At the end of the day

Progress report

HERE ARE TWO PAINTINGS I started some time ago, paintings on which I just resumed work. The little rowboat is was spotted catching sunlight in late May from between the planks of the dock at Islesford on Little Cranberry Island, Maine.

The young lady is another imaginary beach queen wearing a paper crown. James McElhinney with whom I've worked for several years at the Art Students League in New York refers to this kind of pose as "one of the mud-flap girls."

Exhibiting at the Salmagundi Club

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, the Salmagundi Club is a grand old artists' organization on Fifth Avenue just below 12th Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. It's a couple of blocks north of Washington Square.

The above oil painting of my wife is there in a juried portraiture show along with works by other notable artist members.

Plein Air at the Vanderbilt Museum, Centerport

I HAD A GREAT TIME yesterday afternoon and evening painting on the grounds of the Vanderbilt Museum and Planetarium. Heavy clouds and predictions of thunderstorms threatened our afternoon but by 4 o'clock or so it was clear that blue sky was taking over and we'd have a nice evening.

It was fun painting in the good comapny of accomplished painters like Anthony Davis, Jane McGraw-Teubner, Esther Marie Chagaris and David Monteiro.

At 6 pm the grounds opened up for the annual Northport Rotary Club's "Wine in the Courtyard" celebration and 700 paying guests surveyed our efforts for the day. The two images shown here 14 x 11 and 11 x 14 inches respectively were what I had to show for a day spent admiring the view across Centerport Harbor from the bluff behind the mansion, looking off toward Asharokan and farther still toward the Connecticut shore.

Gary Erbe's trompe l'oeil painted collages

I went into NYC Saturday to drop off a couple of paintings for two upcoming shows at the Salmagundi Club. If you don't know this grand old place, you should stop in for a visit. It's one of the oldest art organizations in the country. The club occupies a townhouse built in the 1850s on lower fifth avenue just a few blocks north of Washington Square. The building has been used in a number of movies, most recently the club library was used in "The Good Shepherd." But I'll save all that for another posting.

Saturday was the last day of a wonderful retrospective exhibit by Gary Erbe, an artist one might describe as a hyper realist, in the tradition of William Harnett and John Peto. But unlike those 19th century masters Erbe often works quite large. You can see a great many of his works on his website but there's nothing quite like seeing them in person. Some are very large indeed.

One theme that fascinated me was a series of paintings of abstract collages. The textures of papers overlapping each other are minutely examined and delineated in paint. But what makes these works unique is Erbe's reverence for the abstract, perhaps a rather unusual quality for one who works so hyper real.

I was fortunate enough that when I saw this exhibit that Erbe himself was there and we chatted for a few moments. I told him that I was flattered to see two newspaper front pages done long ago at Newsday (where I was director of design) were included in one of his largest paintings ("Subway Series"). I assumed that he had included the Newsday front pages because he lives on Long Island where the paper circulates.

"No," he said. "I live in Hoboken."

He had simply included those newspaper front pages because he thought they were particularly graphic. And so I was flattered all over again. Erbe may be as charming as he is talented.

Erbe's website: http://www.garyerbe.com/

Finished... Again

This little yard-side scene was up the road from where we stayed on Little Cranberry Island in Maine at the end of May. The top image is a reference photo I took for this painting. The finished painting is 24 by 30 inches, oil on canvas.

Although I signed this painting and considered it finished more than a week ago, I just went back into it and added a bicycle to the porch. It's an illustrative detail that may not add anything aesthetic, although I like the way reds and greens play off each other in this painting, along with the complimentary relationship between the maroon and the yellow. But I liked the addition of the bike for some sort of story-telling quality that the detail adds.

And as you can see from the reference photo, I chose to change the color of the shed in the background and lose the bush in the center.

Movies about artists... waiting to be made into films

Here, again in no particular order, is a list of artists about whom interesting movies could be made. In one or two cases, it's really surprising that we don't have movies given the colorful details surrounding some of these artists.

Whistler was such a flamboyant character and his famous lawsuit for slander would make for fun cinema as well as his notorious painting of Madame X (in which he portrayed her with the strap of her dress fallen down her shoulder only to repaint it with the strap up after enormous public pressure.) Wouldn't all this have made for a great film? Where are Merchant and Ivory when we need them?

Salvador Dali. I mean, really, the old boy must be squirming in his grave knowing that after all his publicity stunts, his weird behavior, bizarre relationships and influential art, mugging thousands of times for photographers with that ridiculous mustache, nobody has bothered to make a movie out of his life. It's not like there's a shortage of material here.

Joseph Cornell. If you've ever read Deborah Solomon's wonderful and cleverly named 1997 biography, "Utopia Parkway," you'll know that the weird banality of this man who lived with his mother and his sickly brother might make a movie very different from the kind we wish for from Dali's life. Cornell's surreal (some would say creepy) boxes, tacked together in his Queens basement, were part of a very different life punctuated with visits from other, younger adoring artists or chauffeur-driven visits from people like actor and collector Tony Curtis who enjoyed taking Cornell out for rides in the limo. Think Grey Gardens focused on a hapless but successful artist.

Andrew Wyeth and the Helga paintings. The secret paintings of Andrew Wyeth. Was this a great marketing ploy played out to gain enormous publicity? The almost reclusive Wyeth found himself on the covers of Time and Newsweek the summer this body of work was revealed. But if, as Wyeth himself declared, the paintings were about "love" and the whole decade-long depiction of Helga in these images had been a secret kept from Betsy Wyeth, then how is it that Helga was retained as part of Betsy's staff for so long after the revelation of this work? (Betsy Wyeth oversaw the licensing and archiving side of the Wyeth image empire.) Was the secret aspect of these paintings a case of marketing hype or was this a case of one woman who knew that you keep your friends close and your enemies closer?

Robert Henri. An artist with a made-up name he acquired because his father had shot a man out west, fled to the east coast and gave everyone in the family a different alias to protect them from the scandal should he ever be caught. Henri was THE influential teacher of so many beloved American painters and yet his own art was only of moderate commercial success. His little sayings and quips in the art schools were collected by Margery Ryerson, one of his students, and have never been out of print even though Henri died 80 years ago. He loved painting portraits but did not have that many commissions. That left him free to do things like paint portraits of Irish urchins that charm us to no end today. A list of his students and followers reads like a Who's Who of American Art: Hopper, Rockwell Kent, Stuart Davis, Bellows, Prendergast, Lawson, Davies...

If you've read this far, you're probably the sort of person who has his or her own list of candidates for bio-pics.