Solomon Sold Me This Image

My son photographed these paintings with his iPod and sold me the rights to use this image in my blog for five dollars. 

Good Boy!

Stochastic Spirals

Olympus E-620 January 10, 2012

My new site Stochasticspirals.com is up and serving pages since about 1:30 am this morning. 

I started a series of paintings last summer of red spirals on blue backgrounds, rendered on square canvases.

The same idea with a few variations over and over again, canvas size between 12 inch and 36 inch squares.

I use only three colors, Cadmium Red, Winsor Blue and Titanium White, mixing white with the red and blue but not red and blue together.

The spirals are painted first and then the background is painted in as negative space spiral.

The paintings are about random possibilities, about the marks made by hand, how the events of life can not be predicted, only analyzed after the act.

I photographed as I worked, documenting the life of the painting, the stages of complication, and abandonment.

I saw the de Kooning MOMA show several times and was most impressed at how he reached a state of luminosity in his work at the end of his life, creating a path to the other side.

I find abstract painting so different from photography but just as compelling and ultimately satisfying. The canvas begins blank, transformed into another dimension, a "Door of Perception".

One painting makes you larger,

And one painting makes you small,

But the one that another gives you,

Doesn’t do anything at all,

Open your own doors before you fall,

Just like Willem the Flying Dutchman,

Of Long Island showed us all.

Around We Go,

And Where We Stop,

No Body Nose.

December 16, 2011   Sony R-1

When I was a little boy I wanted a camera, the magic instrument of shadow images. 

Gray smudges on squares of shiny paper, the secret mysteries of life revealed. 

At college I majored in painting, pictures of the inside of things. 

Seven years of painting from photographs followed, and then graduate school in photography and painting was gone. 

Thirty years of COBOL and darkrooms and digital imaging ensued, until my retirement this summer from the career of my middle years. 

The painting behind me is ten days old as of this post, one more has followed since. 

Looking at the photograph I prefer the painting a bit out of focus, to soften the brush work into stains, levels adjusted to pop the red, the center dodged.

A major issue in art is defining the end of creation, the edge of the work, the borderline between art and the world of common definition. 

The role of the artist is to present a unified view of thought and vision, a record of struggle, leading to the triumph of order.

Perform until, 

Jack and Jill.

Stretched

Fire Island New York

August 31, 2010

Canon S90

This was a hot day, a hurricane was in the far distance, we were a group of three or four family fragments, I was the only man and Solomon was one of two boys, mostly women, girls and dogs. Ferry over in the morning a pleasant day of walking, beaching and photography, ferry back in the evening.

Our group walked together for awhile, the ladies desired lunch on the beach, Solomon and I split off to photograph in the shade and lunch in a cafe with air conditioning.

Long story short, Naomi and Stephanie were hit by a rogue wave and dragged into the surf escaping soaked and sandy. 

Father and son kept their cameras dry and sent the ladies off with a credit card for some new clothes.

"You must leave now, 

Take what you need,

You think will last,

But whatever you wish to keep,

You better grab it fast."

Stumped

Olympus E-620

November 21, 2011

We lost three trees in last month's snow storm, this one missed me by inches.

My Red Bush,

My Bare Bush.

iPhone 4S

November 14, 2011  7:31:38 am

November 17, 2011  7:31:38 am

How odd indeed! I had some thought forming about these images and the three days passed, and then checked the EXIF info and found they were exposed exactly three days apart to the second! 

Seventy two hours, 

Four times Chai, 

Mazel Tov.

This Is Not A Painting

November 16, 2011 10:50 am

 iPhone 4S

I retired from programming three months ago and immediately returned to painting. I never stopped photographing but painting and the entire concept of using paints and brushes and pencils to imagine and then conceive a creative construct disappeared from my life.

When I started as a young COBOL programmer we used punch cards for code, I would keep a stack in my shirt pocket and draw on the blank side, the world of imagination on one side and the rows of numbers on the other. A year or two and the abstract world of Art was supplanted by the invisible construct of COBOL code, applied poetry of the mainframe.

The image above is a photograph of my morning meditation, brushes paint and a canvas, I am down there blending and working an edge, I am focused on the point of a blue brush, licking a red spiral I drew yesterday, the world is at peace and I am at home.

Shalom.