped beneath the surface of our consciousness, it is woven throughout all creation … as the fabric of life. Well, at least that’s the plan … I’m only a little bit comforted by knowing that our reach should always exceed our grasp ;-) ;-) ;-)

The essay called “Art in a Time of Catastrophe” by Peter Reason and Sarah Gillespie does a wonderful job of expressing this idea — that art has a giant role to play in this time of transition. https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/the-place-of-art-at-a-time-of-catastrophe/

At such a time, are the arts irrelevant, a luxury? To the contrary, they have an essential place both in grieving for what is lost and in imagining new human possibilities. Facts and figures don’t influence people directly—all science has told us about climate change has had little impact. It is the stories we tell ourselves, the metaphors we draw on, that create our world. The mess we are in reflects the stories that have dominated Western culture: stories of human supremacy, stories that separate humans from Nature, that emphasize economic growth at the expense of human and ecological wellbeing. Stories that we ‘rational’ creatures no longer need stories. Whoever can change these pervasive narratives can change our core beliefs—for better or for worse. Visual art, prose, poetry, music, drama can all help provide space and imagination for new stories to emerge and artful means to express them.

Then, there is art as beauty. Beauty can rip the fabric of the taken-for-granted world, create an opening to a different experience. And art may also offer us a place of beauty that can sustain us through darkness, even make beauty out of that darkness. This is what the poet John Keats was pointing to when he celebrated ‘negative capability’: “being in uncertainties, Mysteries and doubts, without any irritable reaching for fact & reason.”

So that’s the plan for Garden. Here we go …

Winston ... Maybe

Went to bed last night thinking this pet sketch of Winston was finished … signed it and all that … but as I look at it now in the light of day, something …. not sure what … isn’t working. Oh well, it will come to me.

The Great Chinese Dragon

A fascination with using a Chinese Dragon in an allegorical Garden of Eden painting emerged about this time of year in 2015 … over these five years the concept has been incubating, moving on and off of my to do list. So as work on the Garden is well under way again, I’ve been studying early notes and sketches. The composition has now drifted way off the early concept, which focused only on Eve and the Serpent. Now Adam is on the scene as well. But this early sketch still draws me in … maybe there will be more than one Garden. Ferlinghetti’s iconic Chinese Dragon poem was part of the process back then, and I’m studying it again this morning over coffee … ironically it’s my escape from the morning news, to an apolitical place … of which the great poet and painter would not approve …. certainly not in these times!

Cecil-luck

This story is a little bit longer than usual … sorry for that …. it just took more words to tell ….

People sometimes ask how I came to study with Ben Long. Like so many of these stories, it pivots on something my family calls Cecil-luck. What’s that? Think Forrest Gump: in a walk-about naivete he bumbled in to something huge … innocently proceeded along …. and, amazingly, everything turned out fine … over and over again. Another apt metaphor is the classic Elvis movie: Elvis is a busboy at the swanky ski lodge, and the dashing nightclub singer breaks his leg so there’s no one to perform for The Big Show! YIKES! Someone happens to mention, “you know, I heard that busboy singing in the club the other night after everyone had left” ….. the reliably aw-shucks-ma’am cheesy Elvis movie plot line. You know, now that I think about it, Cecil-luck generally shows up in the arc of every cheesy Hollywood movie.

The House. I had moved back to Charlotte in my mid-thirties, and was doing public opinion research in an unusual affiliation that allowed me to be both partially employed and a freelancer. It was a very Cecil-luck arrangement. Michael Kampen O’Riley and I, absolutely mad about each other at the time, decided to move in together. Michael lived in a moldy-rented-trailer-just-off-the-highway. Believe me, it was dreadful, but he wasn’t overly concerned about things like that. And obviously, he wasn’t the house buying type. But I was, so I purchased a little bungalow on Club Road. The seller was my college friend, Michael Rouse, an architect who wanted to move to Asheville. He wasn’t quite ready to relocate so the three of us decided to occupy Club Road for the transition. It was mostly a lot of fun, like an episode of Seinfeld. However, I came with a lot of stuff, and on top of what MR already had, things were just too cluttered.

