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.

Woman with Tomatoes

I took a snapshot of this woman carrying her tomatoes in Dorfgastein, Austria five years ago. It has been lodged in the back of my brain.

At the Cafe Möhring, Berlin

At the Kunsthistorische Museum, Vienna

My granddaughter sat one day with Louise in the art history museum in Vienna. I had to take her picture.

Migraine

Gilding Gelsey

The first and last time I saw Gelsey Kirkland on stage was at Northrop Auditorium on the campus of the University of Minnesota. It was a tradition, now broken, I believe, for the Metropolitan Opera and the American Ballet Theater to take summer tours to a few locations around the country. On this particular occasion, Louise and I bought tickets for Swan Lake, with Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov as principal dancers. I had heard of Baryshnikov but not a whisper about Kirkland. I won't recite her long career and successes here. You can look them up yourself online. What I do want to say is that I fell madly in love with her. I had never seen such a supernatural creature dance. She could leap all the way to the sky and then float back to the stage. It was as if she was defying gravity. It was nothing short of miraculous. When the two dancers finished the ballet, with its dramatic finale, I was in tears. Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov were my heroes. 

This is all by way of introduction to my newest attempt at art. Louise and I have seen Klimt's painting, Adele in both Vienna and New York, where it now resides. It's a stunning piece, and I began thinking about gold leaf, and have since watched several videos on the art of applying gold leaf to a painting or to an object. My first attempt tonight was to create Gelsey Kirkland in gold leaf in the style of a Giacometti sculpture. My reason: it's a whole lot easier than doing a more finished piece. 

Now that's a lot of blather, but the background may make more sense to you now. 

Femme avec le Chapeau

If I didn't love to paint so much, I think it might drive me insane. I bit of a curve here, a smidgen of color there, a change of costume all over. And after about three weeks, out comes the woman with the hat, Femme avec le Chateau. Is she any good? I don't know. I just know she's finished, that I have poured everything I have into her. And now, like a bird leaving the nest, she sails into the sunset to make her way wherever.

On the subject of art and morality

I just ran across this piece while looking for new materials on Picasso. I find it sobering, profound, and quite possibly true.

Thoughts on Painting "The Sigh"

In an ensuing conversation on Louise's post on Klimt's painting, "Adele," Jeffrey Baldwin-Bott wrote, "The Scream has already been painted, but I think you should ask Tom to take a shot at painting The Sigh. I'm sighing right now too, and it feels borderline expressionist."

Well, Jeffrey, I take all such suggestions seriously. I'm always at a loss for new subject matter, especially subjects that offer interesting visuals, so I went right to work. I first Googled "The Sigh paintings," and came up with numerous sites on "sign painting." Eventually I came upon an article from Psychology Today titled "Why Do We Sigh?" The author reported on Scandinavian studies, where I can only imagine those long winters give rise to a lot of sighing. He concludes, "Depending on who's sighing--and in what context it can be perceived differently by others." Using the author's prompts I came up with a list of times when one might sigh:
Resignation, as in old age (this one hits right close to home for me)
Frustration
Discontentment
Wishful thinking
"What if" or "if only" thinking
Sadness
Failed romance
Passivity
Surrender

But then I stumbled on a particular cartoon character who is adept at sighing. Do you know who it is? Cover your eyes for a moment before reading on.

Yes. It's Charlie Brown. Charles Schultz was merciless with poor Charlie Brown, the perpetually plagued passive victim. Here are some moments of Charlie Brown's sighs:

It's one thing, however, to capture Charlie Brown in moments of sighing, and it's another thing to come up with a painting that depicts sighing and that has any interesting visuals. Not impossible. But challenging. So my mind spins on.

But I do have one idea, Jeffrey Baldwin-Bott. Why don't YOU have someone in your household take a picture of YOU sighing, and I'll paint YOUR portrait and call it "The Sigh"? How about that? All if favor?   

