design without intentions

Paying attention and then not.  A flea infestation and then something not as small like the anteater at the zoo last Sunday.  The house across the street is emptied, its window is ajar and the curtain blows, and it's ordinary.  Opinions are strong about the right way to live these days.  But it's the night time that interests me and its design without intentions. 

John Hejduk and Colin Rowe, among so many of those post modernists, had a lot to say about such design.

I dreamt I was a tree in a courtyard.  Everybody was a busybody.  

Davis Gallery of Austin is part of WEST, West Austin Studio Tour, open Saturday and Sunday.  

migratory

Ruby throated hummingbirds have returned.  The first red (bloodgood) leaves open upon the bare branches of my Japanese maple.  And I still find a plastic Easter egg here and there.  All a celebration of moisture's arrival.  

An appetite for transformations.

Between Park Avenue and Harlem.  

work and play.

a tool to make a tool

A city is the runway for the flight of ambition and the descent into melancholy, a long street pounded by hopes and frustration.  It is the dynamic substance I've chosen for exploring the subtle behaviors of watercolor.  For transforming commonplace into mystery.  Because the delicate spilling of watercolor on concrete isn't a gesture of expressionism — it's human vulnerability.

Heading outward, I pack a tool inside a green bag.  Yes, it is a camera, and it is an important tool that I use to make another tool. 

Snapshots develop into paintings develop into questions.  Can painting paper communicate buoyancy?  Is this finally where time can be squandered?  

listening

My father is 76 years old.  A January boy from Manhattan.  He has become a volunteer, somebody to meet convicts newly released from years of imprisonment.  They sit across from each other in the morning, the time to go out and get.  And for my father the getting is to become a listener, though his hearing is nearly gone.

I am 40 years old.  And I am pleased to announce my first New York solo show.

 March 26-April 20 at the George Billis Gallery.  

  

  

absorption

I have been using inks more and more alongside watercolors.  They are thinner than watercolor, at least the pigments I enjoy the most, and they stain permanently into the paper.  One tincture of carbon black is probably meant to endure months and months, but I enjoy pouring it straight out of the bottle like a sauce, undiluted and penetrating...

...but the paper cannot absorb everything I throw at it.  Most of it is sacrificed.

Saturday February 16th will be the opening of a solo exhibition of my newest work created during the past year.  Hooks Epstein Gallery is one of Houston's longest running art galleries, and I am so grateful to be a part of it.  There is a direct flight to Houston from just about everywhere, so please join us.

handful of water

The border is the outer edge, and I choose masking tape to secure it.  It contains this great big area of work and play, structure and formlessness, control and chaos.  There is a pressure to break out of and spill beyond the border, to abstract.  But this is where I find abstractions to be too literal (what isn't abstract?). The game I like to play is within the same agreed-upon playground using the words and images that are used by everyone.  

 This is a celebration that says "Let's disappear".  This is what makes realism such a mysterious vehicle. Within the fence of my winter garden, I came across a black widow spider.  The power of this delicate and beautiful creature (to remove you from the garden) is all the more striking against the sprouting broccoli and cauliflower.  All a part of this little Eden.

Sometimes the commissioner is led by their half-asleep canine.

This area is pure night.  Yet the paper is covered in rainbow, very little black really, mostly raw sienna.

golden twinkle

Sleeping habits, or the lack thereof, are such that we've moved our children's beds into our bedroom.  And after a week-long stretch of fever amidst a month-long Willy Wonka marathon, daytime seems a blurry continuum.  Interestingly, painting has never felt so rooted in somnambulism.

I find myself humming throughout the day, mostly songs from Willy Wonka.  Grandpa Joe sings the sweetest: about a golden twinkle in his eye.  These are my twinkles.  Even if they are out of focus most of the time.

This is my first watercolor.  Painted while I was in Ireland in 1997 on a bicycle with a rucksack.  My preschool watercolor kit consisted of six colors.  The sable haired, flat-head brush I still use today.