Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man

Change of Address

2011-10-14T01:57:00.000-04:00

To view Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, which is posted every other day, go to http://www.grierhorner.com/blog.html

This self portrait of the artist and blogger was taken by computer yesterday as he was talking with his son and grandson in Louisiana. That's what put the smile on his face.

Golden Gown

2011-08-24T01:03:00.000-04:00

This is a work in progress, the latest in my Runway series. It is oil over acrylic. Not too much more work until it's done.

It's the first time in a long time that I've worked in oil, which used to be my standard paint, and I've been having fun. The figure has been done with pallet knives and my fingers so far.

The painting is six feet by four feet.

From Greylock

2011-08-19T22:32:00.000-04:00

We drove up Mount Greylock the other evening and I got this shot of the setting sun. At 3,492 feet it is Massachusetts' highest peak.

It's eight miles up its twisting road - eight luxuriously smooth miles since its reconstruction several years ago.

It was our first ascent this year. It's a place of such beauty we wondered why we don't go up more often.

I used to climb it on my bike. I wish I still could. The ride up was work but the ride down was exhilarating. Once I pedaled up on January 1 on a day when the snow was only about an inch deep.

On another winter descent I skidded in a patch of snow and landed on the side of my head. Those were the days before I wore a helmet. Almost knocked myself out.

It is a rare winter when you can ride up. Usually the snow comes early there, piles deep and stays until spring.

Grier Horner | One Life Photos 2011

2011-08-17T22:53:00.003-04:00

VOTE for me. If you like the pictures I've entered in this contest - One Life Photos 2011. To vote, and see the pictures, click here. The winner gets $10,000. There's still time to enter. Thanks.

The Vote Count: at 10 a.m. , Aug. 19, - 25.

By the way, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man is back on its original spot - one that had been eaten and spit out by Lion.

When I bought Lion, Mac's new operating system to replace the beast had carried my burden previously - was it Snow Leopard? - Lion killed Contribute, the software I use to do my blog.

Contribute is made by Adobe and that firm's Loveesh Kumar, exercising the patience of Job, talked this non techie through the harrowing procedure of installing the software on my iMac, which seemed to fight us every inch of the way.

Although my sites up and running again - I have a new post on it now - I may stick with blogspot for a while to see if I can built some readership here.

(Photo by Grier Horner/All Rights Reserved)

Faces 2

2011-08-15T22:49:00.002-04:00

On the subject of faces I've painted over the years, here are some more. Some of them are details of paintings and some are the full painting. A number are self portraits.

Faces

2011-08-14T04:25:00.000-04:00

In my painting life I have created a lot of faces. Here are a few. Well, more than a few.

Jeanne d'Arc and Me

2011-03-26T17:05:00.001-04:00

A couple years ago I did 35 paintings about Joan of Arc. Big, bold - at least I thought so - paintings. They were exhibited once and three were sold. But there are 32 stacked up in my house. This is a house in which 450 are stored.

Me, I love them. But someday I think they're going to be tossed in the back yard and go up in a burst of flames - like the flames this one portrays.

http:grierhorner.com/blog

Work in progress (2)

2009-12-14T12:38:00.001-05:00

More work has gone into my painting of the Angel of Incineration about to firebomb Dresden. This is what it looks like now.

See my December 12 post for an earlier view. Some work remains to be done.

Work in progress

2009-12-12T09:42:00.003-05:00

Here's the Angel of Incineration diving to deliver her fireball to the prone city of Dresden. This is a work in progress. Still looking amateurish at this point.

I'm painting it for a show on theDresden firebombing I'm having at the at Bard College atSimon's Rock January 18 to February 12. It will be in the Great Barrington college's Atrium Gallery.

After 1 1/2 years working withacrylics, I've switched back to oils for this one to keep it in syncwith the other paintings in the series I did several years ago.

My painting is derived from William Blake's Pity show below.

Ornithologically speaking, my wings are in the wrong position, unless she's putting down her flaps to slow down for a landing. Also, I have to tone the gold down.

The painting is 4' x 5' and the bodiesare cut-outs of canvas that I gessoed to the painting. The face of theprone woman, in my painting, is a blowup taken from Blake's. I alsocollaged a print of the horsewoman's face on the angel.

But it lost too much of the detail inthe enlargement. And what you see instead is yesterday's effort topaint a reasonable facsimile of the Blake face. It isn't there yet.
Click on photos to enlarge.

Street joy

2009-12-10T01:37:00.003-05:00

During my gallery quests in New York, I shot lots of pictures. Last Friday I took more than 200.

One of my favorites from that haul was this one.

Click on photo to enlarge.

Work on the wild side

2009-12-08T02:10:00.005-05:00

Photos by Grier Horner

If you want to take a walk on the wild side, hit the Paul Kasmin Gallery in Manhattan and feast your eyes on Walton Ford's allegorical nature paintings.

It doesn't take you long to realize that the subjects in the Great Barrington artist's monumental watercolors would just as soon feast on you.

As these wolves are doing on the body of a dead soldier killed at the Battle of Borodino in 1812. This is where Napoleon won the battle but lost his quest to conquer Russia because he failed to pursue the retreating Russian Army.

In this detail from that painting, you can see how brilliantly Ford depicts the wolves' ferocity and aspects of his painting style. The works are watercolor, gouache, pencil and ink on paper. These are not timid paintings either in subject or scope. This one is 60" x 119".

Below is a detail from another painting, The Royal Menagerie at the Tower of London - 3 December 1830.

These are photos of the paintings as you see them in the gallery, glare and reflections included. They were taken December - 179 years and one day after the incident in which two tigers mauled a lion.

My shot of Ford's painting, An Encounter with Du Chaillu, includes not only the marauding gorilla, but refections of me taking the picture and a truck passing by on the street.

Paul du Chaillu was an anthropologist, explorer, hunter and author who confirmed the existence of gorillas on a trip to West Africa during the 1860s.

In a nice twist, the gorilla, not du Chaillu, comes away with the trophy in this painting. And it leaves you wondering if the animal is going to manage to kill itself with the gun despite its twisted barrel.

Ford, who was born in Larchmont, New York, in 1960 is in the art world's bigtime. Museums give him shows. Critics give him raves. Collectors buy his work. The New York Times writes feature articles about him, as do other publications.

In a January 2009 New Yorker profile, he told writer Calvin Tomkins, "Before Fay Wray comes to Skull Island, King Kong isn't doing anything. There's no story until she shows up...What I'm doing, I think, is a sort of cultural history of the way animals live in the human imagination."

He may be giving the human imagination too much credit.

What he's doing is the way animals and events live in his imagination. And he does it powerfully.

Ford's show will be up through December 23. The Paul Kasmin Gallery is located at 293 Tenth Avenue at the corner of 27th Street.

Gallery Quest 5

2009-12-06T02:37:00.008-05:00

In my ongoing Gallery Quest, I hit 27th Street on Friday. I was lucky. If I'd put the trip to Manhattan off or gone back to 23rd Street as I'd planned, I would have missed Andrea Mastrovito's wild and wonderful show at the Foley Gallery. It closed yesterday.

His large paintings were butted together forming a single work of art that must have been 75 feet long as it circled three walls of the gallery at 547 West 27th Street.

I couldn't find any reviews, but New York Magazine gave it this squib:

"An exquisite show composed almost entirely of paper and exploring the edgiest theme of all: love. Imagine if Van Gogh had had a child who became a genius in the art of origami."

I think I'd slice a little Kara Walker and James Bond to that mix as well. And a pinch of Edward Scissorhands.

Here are a two details of the diptych show at the top to give you a better idea what this young Italian artist is doing.

Lights. Cameras. Action. Color. Drama. Humor. Figures formed of cutout letters. Animals copulating. Adam and Eve. Origami. Well, not exactly origami, because that's the art of folding paper. I think Mastrovito's is the art of cutting and layering paper as he builds his collages.

And here's a closeup from another painting. It gives added insight into Mastrovito's technique.

How's the Gallery Quest going? Stay tuned.

Photos by Grier Horner/Click to enlarge

Moonglow

2009-12-03T23:34:00.003-05:00

This is the moon taken through the trees last night with a handheld camera. And below, camera hand held again, is a shot of the windows of my house emitting light like flames.

And here is the hand that held the camera and the camera that was held. Also there is paint under the fingernails and on the cheek.

I painted in the afternoon. In the morning Gae came over and we figured out what paintings she was going to put in her house.

At noon I went to hear Ellen Lahr, a former Eagle reporter, talk at Berkshire Community College. She spoke engagingly about sources who had acted bravely as sources for several stories she wrote. Then Ellen and I went to lunch in Lenox.

"Which wine, white or red, goes best with the tomato soup?" I asked Ellen.

"Red. I believe in color coordination."

So I got the red.

Photos by Grier Horner/All rights reserved. Click on photos to enlarge

Where's the sled

2009-12-02T02:40:00.006-05:00

Rudolph and the gang must have had the day off when we saw Santa cruising on his Harley on I 495 the other day.

Or maybe St. Nick has put them out to pasture.

If he did my son Eric, a Hog owner, will be delighted to discover the jolly old elf's new mode of transportation.

I'm not sure whether a Harley contributes more to global warming than eight reindeer. Nine if it's a foggy night.

But I do know that this bellowing cycle is going to give new meaning to the lines:

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.

To any kid wondering if these saddle bags can holdall the toys, don't forget Santa crammed everything into thatchimney-capable bag he flung on his back. After all, Santa's magic.

P.S. This is my 100th post on Blogspot. Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man has had a much longer history at www.grierhorner.com/blog. Click on photo to enlarge it. Photo by Grier Horner/All rights reserved.

Thanks for Thanksgiving

2009-11-30T08:53:00.004-05:00

Emily and Heather ham it up to make a crying child laugh. Photos by Grier Horner/All rights reserved.

Thanksgiving at Pete and Zoa's is not just a meal. It is the annual gathering of the clan. And it lasts from Thursday through Saturday.

This is my Thanksgiving album. It features:

Emily, a high school senior who just starred in her high school musical, and her sister Heather, who is studying dance at the University of Cincinnati.
Pete and Zoa Guernsey, who have hosted the annual family Thanksgiving feast for almost half a century. (And may the tradition they started - one that has created a tight-knit family - continue a long, long time.
The girls, Zoe, Sarah Mei and Riley. And the Pitt players.

Zoe, Sarah Mei and Riley.

Shannon, our daughter; Cookie, Babbie's sister, and Pete, the host and patriarch.

The bunch (some memebers missing).

Playing Pitt, a commodities trading free for all. From left, Pete Jr., Zoann, Sarah Mei and Zoe.

Ending the way we started with Heather and Emily. They're dozing after the feast.

November skies

2009-11-28T00:25:00.002-05:00

Climbing the mall road the other day, I shot this out the side window of the Prius. Those clouds, those amazing clouds.

To me 2009 is the year of the cloud, as I have said here before. I can't remember seeing so many days of great skies before.

Thursday as we wolfed down a spectacular Thanksgiving meal at Pete and Zoa's - who have been hosting the annual family get together for almost 50 years - the sky was gray. But in the house with 23 of us at the table it was all light and warmth and memories.

When it all started Babbie and I were still in our 20s. Now we are the oldest of the three generations at the table. Our children are now older than we were when Pete and Zoa extended their first invitatioin.

I hope the kids, and their kids keep the tradition flourishing another half century.

Getting back to clouds, here's another shot, this one on a partly sunny day when the clouds capped the hills.

What's so Odd?

2009-11-26T00:22:00.003-05:00

Odd Nerdrum is a painter who I triedto paint like when I was given this book some years ago. But I couldn'tmaster his old- master style.

Still I triedrecently to capture the spirit of this Odd image in this selfportrait. I should have pulled the hood down farther over my forehead. Did I hear you suggest "way farther"?

Oh, by the way, happy Thanksgiving.

Could anything be more appropriate for Thanksgiving than thisphoto? Why? Well for one thing there's the wattle, otherwise calledturkey neck.

Here's a portrait of me drawn by FX Tobin, a guy who's been teaching me some important things about painting via our email correspondence.

I liked his drawing so much I had it framed. The shadow captured in the glass is me taking a portrait of my portrait.

Orange alert

2009-11-24T00:57:00.001-05:00

This is a photo of a neighbor's house on a pitch black night with its lights on. The camera was hand held, giving the effect that the house is on fire.

Continuing the orange theme, this is a painting by Hubert Scheibl, an Austrian painter I admire. His new show at the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropak opens today. From the information I saw on the website, I can't figure out whether its at the gallery's Paris or Salzburg locations.

But I guess it's a little late to fly over for the opening.

Orange is also at play in this photo of the painting I am currently working on for my Dresden show at Bard College at Simon's Rock from January 18 to February 12.

I showed you mock-ups for the painting in my November 18 post.

What you're seeing here is the angel at the top and the prone woman, representing Dresden, at the bottom. The figures were drawn on canvas and were then cut out and attached to the surface of the painting with gesso.

The idea for the painting comes from William Blake's Pity, and the angel's face and shoulders were printed from an internet reproduction of that painting. Looking at what I've done so far, it looks like the angel needs breast reduction surgery.

For blowups click on the pictures. Top photo by Grier Horner/Protected by copyright.

In hot pursuit

2009-11-22T00:29:00.004-05:00

I'm driving the Odyssey down Crane Avenue Friday afternoon when I spotted it coming out of Clark Road.

See it. See that yellow school bus making the right turn there out of Clark?

Who do they think they're fooling? They can't outrun us even under the cover of lowering clouds. We just had new alloy wheels with extra fast snow tires mounted on the van. So fasten your seat belts, we're in pursuit.

The bus is hotrodding it but we'regaining ground anyway. And unless the driver's willing to risk thelives of 25 kids, he (or she) has to stop at the bottom of the hillwhere Crane ends at North.

What did I tell you. Even if he (orshe) wanted to run the stop sign, the driver was forced to come to a halt becausethe cars ahead of it stopped.

It's not like the movies where thedesperadoes use the weight of the bus to push the cars out of the waylike toys.

So here, intrepid reader, you have photographic proof that daring drivers like us always catch the bus.

To enlarge the photos click on them. Photos by Grier Horner/Protected by copyright.

Cloud quest

2009-11-20T00:21:00.001-05:00

Sometimes you see such beauty you are transfixed.

Before I saw this scene I'd been amazed by the clarity of the late October light and its power to transform something as mundane as a busy intersection into something extraordinary. (See my October 31 post.)

Driving home I was pulling into my road when I saw that amazing cloud over Pontoosuc Lake.

I turned the car around, drove across North Street and into the Muscle Beach parking area, and walked along the shore. I took some shots, a lot of shots. (With all that motion, I guess my claim to being transfixed falls apart.)

Maybe this was a transcendental experience. But I'm never quite sure what that means.

Click on photos to enlarge. Photos by Grier Horner. Protected by copyright.

The house where we lived

2009-11-19T01:25:00.006-05:00

One of the most beautiful displays at MASS MoCA in North Adams several weeks ago was this tree in its courtyard. (Click on photo for large-scale view.)

I know. That shot has nothing to do with the house where we lived. But looking out a window at MoCA you can see it off Houghton Street. In the photo below its the one on top.

It is a wonderful Victorian house with a cruciform layout and a big yard. It was our first place. Babbie and I rented the bottom floor from 1960 to 1965 for $65 a month plus heat. Shannon and Eric were born there.

Babbie was a nurse at the hospital and I was a reporter at the North Adams Transcript.

We had some great upstairs neighbors during that time. But one couple complained because I sang or whistled in the bathroom in the morning. Stifling happiness is a bad business.

From the big window in our bedroom at night, we could see the flames of a blast furnace at Hunter Machine, located where City Hall is now. That was beautiful.

We had some pretty wild parties there. Everyone got so smashed at one, they spent the night, sleeping where ever they could find a spot. For some reason, I slept in our car. That was before we had kids.

Going off subject again this shot of operating piping, gages and shut-off valves at MoCA is a piece of art in its own right.

Hope Gangloff takes off

2009-11-16T00:24:00.009-05:00

The show I liked best during Gallery Quest 4 was Hope Gangloff's at the Susan Inglett gallery at 522 West 24th Street.

In a slow art market her cool, classy acrylic paintings have all been sold.

The New Yorker on November 9 said, "This young drawing whiz shows large paintings of pretty, languid friends that are mannered and feel trendy, pleasantly." Seems pretty apt.

The large paintings are pale with splashes of color like the dog and the window scene in the one at the top. I like the way she nails expressions and find the subtle way she paints skin fascinating. Here's a closeup.

The New Yorker described the young woman below as "a plainly overqualified waitress lurching to grab a bottle of Tabasco sauce."

The young woman in the painting in the gallery window, is almost overpowered by the red dress she has stripped off and hung on a corner post of the dock, next to her beer. She is clearly annoyed as she looks at her cellphone. At what? A text message. The number of her missing boyfriend?

The show is at Inglett through November 25.

Click on the paintings to see blowups. Photos by Grier Horner.

Drawn Together

2009-11-14T01:49:00.002-05:00

The art critics, Charles Giuliano, in the beret,

and Keith Shaw, hands linked behind his back.

DrawnTogether opened at the Lichtenstein last night and was jammed. Despitethe date - it was Friday the 13th - everything went well. (The shotabove was taken at the end stage after many had left.)

I had a wonderful time. And I think a lot of other's did, too. Many stayed for a long time.

Unlessotherwise noted all the photos in this post were taken by my10-year-old granddaughter, Riley Nichols, the official photographer ofall my shows.

This is Matilda, Gae's granddaughter,

with a fashionable friend.

And this is the photographer, flash ablaze.

Tonight, Tonight

2009-11-13T09:00:00.002-05:00

It's finished. I've worked a long time on this painting, Runway (Number 7). The piece is 6' x 4', acrylic on canvas.

This is one of two from the Runway series that I hung in the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts yesterday for Drawn Together.

That's the name of the show featuring the seven members of our art group, which has been meeting for eight to 10 years.

The reception is tonight from 5 to 7. You're invited. The Lichtenstein is located at 28 Renne Avenue, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

The other members of the group, all accomplished artists, are Linda Baker-Cimini, Betsy Dovydenas, Barbieo Barros Gizzi, Julie Love Edmonds, Paul Graubard and Susan Hartung.

Drawn Together runs through January 9. The gallery is open Wednesdays through Saturdays from noon to 5.

The other painting I'm showing is the woman with the horse with a flaming mane. You can see that one in my November 1 post.

Crashing through

2009-11-10T01:51:00.006-05:00

Into the Crosscurrents, Christine Heller's 25th solo show, is a powerful return to abstract expressionism.

Before this new series, she had been working for about four years on paintings about the Iraq War, paintings that were often devastating and started leaning toward abstraction, a style she often used in the past.

The current paintings were done during "a year in which tumultuous shocks have thrown me into a new stage of life," Christine says. Those shocks included the death of her mother.

