Conflict

Now that Goldsmith's has closed their Waterbury location, I have two paintings in my living room demanding that I finish them. It's not a very big living room, so having two easels set up makes it a little crowded.

Connecticut Women Artists Open Juried Show

Tempus Lux: Clock on the Green, 2009             oil on canvas, 20 x 30 inches

Very excited to learn that my Tempus Lux painting was accepted into the 82nd Annual Connecticut Women Artists Open Juried Show. The Juror was Dr. Fereshteh Daftari, former Curator at The Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibit will be held at the Jorgensen Gallery at UConn, Storrs, June 19 - July 16.

The Reception and Awards Ceremony will be held Saturday, July 9, 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.

Subject Matter

The Waterbury Fire Department stopped by my house yesterday to check for a gas leak.  Two very large firemen in full gear waited upstairs while the third fireman checked out the basement with a meter. We started talking about my art, since my almost-finished painting of rush hour traffic is on an easel in the living room.

First there was the standard polite compliment. The conversation quickly turned into a friendly debate about subject matter and marketability. When I remarked that I have yet to make any profits from painting, one fireman said the problem was my subject, that there is no beauty in Waterbury and thus there is no market for paintings of Waterbury.

I didn't have any other paintings in the house, so I grabbed my cell phone and showed him the detail of my painting of the Welton Horse fountain, which I have on an iPhone case for just this sort of situation.

Waterbury is full of beauty, but I guess not everyone can see it.

Mixed Media

I went to see the exhibit That's Women's Work at the Freight Street Gallery and was really struck by a mixed-media painting by Pam Bogert.

At first glance, I thought I didn't like it. I thought it was too crude, too grungy. Then I looked at it closely and realized that I love it. It's fantastic. I love the cartoonish depiction of Torrington, the caricatures of familiar sites, the playfulness of the depictions.

I'm inspired to do something similar of Waterbury, but I know it will be hugely challenging for me. Which is probably all the more reason to try.

Now for procedural questions. Do I try mixed media, like Bogert did with this work? When I was a kid, I loved playing with paper dolls and paper cut-out buildings. I used to take huge sheets of paper, lay them out flat on the floor or table, draw roads on them and then place the paper buildings I had made on them. Maybe I could do some sort of complex high-relief mixed media image. Something to think about!

In Progress

I've been working on finishing two paintings of Waterbury, one that I'm working on at home when time permits (which is far too rarely), and one that I'm working on almost every Friday in the window at Goldsmith's downtown.

First up, here's the one I'm working on at home. A view of downtown looking towards Grand Street from St. Mary's Hospital, at rush hour during the Autumn.

Eliminating Art

State Sen. Paul Doyle, 9th District, has introduced a proposed bill to eliminate the state requirement that the State Bond Commission allocate one percent of every state building project cost for the purchase of art.

There will be a public hearing on March 7, 2011. Please contact your state legislators about this.

Winter Blues

I haven't been posting much to this blog lately, mostly because I'm using my Facebook page for updates. I'll try using this blog for longer things, ruminations about art.

I've been thinking for a while about doing a winter painting. I've always been impressed by paintings of snow. Some favorites are William Glackens' Central Park paintings, John Twachtman's Connecticut Shore-Winter and  Winter Harmony, Ernest Lawson's Snow Scene, Robert Nisbet's Connecticut Winter Landscape, and Hobart Nichols' Winter Landscape with Stream.

One of the amazing things about snow is the color. You think it's white, but when you really look at it, there's a lot of blue. It's subtle, but it's there. You can see the blue more obviously in ice, like in this photo I took in Thomaston: