Countdown to an Art Exhibition Painting Nine

On a stretch of highway 301 going from Orangeburg. SC heading towards Bamberg there was an old farmstead. The main building was a creamy white with hand carved shutters painted green. A faded pink barn rested behind and slightly to the right of the long white house. I had painted the white building some time ago shortly before it was bulldozed down. The pink barn I painted last week for our two-person exhibition which opens tomorrow at the Orangeburg County Fine Arts Center.

The outbuilding, seen through the edge of a woods, looked distant and beckoning. The trees were being cleared and a slightly elliptically shaped log had rolled onto the ground like a giant eye upon the border of wild trees and plowed field. The sun hit the golden flesh of its pulp wood in a beautiful glowing way. I painted the scene on an eighteen inch square canvas - small by most painter’s standards - but dwarfing all the miniatures in the exhibition.

The day before the opening of an exhibition entails a lot of cooking, cleaning and preparations. Hence the shortness of this blog entry - and tomorrow’s as well no doubt.

The small painting at left is “Eye of the Big Cat,” ninth in the series “Thirty-three days of the Puma.”

Countdown to an Exhibition: Painting Number Eight

My preparations for the “Locations/Dislocations: Abandoned Houses and Unsheltered Souls” over these past two weeks has consisted of creating new works while painting revised versions of older works that are no longer available for display. Among the latter are the paintings I did over again that were featured on the postcards and the note cards. One such painting, the abandoned house with the red tin roof featured above, was originally a small oil on wood. The oil on wood was purchased by a client in Beaufort so I made a similar painting four times larger on canvas. I like the larger size better because it fills an expansive gallery wall to much greater effect. The larger format also enabled me to use larger brushwork for mor textural detail. Like most of the other recent paintings, this one was painted with my Venice turpentine medium, which adds a high sheen and shortens the drying time. This enabled me to paint the greater portion of this exhibition on very short notice.

Painting number eight in the countdown to an exhibition is accompanied by the Red Puma, painting number eight as well in the countdown from the day drilling started in Chile to rescue workers trapped in a copper mine. It started out as a coincidence that the two countdowns started at the same time, but I have been making these little paintings of big cats with some intent, and I will continue the series until the end of the year.

Countdown to an Exhibition Painting Seven

The painting above is of another abandoned home in Orangeburg County. Although it was popular to paint an entire house a bright blue to scare off demons, in many cases, such as this one, jsut the window trim and the posts were painted that way. For the poetry reading this Thursday evening, I’ve written a very short verse to accompany the painting, “House with Blue Trim.”

When my husband Nat and I explored this site, we found several views that were captivating enough to sketch and photograph. On the porch of the house was a large cushion chair with the upholstery still intact. Nat’s photograph of this chair, “Chair within a chair” will also be in the exhibition. The photograph was so named because the upholstery had a pattern on it that included a picture of a chair in a livingroom setting.

The painting to the left, “Big Cat with Blue Markings” is the sixth in my “Thirty Three Days of the Puma” series. When I posted the second one in this series, I found by accident it had a pictorial relationship with the architectural detail in the accompanying painting. I am now painting the big cats with that in mind.

Day Six in the Count Down of Houses and Pumas

There is a long house in Bamberg South Carolina that is painted a robin’s egg blue and has a copper roof. I see it every time I go to Bamberg to visit an artist friend in order to have company and better studio conditions while I paint. The house is like a beacon, it is so bright. It is a welcome harbinger of hot tea, good snacks, great films and all the other things that one shares with friends. Because of this, I made a small painting of it in order to have it in the upcoming exhibition “Locations/Dislocations: Abandoned Homes and Unsheltered Souls.” It is a house near the house where some of the other houses were painted.

This is the sixth in my series of count down paintings to the opening of our show at the Orangeburg County Fine Arts Center this Thursday. The painting of the purple puma at left is number six in my series “33 days of the Puma.” As I progress in this series I am noticing that the pumas are starting to look less like big cats and more like domestic ones.

Count Down Day Five

“Red House with a pointed Dormer” is another repainted scene from Blackville, South Carolina. It is second in a display of four tiny oil on panel landscape paintings for our upcoming exhibition. Yesterday I put up the last labels then went home and rested. After hanging a large exhibition of art work, it was good to relax and slow down for a few hours.

There is something very satisfying about seeing a cohesive body of work on the walls of an exhibition space. My husband’s architectural photography and my landscapes featuring mostly abandoned houses seemed to dovetail nicely. The entire impression of the show is one of taking a trip down back roads - something people do here for relaxation.

The fifth big cat of my thirty-three puma series made me recall what I initially read when the saving pipeline first reached the miners in Chile. Once it was established that this would be a prolonged rescue mission, a number of commentators offered ideas about what should go down or come up that pipeline. I suppose this series of paintings was started in response to a commentator who offered a suggestion that perhaps pictures could be sent down to the minors to cheer up their gloomy space. It wasn’t entirely a bad idea, I thought, but is there a place for art? The social scientists, psychologists and medical professionals assigned to the miner’s welfare emphasized the importance of establishing routines to pass the time. I hope that a routine does not become a monotony. Scientist know how to make every day the same and to be consistent.
And that is required in many respects for the survival of the body. But artists know how to make every day a little different. It is what makes a Decameron out of a long wait for a plague to pass, or the Canterbury Tales to pass the time of a rugged pilgrimage. It makes the tales of a Thousand and One Nights. Every day a little different. Something earned, something discovered. It is what makes a soul survive. I suppose that is why I am making a little painting every day to count the difficult and long journey to a rescue. So this can be the day an emerald cat sniffed the ground to discover that someone or something has passed this way.

Day Four of a Painting Count Down

Black and grey with pink and red have always been favorite color combinations of mine. For the fourth day of my countdown to our exhibition and the fourth day of the Puma paintings (see previous blog entries to find out what they are for - Ah! I knew I would start getting lazy) I am featuring these colors. I saw this long pink barn with the black roof and the black tire in the area of Blackville, South Carolina. This painting is a smaller version of a larger one also in the upcoming exhibition.

I have two people to thank for my series of small works on panels, Alicia Leeke, for supplying the small frames through her Artist’s Round Table organization, and Stephen Chesley, for cutting numerous masonite panels and even priming them for me. Thank you friends!

Locations/Dislocations Painting Number Three

Count Down to an Exhibition
Painting number three

September 2 in Orangeburg was a labeling and adjustment event. Most of the hard core delivery, set up, and arrangement of paintings and photographs was completed yesterday. But today replacements needed to be made, labels printed out, and everything adjusted for height and distances apart. It took up the greater part of this day.

Thankfully, an article about the exhibition which came out in the local paper today. A section in the middle of this article looked very familiar. It was classic Kozachek writing, with words like “elegiac” and “juxtaposition” and more than one idea in a sentence separated by the ubiquitous hyphens. My first thought was should these words not be embraced by quotation marks? I then recalled that I had attached chunks of a previously written essay onto a press release which was forwarded to one center then forwarded to a newspaper and in my haste to get the work done forgot to take ownership of anything that I penned thus making it a parcel of thought folded into the corporate ownership of ideas. Also in my haste I hadn’t really been very diligent about revisions. So it might actually be for the best if my meandering thoughts should be attributed to the great cultural unconscious of Orangeburg. No matter. It is good to get the word out and I appreciate the effort made on our behalf.

My painting featured above is called “Grey Shed in a Field of Yellow Grass.” It is another oil on panel that dried just days ago. The scene is from the rural area around Blackville, South Carolina. I recall that the area was moist from its proximity to a pond which probably also the reason for the yellow grasses. Fields of grass in the autumn in South Carolina are as spectacular for their colors as autumn leaves in the northeast. They are made even more splendid by these little gems of architectural remains.

The third painting in my ongoing series of daily art for the miners in Chile is a white ghostly puma moving through golden grass. Every day I do a painting for myself and one for the miners. Hopefully I can keep it up until Christmas.

Painting Number Two Count Down

It was a long day spent hanging an exhibition. Hanging for two people went especially slowly (I had to hang my husband’s photographs as well due to his teaching schedule). As I expected, there were two paintings that were still too tacky to set into a frames so they will be squeezed into the exhibition later. I ended up hanging just three of my collage works, all of which were not previously shown. So although this exhibition thematically is a traveling one from the previous venue at Gallery 80808 in Columbia it is largely new.

The painting above is of two rusting latches on the door of an abandoned house. I liked the worn paint and the numerous nail holes. This is the only painting in the exhibition of a detail - something I will be doing more of later this month. I painted it in a square because the shape happened into fit a wrought iron frame that I acquired years ago on a trip to Italy. The frame was probably intended to hold a mirror but it suited the small oil on panel fine.

As I was hanging the exhibition, “Locations/Dislocations: Abandoned Houses and Unsheltered Souls,” Beth Thomas, the director of the Orangeburg County Fine Arts Center asked me how I got the glossy finish on my paintings. Many artists wonder that so I’m submitting here the “secret” recipe painting medium I use to get the enamel- like sheen and sculptural impasto effects in the paint. I got the recipe years ago from Piero Manoni, a museum conservator from Rome:

Two Parts Venice Turpentine (Can substitute Canada Balsam)
Nine Parts Gum Turpentine
Four Parts Stand Oil
Nine Parts Damar Varnish

Mix the Venice Turpentine slowly into the Gum Turpentine until it is entirely dissolved. Add the stand oil and damar. Mix thoroughly.

The small painting at left is second in the cycle “Thirty-three Days of the Puma.” for the second day of rescue of the Chilean miners. I have been following the news story and understand that the slow drilling is due to having to bore through solid rock. The puma, which I think is another name for a jaguar, was a holy beast in Pre-Columbian mythology and could be loosely associated with what we might consider an angel. In this picture it is difficult to actually see the puma without looking for it closely, which characterizes the ephemeral natural of spiritual things.

The Count Down Begins

Sold out. It is a phrase that every artist would love to hear. No. It is not the metaphorical “sold out” to imply artistic compromise. It is the literal “sold out” of having an entire or almost entire collection of work purchased. Ideally this should occur when one is about to leave for a trip or when a bill is due. But good news can come at awkward times as well and the best of plans can go awry.

I had the end of summer planned very well. I didn’t think I would have to work exceptionally hard on creating new work for my upcoming exhibition because I had a collection of paintings that had not sold in one gallery that I would simply transport to the new exhibition venue. Planning exhibitions of the same or similar work back to back is living life a little dangerously. What if the work is all sold at the first venue? Then what? But only a small percentage of my work is ever purchased from my exhibitions and sometimes nothing at all so I figured that it was perfectly safe to come back from Maryland at the beginning of August and work at a leisurely pace here, then pick up my work in Beaufort for a show that hangs on September 1 here in Orangeburg and opens on September 9. The collection of landscape paintings of rural South Carolina had been sitting in Beaufort for over a year so I figured that they would naturally still be there. But when I announced my plans to come down and pick up the work by the end of August I noticed some hesitation in my agent’s voice as she asked me to wait on a few phone calls to clients first.

Just two weeks ago, I got the news that the entire collection, save two pieces, had been acquired by a collector. Since two paintings do not an exhibition make I had about ten days to paint ten replacement paintings. Being a slow working painter, this was a challenge (I’m still working on it). But despite the good yet daunting news, I have been making almost a painting a day.