During this period she found her studio in Hudson was a sanctuary.

"I didn't feel afraid in the studio," she said. "I was trying to work from my feeling of freedom there, going where ever the paint took me. It felt like I was working up to a fever pitch and I just didn’t want to stop."

You can still see figurative traces in some of the new paintings. Look at the one above.

You can see the turmoil in her life during this period pouring out in the forceful images.

"I kept crashing through to new ground," she said.

This is Christine in one of two rooms filled with her paintings in the show that just ended at the John Davis Gallery on Warren Street in Hudson. Davis has a strong stable of artists and sculptors and shows them to advantage in his storefront gallery space that leads out to a sculpture court and then into a four-story mill building.

The painting below is one of Christine's smaller works in the show. She says that some of her next abstracts will be much larger.

A golden grunge

2009-11-08T02:21:00.003-05:00

Underground in the subway stations and subways in New York there is a golden cast to the light. Not quite celestial. More like a golden grunge.

To see blowups of these shots, click on them. Photos by Grier Horner/Protected by copyright.

Beauty and the Beast

2009-11-06T00:18:00.003-05:00

I think the girl on the train yesterday morning was a fashion model. She was tall, thin and beautiful. This is not a direct shot of her, but of her reflection in the window.

By luck you can see the foliage of the trees along the tracks in her face.

I couldn't see her. But I could see her reflection in the narrow space between the seat back in front of me and the window. Here's another shot.

While I was very happy with what I got on the way to Grand Central, I was unhappy about a shot I missed in New York.

A tall, attractive woman was on 10th Avenue at the corner of West 24th talking with a young man. She was pregnant and this was emphasized by the blue and white striped sweater she was wearing.

Suddenly she yanked the sweater up so he could see.

I was watching this through the window of Trestle on Tenth, one of my favorite bistros. But I couldn't get to my camera in time. For consolation I had a duck tenderloin sandwich and a glass of pinot noir.

One more shot, to add a beauty and the beast twist to this post. A picture of my reflection returning on the train last night.

Click on the pictures to get blowups. Photos by Grier Horner. All rights reserved.

Desolate days

2009-11-04T00:07:00.003-05:00

There are days in late October and in November when the landscapes you see while driving on country roads are stark and bleak.

Days when the sky is heavy with gray clouds, when most of the trees are bare and leaves sail as they detach from the few that are not. There is a sadness to these landscapes and a raw beauty.

It was one of that kind of day when we were driving home from Hudson, New York, last Saturday.

Babbie drove and I shot. Normally I aim through the windshield by this time I also tried some side window shots. Which these are. I think they capture the mood.

Click on these pictures to get blow ups. Photos by Grier Horner and protected by copyright.

Getting ready

2009-11-01T22:54:00.008-05:00

My art group is going to have a show at the Lichtenstein Center in Pittsfield this month and I'm going to put up two or three of my Runway paintings.

The opening is November 13, a Friday naturally. There will be a party from 5 to 8 that evening. Hope you can make it.

So I've been building 6 foot x 4 foot stretchers for them and stapling the canvases on.

In the process I've found that I want to work on some of them some more. That's what I've been doing on the woman in the Gareth Pugh outfit with the horse of fire above.

I made her face very pale and added reds, oranges and yellows to the tale and mane to make them suggest fire more than they had.

Next I'm going to tackle the woman in the Alexander Wang mini dress with Baghdad burning in the background. For one thing the clouds of smoke have to be toned down a little.

Here's one I didn't put in the show, although now I sort of had. It's better than I had remembered it. I like the armor plate that Alexander McQueen used in the outfit.

Also showing will be Linda Baker-Cimini, Betsy Dovydenas, Barbieo Barris, Julie Edmonds, Paul Graubard and Susan Hartung.

Click on the top two paintings to enlarge them. Paintings protected by copyright.

Golden day

2009-10-31T00:29:00.005-04:00

Sometimes in late fall in New England, there are golden days. Friday was one of them.

I took a lot of photos in the morning and then again in the afternoon. These are all from the late afternoon after a friend and I had a wonderful time talking over coffee.

I was driving up South Street in Pittsfield, Massachusetts - the town where I live - when I caught a red light at West Housatonic.

It looked so beautiful in this clear light that I pulled my little Nikon out of my pocket and took this shot.

Then I turned right on East Street to return an audio book, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, to the Berkshire Athenaeum.

If you haven't read this amazing, mystic first novel by David Wroblewski, I recommend it highly.

Anyway, I was standing in the library's lower parking lot when I took the photo above looking east on East Street.

Still on East looking east I put the camera in it's telephoto phase and took this picture of the Wendell Funeral Home and Pittsfield High School, it's spire pointing to the moon.

Click on the shots to blow them up. Photos by Grier Horner/ All rights reserved.

Let me apologize for the technical problems that have blocked my efforts to post recently on my main blog site, http://grierhorner.com/blog.

A wing and water

2009-10-29T00:30:00.006-04:00

From my window seat on the plane Tuesday, I shot its wing which was upswept at the end. The gold beads are raindrops on the window.

In the top center of the photo you can see the reflection of my camera, and to either side of that my hands. We were coming back from Louisiana.

Here's another shot (see the October 27 post) of rain lashing the parking lot of our Louisiana motel Monday night.

Click on the photos to enlarge them.

Photos by Grier Horner/All rights reserved.

Liquid gold

2009-10-26T23:31:00.009-04:00

I shot this picture from my motel room window in Lake Charles, Louisiana, last night. It was raining like mad. This was the rain beating insanely in the water covering the parking lot. A street light cast it in this amazing light.

To see a large-scale version, click on the picture.

We were supposed to leave Lake Charles Monday morning but terrible weather in Houston messed up our plans. So we went back to Jared at Enterprise and rerented our navy blue compact for another day and returned to the Best Inn and Suites and rerented a room.

We got up at 4:45 am Tuesday and got home about 7:30 this evening. With no complications, except I couldn't tap into the wifi at the airports in Houston or Cleveland and was very frustrated.

You wonder why we went to Lake Charles? The Shadow knows.

Photo by Grier Horner. All rights reserved.

Pistol packing bridge

2009-10-26T14:18:00.003-04:00

On the subject of the Interstate 10 bridge in Lake Charles, Louisiana, I neglected to mention one swashbuckling element of its design.

That touch was casting 5000 braces of crossed pistols in the design of the railing - a tribute to the spirit of the pirate Jean Lafitte, who prowled these waterways.

Lafitte and other waterborne brigands are celebrated in Lake Charles with a festival called Contraband Days.

Click on the photo to enlarge it.

Bridge over the Calcasieu

2009-10-25T14:34:00.005-04:00

By the dawn's early light the bridge over the Calcasieu River in Lake Charles, Louisiana, is bathed in gold in this photo from a series I took from my 3rd-floor motel room.

Now you see the bridge, which may be replaced, in the light of early afternoon.

And finally, a view at sunset.

The structure is over a mile lone and climbs until it is 90 feet above the river which flows to the Gulf and the Waterway. It's that high so ocean-going freighters and tankers can pass under it.

Now that the 57-year-old bridge needs to be replaced because of its deteriorating condition, the federal government, I am told, wants a low bridge.

But Lake Charles is pushing for a high bridge to accommodate modern ships that sail in from the Gulf or the Intracoastal Waterway.

Under debate for years the new bridge won't be built anytime soon, one local told me.

Photos by Grier Horner. All rights reserved. Click on photos to see them in a large scale foremat.

In and out of focus

2009-10-18T20:46:00.008-04:00

Grand Central appears cloaked in gold Friday evening as the figures of rush-hour commuters swirl and as flames seem to jet from the wall on the left.

While I'm on my gallery quest, I'm doing a little house hunting.
I mean this place going up on 10th Avenue between West 23rd and 24th might fit the bill.

But when you live in a glass house in the city you become part of the view, as a friend observed.

That dark form slicing through the left side of the photo is the new High Line elevated walkway. Not a bad thing for a country boy to have at his front door.

This is my reflection in the window of the train taking me home. I didn't have time to get a martini at my favorite Grand Central bar. But I grabbed a Coors Lite at Gate 30 and drank it on the train.

In the old days when my father used to commute to Tarrytown, you could buy drinks on the train. My mother wasn't a big fan of that amenity.

Walking to the subway stop on 8th Avenue after scouting out galleries I took a picture of this middle-aged couple holding hands.

(To enlarge the pictures, click on them.)

West 24th Street

2009-10-17T23:12:00.006-04:00

This photo symbolizes my position in the art world. Outside, looking in. Which I am trying to change. Anyway, those are my sneakers planted on the sidewalk in front of one of the big galleries on West 24th Street Friday.

I got up at 5:15 a.m., which is pretty amazing for someone whose normal wake-up time is 9 or 10. I drove to Wassaic, rode the train to Grand Central, took the S subway to Times Square and the E train from there to Chelsea.
That's pretty mundane. But I'm a novice at subways and riding them is an adventure. Lots of potential photos underground, but I haven't worked up my nerve to point the camera at riders yet.

Back above ground, these women on West 24th look like they're about to be mowed down by a cab or two that have mounted the sidewalk. But they're OK. The cabs were parked.

I scouted out more than a dozen galleries on Friday. And that was just the north side of the street.

It's going to take a lot more trips to Manhattan to cover the Chelsea galleries. Which is fine with me. I love looking at the art and talking with the gallery staffs.

And I'm having a field day shooting in Manhattan.

(Click on the shots to blow them up.)

