Two recent portrait studies. The first Jerimiah is a new model that I’ve been able to paint and draw a few times. He’s posing for various classes that teach and participate in. It’s a luxury to have extended time with a model. You end up feeling like your painting a human, someone that is in your life, not just a hired body.

Stroke by stroke. One color next to and on top of another. Usually, I do these because I’m dying to paint from the model and I can only afford myself at the time. But it’s a strange, intimate contemplation, painting yourself. The outcome always has deep personal implications and describes so directly vague and complex emotions tide to “a time” in ones life.  I’m happy to have the record that I can revisit and read like a personal journal entry.

While painting this Union Square troubadour, I couldn’t help but think about Frans Hals’s characters  . . . sweaty and a bit drunk  . . . hamming it up . . . their crooked teeth and radiant smiles. The relaxed, comfortable joy in his work. is a reminder for me to unload, ease up, enjoy the moment and the people around me.

What I’m drawn to here is the solitary and intrepid effort of making art, of learning a craft, of making that craft your own.  At some level, we are all self taught. I love to think about the millions of kids sitting on the edge of there beds, inspired by the music they listen too, teaching themselves to master the guitar.  I always give my undergrads this advice . . . learn to do something well. It’s going to help you when you get older.

Soap box: “How will this help me get a job when I graduate”? As teachers in universities, we focus to much on preparing students for getting a job when they graduate. They’re all going to do that, whether we interfere or not. The theme is overkilled and ends up frightening them to death.  I try to help prepare my students for the long haul of life. Yes through drawing and painting, through music and art history. Many of the grad students I teach are adults now and have been working for any number of years. They are coming back to school asking the opposite question. NOW WHAT, I have a job . . . I don’t like it.

The other painting that kept coming up during this session was Paolo Varonese’s Marriage at Cana. In the center of his (I believe, life size) composition is a group of musician’s. I read somewhere that the musicians represent the fathers of Venetian painting, Bassano, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. The instruments that they are playing help describe the character of their painting style, voice. Check it out. It’s mind blowing skill.

I love how still, lifeless objects can take on a persona and play a human role. Sometimes, in Hopper’s paintings, objects stand in for people; a barber pole, roof top chimneys, even some of his houses feel like sturdy New England gentlemen.

The other day I passed a simply exhausted newspaper box . . . its’ door swung open off its’ hinges and its’ newspapers spilling out of its’ mouth.

This little “R2 Unit”, the one with the white cap held on by a rubber band, is the star of my composition. It’s a jar of chicken fat that has been unsuccessfully smuggled into Canada.  His buddy, the dried sausage, was caught too.

Spent a late summer afternoon gazing down this driveway.  The couple that lives in this house arrived home while I was well into painting this composition, and parked their car along the side of the warn driveway. They were well past middle aged. He, seemed to suffer from Parkinson’s, was slow, and fragile. When, together, they arrived at the other side of my easel to see what I was doing, she kindly pointed at my painting and asked her husband, “Can you see? Can you recognize what this is? It’s our house.” He gave no answer. She smiled at me and made small talk for a short time, then took her husband’s arm and led him down the driveway. Without looking back, she yelled back at me, “If you need me to move the car, let me know”. The day was another lesson on painting; painting a heavy, gray and misty day. It was also another lesson on what love is. What a marriage is. And what a home is.