Saffi with her Violin

Sororicide

Rachel and Mercedes did a photo with me some time ago. I've just rediscovered this picture. I asked them if they ever fought when they were growing up. Rachel grabbed Mercedes's hair and yanked it. From that moment came this.

Yesaiah the Cellist

FRAMING AND MATTING YOUR ART

I'm getting some questions about how to frame and mat your art. There are a zillion ways and a zillion tastes. I'm going to give you just one that has worked beautifully for Louise and me. You may find, like us, that you have to work with a limited budget. You may have limited space or family considerations. So this may all be nonsense for you, but here goes:

This is a picture that would be, by itself, about 15" x 22". If you have the space and resources, you can have this piece make a statement in your room by giving it a large mat of six inches. YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO THIS. Remember, I'm just saying that this works well. You can have a smaller mat or no mat. That's your choice too. That said, having your framer put a double mat on the picture (the blue line around it) gives the mat a chance to highlight the picture. It may be a thin black line. I've chosen here a mat that picks up the blue in the picture. My outer mat, again a matter of personal taste, is off white. The total size of this picture, framed and matted, would now be about 31 x 38 inches. In my neighborhood that frame and mat will cost about $150. If decorating matters to you, it's something to consider.

Short story. When Louise and I were in Berlin in the 1970s, we lived on the top floor of a villa owned by people who had inherited a large collection of German woodcuts from the early 1900s. Before we left they asked us to take one home for them and try to sell it for $1,000. It was a tinted woodcut of three sailors. I wasn't smitten with it, and we didn't have a thousand dollars. One of my colleagues at the university bought it. I thought no more about it until we were at his home one night for an open house. And there was this picture, beautifully matted and framed in a way that picked up the light blues in the picture. I was stunned. I never quite got over it. Recently I found a copy of that woodcut online and printed one for myself. Will I be able to get the picture with the same effect as my colleague's? Not quite, but the framing and matting will make a huge difference.

Megan's Portrait

Some visitors to my Facebook have noticed that this portrait is a shift toward realism. It is not entirely realistic as in the portraits of Joshua Reynolds from the 18th Century. It is more in the direction of German New Objectivity or Neue Sachlichkeit from the 1920s. In any case, it is a move in a new direction for me.

I am calling this portrait "Woman with the Red Umbrella."

Bllue

Portrait finished July 15, 2015.

About the Casino de Paris

In a Facebook comment on this picture, RobertHeatherYoung (aka Heather) writes, "What's with the naked lady in the back?" She writes that she thought this was a painting of a jazzercise class but that she didn't remember any naked women. "Tell me what your inspiration is," she says.

That's a great comment, because it hadn't occurred to me I might be depicting a jazzercise class. The inspiration is this: when I was a young man, having just finished a Mormon mission in Austria, I toured Europe with my parents. In Paris, my father said he wanted to go to the Casino de Paris, a cabaret-type show with sexual innuendos and displays throughout. When the show began, a naked woman on a trapeze bar was lowered from the rafters to the stage.

My mother, who had not realized just where my father had taken us, put her hand to her mouth and said, "Oh laws, we should have stayed at the Evil Tower."

This piece, then, is a commemoration of our trip to the Casino de Paris.