On the fly

2009-10-14T01:02:00.004-04:00

Remember when Janet Jackson had her "wardrobe malfunction" during halftime of the 2004 Super Bowl?

I had something less traumatic but nevertheless troubling happen to the fly of one of my favorite pairs of pants, pictured above. The strip of cloth that hides the zipper started malfunctioning, exposing the zipper.

Even with the zipper up, it's sort of embarrassing going around with it showing. So I fixed them by attaching Velcro with a staple gun.

In case you need to refresh your memory, I've tucked in this picture of Janet exposed. A lot of people contend that Justine Timberlake, who was singing with her, intentionally yanked off the material over that breast as a publicity stunt.

Adding credence to that was the fact that this part of her costume was attached with snaps, making it detachable. MTV, which produced the halftime show, had promised a "shocking surprise."

But back to my wardrobe malfunction. Snaps probably would have been a more tailored solution for my pants.

But I don't think that the staples really show that much. Here's proof. If I hadn't drawn the arrow, would you have noticed?

Overhead

2009-10-12T00:17:00.004-04:00

This has been a year of magnificent clouds in the Northeast. Here are a few shots to illustrate my point.

The one at the top was taken last week from the newly opened pedestrian bridge crossing the Hudson River at Poughkeepsie, New York. It was an abandoned railroad bridge before its conversion.

This shot was taken in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, this weekend.

A patch of blue sky, above, looks like a gigantic bird soaring over Pittsfield.

Then there were these clouds adding to the drama of Niagara Falls, which made clouds of its own, as well as rainbows.

To enlarge the photos, click on them. All photos © grier horner

The Canary

2009-10-07T01:24:00.005-04:00

I'd like to fly this pretty yellow Piper. But I don't know how. Steve does. He's building one, an open cockpit job. That would be great to fly in. But I don't think he's ever going to finish it.
He doesn't either.

I took the shot of the Piper when Steve, an ex paratrooper, and I visited the grass-strip airport at Ghent, New York.

Years ago a North Adams 12-year-old and his friend swiped a plane from the North Adams airport and landed it safely in New York state.

That was pretty impressive. He had never flown a plane before, only read about flying planes.

I only bring up the thing about the kid taking the plane because Steve and I kidded about stealing one.

Amelia Earhart's first plane was yellow. She called it Canary. Too bad this shot wasn't in color.

Jonas has a wild plane (above) that he built. If he took me up he'd show me some stunts. That would be wild. Like the way Mickey's giving us the finger.

Looking backward

2009-10-02T02:06:00.004-04:00

Sometimes when I ride the train
from Wassaic to New York,
I sit in the seats facing backwards.
Other times in forward facing seats.

I have friends who say
they can't stand sitting the wrong way.

As for me if night blackens the windows
or I close my eyes,
I can't tell whether I'm pointing
toward the future or the past.

The shot at the top is Harlem under a heavy sky. I took it from the train going into New York yesterday. It looks like the Apocalypse.

The guys on the right are having fun watching the guys on the left. What's in the blue bag? A body?

I like this photo even though it's out of focus.

This man with the cool folding bike sat across the aisle from me on the way home.

New York reflections

2009-09-29T01:57:00.007-04:00

Today I'll show you some of the photos I took in New York last week. I was shooting with one of those miniature Nikon's you can slip in your pocket. It has a strong telephoto.

A problem, as you can see, is I managed to imprint these with the date and time. It was my second time handling the camera and I didn't know how to switch that feature off.

I love all the layers of reflection in the building above and the one below.

Like me the man in the dark suit was looking at this woman's shapely legs. And doesn't that look like the face of a ghoulish giant looking on from the second-story window in the building across the street?

To get big enlargements of the photos, click on them.

Gallery quest 2

2009-09-26T23:03:00.008-04:00

Here's a smattering of other things that I liked during my tour of some galleries on West 57th Street last week.

Above is a still I captured from a video of a chess champion,, Jennifer Shahade, and a friend keeping hula hoops spinning around their waists while duplicating the chess moves of a game played by Marcel Duchamp, the artist.

It was part of a show at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art at 24 West 57th Street called Marcel Duchamp, The Art of Chess.

I watched the video over and over and it made me smile each time. You can catch a segment by clicking this link.

The video was done by Daniel Meirom of DimMak Films in conjunction with Shahade, who is also an author and self-defined games player.

This thoughtfully gathered and presented show is up through October 30.
This sculpture of a dancer is at Bernarducci.Meisel.Gallery, 37 West 57th Street. It is a painted bronze by John DeAndrea. She sat amid a solo show of paintings by photo realist painter Gus Heinze. The show just ended but you can still see Heinze' images at this link. While you're there you can see some of DeAndrea's nudes under his name in the artists category.

I took this photo of the dancer who is in a window overlooking the building across the street. DeAndrea's sculptures, from the gallery's booklet on his 2006 show, is a photo realist himself.

One of the most incredible things about his sculptures is that they look as if you touched them, the flesh would yield. I don't know how that is done in hard metal.
This wooden sculpture is part of a timely show at the Franklin Parrasch Gallery, 20 West 57th Street. The solo show of work by John Cederquist is called Treachery of an Economy.

Surprisingly this piece is also a functioning, finely constructed chest of drawers. I never saw that coming until Chris opened a drawer for me. It is up through October 10.
And here's a pre-installation shot I took of a photo by Peter Bialobrzeski of Germany. It drew me into the Laurence Miller Gallery, also 20 West 57th.

Called The Abstracted Landscape, the show, up until November 14, will also include photography by Stephane Couturier from Paris, DoDo Jin Ming of Beijing and New York, and Toshio Shibata of Tokyo.

You can take a look by clicking this link. You can enlarge the photos in this blog by clicking on them.

Gallery quest

2009-09-24T21:47:00.011-04:00

This compelling photo is by Richard Learoyd, an Englishman being shown in this country for the first time at the McKee Gallery, 745 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Learoyd's one-man show at McKee, which has never shown a photographer before, was one of the wonderful things I saw on my tour of 57th Street galleries on Tuesday.

Look at Agnes in a Striped Dress and she looks back at you. Wherever you go her eyes follow you.

You start thinking you know a lot about her from staring at the photo. But then it occurs to you that Agnes is the one taking you in. To see more of his haunting portraits at McKee, hit this link.
And to enlarge any of the photos in this blog, click on it.

Going from classy photography to ordinary, here is a self portrait in an elevator on 57th Street.

I went to New York galleries a few times five or six years ago. I didn't get anywhere and gave up quickly. I'm determined not to fold so easily this time.

Another gallery I looked at was Marian Goodman where I took this shot of a maintenance operation. The gallery is showing large scale photos by Jeff Wall, an art world star. To see my blog on Wall's show at Goodman two years ago click here

and scroll down to the March 26 post.

One thing I did discover Tuesday was this: In New York the messenger bag has replaced the backpack, despite what you see on this mannequin I photographed Tuesday.

My daughter Shannon had told me a messenger bag might be the way to go and I had bought one for my forays into Manhattan. It proved very convenient and comfortable.

PS: Learoy's picture of Agnes in a Striped Dress was taken from the gallery's website. He works with the camera obscura. Each photo is unique.

Shock and awe

2009-09-20T23:48:00.004-04:00

This is Number 7 in my Runway series. I'm still working on it. If I can resolve a few things, I think it will turn out well.

Like the others it is 72"x48" and is acrylic on canvas. I shot it at this angle to avoid the full glare of the flash.

I like her sequined dress, which was designed by Alexander Wang. If you want to see the photo I'm using as a guide, go to my September 11 post.

In the background I have Baghdad burning during the shock- and-awe campaign undertaken to soften up resistance to our invasion, which came on March 20, 2003

To see a large blowup of this photo, click on it.

This painting is protected by copyright.

Joe Goodwin at Ferrin

2009-09-19T01:53:00.003-04:00

Megan Moore and Joe Goodwin in front of one of his paintings, Kilauea, at the Ferrin Gallery on Third Thursday.

If you want to see the work of a pro, drop in on today's opening reception for Joe Goodwin's A Recent Epoch at the Ferrin Gallery at 437 North Street, Pittsfield.

He is an epic, full-time painter whose work I've admired since I first saw it a few years ago. He paints in a large studio on the third floor of his Pittsfield home, a studio shaped by the lines of the roof.

I'm not an art critic. So instead of talking about his stunning show of paintings and monotypes at Ferrin, I'll show you a few of the works hanging there.

This painting is Spectral Emission, 21"x29", acrylic, 2009.

And this is Untitled, 36 X 42, acrylic, 2009.

Sold prior to the opening was, Storm Cradle (diptych), 20×16x2, acrylic, 2000-2009

A native of Oklahoma, Joe got his bachelor of fine arts at Oklahoma State University and his masters of fine arts at the University of Illinois. He has had solo shows in New York; Sante Fe; Aspen; four German cities, Wiesbaden, Baden Baden, Frankfurt and Budingen; Tokyo; Lakeville; Chatham; Kent; Salisbury; Lenox, and Williamstown. His work is in the collections of seven museums.

If you don't get a chance to see Joe tonight, he's giving a talk at the gallery on Sept 30 at 7.

I took the pictures in this post. They may not conform exactly to the colors in the works. Click on the photos to enlarge them.

Third Thursday

2009-09-17T23:54:00.004-04:00

This little girl is figuring out that there's something fishy about this guy's legs. Michael Wolski was sailing up and down North Street last night as part of Third Thursday in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

This painting of President Barak Obama is the work of Brian Sweener, whose one-man show opened last night at the Berkshire Community College Gallery downtown.