The Yard Sale. I had lived, during my 20’s and 30’s, to make money and shop. But now in the bungalow with two artsy roommates, I was very ready to be sans-stuff ….. and to embark on a post-stuff life. So sister Terri and I, neighbors in Charlotte’s Plaza Midwood, decided to have a BIG yard sale. Since we did BIG signs (ridiculously attention grabbing with the headline Surrender Dorthy) and put them up all over the place, many many many people showed up. I’m not kidding … it was a happening … our first and only yard sale was a grand success. Oddly, I remember that spring morning vividly. I stood under the arch on the front porch looking out over the tables … drinking coffee before the sale started. I remember being a little angstie … and feeling like an actor on an empty stage looking out over an empty theater … right before The Big Show …

The Meet. One of our shoppers was Ben Long; he had recently arrived in town to begin the multi-year work on two major frescoes. He came inside to see a yard-sale loveseat in the back. As he walked through the house he saw my at-home-after-day-job art work …. paintings, mostly portraits and figures … hanging all over the place. At one point in the stroll, he stopped to look at a nude sketch — of Michael. Michael was … hmmmm…. not so impressive as the painter … but fabulous as the art historian and writer. He did studio studies at Tulane, but then came to his senses and did art history and archeology at Penn and Yale. What a brilliant guy …. I’m so blessed to have known him. At any rate, he insisted that I paint from life, and was a really good sport to model for me. One of these sessions produced the piece that stopped the Maestro that day. It’s hanging in StudioKitchen with me now, and is pictured below.

The forever-remembered conversation with Ben in front of that homespun painting still makes me cringe and laugh today.

You painted this?

Yes.

Who are you working with? [note to reader: he meant studying with]

Rawle Murdy. [note to reader: I didn’t understand ‘working with’ so I named my employer. When Ben looked puzzled I clarified] I’m Research Director for an ad agency in Charleston.

Have you ever studied art before?

No.

I’m leading a drawing group, and taking a few students for the summer, Monday thru Friday. Would you like to join?

A drawing group? …. No.

NO? [note to reader: Ben didn’t ask that question very often, and he certainly wasn’t accustomed to hearing no.]

I want to paint, not draw. [note to reader: first of all, how amazing that Ben Long just ask me anything, right?!!! Secondly, I was so incredibly stupid to not even know that drawing is the proper foundation for all art!!!]

Well, why don’t you think it over … (with emphasis) Ask Your Friends … and call me if you change your mind. We start Monday morning. [note to reader: on the way into the house Ben had seen Michael and Michael, so I guess he figured one of these guys would talk some sense into me before Monday. He laughed, and handed me his card. Needless to say, I called him Sunday morning, and showed up for my first drawing class the next day.]

The Gallery. It looks like I may be represented in Charlotte soon. This is a positive development for me … a well established gallery that feels like a good fit. Since we have yet to formalize the arrangement, I don’t want to say more. But I will tell you this: Cecil-luck was involved. Last week I was meeting friends in South End, and had some time to kill before dinner. Every artist knows you NEVER walk into a gallery with your portfolio, no appointment, and ask if they want to represent you. It’s terrible form, and very likely to irritate the gallery owner. But for some reason, that’s exactly what I did. And as Cecil-luck would have it, everything seems to have turned out fine.

The gallery is talking about a solo show in the spring. Of course, I’m still struggling, but I know in my heart I’ve arrived at the very end of the hungry years … I can feel the final lap. So these next months will be a time of immense joy … delicious solitude … creative lust … maybe even faith for dinner. Spring sounds like a long way off, but in a painter’s world it’s next week. And I am N. O. T. hanging a solo show with old work. So stay tuned…

I drove by the Club Road bungalow this past week. From the outside it looks mostly the same. The current owners are in mid-remodel. My guess is they are are finishing the attic … or maybe putting an addition on the back. But the arch on the front porch is still there … still framing an empty stage right before The Big Show.

No Dancing. No Cake.

In the world of Studio C Shute, yesterday was a pretty good day … more on that soon.

In all the different challenges I’ve pursued over my life — tennis as a kid, and later broadcasting, marketing research, real estate investing, and of course art — I’ve managed to succeed. And I’ve also failed to succeed. In fact, I’d characterize my life so far this way: some modest success coupled with some spectacular failure. So even though I’ve spent the morning dancing around the studio, and singing with Motown records, and soaking in a bubble bath, and eating cake for breakfast … I know this supremely important thing: there will be mornings like this one, with dancing and cake … and there will also be mornings quite unlike this one. No dancing. No cake.

