New Work and Immortality

Centerfold 1, mixed media with encaustic, oil paint and cold wax, 30"x30"x1.5", 2011

Centerfold 2, mixed media with encaustic, oil paint and cold wax, 30"x30"x1.5", 2011

Here are some other new pieces that I have been working on. The center rectangles are patinated copper and my usual horizontal elements have been overpainted with oil and cold wax medium. (Yes the encaustic was fused before the oil paint mixture was added.)

These pieces are related to the Building Blocks series (see my website) but take it a couple of steps beyond.

Notes on Immortality
Today, because of the enforced couch time brought on by Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene, I actually got to read the Sunday NY Times. I haven't done that for quite a while. One of the articles, by Stephen Cave, contained excerpts from his forthcoming book, Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization. His premise is that the quest for immortality is "the motor of civilization" and that without our constant striving to be immortal, civilization would cease to function. This, he claims, has been proven by scientific research.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The original research study that he cites records the difference in subsequent actions by two groups: one group reminded of their mortality before the subsequent test (Hey, dumbo, you're gonna die) and the other given the same test but without the warning. (They didn't really say the "Hey, dumbo" part.) The two groups were composed of "court judges" (to distinguish them from Judge Judies?) from Tucson. So the test was that they had to rule on a hypothetical case of prostitution, and the result was that the group who had been reminded set a higher bond on the prostitutes than those who hadn't.

The results of this study, and the subsequent "more than 400" other experiments aimed to test the "worldview" of participants, claim to support the "Terror Management Theory" which holds that we (humans) attempt to manage our fear of death by adhering to "cultural, philosophical and religious systems" that offer immortality [if followed] - my brackets.

My Take On This Thesis
Personally, I think this all sounds totally dubious. Now, it may be true that I do not subscribe to any system which purports to offer me immortality, but if I had just been reminded that I was going to die, why would I care about some poor working girl trying to make a living? Haven't I got bigger things to think about? Although I try not to think about dying because it kinda adds a bad taste to the moment, if cruelly reminded that it's bound to happen one day, I think about those near and dear to me, my giant collection of stuff that will have to find a home, and how glad I am that my body will not go to the Fisher & Sons Funeral Home (Six Feet Under for those who don't recognize the name). Wouldn't that make you more lenient instead of more strict - or am I just out of step with the test subjects? (I would like to have your comments on this.)

Death as the Engine of Life
Continuing with the article, the author claims that if there were no death, civilization would grind to a halt because our drive to seek immortality propels all our actions. Therefore, with the achievement of immortality, "We would have no need for progress or art, faith or fame." We would all wander around aimlessly for eternity, purposeless and timeless.

My assessment: first, I think he's been reading too much Anne Rice. This sounds an awful lot like that vampire series. Secondly, I think that many of us are more concerned with improving our life here and now on this planet and in this time than we are with making ourselves ready for some illusionistic future life with halos, clouds and harps. Do most people really believe that if they follow all the rules and don't step on the cracks, they will be guaranteed entry into the promised land? And is that why they make the choices and lead the lives they do? Does anyone really want immortality? Is that why we make art - to become immortal?

The Pace of Life and Art

Sometimes I feel that my life is racing by and I can hardly keep up. Other times, it seems to crawl or be stuck in a Groundhog Day mode. This past month has been a slow period in which I seem to be picking up that boulder for the long trudge up the hill again and again. And, of course, my work in the studio is what guides all the sensations. It feels like the work has been coming together at a snail's pace. In the end, I'm happy with the result so I guess it just took as long as it took to make.

As Sweet As Honey, mixed media with dominoes and encaustic on panel,
36"x36"x1.5" (click on picture to enlarge)

As Sweet As Honey is one of three pieces I made that use dominoes to comment on the theme of pollination. They will be shown in Pollination:Beyond the Garden at the Brush Gallery in Lowell, Mass. in the fall. That show has been curated by Greg Wright and will include work interpreting pollination by eleven artists who work in encaustic. Below is an ad for the show designed by Lynette Haggard that appeared in Art New England this month.

In addition to the art, the cultural importance of the theme will be broadened by inclusion of the film by Laura Tyler, Sister Bee, and a talk by Tony Lulek, President of the Norfolk County Beekeepers Association. There will also be a catalog of the show available.

My piece As Sweet As Honey will be shown with Dark Companion, a piece of the same size that I had finished some months ago. I have been using it as the opening page for my website. Somehow the first piece that I made, before As Sweet As Honey, was not working for me. When I had it hanging up and it didn't look any better to me over time, I finally tried to improve it. That didn't work either, so I just started over. Sometimes a dog painting is just a dog and remains that way no matter what you do. The trick is to recognize that before you spend hours trying to make it into something it will never be.

