She Chose Carefully

She Chose Carefully   oil on burlap on canvas   48 x 24

We have been lucky to patronize many corner markets in San Francisco over the years...loads of produce in bins right on the street.  This gentle older woman had no idea that I was trying to take in all of the lusciousness with my camera.  What struck me immediately was the time she took to select her fruit....which is diametrically opposed to my own always-in-a-hurry process.  And, of course, I end up with produce that is often bruised and sometimes rotten.  She was savoring that very moment....as was I.

The canvas:  had been gessoed and covered in burlap and gessoed and gessoed some more.  It had been leaning in the studio for at least a couple of years.  My other experiments on burlap were nature-oriented, a more apt application, I think.  But that day, that particular day, I needed some excitement of the art kind.  I grabbed up that canvas and began work.  Layers and layers of raw umber.   The color was added later.  And, while I like the final result (the burlap relating to the bags of grain and beans at the market), the process was made much more difficult by all of the texture.

Too much gesso.  Too much paint.  Too much work.  Was it worth the effort?  YES!!!!!

All That Glistens....stepping out of the regional

All That Glistens   oil/burlap/canvas/gold leaf   24 x 18 x 1.5

The bad news is that none of our children lives close by...so we don/t get to share time together on a weekly basis.  The good news is that we get to view art in galleries in major cities that are so very different than the regional art that we participate in  and view on a regular basis.  In this case...San Francisco.  Our last visit was comprised of a half a dozen galleries located in the downtown area.  The work yielded no surprises...it was all abstract, very very large and very very impersonal.  Designed to be impersonal.  The only commanding figurative works were in a series of photographic works taken of circus performers from Eastern Europe, I think.  While representational painters are often accused of working in a technique-driven box, abstractionists seem to work in another sort of box- line murmurations, squiggles and patches of bland hues ad nauseum.  My humble opinion, of course.  What I came away with, however, was the wonderful notion of possibility - simply anything goes!  I was inspired by patches of blue and white resembling a flow blue plate; fearlessness in the use of color; and, yes, works on burlap!  Carrying within them the knowledge of hard-won possibilities, these California works represented a great freedom to me.  I came away with new eyes.

"All That Glistens" is my post-holiday foray into a different world...one outside of my unusual regional recipe.