Studio, Twice Open

Friday night my studio building had a very well-attended open studio event as part of the monthly art walk. The crowd might be explained by the sunny weather that draws Mainers back out in the Spring.  We also only have a couple of events like this a year, so some town aficionados know if I door is open that they'd better stop by this rare event.   Maybe the sweet sound of live accordion music pulled them up the stairs.  I posted some photos of the evening over on the Facebook page.  In any case, I am usually exhausted after but I was on the move bright and early to play host to another event sponsored by the Portland Museum of Art today.

The symposium, "Art On-Site: Studio Practice in 21st-Century Art," began at 10. Joe Fig, author of the book Inside the Painter's Studio, opened the day with an entertaining talk about his work and his decade of interviewing some of the most established figures in contemporary painting practice. After lunch, I had a nice flow of attendees from 1-5pm who stopped by as part of a tour of four artist studio sites in downtown Portland.   I had some great conversations and it always great to meet more people seeking to learn a bit more about art. Thanks to everyone who stopped by both days asking so many thoughtful questions.

Tree

There is this fantastic tree that I walk past nearly every day on my way home from the studio and I'm always meaning to sketch or photograph.   I had my camera with me today with a fixed lens so that I couldn't get the whole thing in the shot.  Then I remembered photo stitch software.  I was reminded of this last weekend when Gary was taking photographs of my larger work.  He actually took several pictures from each one using a level and a special tripod, and then made a composite image from each at massive resolutions.   While mine is hardly as precise as the work he was doing, I was surprised at how well this study came out with so little effort.  Definitely will be good enough to inspire a painting, and the time to take it was now as it's been unseasonably warm.  Thought today felt like the last breath of winter, it wont' be long before it will have all these pesky green leaves sprouting and lose all of its fierce naked majesty.

Prime Location

Okay, one of the arguably best things to happen to downtown Portland, Maine last year (other than the new SMFA  location) was the opening of Otto's Pizza.   Once you've been an inhabitant of the New York City area, you occasionally pine for it's many world-class museums and galleries, a good bagel, and a really good slice of pizza!  Okay, in Portland we have a rocking gallery scene for our size and some good places to grab a whole pie, but we were really missing a place to grab that perfect slice to go.  Enter Otto and I feel like we've really gone up a notch.   Unique favorites like bacon and mashed-potato pizza literally stop traffic.  Now, I'd like to think that people need art as much as pizza, but I'm not that naive. I'd be willing to wager that everyone in town has learned where Otto is, but might not have a clue where all the galleries are located.   So for those of you who don't get out that much, the Joseph Begnaud solo show, "Night Fictions" will be right across the street for the month of February.  Next time you're grabbing a slice, stroll over and check it out.  Or if you must be lazy, if you can just sit in the window, squint, and admire my Blue Macaw painting. It's right under the second "O."

Occasional Sightings

I've been asked a few times this week about the portrait that's hanging in the window of Space Gallery.  It's mine alright--- a self-portrait that I submitted it to their current exhibition, "Free For All 2."  You may also notice it's the painting I've been using for my profile picture online for sites like Facebook and Blogger. I imagined that this salon-style survey of Portland artists would be this huge mishmash of colliding images, much like the internet, so I entered the painting under the new title "ID."  A chimera can always use another head, I figured, and it would be my own little conceptual appropriation of the show.   Rather than my head peeking out of a sea of pictures, the curators went ahead and hung the painting in the front window---and nicely, I might add:   plenty of white space and not at all the side-by-side chaos that I imagined.  I've only peeked in to the gallery, but it all looks like a fun exhibit showing a wide range of Portland's talent.   It's up until February 18th, so it seems I will be part of dueling windows on Congress street for almost a month.

Life Imitates Art

So, it' not that surprising that it would snow in Maine for January.  The plan of the Winter exhibition was to have the subject matter parallel reality.  I was beginning to worry, but we got a fresh blanketing on Monday and Tuesday.  It makes for a much more pleasant walk to work;  the snow dampens sound, fewer people are out, and everything just seems at peace.  

All the World is Green

Another perfect spring day, cool and overcast. Took a hike on Mackworth Island and had to appreciate the deep greens of the new undergrowth. Maybe I'll be psyched up for a Spring painting by January.