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A Facebook comment on this piece by Joanne Mattera:

I love the rhythms going on, the underlayer of lyrical line overlaid with the tap-tap-tap of the nails, and the purposeful meander of the dominoes, their dots an echo of the nail's staccato. That yellow grid is very "sweet" compared to your usual palette, and a lovely counterpoint to the black and white.

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TV Recommendations From the Studio

Busy, busy in the studio. I'll have some images of new work to post early next week. In the meantime, I thought I would recommend a couple of things I've seen on TV recently.

The first is a new HBO documentary, Gloria Steinem, in her own words.  This is an hour-long program that sums up Gloria's life and career with lots of clips, interviews, images and commentary. She has had a full life and been a leader in the so-called second wave of feminism. (I don't really get why feminism has to be divided into waves, but from today's perspective, waves differentiate various efforts and timelines in the movement.)

It's surprising how much I had forgotten about what Gloria had done to work for women's political progress and about the women's liberation movement itself. The gains that women have made have been of very recent history and I guess we all tend to forget unless we are looking back. I guess I focus more on the lack of progress, rather than the gains. For example, one interview showed Gloria with Bella Abzug where they were both saying that they fully expected women candidates for president and vice president to be totally the norm in thirty years. What a disappointment that has been, as has the minimal number of women in Congress, in high-level jobs in business and achieving parity of pay - to name just a few areas where quantifiable inequality still persists.

Seeing women of many ages marching to achieve abortion rights really brought home to me how important that achievement was because previously abortion was dangerously illegal. Gloria herself had an abortion and publicly admitted that as part of the abortion rights movement. That fact was thought to be a shameful admission for a young, unmarried woman at the time.

The current war on women by the Republican Party is trying to put us back to that era where unmarried girls don't have (or don't admit to having) sex, where birth control is denied or unavailable, where abortion is murder and therefore illegal, where women are subordinate to men, where only hetero sex is acceptable, where the bible is literal truth and science is just another wrinkle in the political game.

Gloria, we need legions of you to fight the same fights over and over again! Can't we ever just move beyond patriarchy and get real for once?

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Fair Game: 2010 movie about Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts

Next is Fair Game, a movie we saw on demand about the outing of Valerie Plame's identity as an undercover CIA agent by the Bush administration. This was a fast-paced story with good acting and a plot that rang true, although movies always take some liberties for dramatic effect. In actuality, Cheney's righthand guy, Scooter Libby, took the fall for his disclosure of Plame's name and its subsequent publication in the Washington Post. (Of course his pardon was nearly instantaneous.)

As much as I hate recalling anything about the Bush administration, I do remember this happening. It was part of the inexorable march to war on Iraq that Bush-Cheney undertook. Now the odd thing is that if you Google this movie, up will pop a number of websites that debunk this movie and claim that it's all a load of crap, that the movie exaggerates Plame's and Wilson's stories and that even deny that Bush-Cheney lied about the reasons for going to war. But wait a minute, I was there. I know they lied about the invisible Weapons of Mass Destruction, they invented suspicious actions and imports of supposed tubes and uranium and scientists and whatever else it took to make it seem plausible that Saddam (the Madman) was about to bomb us off the face of the earth (or if not us, at least Israel).

So I say that those websites that debunk this movie are still spinning the lies on behalf of Bush-Cheney. I believe the movie (with allowances for glamour, simplicity and dramatic impact) and I enjoyed the hell out of seeing Cheney depicted as a devious Dr. Strangelove-type and Bush (in actual clips) as the dumbass that he was. Besides, you usually cannot go wrong with a Sean Penn movie and Naomi Watts is both beautiful and a good actor. Here's a review by Roger Ebert that has a realistic take on it.

Alexander McQueen and The Cone Sisters

Now there's an odd trio for you - two elderly Victorian ladies and a contemporary avant garde designer - but all three were actually quite ahead of their time.

Ever so long ago, in mid-July, this was the way we spent our Saturday in New York - visiting the McQueen show at the Metropolitan Museum and the Cone Sisters exhibition at the Jewish Museum. I have to hand it to myself for having the persistence to continue with posting about this trip because I've dragged it out so long. Nevertheless, I'm determined to finish. (click pix to enlarge)

Metropolitan Museum
We (Binnie Birstein, Greg Wright and I) started off the day with an early train to NYC from Connecticut. When the cab dropped us off in front of the Met, there was a long line waiting to get into the museum. We raced upstairs to the McQueen line as soon as we entered, but the crowd behind the ropes waiting to get in was already in the hundreds. Greg and I were dismayed (to put it politely) and would have given it up, but the Binster was determined.

