Clinton Street, Brooklyn

Clinton Street, Brooklyn

oil, 5 x 7"

The afternoon sun casts long shadows on mountains of snow the day after a January blizzard dropped 30” of snow on Clinton Street in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.  My daughter lives on this street and snapped this photo for me.  The blizzard was on a Saturday.  Happily, by Monday she was able to trek to her classes at nearby Pratt Institute and to her job at the Trilok School!  

Marrero's Hot Dog Cart

Marrero's Hot Dog Cart

5 x 7", oil

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Marrero's always smells sooo good!

This painting began with two of my favorite underpainting colors: iron oxide red under the greens and raw sienna under everything else.

South

"South", oil, 5x 7"

Before revisions

One night per week I pick up Husband after he teaches his trial advocacy class at Temple or Penn.  He says me picking him up is lot more fun than his former hour long commute on I-95 back to Bucks County.  Ya think?  After his first Spring Term class I fetched both him and Daughter (she’s a 2L at Temple Law, shameless mama brag) and we headed to South, a restaurant and jazz bar on Broad Street.  Lucky for us the restaurant section was packed, even on a Thursday night after 9 PM, so we were offered free seats in the ticketed jazz area just as the second set was beginning.   What a fabulous night we had!  Cool Saxophone, melt in your mouth Southern cooking and a glass of wine – can you think of a finer combination?  We can't! 

I use PhotoShop to proportion my photos.  For this painting I used a few reference photos. I made sure to place the sax player in just the right spot.In order to capture the soft interior lighting, I used opposite hues to gray the local colors. I also wanted to capture the soft glow of the candle on the table but not have it compete with the stage, which I hope I did. 

River Rink (Maura and Pat)

River Rink (Maura and Pat)

oil, 5 x 7"

NFS

This painting began as an iPhone snapshot of Husband and Daughter enjoying a happy night of ice skating under the lights of the Ben Franklin Bridge. 

To begin this painting I cropped my the photo to the same proportion as my canvas, in this case 5 x 7”.   I use a grid feature to make sure my composition more or less comports with the Rule of Thirds.

I began with an under painting of raw sienna to give a nice glow to the ice.  I filled in some of the background figures with a darker value of raw sienna and wiped out along the ice.  I added the darks, burnt umber, French ultramarine and black, to the night sky and the foreground figures.  As I stood back, I noticed the pretty glow the under painting of raw sienna gives the skater figures on the right.  They almost have the feel of a watercolor.  Should I worry them with detail? No!  Do they convey all of the information the viewer needs as they are?  Yes!  

It sometimes takes a heck of a lot of self-restraint not to go in for the kill and worry every last element with detail.  

Thanks for looking!

Fairmount Devil

Fairmount Devil, 5 x 7", oil

sold

When a January blizzard dropped 24 inches of snow on Philadelphia our neighborhood was transformed into a beautiful white playground.  Fairmount Avenue filled with groups of young people gathering at bars and restaurants.  Many were traveling to the Art Museum to sled down the steps.  This young man sporting a pair of devil horns atop his woolen cap perfectly captures the convivial, mischievous spirit of the day.

This painting is happily in the collection of my good friend, Debra Kaplan Garvey.

Firethorn and Tincture Vial

 oil on panel, 5 x 7"

Donated to A Home for Dawn

Could a tincture of Firethorn ever have been contained in an old medicine vial like this? Bitter Firethorn berries warn of toxicity but were, and still are, used in jams and jellies.  I plucked this bunch from one of the many bushes prominent near The Spring Gardens along 19^th street in Philadelphia.  The tincture bottle was dug up from our former back yard in Washington Crossing.  If only this bottle could speak!  It may date back to fevered times of bloodletting and mercury purge.  If mercury was thought to be curative, I suppose a distillation of Firethorn – cyanide - may not have been out of the question.  

Collage Number 8

Number 8, 4 x 6" framed

Collage Number 8 is another created for Neil DiSabato's color class at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art.  At my daughters' request I've  framed up a batch of favorites.  Stocking stuffers?  I think so!

The red in this piece is a true red, not the red orange my camera and computer insist upon.

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November Trio

"November Trio", 5 x 7, oil

Cranberries make the season, wouldn't you say?  This is a small study I did for Neil DiSabato's color class at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art.

Bricolage 31

"Bricolage 31", 5 x 7"

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"Bricolage 31" calls to mind my favorite childhood game, Mousetrap, or a Rube Goldberg sequence.  I snipped a piece of  Philadelphia Department of Streets orange fencing from construction on our street.  Tela's Market across the avenue provided the elegant twisted paper bag handle. A memento of drywall mesh from our old house turns the collage into a personal story of the orderly chaos that was our move to the city. 

Color story, bricolage, mousetrap.

Bricolage 34

"Bricolage 34", Mixed Media  

4.5 x 6.5", framed

This assemblage is a Color Story created for Neil di Sabato’s color theory class at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art.   Color Stories are small collages made of any media or flat surface. No boundaries on what those can be.  I’ve heard some undergrads have used their underwear.  Oh, artists! The unifier is color and compositional harmony.

As with two paintings I created some years back, “Fernando” and “Maria”, I think of my Color Stories as bricolage.  Bricolage is a French term for something created from objects at hand. I came upon the term one winter when I no longer felt inspired to paint the season.  I invented compositions with tropical landscapes, birds at my feeder and objects in my studio.  I called these paintings bricolage instead of surrealism because the term seemed to better describe my method.  

During the last few years I’ve studied with several fine teachers.  With Pat Martin I poured, splattered, rolled, dissolved, collaged, sewed, stamped, glued, sanded and resisted paint, asphaltum, plaster, turpentine, ink and water.  With Kass Freeman, Trisha Vergis and Christina LaFuente, I’ve drawn, composed, toned and textured.  With all of them, I’ve turned paintings upside down and sideways, looked at the backs of them to see if they are better than the front.  Sometimes they are.

Now my studio contains an extensive array of materials, particularly generated while working with Pat.  During her classes I took up scouring the ground, streets and hardware store aisles to find textures and surfaces.  

Enter Neil’s Color Stories.  Compose flat surfaces into smaller than 6 x 8” objets d’art? 

It just so happens I have mountains of interesting surfaces, painted, clipped and foraged, in need of loving arrangement.  

Bricolage.

Hope you enjoy!