The Berkshire Bateria was just one of the bands entertaining the people.
These guys were having some down home fun at the Transit Center on Columbus Avenue.

This sweet green car was one of the hot rods lined up along North Street.

And this mobile art gallery was the coolest rod I saw.

Photos by Grier Horner. To enlarge photos click on them.

Alice's therapist cried

2009-09-17T00:36:00.006-04:00

"Alice hated the taste of booze but loved being drunk."

Hi Grier,
Your August 25 blog brought back memories of the summer of
'92. Mike took me to Saratoga 2x and it was fun to dress up and wear a big hat at the race track.

He had good friends whom we stayed with who had a bar just across from the entrance to the race track. I think it
was called "King's Bar".

We met some interesting characters at the
bar. Some of them became Mike's friends for life and they used to visit us on the Cape.
All were pretty hard boozers and many have since died.
Alice was notorious for the huge quantity she could put away.
She used to come visit me because Mike didn't like her around due to her 300 lbs of flesh. The bar owner is dead now but I'm still in touch with his wife Patty.

I wonder if the bar you went to was the same one? Next time you go ask if it was Dick Bendon's bar? He was certainly a character; addicted to his own adrenalin. He drove poor Patty crazy.

On my 2nd trip there, I skipped the races and spent 5 hours walking up and down the main drag with the big beautiful hotels. Saratoga must have been quite the destination at one time.

I've always wanted to go back to Saratoga someday. I know I would be welcome at Patty's.

Getting back to Alice. She had a dear male friend Joe whom she met at King's bar. His wife wasn't interested in horses. So Alice and Joe traveled every year to The Kentucky Derby. He could drink Alice under the table.

Alice died a few years ago at 62 of a massive coronary, just a few weeks before her scheduled stomach bypass surgery. At 55, after she had had a heart attack, she decided to give up boozing and cigarettes. Then she became addicted to food.

She told me she hated the taste of booze but loved being drunk! She became very depressed when she couldn't get high anymore. She spent 6 months talking to a therapist. Alice was from a large Irish family and she was funny as hell.

At her last therapy session, her therapist broke down and cried; said he would miss seeing her every week. Everyone loved Alice. I certainly miss her calls and her visits.
P.S. I forgot to mention that Alice had a heart of gold and always put her friends' needs ahead of her own.

This email was from Carol Haeberli, my wife's sister and a good friend. None of the people in my Saratoga photographs are those mentioned in this post. Click on the photos to enlarge them.

Out of the loop

2009-09-15T01:27:00.002-04:00

I'm watching Jay Leno's grand opening on NBC last night and as usual he's cracking me up.

A while into the show, he brings on Kayne West, the rapper, who he congratulated for not backing out of the appearance after what happened Sunday night.

West sits in a blue chair next to Jay and he's contrite. It looks like he's going to cry when Jay asks him what his mother would have thought of his behavior.

So there I am feeling out of it because I have no idea what West did, an act I realize everyone must know about because Leno doesn't even explain what West is apologizing about.

I go to Google and find that during the MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall something wild happened.

Taylor Swift, the young country singer, was just starting her acceptance speech for her surprise win for Best Female Video.

West bounded onto the stage and took the mic away from her.

"Taylor, I'm really happy for you and I'm gonna let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time," West said.

After his outburst Swift stood there looking lost. The crowd applauded Swift. (To see the thing on video click this MTV link.) She didn't get to finish her speech.

"Poor Taylor," writes Elizabeth Snead in the Los Angeles Times website. "First Joe Jonas dumps her by phone. Now Kanye West spoils her VMA memory!"

Poor Grier, I say. He knew nothing about the mic-grabbing incident. He didn't even know Joe Jonas dumped Taylor, by phone no less. He didn't even know who Joe Jonas was. In fact he wasn't really sure who West was.

To his everlasting credit he had heard of Taylor Swift and liked Beyonce, who was sensational as she sang "At Last" at President Obama's inaugural ball. This is a photo of that.

And I did see Serena Williams tell the foot-fault-calling line judge she'd like to stick "this [expletive] ball down your [expletive] throat."

That drew a one-point penalty that sealed the victory Kim Clijsters was about to win on her own.

Of course none of these outbursts came close to the level of offensiveness obtained by Representative Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, when he shouted "you lie" during the President's health-care speach to Congress last week.

Getting back to Sunday at the MTV awards, Beyonce came to the rescue. It turns out she won the Big Kahuna Video of the Year, which is a bigger deal than Swift's award. Beyonce turned her time over to Swift. (See the picture below.) Pretty nice of her. And now you're up to date on the latest news in case you're as out of it as I am.

Anniversary

2009-09-11T01:18:00.003-04:00

She is going to be the model for my next Runway painting. I don't know her name. But I do know she is quite lovely and wearing a stunning dress by Alexander Wang. Her photo was taken by Mat Szwajkos/Getty Images.

My original plan was to pair her with the little girl running naked after being burned in a napalm attack on her village in the Vietnam War.

This iconic picture was taken in 1972 by Nick Ut, a young Vietnamese photographer working for the Associated Press. It won the Pulitzer Prize.

It is so painful to look at these children, all from the same family, that I don't know if I can bear to paint them.

While the U.S. soldiers in Ut's photo appear indifferent to the children's plight, moments later Americans came to her aid. The humanitarian act was captured by a British cameraman, Alan Downes, in the photo below. The black censure band reflects the practice of the time.

The girl, Kim Phuc, not only lived but married, raised a family, settled in Canada and was named a good-will ambassador for the United Nations.

Here she is with her infant son Thomas, her back horribly disfigured by the napalm burns. The photo was taken in a 1995 by Anne Bayin.

Instead of Ut's photo I may borrow from the shot below of one of the militias that complicated things in Iraq.

It is probably appropriate to turn to the Iraq image since this is the eighth anniversary of Al Qaeda's 9/11 attack on the United States.

George Bush convinced Congress to allow him to go to war with Iraq because Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 and because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Both reasons turned out to be false.

More than 4,300 service personnel and countless thousands of Iraqis have died in that war, and it isn't over. Meanwhile, we're committing thousands more troops to Afghanistan, a war that I think will become an albatross around President Obama's neck - and ours.

Family gathering

2009-09-09T02:22:00.008-04:00

Family. What a wonderful, terrible, complicated invention. It is with us for life, whether we like it or not. And it assumes greater importance as we age.

Families work when the wiring hasn't gotten impossibly twisted, and sometimes, I guess, even when it has. For this crew the wiring is still intact and they get along famously.

I shot this at the home of Cookie and David Bates during a long Labor Day weekend. Cookie is at the left and David's in the doorway. She and Babbie are sisters. Pete, looking on, is their big brother. (Their sister Carol couldn't make it.)

This was the fifth year in a row we've spent three days with the Bates at their home on Lake Ontario near the Canadian boarder.

While we were there I finished Richard Russo's new novel, That Old Cape Magic, where the protagonist makes peace with his parents posthumously. Better late than never.

We ate at the house. We ate outdoors on a shaded terrace at Sacket Harbor where our waitress looked like Edie Sedgwick, the Andy Warhol star. From Alexandria Bay, we took a boat tour on the Saint Lawrence and saw dozens of the Thousand Islands.

My ears got sunburned and still hurt.

And we talked for hours. Two evenings they played cards. Me, I dealt with Russo while they dealt the cards. The only card game I like is War. Try to get adults to play that with you.

Below, in sequence, are Pete, his wife Zoe, and Babbie. (Cookie isn't here because I didn't get a good shot of her. David ditto but his picture was in my September 7 post.) The last photo is the view of Ontario from the Bates living room. It's a pretty spectacular place to live.

Into the sunset

2009-09-07T11:38:00.002-04:00

Babbie and David, her brother-in-law, prepare to embark on the first jetski ride of her life.
They navigate the lake's rocky bottom
They're getting closer, now wearing the life preservers they had forgotten and had to go back for.
They ride off into the sunset, David at the helm, Babbie holding on. He's an old jetski hand. She loved the ride.

Me, I was a landlubber and clung close to shore.

Melville and whaleboats

2009-09-04T21:37:00.004-04:00

Here's our whaleboat, now plying a painted sea, propelled by a phantom crew of six oarsmen in a dangerous quest for hearts.

(Click the image for a giant enlargement.)

Rereading several chapters of Moby Dick, which Herman Melville wrote while living in Pittsfield, my town, I now know more about rigging a whaleboat.

Hundreds of feet of line are carefully coiled in a big tub. (The tub full of line is just forward of the harpooned heart in my boat.) That line is then run aft to a capstan and then is returned forward to the harpoon. In this configuration it runs between each of the pairs of oarsmen.

Both harpoons are attached to the line to give the harpooner a second chance after he throws the the first. If he doesn't have time to heave the second it goes overboard. The other end of the whale line is not attached to anything. If it were, a deep diving whale would drag the boat down into the depths.

As the crew "pull into the jaws of death," Melville writes, "the line silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play -- this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair."

When the whale is harpooned, he runs and the line plays out fast and furiously. A kink in the rope can take a man's arm or leg off, or worse, yank him from the boat into the sea.

"But why say more?" Melville asks. "All men live enveloped in whale-lines."

The whaler

2009-09-02T01:19:00.004-04:00

The crew of this whaleboat has harpooned a heart and pulled it aboard. A second harpoon is at the ready in the bow in case another heart is sighted. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

This is the second of two pieces commissioned by a buyer. Each canvas is 18" x 14". The first was a tramp steamer. (See my August 27 post.) I expect to paint the ocean in today.

