volar plate

If I were someone like Judy Blume this month’s blog entry would instead be called “Summer Break”.  A reference to school emptying into months of unstructured play; also the weight of cast plaster on my right arm.  No baseball, no cartwheels, no catching lightning bugs.  It’d be the summer I spend reading, when I befriend the insightful aged camp custodian whom my fellow campers laugh at.

Thankfully I only broke my finger (jammed and now reconstructed).  Summer too has broken but it is meteorologically late.  So the colors of summer are still early and unfaded.  They arrived atop my daughter’s toy-like zinnias.  There’s the yellow slip n' slide and the blue blow-up pool, colors that escape nature’s range between the pickets of my neighbors’ fence.  And there’s my healthy left hand.

“All summer long” is a group show now thru August 30th at the Davis Gallery in Austin.  I have there a few new acrylic paintings that have summer in mind.  And I just learned a second solo show of my work at Hooks Epstein in Houston will take place this upcoming October. 

gamma

I was in Chicago this past weekend.  Oh how it has evolved over the past 30 years.  And to commemorate all those weekend trips that I took as a child, into the city's center from sub to urb... 

I'll unearth some older work.  The cityscape, which I prefer to simply call a landscape, still holds it for me.  The trickier part is hunting down what stands out... cuz what stands out is what blends in.  Such is my pleasure in acknowledging what doesn't wish to be noticed.

 These as well as newer paintings will be part of a solo show that is scheduled to open October 4th at Edinburgh's Gamma Transport Division.  Should be up for two months thereafter.

weeding

I stand while painting in the studio, but I crouch while resting.  In the garden, where glory is given by gardeners and illustrated into Botany, I find respite in dirt from thought, and in the tedium of uprooting weeds from the spilling of ink. 

 

Though, yes, I battle against nature (mostly that of thistles and sticker burrs) I confine the battlefield to my backyard enclosure.  And by putting myself in charge I alone determine what is welcome to grow here and what is not.  

The garden is where I hear and locate (in this order) a pair of woodpeckers.  And as an artist blogger I find this a fitting phenomenon to catalog.  Isn't this what my painting blog is for?  To journal my painting alongside my experiences of bird-watching and gardening?  Woodpeckers are reminders of what's blissful, and they always have been.  They are the purest of distractions along the straight and narrow path.

zuzmara

I've been working on a dream in Hungary's Őrség for over twelve years.  An old house of rammed-earth walls, it is a symbol more than anything else.  

When we arrived in December the ground and trees were frozen (zuzmara in Hungarian).  Days later the earth thawed and we tracked the muddy footprints of deer and swine.

"watercolor artist" magazine February issue, now in stores.

Good time for acrylic on canvas.

atomism

The redbud drops its color consecrating the cracked ground for one hundred hours.  It's a quiet Springtime transfer, the sun's last blessing before sweltering months.  Witness this and you'll fast forward to the planting of emerald rye in October.

Today my window is open and I hear the high school marching band practicing (they sound good).  The team has a home game this Friday against a conference foe.  And my neighbor is rider-mowing his lawn after a couple weeks of rainfall.

North of my window: The Arkansas Arts Center will include two paintings of mine for their 45th Collectors Show & Sale in December.  And I've been fortunate enough to be welcomed into AQUACHROME, a contemporary watercolor exhibit at Manifest Creative Research Gallery of Cincinnati opening November 8.  

meta

Let's talk about vanishing point, the title of this blog at the top of your screen.  Vanishing point is, for me, an irrational way of looking through my environment and into the unknown.  It is a shifting of colors and shapes around one central continuum (the vanishing point is always the same point).  It is the remnants of what's left - of both life moving past me as well as life fading away beyond my grasp. 

The street lined on both sides unfolds before me now and forever.  And though I'm not really as interested in the individual buildings on each side, I am comforted by how they contain the tunnel track of space (mainstream) that we move within.  

I don't believe in, no, I'm not allowed to structure my life around the idea of painting.  And this fundamental parameter encourages me to strive for the opposite: to live with my world, to not change  or deny parts of it, but to simply see it for what it is.  The result is a dictum: paint only what you can experience along the way.

This week I am delivering work to the Beeville Art Museum.  For my first museum show I will have work occupying the entire main gallery through the end of December.  Opening reception is September 28th from 12-2pm.

john parks

I just finished a phone interview for Watercolor Artist Magazine with John Parks.  Though I tire easily when talking about the particulars of why I do this or that, I know I'm in good hands.  He is a seasoned painter and writer with a sense for connecting craft with its concept.  I look forward to the February 2014 issue.  He also saw what I see in this inkscape from last year...phew, I thought nobody would.  

Yesterday I sent a painting to the Russian Federation.  Dobryy Den.

  

And Davis Gallery of Austin is still showing my newest work with David Leonard and Daniel Burns.  There will be an artist talk on August 14th there at the gallery.  The three of us will explain everything.

John Parks also liked this one.  Thank you, John.