Flowering Trees

While I am truly sad to see Winter depart, I can stop and smell the trees on a day like this. It was foggy and a crisp 51 degrees on my walk to the studio, my idea of perfect weather. The air was full of fragrance that would be impossible to paint. I lack the patience to even try painting all of those petals, so photos will have to do. Click any for a better view.

Crow Park

For my first three years in Portland, I lived on lower Mellen street near Deering Oaks park. I called it "crow park" as it always seemed full of crows and mostly lacking in the enormous seagulls that dominate the rest of the town. I liked to imagine it was their little bit of hard-won turf in their underdog struggle for the garbage of Portland. I rarely get over to this area of town in the mornings anymore, but I headed over to the park in the morning and set up station on a park bench. There was a cool fog over the park, just below 40 degrees, my actual idea of perfect weather to be outside for a couple of hours. I was able to take over 200 photos of them though they were still very skittish.

Photos and Retro Blogging

The astrologically observant will note that there is no full moon tonight, nor was there one last night. On March 10, there most certainly was. It was a spectacular evening, and after walking home from the studio I was compelled to grab my camera and head back out. As usual, I took a lot of pictures that I have no idea if I will ever use as painting source material. What to do? I don't like showing my photographs.

When I have an open studio, I purposely hide my photos even though it takes a day to remove them all and put them back up again. Luckily, I don't paint over them like Francis Bacon, and unlike Thomas Eakins, who claimed to not use photo sources for his work, I own up to it. There was a whole show of Eakin's photos next to his paintings a while back: curators love showing photographic sources in comparison to paintings. At an Alphonse Mucha show in Warsaw last summer, they had a whole wall of his photos on display, even though it is well known Mucha used the camera as a tool. To a die-hard painter, a photo is flat, there is no surface, and often little depth. In my own work, a painting can be mental collage of tens of photos, and all of the color is completely reinvented within the reality of a painting. I'm almost insulted when somebody likes my photography, especially they prefer it to a comparable painting. However displaying preparatory work is nothing new, as a graduate school professor liked to point out with regards to shows of master drawings. He thought it was completely ludicrous that everyone was digging up Michelangeo's sketches and putting them on display, something the artist could have never imagined in his lifetime or intended. Of course, now we see drawing as an art in itself, and love following every line of the master's hand. Even for painters like myself, I suppose a photo sketch may speak something of the artist's mind, even if it is never intended for exhibition.

My reticence in showing photos is a little different. In an open studio literally hordes of people stroll through my studio, look at this and that,and leave. I'm lucky if they spend ten seconds looking at a painting I spent months on. In this sense, photos would be a competitive distraction to the work I wish the audience to consider. Online, there's a little of this. Initially, I wanted the paintings to remain the focus. Also, there's a bit to the magician not giving up his tricks, and I still don't like to show things that might end up in a painting, which I a little hard to decide in the daily time frame of blogging.

So my solution: retroblogging. Sadly, I looked it up and see that I did not coin the word. However, it appears that most people label "retro blogging" as post they make that day with a noted back date. As artists tend to like to subvert utility, I think its more interesting to truly back date things. So i think I'll start posting some of my better unused and otherwise interesting photographs, retroactively by fiddling with the date in the post options. They'll be buried under the date they were taken, effectively backfilling my journal into some sort of useless memoir. I promised to give them some sort of tag like "photo" so they won't be truly lost, but otherwise a new reader will have no idea they are there. A fun thing to do for a site with no traffic, huh?

Crow Hunting

I've been photographing corvids (crow family) regularly in Poland, but I realized recently in the studio that I was lacking the good old American variety. So, I’ve spent the last month here walking to the studio with my big heavy camera, and no luck. I ran across some last week in Deering Oaks park at dusk and tried my luck there again tonight, but they were all flying west. I followed them around town with my car and was very surprised to find them down by the cove near the 295 on ramp. They really hate being photographed and tend to fly away. I tried to entice them with bargain parrot-seed I bought at Target, but it just drove them back further. The last picture is from the Western Promenade, which is where the scared ones were flying to from the beach. I think I finally frightened them back to the interstate before going home for the night.

Retro 01

Snow Day

I know you're all wondering if there are snow days in Maine. Well, schools are closed when the snow is so sticky that you can't read the signs. You just wander around lost, bumping into trees that blend into the snow.

Portland Today

My typical walk to work, and the walk home in scenic Portland, Maine. (You might see where I get my inspiration.)