Crowd waiting for entry to McQueen show (image from the internet)

She decided that she would wait in line while Greg and I looked at exhibits downstairs and she would call us when she reached the doorway. Although we didn't really agree, she was not to be moved, so Greg and I went about our business.

Greg with the Ancient Greek krater showing a painter applying encaustic to a statue
of Herakles

The first stop, but of course, was the krater of the encaustic painter that Greg had not seen in person before. He was so happy to be there. You can see that he is beaming.

Greg with the Fayumn portrait of the boy  Eutyches

In this photo, Greg seems to have turned into a Fayum portrait himself

Anyway, we happily visited several galleries in the antiquities wing for an hour or so while Binnie waited upstairs in line. Then we went to an information desk to ask where the exhibition of Richard Serra drawings was located. While we were standing there waiting, I noticed a sign that said if you joined the museum, you and all the members of your party could be admitted to the McQueen exhibit without waiting. I was incredulous and made sure that I was reading it correctly. Why hadn't we known about this before? Membership was $70 and Greg and I agreed to split the cost. We stood in another longish line to get a membership and with our temporary pass, we texted Binnie. She met us upstairs and we went into the exhibition with the membership pass.


Alexander McQueen, "Savage Beauty"
“You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.”  - Alexander McQueen

Was it worth the wait and the $70 is probably what you're wondering? Overall, I would say yes, it was. I am certainly no fashionista and Project Runway is the closest I come to being concerned with fashion, however, I do think that McQueen was an artist who was closer to a sculptor than a designer. His mastery of tailoring was superb, but more than that, his imaginative innovation in conception and use of materials was quite incredible. Following are some examples.

Dress made from shellacked razor clam shells he first found on a beach.

Dress made from medical slides stained to look like blood on top and
dyed ostrich feathers feathers on the bottom

Coiled corset made from aluminum 1999-2000

Dress of woven leather, neckpiece of pheasant feathers with resin vulture skulls

Leather shaped corset with horsehair skirt

Spine corset made of cast silver

Here is an 8-minute video narrated by Andrew Bolton of The Costume Institute, curator of the exhibition. This will show you the exhibition gallery by gallery. (For more photos of each gallery and info on the designs, here's the link to the Met's blog on the exhibition.)




Seeing the exhibition was not a great experience in that it was so crowded that it was hard to get close to the pieces and see the detail. It was also much darker than in the video and I found the soundtrack annoying. But despite all that, I am glad I saw it. I had no idea of who he was or what he had accomplished in his short, rather sad life.

Isabella Blow with Alexander McQueen early in the fashion game

One blog (which apparently is stronger on fashion than punctuation) gives his story as follows: "Son of a taxi cab driver he dropped out of school at age 16 and went to work on Savile Row as a cutter and tailor at : Anderson & Sheppar, Gieves & Hakes and then Romeo Gigli. McQueen finished his education and graduated in 1994 with a Master’s degree in fashion design from London’s Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Isabella Blow legendary fashion guru discovered Alexander and purchased his entire graduating collection, which helped him make industry connections."

By 2006, he had markedly changed his appearance and was dressing and
hobnobbing with fashion icon Sarah Jessica at a Met gala

When I saw the shoes and hair from his spring 2010 collection (image below), I couldn't believe it and actually wrote a blog post about how horrifying I found it. However, seeing everything in context makes me understand it better, even though I still think those shoes are pretty devastating.

Spring 2010 collection on the runway. The lobster claw shoes horrified me.

Greg and I went through the exhibition together and looked pretty closely at things. We noticed that the first dress in the shot above was called the "bee dress" and I found an image of it by itself (this gallery was about the influence of Nature on McQueen).

The gold-colored hexagons on the hips are separate paillettes 

Alexander McQueen committed suicide at age 40 on February 11, 2010, shortly after the death of his mother. R.I. P.

Read the NY Times story about the final few hours of the show here.

“Fashion should be a form of escapism, and not a form of imprisonment, I wasn’t born to give you a twin set and pearls.” - Alexander McQueen

Claribel, the eldest and one of the first female doctors, and Etta Cone

The Cone Sisters at the Jewish Museum: Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters

After a visit to the sculpture show on the Met's roof (underwhelming), a brief rest and then an incredibly expensive but tiny lunch in the Met's restaurant, we hiked it up to the Jewish Museum to see an exhibition about the Cone sisters' collection.