Years ago an important mentor in my work life, who was also a big history buff, used to say these words to me when I was dancing around the office over some great triumph or another : “all glory is fleeting”. As I understand this well-known tale, when a Roman commander would return home after great victories in battle, his magnificence would call for a grand celebration. And as he rode through the city, cheered by adoring citizens, a servant stood behind him in the chariot to whisper in his ear: omnia enim et voluptas vana gloria. Sobering, yes … but I guess we can all take heart in Napeleon’s response: Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever. So this seems like the perfect day to post the happy little birthday mouse. Oh Yeah!

African Queen

Mervil Paylor (Mervil Paylor Design) and I met for the first time in 7th grade at Charlotte’s Quail Hollow Junior High. The next year it was Carmel JHS where we sat beside each other in the back of Mrs. Mosley’s language arts class. We loved Mrs. Mosley, but she was a considerably-less-than-spectacular teacher, so Mervil and I engaged in a kind of Dada banter we called “ChitChat” during the otherwise boring two-hour sessions. We invented a language art of our own — trading endless, random, nonsensical strings of words as if in actual conversation. The currency of ChitChat was the unexpected, so a winning contribution was one so outlandish that it halted the non-stop flow of the game. Although we were not in the same school tribes, our intellectual connection transcended all boundaries, and we became life-long friends. Through all these years we’ve delighted in collaboration … like two parts of the same brain separated at birth … giddy with reunion … and dancing across the universe.

In the last decade — in both research and art — I’ve found it troublesome to take on today’s work with yesterday’s technology. Of course that sounds wonky on its face — a classically trained portrait painter is, by definition, using ancient technology. But it’s not the essential nature of art or research that bothers me, it’s the business models. I love the old ways of observing people, reading their secret micro-expressions, asking them questions, truly seeing them, and painting their portraits … I just want to do those things within the context of modern life. So I’ve been tinkering with a new business construct for Studio C Shute … for a start, the Amazon store (in progress). But c’mon, using new marketing channels is a no-brainer. The part that’s really keeping me up at night is the painting itself … how the portrait lives in the world today … certainly not the way it did in the 1500’s … or any century since. How is the portrait … individualized art …. the personal narrative … how is the hand-crafted portrait consumable today? Perfect opportunity for a collaboration with my “shared IQ”. Trust me on this: Big. Things. Are. Afoot!

It’s been almost exactly two years since I made my way back home … to the Carolinas … where my roots are deep. When I arrived in my little mill town, I was lower than penniless. Somehow I managed to find a home, keep myself and the pets alive and healthy, and claw my way back. But there were some dark nights of the soul. Struggling to rebuild, it was a year before I could afford a hot water heater … nothing like a cold shower on a freezing winter morning to test one’s mettel. I remember plenty of times having to decide who got food …. me or my house-mates — Alia Atreides, The Amazing Poppy, Romulus Prince of Maryland, and Duncan Idaho. Needless to say, on those occasions I always went without, and they never did. Funny, having lost so much weight, people commented that I was such a successful dieter … I certainly didn’t want to scare the hell out of them with the truth.

Last night I watched Two Popes … fabulous. The future Pope Francis tells of a time, his dark night of the soul, when he could not hear the Voice of God. There were moments in my life … during times of prosperity and big white houses … when I didn’t hear God. But there was never one single nano-second in the past two years that the Voice was silent. On those hungry nights I would feast on faith for dinner, and make my way to sleep knowing I’d have the same for breakfast. The Voice always said, “never give up … go to sleep … you have arrived … you just don’t know it yet.”

When Mervil turned 60 she wanted to let the occasion go unmarked. Well that didn’t happen. One of her talents is creating amazing events, so no one was going to let her off the hook for this milepost. We all received an invitation with only an address in Davidson NC and a time. Turns out she had rented an old movie theater for a private screening of African Queen, followed by a themed dinner at a nearby bistro. It was the first time I’d seen African Queen on the big screen. What a difference, right? As is always true with great art, the movie spoke DIRECTLY to me: it washed over me with “never give up … the lake is just on the other side of these reeds … and the rains are coming. Go to sleep … you have arrived … you just don’t know it yet.”