La Danseuse

A friend asked me to tell her about this painting. I suppose a blog is the appropriate place for it. It began with an inspiration from the "Triadisches Ballett," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87jErmplUpA which you can see on YouTube. I saw the original black and white film in Berlin in 1973, and I've never forgotten it. Oskar Schlemmer, the creator, was part of the Bauhaus movement. There's another reference in the painting to Olympia in Offenbach's "Tales of Hoffmann." Olympia is a robot, with whom Hoffmann falls in love. I love this Olympia by Kathleen Kim at the Metropolitan Opera:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9emRjIMZsVk. I have taught the original literary texts by Hoffmann (German, although the opera is in French). A central theme has to do with "seeing" what is real and what is art and deception and both text and opera develop layers of themes around that. That's why in the YouTube video of the opera there's a moment with eyes everywhere. So yesterday I was thinking about her eyes, turned to T.S. Eliot and ran into the line about daffodil bulbs and eyes: 

Daffodil bulbs instead of balls

Stared from the sockets of the eyes!

In short, it's an autobiographical piecemeal of snippets of my education.

Detail of the eyes:

The Cafe Central in Vienna

One of my favorite restaurants in Vienna is the Cafe Central. In the late 19th Century, it was the meeting place for intellectuals and writers. I cannot say that it fell into disarray in the mid-to-late 20th century, but it needed a facelift. And it got one. It is now a place where people, tourists and natives alike, dine to savor the old empire. The decor is premier Viennese, the menu offers the best of Austrian light deli foods and pastries. A picture may help a bit:

I tried to capture a feeling for cafe patrons in my portrait of this woman in the Cafe Central. The diners reflect nothing of our fast food clientele. Of course America has elegant restaurants. But it's harder to find elegant restaurants in America with the same diners one sees in Europe. 

Sometimes you wake up and look in the mirror . . .

...and you think, WHOAAAA.

The Words, the Damn Words

Mark Twain once said that finding the right word sometimes took him "two or three days." Two or three days of staring at the wall. Two or three days of watching the baby throwing mush around the room. Two or three days of staring at the wall. Two or three days of watching the dog pee on the neighbors' lawn. Two or three days of somnambulism. Words. Did Mark Twain really say finding the right word took him two or three days? That's what I heard. From somewhere. From Wikipedia. I'm sure of it. Yup. Pretty sure.

Which Is the Best Art?

When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Utah, I enrolled in an honors course with the title, "What is art?" I assume that my rationale for enrolling in the course was that it was open to honors students and that it fit into my schedule. Such was my undergraduate brain--and the brain of most undergraduates still today.

The professor was a philosopher, Dr. Charles Monson, who walked into class on the first day, put three pictures in front of the class, which looked something like these three paintings:

He then went around the class of about 12 students and asked each of us which painting we thought was best and why. I am still embarrassed to say that I knew not one smidgen about art, and that I , with the rest of the class, went with picture number one. It looked familiar to me, even if I had no idea who painted it, or in what period, or for what reason.

But when Professor Monson came to the last student, he chose the Picasso. I had not heard of Picasso. The fact that he was still alive is no excuse. I was stunned that this student would choose a painting so "silly" to my young mind. And in response to the professor's question, why he liked that painting, the student said that it was by Picasso, a painting of his model Dora Maar, and that it challenged the way we see. It did not give the viewer a historical  image or a realistic flower. It forced the viewer to stop and look harder.

At least that's the way I remember the student's answer.

I was almost as stupid by the time the class ended as I was when it began, but I have not forgotten Professor Monson's determination to wring an intelligent thought out of me. Thank you, Professor Monson.

Painting is Re-painting

Writing is re-writing, we tell our writing students, and, I have been learning over and over, that painting is re-painting.

A few days ago I posted a picture, which got a lot of "likes" and comments from you, dear friends. It was a woman, her body painted abstractly, with a white mask and clearly painted facial features.

Not everyone was drawn to it. My conversation with Louise went like this:
Louise: That mask doesn't work.
Tom: Why?
Louise: Because its style is completely different from the rest of the painting.
Tom: But it's a mask. It's supposed to look different.
Louise: It doesn't work. You still have work to do.

I got a similar reaction from Charles. "Well," he said, "you have two different styles working here."