Etta bought the first five paintings in 1898 to decorate their apartment, but after the sisters met Gertrude and Leo Stein, they discovered Matisse in Paris in 1905, began collecting his work, and eventually owned 500 of his works, making theirs the largest and most comprehensive collection of Matisse's works in the world. On their death, the collection was donated to the Baltimore Museum and that museum has put together the loan of 50 pieces for the show at the Jewish Museum.

Matisse: Interior, Flowers and Parakeets, 1924, part of the Cone collection

Matisse: Large Reclining Nude, 1935

The Cones also collected about 100 works by Picasso and had extensive collections of lace, textiles and jewelry. This was another very crowded exhibition and it was difficult to see the works. The most interesting part to me was not the paintings but the jewelry and the handwritten letters between the sisters and with Matisse and Picasso. There was also a short film about the sisters, their relationship with Matisse and their collection. This show runs until September 25th so there is still time to see it. Here's another good link.

The Cone sisters' apartment showing their extensive collection of art

Maira Kalman
After looking around the rather compact Cone exhibition and seeing the film, we went upstairs to an exhibition of works by Maira Kalman. I like her witty drawings and ironic commentary but I have to say that I was about done in by the time I got there.

Maira and Pete by Maira Kalman

Maira has done many covers for The New Yorker and writes a blog for the magazine

Viewing her work and the collection of objects she put together required some intimate looking, ironic interpretation and a lot more attention than I was capable of giving, so I'm afraid I really couldn't do it justice, but if you are a fan of Maira's, you probably would have loved it because there are many small works to look at. Unfortunately, it ended July 31st.

And so, dragging ourselves slowly and reluctantly in the heat, we made our way to a coffee shop where Greg and I told Binnie we wanted to cut our plans short and go home to Connecticut. We are just not the troopers that the Binster is, and that's all there is to it. Luckily, we revived enough after the train ride to have dinner in Binnie's favorite Chinese restaurant before we called it a day.

Three Chelsea Galleries and the High Line

Remember when I went to New York? Well, I barely do. It seems so long ago, but I insist on dredging my cluttered memory bank to bring you the remnants of my experiences. Thank goodness for photos or my mind would be a complete blank (well, nearly).

Three works by Ruth Hiller. The gallery website gives the dimensions of the
far right piece, called "oe", as 34 x 14 x 2 inches.

NOTE: Click on any of these images and they will open larger.


Ruth Hiller at Winston Wachter
So there we were in Chelsea - hot, tired but determined. We wanted to see Ruth Hiller's show at Winston Wachter on West 25th Street. (Note: there is an umlaut over the "a" in Wachter but I don't know how to add it.) Ruth is an encaustic homie and her work looked great in the gallery. I have to admit right up front, however, that I failed to get the titles and sizes for individual pieces.

Greg acting as the human scale again with large pieces by Hiller

Ruth's statement says that she is exploring "the parallels between microscopic and macroscopic elements....I find the visual similarities astounding." These are parallels that Greg has also explored in his work. Ruth works with very smooth surfaces on panels or slabs of wood with rounded corners. Each piece has one or more dimensional protuberances that are sliced open to show layers of color within. She calls this work "3D encaustic."

Side view of one of the works

One small room in the gallery was lit with blacklight to illuminate Hiller's use of fluorescent pigments.

Four large works

Hiller's saturated colors, rounded forms and colorful three-dimensional elements made for an unusually minimalist exhibition of work in encaustic that was striking in its simplicity and clarity of concept.

Binnie with one of Hiller's large pieces

Along with Ruth Hiller (her website here), the gallery was showing poured enamel paintings by Leah Durner and glass sculpture by Eric Woll. The resonance between the works of the three artists made for a unified show with a pared back but vibrantly colorful look.

Four large poured latex enamel works by Leah Durner

Closeup of two Durner works

Installation of glass beetles by Eric Woll entitled "The New Normal",
60 x 47 x 7 inches

Glass squirrels by Eric Woll

This is Winston Wachter's summer show and it will run until some time in September (date not given), so there is still time to see it in person.

Li SongSong at Pace Gallery
We happened to be walking by Pace on West 25th Street and stopped in because the building looked so attractive.

Exterior of Pace Gallery, West 25th Street, Chelsea

When we went inside the massive space, I was overwhelmed by the heavy impasto on the gigantic paintings by Li SongSong. I was so fascinated with trying to capture the dimensional effect of the two or three inch thick painted surfaces, that I barely scanned the overall images presented in the work.

The gallery's website says this is the first solo U.S. exhibit by 38-year-old Chinese artist Li SongSong, and the show consisted of 11 giant works, up to 17 feet wide.

