It's all Relative

Eclipsed   oil/canvas   24 x 8 x .5

Painting The First Merit Bank Building at night from our ASA studios on the 3rd floor of Summit Artspace using only headbands with LCD lights on our foreheads was exciting. Oh, yeah, and it was also the night of a lunar eclipse. Also exciting was sipping cocktails on the top of the 100-story John Hancock Center in Chicago. I also had a chance to visit a few galleries on my visit. There were lots of Chinese and Russian paintings being sold for exorbitant amounts. There were also many slick large-paneled multiples. The images were beautiful....sunlight drops showing through branches of trees that were dripping down to lower edge of the picture plane. Really lovely. And there is was.....in green....in red....in blue....in yellow. I was told by the gallery owner that it really is the "big city" thing to do in large art markets such as Chicago.....focusing on just one thing....polka dots....whatever. You might as well put pins in my eyes. Doing the same thing again and again. I guess that makes my work pretty regional. For me, moving into the impersonal visual is a step towards the commercial-oneness. One of my hug-to-my-chest books is Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Rilke. He says:
Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connexion with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

• Worpswede (1903)

I asked the gallery owner where he was from......Iowa....or was it Idaho?

Stepping out of the Comfort Zone

Eclipsed   oil/canvas   24 x 8 x .5

"The jazz in life is not found in the comfort zone". Wow, do I love this quote! As we muddle through our days, we find comfort in always sitting in the same chair, taking the same route to the grocery, and so on and so on. I think that this saves our energy and that is good. I wear my bib overalls every day to paint.....I like saving my creativity for the canvas. It is only when the status quo consumes every moment of our lives that we become bored and restless. I really do believe that we ought to "shake it up" in the realms that are most interesting to us. "Eclipsed" is such a painting. A few of us painted during the recent lunar eclipse on February 20 on the 3rd floor of a county building in Akron, Ohio. We turned out all of the interior lights and used only LED headbands to paint the nightscape. What a rush! This painting is of The First National Bank Building.....I added the eclipse later, as it was not visible from my viewpoint. As I couldn't see my palette that well, I found that I was much more generous with both the paint and the medium than usual and was pleased with the results. Painting "in the dark" has its benefits. Are there other lessons to be learned here?