The first challenge was to do the paintings on the invitations and other publicity over again. So the painting above is very similar to, but not the same painting, as the one on the invitation. Revisiting a previously painted landscape brush stroke by brush stroke is not something most artists would do. But I did it because visitors might be expecting to see the work that they have been invited to see and I wanted there to be at least some truth in advertising. So for the next ten days up to the opening of our three-person exhibition, this will be a painting a day blog.

The ten day countdown to the opening of our exhibition, “Locations/Dislocations: Abandoned Houses and Unsheltered Souls,” begins with another countdown of much greater magnitude and seriousness. Today the drilling started towards the trapped miners in Chile. When I first read about the incident I was mortified like I’m certain everyone else who read about their plight was. I even lost a night’s sleep over it. The thing about reading stories about people trapped is that it occupies a place in the mind that seems to hold its breath and not exhale until the people are freed. Four months is an unthinkable amount of time to be trapped in a mine. Although it may never directly help the miners, I am creating a small painting every afternoon to mark the days until they can be released . I’ve divided them into four groups of thirty-three paintings - one for each miner. Each group depicts various visual interpretations of four animals from Chile, the puma, the wolf or alpaca (haven’t decided yet), birds, and butterflies - one for each month. I’ve attached the first one to the right - a blue puma breaking free and soaring.

Janet Goes to Chicken Farm

In an amusing moment of synchronicity, while I was waiting with my husband for our meal to arrive at the local Cracker Barrel, my eyes lighted upon an old book propped up on a fake mantel. It was there not to be actually read I found out by noticing hardened glue on the bottom pages where it was affixed to the mantel piece. It was, rather, an attempt at maintaining the hallmark Cracker Barrel nineteenth century rustic look. Just for show though it may have been the 1908 book’s title, Peggy Goes to Spinster Farm was so intriguing that I pried it loose and took it back to our table to read it (It didn’t really take much prying, the glue was not really adhered properly anyway). What caught my eye was Helen Winslow’s opening line, “Everyone should be alone for a year, not to find himself, but to discover the storm at the center of one’s being.” (I am paraphrasing here)

I asked my husband, a devoted English Professor to read a few pages and give me an evaluation. I cannot quote him exactly because I have forgotten the verbatim commentary but it went something like “It is merely a Victorian piece of lightweight fluff literature.” Naturally that just made me want to read it even more in order to judge for myself. Fortunately I found the book on line and began reading the adventures of Peggy and her Aunt Janet. They were Boston ladies of means who decided that they were weary of city life with its many social commitments of the kind the author tells us through her characters, seem to beleaguer women. What these women’s groups were or the nature of their obligations remained obscure. But I was intrigued and amused because the women were leaving Boston behind along with what was described somewhat obliquely as academic and art careers. Having just taken myself and my art business off of social networking sites I felt a sudden kinship with these pioneering ladies. The relationship of the women is purportedly one of blood but it seems reminiscent of the “Boston Marriage.”

There seems to be very little known about this book and its author and I cannot ascertain how much is fiction and how much is autobiography. Stylistically it is, as my husband says, somewhat lightweight, yet reading it in small snippets of time away from my easel has been fun. The prose is not as magical as another author who may have overlapped Helen Winslow’s time, Sarah Orne Jewett, yet it still has some of Jewett’s charm and love of nature. The book chronicles the women’s slow release from Boston society and their discovery of good health by abandoning corsets and taking long walks in the country. There are minute descriptions of the colonial farm house they purchase for their new lives as chicken farmers - with latches in place of “the modern invention of doorknobs.” The hens themselves are described in anthropomorphic details which are entertaining in their silliness.

While perhaps not being great literature, this little book is still a small gem of social history. And its modest writing is the perfect antidote to present day gloomy news and tea party ranters. I may comment on such things later but for now I’m being chicken with the media.
The acrylic painting at the top of the page is my quirky interpretation of a self-actualized chicken. It was painted from an old folk paper cut in my collection.