Unlike the first boat, this one was pieced together from a sheet of highly weathered copper a neighbor gave me.

The tangle of line in the bow is from the first throw. The line for the second harpoon is coiled in the bucket in front of the heart.

When a whale is harpooned the coiled line plays out fast and can be lethal. If a crewman gets snagged by the line, he will be yanked into the water.

If he doesn't drown as he's pulled along the surface, he will when the whale dives.�

Scar or beauty mark

2009-08-31T09:50:00.005-04:00

Specialty Minerals' limestone operation in Adams, Massachusetts, keeps gouging out more of the foothills below Mount Greylock, the tower-topped peak in the center. (Click on the photo for a large-scale view.)

These pictures are drive-by shootings taken from Babbie's Prius on East Road. It runs along the hillside on the east of the valley. The mining is on the west side.

In the complex of buildings below the quarry, the limestone is processed. The products go into everything from building materials like joint compound to pharmaceuticals to chewing gum.

This one is taken from further north near the McCann Vocational School in North Adams. It shows the extent of the scar in the distance.

And here we've turned off East and are dropping into town on Lime Street.

I've never heard anyone raise a stink about the Specialty Mineral operation. That surprises me because it seems akin to the strip mining that scared the Pennsylvania landscape for so many years. This gash keeps growing. And there seems to be no reason it won't continue to spread along the hillside.

Still no outcry.

Maybe the difference here is that there's a certain beauty to the quarry. A certain pristine quality to the factory - its buildings always gleaming white from the lime powder that covers them.

It doesn't hurt that Adams, which is not a rich town, gets jobs and taxes from Specialty Minerals. Maybe the company could do something to clean up its act.

Tamp steamer

2009-08-27T00:12:00.005-04:00

This is the tramp steamer I'm making for an old friend who had seen a similar piece of mine and wanted one. This is made of copper, wire, pencils and acrylic paint. It is 18" x 14". I call it Tramp Steamer.

As you can see it's three dimensional. Its cargo, a giant heart, is being lowered into the hold.

This is the boat in an earlier stage. To get to this point I had drawn paper patterns and traced them onto sheet copper. I cut the copper with shears and riveted the sections together. I made a ladder out of aluminum wire.

I had painted the sky light blue but converted it to violet. Then I painted the hull to make it look like a beat-up freighter. More changes are in the works.

A Saratoga primer

2009-08-25T00:15:00.004-04:00

Bill and I went to Saratoga yesterday to see the horses run. Of course from our vantage point in the infield, you mostly see the horses on the giant TV screen. But that's OK because you're there and you soak up the color.

The filly at the top has just been hosed down after her race.

The little girl below had one of the best seats in the house.

I wonder if she picked any winners. I know we didn't.

Some people get all dolled up to go to Saratoga.

Others don't.

After the fourth race we retired to the Man of Kent for sustenance. We didn't have to drown our sorrows. That's because we bet, as Bill puts it, modestly.

So there you have it - everything I know about horse racing.

The handstand

2009-08-23T23:57:00.006-04:00

This is a painting of my mother I did about 10 years ago. I was using the photo I showed you August 22 as a guide.

That black object at the lower right is not part of the painting. It's a corner of our TV table. I was too lazy to take the painting off the wall to photograph it. The painting, 74"x37.5", hangs in the living room.

It was part of a series I did called Family Album. Painting my parents, who died in the mid-1960s, was a way, I suppose, of reuniting with them temporarily.

Comparing my painting to the photo, I see that I failed to capture her grace as well as I would have liked to. And I made her legs too thick.

In another painting I tried to portray her mental anguish. I struggled with it for a long time but it never worked out.

On another beach

2009-08-22T00:26:00.005-04:00

Hey. What's going on here? Who's that at the edge of the beach lifting his leg like a puppy?

Me. I was 5. That was just 69 years ago. We lived in one of those white cottages on my left. You had to feed coins into the stove to make it work. That was a drag on our livelihood because my mother made "Mrs. Horner's famous Key Lime Pies" to help with the finances.

This was Florida. My father, who I think took this picture, was still working in New York and my mother, my sister Britt and I were in Florida for the winter.

I don't know whether my parents were separating or whether my mother was there for her health. She had been in a sanatorium in the Adirondacks with TB for more than a year when I was just a year or two old.

Rosalie took care of me when mom had TB. According to my mother, Rosalie told her before she was sick, "Mrs. Horner, you got the widest hips in all of Scarsdale."

We were kids and that always made us howl with laughter. I think my mother took what Rosalie said as a compliment, just as I expect it was intended.

Here's a shot of my mother - hips and all - taken that Florida winter. She must have been the best looking woman in the lime pie business on the Gulf that year. I can't remember how they tasted. My mother confided that she had never made one before we got there.

So how do you explain the "famous" on the posters that we used to walk up the road nailing to utility poles? My father was in advertising, that's how come.

(For more on my mother, see my August 18 post.)

Banished from the beach

2009-08-18T00:27:00.003-04:00

This photo was taken by a New York Daily News photographer when my mother, Beth Hall Horner, was ejected from the beach for immodest attire.

My father told me that the photo appeared on the front page of the Daily News. Because the photo isn't dated I can't go back to the old newspapers to look it up. I'd love to see the page and the caption.

For his part the officer doesn't look like he's about to handcuff my mother and throw her in the Paddy Wagon. And my mom doesn't look terribly indignant about her ejection.

She was a free spirit when she was young. And throughout her life she was funny, warm, loving and lovely. But she was plagued by manic depression, and it became devastating in her final years.

She underwent shock therapy a number of times.

"It's like being electrocuted," she told me when I visited her in the garden of the sanitarium.

She wanted me to intercede and have the treatment stopped. Foolishly, I believed the doctors knew what they were doing.

It was not a humane treatment. By the time she died at 58, the electricity had largely burned out the spirit that made her a shooting star. That was 44 years ago. I still think of her a lot.

Abstract photos

2009-08-16T00:58:00.003-04:00

I took these shots this week, not knowing how they would turn out. I'm intrigued by what I got.

Surprising myself

2009-08-14T00:46:00.008-04:00

OK, here is the final version of Runway No. 6. Please stop me before I do more work on it and screw it up.

As soon as I uploaded this photo, I could see there is a section on the right side of her waist that needs some shading.

I repainted that area Tuesday in an effort to make her bikini bottom show through subtly. (I think you'll be able to see that if you click on the image to blow it up.) At the same time I redefined the scarves on the left side and did some work on the legs and the flowers in her dress.

I posted early and mid-stage photos of the painting on August 1 and August 6.

Sometimes a painting I do amazes me. This is one. The tough part for me was the clothing. I don't usually do low-velocity colors. Like the others in the series, this is 6'x4' with a dark violet background.

The outfit is by Missoni and the burning vehicle is from a photo taken during the Vietnam War. I haven't been able to track down the photographer.

I had technical advice in toning down the burning truck from FX Tobin in Arizona. Take a look at his website. It's pretty wild.

On the rail

2009-08-12T00:15:00.004-04:00

I took this shot of Pontoosuc Lake from Route 7 last evening during a 2-mile walk. The railing was put up by the state when it rebuilt the road about 14 years ago.

Originally the state had planned a concrete wall, but substituted this see-through railing after stories by Dan Bellow in the Berkshire Eagle, created an uproar. People wanted to see the lake as they drove by in their cars.

After the walk I had supper and listened to John Irving's novel Widow for a Year and drank three or four glasses of cheap white wine - a wine we always get and which I like a lot. Babbie was out. I wouldn't have had so much wine if she was home.

Then I went down and worked a while on the painting I have been doing. I had already worked on it for several hours earlier. It's a good painting. And I'm concerned that I'm getting too fussy about the details and may ruin it.

The Gwathmey connectioin

2009-08-07T17:43:00.014-04:00

This studio and the house in the background were designed by architect Charles Gwathmey who died August 4. He was 71.

Built for his parents in Amagansett, Long Island, in 1965 for $35,000, this project signalled a new wave in American architecture. And it catapulted Gwathmey, still in his 20s, into the forefront of his trade.

This project along with houses by other up and coming architects of the period ended my love affair with Colonial architecture. I was a convert to modern design.

Babbie and I scrapped the plans for a Colonial addition an architect had designed for our house and drew our own. The result is shown in the next two photos. In each case the addition is in the foreground.

It was built in 1971 for $13,000. I did the shingling, installed the wide-board flooring and did the painting..

When our addition was framed I remember walking up the street with Babbie to take a look at its profile.

"What have I done?" I asked her. I thought it looked like hell.

But after the initial shock, it grew on me. It didn't take long until I was proud of it.

Getting back to Gwathmey's brilliant early work, here's his restoration of Whig Hall at Princeton. The building had been damaged by a major fire.

His blend of the classic and modern in this building was astonishing.

But Gwathmey was not always so successful. The large addition he and his partner Robert Siegel designed for Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in 1992 was blah.

But at least it is so unassuming that it doesn't compete with the Wright landmark.

The photo of his parents' house was taken by the New York Times. If you'd like to see pictures of more of his work, here's a slide show from the New York Times.

Multimedia

Gwathmey" border="0" height="126" width="190">Slide Show

Dressed to kill

2009-08-06T00:39:00.005-04:00

Runway No. 6 is almost done. (Click photo to enlarge it.) I like it. It's been difficult for me because the outfit by the designer Missoni has subtle coloring. I don't usually do subtle.

Speaking of subtle, the photo makes me think I have to tone down the burning Army vehicle behind her. Maybe I also want to knock out the smoke rising above the windshield.