But Hasn't Everyone Had a Jim Dine Phase

My sister Terri doesn’t really like my work. Not the portraits, at least. I say this with absolutely no emotional attachment … lots of people are simply not “portrait people” … as a terrific art dealer in Atlanta told me recently, “no one in this town wants to buy a painting with a face”. To me they are like those people out there who don’t like cilantro or mayonnaise or liver pate … they just don’t like those things … it has nothing to do with me personally.

But every time I go over to Terri and Jeff’s I see lots of other things I’ve made … other than portraits … most came from a time of artistic gestation … when I dabbled in everything. Bear in mind, this dabbling is exactly what a student artist should do. In the classical tradition this is a time of training the hand, and finding the voice, and it is perfectly acceptable to do copies — either of an actual painting or of a signature style. So I did plenty. Mercifully, most of my early wanderings haven’t survived, except for a few paintings and sculptures, including Three Hearts from the Jim Dine phase … my take on his beautiful pop art hearts. This large painting hangs in a bedroom of my sister’s house.

As I begin to work on a couple of new narrative portraits, I’m thinking a lot about using abstracted as well as representational elements unified in the same picture … not a new idea in painting, but one I’m trying to work out in my own voice. In that spirit, it was good to see the hearts from the Jim Dine phase. It was … for me at least … so easy to relive that time … dive back into the shimmering water of artistic abandon … and the compulsion to PAINT EVERYTHING! For several years there was really nothing in my heart but painting. For better or worse, those days seem to be returning.

I was just reading a great article in Kosmos Journal about Liminal Leadership, an iconoclastic look at the kind of thinking necessary to address planetary problems. https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/liminal-leadership/ . As the author says, “Needs—like to breathe, eat, love, and make community—are arguably impossible to change, whereas rethinking the structure of society is merely extremely difficult. Keep in mind that the ‘reality’ of these socioeconomic systems is a human construct; the deer and the sea algae do not buy food. As our systems begin to fray in this unraveling time, reorganization is necessary.”

Taking on expansive, boundary stretching ideas like this sends me into the world of thinking in pictures. The process is so automatic now, that I rarely notice the auto-translation. Read the words, feel the pictures. Seeing the Three Hearts painting, I remember the time of three hearts in my life, and the difficult relationship I was compelled to reconcile in the language of my soul — pictures. And I remember that I didn’t chose to risk everything in that nascent time because I wanted something from painting … I did it because I would die if I didn’t. I love this passage from the Liminal Leadership article:

Being a parent is sometimes dangerously close to playing God with someone else’s life. I was afraid to send my son to a professional acting school when he was 15. He was a good student on a path to a good university. I asked his acting teacher if he thought it would curse my son’s life to send him to study a skill that would likely land him a lifetime of waiting tables, and his reply was this: “If your son wants to go to acting school, don’t send him. If he will die if he doesn’t act, send him.”

Anyone who wants to help usher in a new way of living that honors the wellbeing of all people and the other organisms had better be willing to risk everything to get there. It will take nothing less.

The Hitchhiker

After a week off for loved ones and chores, I’m back in StudioKitchen today … finishing the underpainting for Winston …. and cooking fresh collards from the garden for dinner. Evidently, this is the Lockhart studio version of my personal New Year construct … always a ritual to focus on what matters most — first painting, then people, then more painting tomorrow. I realized this year how deeply important holiday habits are to me and my family. History teaches us that to destroy a culture’s rituals is to destroy its mythology … and thus its identity. Codified within my family’s holiday rituals is our living story … it has stretched and shifted over time to accommodate many lives, but it continues to play out every year. It anchors us like nothing else can — this is the real beauty of holidays with family.

So by painting today I reaffirm that beauty and artful storytelling and loved ones reign in my world. Those of you who know me, know all about the strange relationship I have with painting …. and with that side of myself. It would probably be different if I’d grown up in the arts … maybe more unified in me if that were the only side of myself that ever found expression. But coming from a conventional suburban life, the artist was a curious intruder. It’s as if I was driving a lonely backroad late on a foggy night … fog thick like dragon’s breath … and picked up a mysterious hitchhiker. He got in the car and said nothing … just rode with me all the way home and never left. I think of him now as my muse … a presence rather than a force. As a frequent visitor in my dreams, he is sometimes a white winged Archangel and sometimes a broken, weary Templar knight who somehow made his way home. He is that whisper you hear behind you, in the hairs on the back of your neck … one that feels so real, you hold your breath for a minute, and don’t want to turn around to look for fear of seeing the hitchhiker standing in your kitchen. Yikes!