And so here is the re-painted figure. Is it better than the first? Were Louise and Charles right? I leave it up to you, dear reader.

The Struggle for "Voice"

My mother would say my painting is "kinda differnt." She would pronounce it just the way it's spelled here--differnt or maybe diffurnt. I don't know what my father would have said. Maybe just grunted. Both of them might well wonder how their son got on a path to find a new "voice," as we say in writing. I don't know what the word for "voice" is in painting. Maybe "style"? Dunno.

Self-Portrait #2

Self Portrait.

When you do a self-portrait, you only have yourself to blame.

Ten Things People Over 70 Should Never Do

I was lying awake at 5 AM this morning, enjoying insomnia, thinking about being in my eighth decade and feeling crabby. So I wrote up this list. Remember, you read it here.

1.     Don’t listen to advice from people under 70. They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

2.     Avoid reading magazines on how to improve your sex life.

3.     Avoid eating vegetables. Life is too short to waste on vegetables. Otherwise eat anything you want.

4.     Avoid Diet Coke and other diet drinks. Regular Coke tastes better.

5.     Don’t stroll through cemeteries. You’ll trip on the headstones and break your head on other headstones.

6.     Don’t tell your grandchildren sweet stories. Tell ‘em the dirty, gritty ones. They’ll think you’re hip.

7.      Don’t hug young people for too long. They’ll get a whiff of you and think you’re already dead.

8.     Don’t go parasailing unless you’re over a mattress.

9.     Don’t be afraid to tell your doctor he/she is an idiot. It gets their attention.

10. Forget learning English. Learn the language of texting, like LOL, OMG, WTF. And don’t stop there:

ADBB: all done, bye bye

BDN: big damn number

DFIP: don’t fart in public

If you start babbling this stuff, family will think you’ve lost it let you go to bed.

Horst, of Salzburg

Last time I was on study abroad with students, we had a guide in Salzburg, who I didn't care for, and who didn't care for me. The weather was brutally rainy and cold, the students under-prepared for the weather, wearing flip flops and flimsy outerwear. Horst kept the march going from one site to another, even as our interest wanted. Late in the tour, He stood looking down at me. I raised me camera and shot up into his nose and eyes. Neither of us said anything.  I have known for some time that Horst had to appear in my painting.

Time for An Old Friend

When I was eight or nine, my mother enrolled me in swimming classes at the YWCA (you read that right--W not M). I refused to go to the church-owned Deseret Gym, because males, young and old, were required to swim in the nude. The idea of a policy like this still haunts me, because I never wanted to see an apostle or prophet in the buff, let alone my friends up the street. So YWCA it was.

I knew I had problems from the start. I just didn't float well, but I managed to get back and forth across the narrow pool without hitting bottom. I was in the pollywogs class, and when it came time for the final test, to move up to the young frogs class, we had to float 15 seconds. I couldn't do it. I could not stay afloat for 15 seconds. I failed the Pollywog Class and went home in humiliation. That was the end of swimming for me.

We were discussing the float vs. no-float issue with Louise's dad one night, and he said, in his very Dutch way, "Everyone can float."
 "No," I said, not everyone can float.
"Well," he said, "black people don't swim in the Olympics, because they can't float either. But they're the only ones."
My patience was running low, so I said, "You don't see ducks in the Olympics either."

So this painting was my dedication to my inability to float--still. Louise once took me to the pool in our apartment building and tried to test this out. "Now just lie back," she said, "and I'll hold you up. Then I'll let go very slowly, and you'll float.

Very slowly she took her hands away, and equally slowly, my feet went down, my head came up, and I sank.

This picture, which I call "The Sinker," (there's no "t" in there, Kathryn Withers, Sinker, not Stinker, is my tribute to all those souls who sink.

Dandy Pig

Ali

Genealogy

In searching for his ancestors, Roscoe Rooster found striking similarities.

Rooster Pox

Cinderella before Her Face Lift

Wild Fire

Variations on "Celebration." Model: Ali

"Celebration"

Model: Ali. Terrific fun.