I'll have to consult my California art guru, F.X.

To see the painting in an earlier stage, go to my August 1 post.

The painting is 6' x 4', acrylic on canvas, as all of the works in the series.

A dream house

2009-08-03T00:25:00.004-04:00

In the late 1960s I dreamed about buying this building, now the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts. It was for sale for $14,000.

As a young reporter at The Berkshire Eagle I passed it every day going from the paper to City Hall. Pittsfield government was my beat.

The gallery space (top photo) would have been our living room. Babbie could have gardens up on the roof, which has a view of Mount Greylock.

The price seemed reasonable - if you didn't think about fixing it up and heating it.

The location was a stumbling block. It was in a business and institutional section off the main drag. There were no residential neighbors.

And we had three little kids. They wouldn't have anyone to play with. And who would we borrow a cup of sugar from?

Eventually it was bought by Kitty Lichtenstein, who spent a bundle restoring it. Later she turned it over to the city where it is the domain of Megan Whilden, the city's cultural director and a driving force in the revitalization of Pittsfield's moribund downtown.

Work in progress

2009-08-01T02:21:00.004-04:00

This is the painting I'm working on now. It is the sixth in the Runway series. (Click on the picture for a blowup.) I'll show you the finished version when it's done.

The dress is by Missoni, the Italian design house and was part of its 2009 fall collection. The burning army vehiclewas taken from a Vietnam War photo.

Missoni was started in 1953 by Ottavio Missoni, the son of an Italian sea captain and a Serbian countess, and his wife Rosita.

They met in London. He was a hurdler in the 1948 Olympics there. Rosita, who had worked in her family's embroidery company, was in London studying English.

"He was gorgeous and I dreamed of meeting him!" she would say years later.

Their company didn't become a real success until they were invited to show a collection at the Pitti Palace in Florence in 1967. There the Missonis gained attention more for what the models didn't wear than for what they did.

According to lifeinItaly.com, Rosita told her models to remove their bras because they ruined the line of the black jersey dresses they were wearing.

"Under the bright catwalk lights, the material became transparent, and the shocking sight of the see-through dresses became headline news around the world," the website said.

Now their three children run the highly diversified operation.

Here's looking at you, Anita

2009-07-30T00:32:00.007-04:00

Since I began Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man in June 2006, more viewers have looked at this picture than any of the hundreds I've posted.

The subject is Anita McFarland who I photographed at the Coltsville Shopping Center in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. (Click on the photo to enlarge it.)

She drew wolf whistles in the process.

Over the years her photo has always been in the top 10 in the stats on my original blog site: http://grierhorner.com/blog

The ship was commissioned by the shopping center. The owner's brother was an art collector.

When the center was sold, the ship was removed. I loved it but a lot of people in town did not.

Standoff

2009-07-28T00:10:00.008-04:00

This is Runway 5, the fifth painting in my series about the catwalk and other aspects of life. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

The British actress Sienna Miller, unbeknownst to her, is the model. She's confronting one of China's combat tanks, a la Tiananmen Square.

I'm not trying to deny the heroics of the Chinese man who stood up to the tanks. I am one of the millions who consider him incredibly brave..

Busy as a bee

2009-07-26T00:57:00.005-04:00

The purple thistles Babbie and I planted in one corner of the raspberry patch some years ago are very popular with bees.

I took this shot about 6:30 yesterday evening after mowing the lawn.

And mowing the lawn came after a nap, which came after hours of grappling with a leak that's causing interior rot inside a small section of the back wall of the house. I hope its a small section.

I've pulled off trim, yanked out one wide plank floorboard, cut a small rectangle out of the mushy plywood underflooring, pried off exterior shingles, and cut a hole in the wallboard - just missing an electric wire.

I can see the damage the but I still haven't figured out how the rain is getting in.

It was nice during the day. But now its night and it's raining. It seems like it's been raining since June 1.

I have a hard time going to sleep when it's raining. All I can think about is it leaking in and wreaking havoc.

In Provincetown

2009-07-24T01:05:00.009-04:00

We always hit Provincetown when we go to the Cape. Between the stores and the people, there's a lot to see and we always have a good time.

These shots were taken on Commercial Street on Thursday. It was teaming with people and it was sweltering.

I don't know how the woman in gold, who strives for statue-like stillness, could stand the heat.

To see large-scale versions of the pictures, click on them.

At The Gut

2009-07-21T23:55:00.005-04:00

This is Shannon, our daughter, at the Gut in Wellfleet.

Shannon, Riley, Babbie and I have been visiting this secluded spot on the Cape for several years. We always called it Our Secret Beach.

When we were on the Cape last week we discovered its name: The Gut.

I just looked gut up in the dictionary. Besides meaning your entrails, strings made from animal intestines, personal courage, etc., it also means a narrow passage or strait.

In high school I was nicknamed "Guts" by a football coach. I was proud of that but a little embarrassed when friends called me that in public.

At The Gut it was windy and cold. Shannon turned the collar of her fleece jacket up. I pulled up the hood on my sweatshirt.

The sun was setting and the sky was dramatic. Riley picked up seashells and stones and put them in her pail. She and Shannon found a couple heart-shaped stones and handed them to me.

That's a tradition based on a series of paintings I did incorporating hearts.

We had a great time at The Gut, Head of the Meadow and Marconi - all beaches. Riley rode her boogie board (see photo in my July 15 post) and learned to dive into the waves. She swam out over her head. She would stay in the ocean so long her shoulders and forehead would turn purple.

She said she's going to be a surfer.

In contrast, I was a wimp. I went in up to my waist but no further. And that was only once. So much for Guts.

Billy, Babbie and Elton

2009-07-19T13:49:00.004-04:00

Saturday night we went to the Elton John-Billy Joel concert at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro.

Me, Babbie, Eric and Michelle - they treated us - and maybe 70,000 others.

Billy and Elton made those pianos ring. Soft like cotton. Loud like cannons. It was my second rock concert. My first was Bruce Springsteen a lot of years ago at the old Boston Garden.

I think we were in the Southie section. Never saw so many Irish faces in a cluster. The women, young and middle aged, were having a wonderful time. Singing along, dancing at their seats high above the field. It was great seeing people giving themselves over to the moment.

That's not something I can usually do. And most of the men around us couldn't either. But by the end I was on my feet and so were many of them.

I was wearing my England Forever t-shirt that I bought in Provincetown Friday in honor of Elton. If they noticed, the Irish didn't take offence.

I took these shots with my cell phone. That's Babbie at the top. And that blaze of yellow is the stage. You can see how far away we were.

Getting out of the parking lot was a two-hour grind. But the whole thing was a blast.

I was surprised at the number of 20- and 30-somethings there. I had expected the hugh turnout of the middle aged. The old, like us, were few and far between.

I've always been a fan of Billy Joel. On stage he was cocky and pugnacious. Elton, on the other hand, didn't talk. But he glittered. A great showman.

Babbie said he looked cute and cuddly.

At the beach

2009-07-15T17:27:00.003-04:00

This is my granddaughter Riley. She loves the ocean.

I guess I don't have to tell you that. The picture, taken by my daughter Shannon, tells it all.

Did the old man jump in too? No, it was too cold for him. What a wimp.

Cloud play

2009-07-12T16:17:00.004-04:00

One of the natural glories last week was dramatic skies.

Of the three shots I took here, two put the clouds in the environment of North Street as it runs past Pontoosuc Lake in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

The bottom shot concentrates on the clouds alone.

There is truth, I think, in looking at the sky both ways.

One more thing. It was wonderful to see the sun again. Of the last 30 days, we must have had rain on 26.

Tiananmen Square it's not

2009-07-10T01:11:00.003-04:00

This is Runway 5, a work in progress. I thought it would be finished yesterday. I was wrong.

I didn't get a chance to do any work on it.

The model is Sienna Miller, a British actress. She didn't jet over for a sitting. I had to work from photos.

Couldn't commandeer a Chinese tank, so ditto.

How it turned out

2009-06-30T00:24:00.007-04:00

This painting, Runway 4, is basically finished. (Oh, no. I just noticed the horse's ears are backward.)

Yesterday I started Runway 5. No horse this time. But there is a tank. Like Runway 1, 2, 3 and 4, it's six feet by four feet, acrylic on canvas.

By the way I entered this world 74 years ago today. Cooked up a batch of jambalya yesterday so we can celebrate Cajun style.

Man, I love jambalya. And key lime pie. That's for desert.

Horse Head Revisited

2009-06-28T00:45:00.003-04:00

The other day I was talking about toning down the horse. My internet pal F.X., also a painter, suggested glazing with the background color.

I did that, throwing in a little raw umber and dark violet for good measure, thinned it down and brushed it on. If you look at my previous post you'll see the difference.

Horse of a Different Color

2009-06-20T01:16:00.008-04:00

Now that her head's on straight, I've given her a face. Behind her is a horse of a different color.
I wanted the horse to take on a mythic look. (See the June 18 post to compare.) This is getting close to being finished.
P.S. The dress was designed by Gareth Pugh, a brilliant young Brit.

Heads Up

2009-06-17T23:55:00.003-04:00

Here's the painting I'm working on now - Runway #4. I've been having a terrible time with her head.

It was cocked to the left and had been bothering me for a couple days. The tilt was too much. She looked unnatural. So I painting her head at a lesser angle.

I put the eyes in for the third time, gouging them into the thickening paint. She still looked strange. So I painted a new head. And then another one. Then I modified the tilt on that one.

