Anniversary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.