Last night it was the Archangel who visited … a bit after midnight. In the dream I was sitting on my back porch with an orange sunset when he came out of the west and said “I’ll see you on the other side” … his statement was more of an instruction than a goodbye. After that he crossed over the house and the river, and came back out of the bright yellow sunrise in the east. What a terrific wowie-zowie-world-of-weird omen for the New Year, don’t you think? Out with the old; in with the exciting, creative, and beautiful NEW! I can already see two new narrative portraits that will push the boundaries for me … one features my stunning Venus model, Josie, and is already underway. The other is a Garden of Eden allegory, one I’ve been imagining for years. So thanks as always, Hitchhiker — thanks for the reassuring dream visit — and have a Happy New Year.

StudioKitchen Gallery

I love working in my StudioKitlchen. These are the views from my drafting desk/kitchen island … starting work on a Christmas painting for my niece Aubri … an oversized rendering of her bulldog puppy, Winston. He’s darling. I won’t finish by Tuesday, Christmas Eve, but I’ll show her the underpainting and then finish next week.

During the reclamation of this space, we took out all the built in cabinets, which were probably added to the house in the 50’s. Originally the kitchen would have had free standing cupboards, as it does now … my motive was not to remodel with slavish historical accuracy, heaven forbid. I just like the texture and look of the old wooden surfaces … and also having plenty of room to hang artwork.

Pictured around the Yellow Cupboard are Santa Knows Son of Man; oil sketch of a model whose name I can’t remember; one of the impenetrable Unseen Architecture pieces, this one painted on the porch of Ann Tracey’s Folly Island beach house; a funky string instrument with a neat carved face; three Belgian ceramic chickens; the amazing Alia Atreides; and self portrait in gray sweater. On the Bright Red Refrigerator wall are Dreamy Dark Landscape, done by an unknown art student thirty years ago; Einstein Santa Knows; Steve Jobs Santa Knows; a symbolic landscape, one of the first things I ever painted, which oddly makes a lot more sense to me now than it did twenty years ago; a lovely woodblock print by Tony Roati in 1987; Red Fredrick study I did in preparation for the larger portrait of this subject; and Rowers, a charcoal drawing I did several years ago … with a great frame from a company called … I’m not kidding … The Bad Ass Frame Company. And yes, there’s another wall but I’ll post that later … for now I have to get back to Winston.

Purple Snow

Here’s Prince as Santa Knows. This was done in Columbus Georgia a couple of years ago. I had an amazing studio there for a short time … Columbus is a great art town, and I received a commission to paint a series of southern musicians. Prince was a commission from my friend, Sheri Baker … we share many interests, notably a love of Prince and Woody Allen. In fairness, Sheri is much more knowledgeable about these artists’ work than I am … she is an absolute fountain of Prince intel.

So when I started working on the image, I couldn’t come up with any ideas for the background …. actually I came up with lots of ideas, but none seemed worthy of my subject. I posted an in progress image on facebook, asking for help, and Ann Tracey, a great friend and brilliant copywriter came up with Purple Snow. Genius, right! The execution took some figuring … I wanted the snow to be as intricate and rich as Prince’s music. And looking at the painting this morning, with the perspective of time, I’m satisfied. Sure wouldn’t want to paint those ice crystals again … once is enough for that.

My Inner Atomic Blond

This Santa came from somewhere deep … it’s an entirely invented face. 2009 was an interesting year. The depth (and breadth) of the recession had become clear, and (thanks to information from my brainiac financial wizard cousin, Chris) I knew we were in for at least 7 years of difficulty. Life had always been way too easy … we had three houses at the time, so we put everything on the market and decided to stay in the one that didn’t sell. That turned out to be Fort Gaines, Georgia … and despite the world crumbling all around, it also turned out to be a wonderful place to ride out the storm.

I vividly remember painting this Santa. My studio was still under construction, so I was working (of course) in the kitchen. I wanted viewers to feel soothed, and loved, and peaceful … so I made this face … with every single mark guided entirely by the feeling it evoked in me.