Now I think the tilt's okay so I'll start grappling with the eyes and nose again. I don't have to worry about her mouth because it's covered by the high turtle neck.

The horse has gone through several incarnations too, including a flaming mane and tail. Looked weird so I covered the whole horse in a coat of bluish black.

That makes him look like one of those plywood silhouettes you can buy at farm stands. That's not what I'm after. Back to work.

High flying fashion

2009-06-09T23:52:00.003-04:00

This is the 3rd of my Runway paintings, the one I showed you June 2 as a work in progress.

It is 72" x 48" and is acrylic on canvas. The outfits the models are wearing are based on designs by Hermes.

They appear to have been inspired by Amelia Earhart, who will make an appearance in the series of paintings.

Studio models

2009-06-02T11:50:00.004-04:00

I'm working on this painting, the third in my Runway series, in my studio. It - the studio - is about as fouled up as Francis Bacon's.

Unfortunately, that's the only thing we have in common.

I took the models from a collection by Hermes which must have been inspired by Amelia Earhart, a record setting woman pilot who disappeared in the Pacific on an attempted flight around the world.

Fiery breath

2009-05-22T08:54:00.004-04:00

Third Thursday drew crowds as it started its new season last evening. Here Maria Bermudez breaths fire.

Problem tenants

2009-05-20T23:03:00.004-04:00

We're being overrun by paintings. Fifteen are stacked up against this wall in our house.

Some are ones I was considering for two shows in March. Six others were just returned by the mental health agency where they had been hanging for four or five years.

My theory is they were driving people nuts.

I know they're doing that to Babbie, my wife.

"Paint small," is her mantra.

Burn baby burn

2009-05-16T09:47:00.003-04:00

This is still a work in progress. I've been fascinated by the idea of pianos on fire as an image ever since seeing one on a tarot card a few years ago.

I like the armored look the designer Alexander McQueen gave this runway model whose look I've tried to duplicate. Needs more work.

Kenyan reverie

2009-04-30T23:48:00.005-04:00

Susan Phillips, an American living in Kenya, is the guest blogger on my other blog. Her piece, accompanied by six of her wonderful photos, is up now. It's worth taking a look at: http://grierhorner.com/blog

Six days later

2009-04-28T02:15:00.004-04:00

Here they are again a week later. Still striding down the Runway. But a lot more work has gone into the painting.

Figurative work takes me much longer than the abstract stuff I was doing for the last year.

Sometimes I get frustrated. There's still more work to go here. I'll show it to you again when it's finished.

Clear for takeoff

2009-04-22T08:38:00.002-04:00

For the first time in more than a year I'm tackling figurative painting. This is a work in progress that I started Sunday.
I have a grand plan for this project, called Runway, including one 30 foot wide painting. Let's see if I can pull it off.
This one is for practice and is 6 feet x 4 feet.

Goodbye to all that

2009-04-21T10:45:00.004-04:00

The last of my solo shows has come down. It was a real ego trip having concurrent shows in two of Pittsfield's four downtown art galleries.
But they're down and that's a letdown. A new one comes up this winter. This time it's at Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington.

Above the Bayou

2009-04-10T12:01:00.011-04:00

A young artist I know invited me to tag along today for a flight over the marshlands of southwestern Louisiana.

For some time now she has been doing wonderful paintings of aerial views of this territory near the gulf, territory that was swept over and submerged by Hurricanes Rita and Ike.

As the pilot flew the Cessna Skyhawk, a four seater, at 400 to 500 feet I think I understood her attraction to this land-and-waterscape. The greens, browns, occasional lavenders, the sun shimmering on the water as its reflection races the plane, the remnants of the fog that delayed our flight still screening the horizon.

She says the marshland is important not only as an ecosystem but as a natural brake on hurricane-driven floodwaters for communities inland from the Gulf of Mexico. But the marshlands have been contracting due to the erosive impact of man-made channels for oil pipelines and the inland shipping lane, and of the hurricanes themselves.

These are two of many pictures she shot with a digital.

At the top you have a view of the marshlands. The one below gives you an idea of the scope of open waters intersecting the marshes.

I like flying in small planes and this excursion in a single-engine four seater lived up to expectations. The pilot, Reagan, (I apologize if I've misspelled your name) was good company and seemed to anticipate just what the artist wanted to shoot.

Transformation

2009-04-06T17:58:00.005-04:00

Directly above is Jeanne d'Arc 34. It used to be number 15 in the series (Fifteen is the painting at the top). But 15 didn't do much for me so it got a total makeover.

I think the only thing left are a few small patches of blue reached by scratching down through the new paint.

You'll have to be the judge of which is better. I vote for the new one. How about you?

By the way, the Jeanne d'Arc show at Zeitgeist in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, came down today. David and I loaded all 19 paintings in a rental truck, had a beer and seafood chowder at Reilly's and unloaded them again at home.

Running with Wolves

2009-03-31T23:57:00.005-04:00

If you read my March 31 post about getting lost twice in a row driving to Nicole's, I suppose you'd write me off as another old man whining about fears of senility.

So as a counterweight I'm running this self portrait to show you I'm not the floundering mess you envisioned. Or maybe it will just reinforce that vision.

But I think you'll have to agree the March 31 post was just an off day in the life of a guy who at 73 is still running with the wolves.

It's Melting

2009-03-31T01:30:00.009-04:00

That isn't open water you see beyond the white ice near shore. It is decaying ice. I took this photo yesterday noon. Wind was lashing the rain and it was cold. A typical spring day in the Berkshires.
My lake walks are over for the season.
Earlier in the day when I returned Nicole's projector, I got lost - really lost. Last week when I picked the projector up I got lost too. And I mean lost. When you're 73 this scares you. It whispers - or shouts - the A word: Alzheimer's.
In the afternoon I finished a painting I had started Sunday. This was the first one I'd done in the last six weeks. I haven't gone more than a week without painting since I started 13 years ago. The six weeks were spent building stretchers and doing other things associated with my one-man shows that opened March 13 and 21.
If I was making $100,000 a painting, think how much money I would have lost. But if I was making $100,000 per painting, I'd have an assistant. Maybe two. Money or no money it was good to be doing what I do again.

Gallery Sitting

2009-03-29T03:04:00.004-04:00

Friday afternoon I was at the new Berkshire Community College Art Gallery from 1 to 4 so the public could drop in.

Lisa Yetz brought in an art class from BCC and I had a good time talking to them about my Dresden Firebombing paintings on display there. I'm going to gallery sit again next Friday afternoon.

Sue Rose and I hung around for an hour or more. Her show will follow mine. We found we had a lot to talk about. A woman older than I am stopped in later. She told me she had been looking at the paintings through the windows every day when she walked by and was glad to have a chance to see them up close.

While she liked them, another man said BCC "could have done better" than launch the gallery with my work.

I took this shot from the gallery before I left.

Me and Joan

2009-03-27T00:49:00.003-04:00

Me and Joan at Zeitgeist last night. By the way we didn't get raided. Babbie took the shot. Today (March 27) I'm at the Berkshire Community College Art Gallery, 1 Columbus Avenue, from 1 to 4 to talk with people who drop in to see my Dresden Firebombing show.

2009-03-26T15:07:00.004-04:00

Tonight there's an Evening with the Artist at the Zeitgeist Gallery at 684 North Street, Pittsfield. The subject is Joan of Arc and I'm the artist. It's taking place in conjunction with my show, Jeanne d'Arc, which opened there last Saturday. (See previous post.)

It starts at 7 and I'll talk a little (if you're lucky) about Joan of Arc and then open it up to a conversation with the audience - if there is one.

You're all invited.

While I'm carrying on, Carl Th Dreyer's classic silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, will be playing on the wall thanks to Nicole's magic projector. That gives the audience a distinct advantage. You can watch the movie instead of listening to me.

Renee Falconetti, as Joan, gives an amazing performance.

Playing the movie could provide some excitement. The FBI could raid the joint. You know how you're warned at the beginning of each DVD not to show this in public for love or money? Well this is one of those illegal showings. The Swat Team could burst in at any time.

By the way, this is for love, not money. Despite all this potential excite,emt. tjere's no admission fee.

P.S. Tomorrow (Friday) I will be at the new downtown Berkshire Community College Art Gallery from 1 to 4. Drop in and see my show, The Dresden Firebombing. That's an order. I'm going to need some company.

Photos of the Shows

2009-03-25T01:46:00.001-04:00

Jeanne d'Arc

2009-03-25T01:07:00.004-04:00

Jeanne d'Arc, the series I've been working on for nine months, opened Saturday at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Nineteen of the 33 are hanging there.

There was a lot of people, a lot of talk, a lot of enthusiasm (he said modestly).

Pittsfield has five galleries downtown and right now two of them are exhibiting solo shows of my work. The first show at the new Berkshire Community College Art Gallery was of my Dresden Firebombing paintings. Do I sound like I'm bragging? You have it right.

At Zeitgeist, 684 North Street (Across from Family Dollar) there's going to be "An Evening with the Artist" this Thursday night. It starts at 7 and will be an exchange with the audience about Joan of Arc. Carl Th. Dreiser's classic silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, will be projected against a wall during the conversation. Wait until you see Renee Falconetti as Joan. She gives one of the great performances in film.

I'm a big Joan of Arc enthusiast ever since reading the transcript of her heresy trial held in 1431. She was brilliant in strategy and leadership and turned the tide of the Hundred Years War. Before she took command of the French army England was winning decisively. The French generals had been timid. She was bold and inspired.

Eventually captured, she was tried by the English and their sympathisers and burned at the stake. She was 19.