First big gallery in the nterior of Pace

This is a detail of the painting in the photo above that's behind
the two viewers. I didn't see the image of the painted figure until
I later looked at this photo. All I could see in person was texture.

I was hoping to include some better photos of the work from the gallery's website, but apparently they are not allowing the photos to be grabbed. And they don't have info about the size of each work or the subject. So all I can say is that the paintings were constructed from slabs of canvas or aluminum overlapping one another and they were very big.

Here's a side view of one of the biggest paintings that was constructed from
slabs of painted aluminum.

Another view of the same piece

And still another view

You can see that I went right into construction mode when I saw this work.

And here's a closeup of the impasto that looks like cake frosting

The website says that Li works from photographs and film stills, some of which record world history and some of which are more personal. He blows up and grids the images into panels and then grids again with pastel colors and graphic patterns that distort the images, sometimes digging through the impasto to hidden colors layered underneath. This technique makes the original images "become[s] abstract and expressionistic, both obscuring and neutralizing the original content as it explores the imperfection of memory."

Two paintings in the show that certainly look like they commented on Chinese society -
and not in a good way.

Tamar Zinn at The Painting Center

When our plans for New York had firmed up a bit, I arranged to meet my Facebook friend, Tamar Zinn on Friday afternoon. We seem to agree so frequently on political comments as well as art in Facebook, that I thought it would be fun to meet each other in person. Coincidentally, Lynette Haggard had just posted an interview with Tamar in her blog and Tamar had two paintings in the show "Grey Matter" at The Painting Center.

Two works by Tamar Zinn in "Grey Matter"

Tamar's wall in the show - we thought it was the best  of the exhibition

Before meeting Tamar, we first went to The Painting Center on 27th Street to see the show. This is a great space, a non-profit, that shows about 20 exhibits a year and posts images of artists' work in a online database, the Art File, and in an artists' registry. For details see the Center's website. (And by the way, they are closed for the summer.) Tamar's work looked great in person. You can see more of it on her website.

Overhead view of the High Line
(all images, unless otherwise noted, from the High Line website)

The High Line

Next we headed over to the High Line, an elevated public park. I have heard so much about it and was really looking forward to seeing it in person. (Don't forget to click pix to enlarge.)

The abandoned High Line

A brief history taken from the website: The elevated railbed was originally built in the 1930s to remove dangerous freight traffic from the city streets as part of the West Side Improvement Project. (There were so many accidents between trains and street traffic before the High Line was built, that 10th Avenue was known as "Death Avenue.") The last trains ran in 1980 and the railbed was abandoned until demolition was threatened and Friends of the High Line, a community-based non-profit group, was formed to save it in 1999.  After a lot of hard work by the group and its supporters, the property was handed over to the city, a design process began and the selected team of James Corner Field Operations, landscape architects, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, an architecture firm ("experts in horticulture, engineering, security, Maintenance, public art and other disciplines") began design and construction. (Check out those websites for some fabulous project info on the High Line and others - worldwide.)

Here's a great computer-generated video that shows the design process in flyover mode - really cool.




The High Line was scheduled to open in three phases: Phase One June 2009, Gansevoort Street to West 20th Street, and Phase Two June 2011,West 20th Street to West 30th Street. (I don't know what happened to Phase Three but apparently CSX Railroad still owns the section between West 30th and West 34th Streets.)

Overhead view of High Line park

People walking on the High Line with traffic below

Plantings - now really huge

People relaxing on wooden loungers

New Yorkers needing a lawn to lounge on

Watertowers visible from the High Line - note how pathway contains rail-like
impressions in the concrete

My skyline view with plantings foreground

Viewing windows to the street below

High Line at dusk looking out toward the piers

This park is really spectacular. The photos here don't show how varied the plantings are and that some are really large scale. They are like prairies or meadows of native plants, most now in flower or with seedheads from flowers that have passed. I was sorry that my Iphone had run out of gas by the time I got to the High Line, but these photos from the website are probably way better than I could ever have done anyway.

So we had a great time sitting at a little table and chairs, enjoying the people watching in a cool breeze and waiting for Tamar to join us. It was a real pleasure to meet her in person and learn about her life in the city. After chatting for a while, we walked along the High Line and then left it to pass through the now-totally gentrified Meatpacking District and up to 7th Avenue. We had dinner at a Japanese restaurant recommended by Tamar, where we were joined by Winston Lee Mascarenhas, another encaustic homie, who was in New York for a residency at the School of Visual Arts.

By the time we trained it back to Binnie's in Connecticut, it had been a very full day. But on Saturday, we were getting up bright and early to make it to the Met for the Alexander McQueen exhibit. More about that in the next post - if I can remember that far back.