I actually dreamed of this Santa last night. He brought me a nail gun … crazy, huh … but that’s exactly what I’m giving myself for Christmas, so I guess there were visions of sugarplums and power tools dancing in my head. Between now and the New Year, with the exception of family time, I’m going to do StudioKitchen carpentry … and yes, I’m going to channel my inner Atomic Blond and crush my fear of power saws.

The Universe Is Perfect

My teacher, Ben Long is a bossy person. He’s a natural leader … decisive, demanding, forceful .. and also very loving. I tend to get along with people like that because I absolutely hate being the boss … I’m thrilled to be associated with someone who is willing to take the burden of leadership … and let me play with pictures and ideas and colors and numbers and words …. like a productive child.

We worked in the South of France one summer — five male artists (Ben’s usual disciples) … and me … the novice, come to painting late in life, non-French speaking, totally lacking in the requisite artist-ennui, horribly insecure, but simply too excited to give in to fear. We all encamped in Ben’s Roman era villa in tiny village of Foissac. I quickly realized that the time was rich with not just with art and culture, but also important rituals and requirements. I certainly didn’t realize it at the time, but it was my initiation into the life of an artist.

Within days after we arrived, Ben insisted on a group day-trip to Marseille … the official purpose of the outing was calamari at his favorite waterfront hangout. Bear in mind, traveling with Ben in the South of France is traveling with a famous person … there was always lots of attention, and fussing over him … also the best tables in restaurants, and trips back into the kitchen to watch the chef prepare something “special for the Maestro”.

But it turned out the other reason for the trip was to purchase two essential items for me — a beret and a knife — the compulsory uniform and tool. So after lunch we all paraded down the street to the little shop that sells one and only one thing — berets. We all crowded into a tiny, narrow, ancient store, high-ceilinged and dusty. All along the right hand side were windows with an unbelievable port view. On the left were floor to ceiling shelves with boxes arranged by size … and there was a creaky rolling library ladder so the shopkeeper could reach all the inventory. And Oh My God!!! the shopkeeper. He was an old man, stooped over and shorter than I. He was as grumpy as Ben … so naturally they greeted each other with hugs and kisses, pouty bottom lip snorts, and all sorts of chit chat. At one point I thought they were going to cry. Finally Ben instructed him to fit me with the proper hat (apparently that’s what happened … since they spoke in French I have no idea what was said). The merchant took the tape measure from around his neck, measured my head carefully, grunted, slid the ladder down to the end of the shelves, and climbed the old creature to its top. He brought down one beret … no, I did not have a choice … and fitted it on my head, pushing it down lower than I would have, to a place in the middle of my forehead and just above my ears, where it fit …. PERFECTLY.

We went to another shop for the knife … Laguiole sheppard’s knife .. with the traditional North Star and Napoleon’s Bee … and the non-traditional cork screw. Again, the precise item was selected for me … I had no say in the matter … I was simply told “pay the man, Cindy”.

My Lockhart StudioKitchen is chilly in the morning … we’ve managed to bring this little cabin a long way, but the heating problem is yet to be solved. Paint is harder to handle when the temperature is cool, but I can make that work so long as I can keep myself reasonably warm. Turns out, wearing a hat makes all the difference … along with my wooly gray sweater and magic Patagonia layers. And guess what … I happen to be blessed with a marvelous beret. Funny how that happened … I guess it’s true — the universe is perfect.

Dalai Lama Santa

Here’s another Santa Knows painting … Dalai Lama … one of two in the series that I’ve actually sold. This one went to someone in Seattle … which (who knows why) pleases me enormously. The other was Prince, the Purple Snow Santa … he’s down in Georgia with my dear friend Sheri Baker.

Of all the Santas … think I did ten or eleven in all … I have only three, my favorites — Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs and Surreal Santa, Son of Man. No artist wants to be their own best collector, but I don’t think I could part with these guys. Yesterday, the Christmas spirit got me, maybe because I wrapped presents (paintings for everyone!) … so I dusted off the Santas and hung them in the kitchen. Yes, on the wall above the Bright-Red-Refrigerator … what’s not to love. Wonder if I should display them all year … they sure look happy up there.

Chattahoochee Sandbar

Finished the Sandbar commission late yesterday. This picture was such a joy to paint … I felt like a kid playing outdoors on a summer day.

Santa Knows 2011

In 2011 Steve Jobs dies, and no one was surprised that he was Santa Knows for the year.