Kenyan reverie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.