ART: Georgia O'Keeffe Goes to Hawai'i

Georgia O’Keeffe was paid to go to the islands to paint by Dole Pineapple.  She returned with some lovely paintings but no picture of a pineapple, so Dole had one sent to her in New York.  She finally did finish it and the image was used in advertising.

I’m so glad she went there - it is one of my dearest places. The place where I first experienced real comfort, luxury, generosity, and freedom of spirt and body, of cleanliness and soaring open water and sky, of intense green spiked with black lava.  Pineapples, coconuts, macadamia nuts, papaya, kiwi, ginger, maile blossoms - the island fruits of desire and plenty.

FILM: "Anna Karenina"

FILM/BOOK: The Life of Pi

ESSAY: My Autumn Roses

The fall roses are always big and glamorous - the last of this year's bed before I renovate it extensively for spring.

ART: Chuck Webster, Painter: Smile when you see that!

I love the blocky, child-like awkward directional changes, the scratchy canvas colors, the bold black outlines, like a child drawing maps.  The yellows punch and yell, they are aggressive and funny, like stand up comedy.  The sutures look like telephone poles askew in the tempest, kites blow about and anchor forms, a blocky heart bled and was sewed.  Clowns cavorted with blah-blah horns.  And the beautiful necklace on the yellow Nefertiti’s neckline awes with its symbolic beauty.

 From NYT, June 2012, Roberta Smith:

“Chuck Webster’s new panel paintings, seen in his sixth solo exhibition at this gallery, are the best of his career. They are also very much, if not startlingly, little big paintings: they have a strange, irrepressible scale, a largeness that exceeds their size and creates a distinctive, slightly comedic sense of intimacy.

All feature variations on an enclosed, linear, somewhat hieroglyphic motif, usually rendered in thick black lines. Suggesting cave paintings, irregular ziggurats and primitive maps, these variations also strongly evoke the art of Paul Klee, meaning they would seem natural to paintings not much larger than your face. Two works here are almost that small, but the others are five or six feet high and seven or eight across. This is not big by Gagosian standards, and that’s the point. The bigness resides within the paintings, in the three-way tension involving panel size, the drawing of the linear motif and surface textures.

Mr. Webster puts his motif through its paces, milking it for various associations, exploring different figure-ground relationships and adjusting paint handling, color and spatial depth, always guided by a generous, enlarging impulse. In the most memorable work, the black lines are thick, the area within them is white and the surrounding ground is sectioned off in big blocks of red and orange. The whole thing jumps. But each painting is very much its own pictorial being: vulnerable, rambunctious and fully inhabited.

Mr. Webster has debts. Philip Guston, Carroll Dunham and Jonathan Lasker are all rightly cited as precedents in the news release. But Klee’s art is his greatest obligation, which he both honors and updates on the springboard of scale.”

FILM: "Silver Linings Playbook"

Seeing films about beautifuul people who are supposed to be mentally unbalanced requires a certain suspension of belief.  Then, there’s the problem of how uncomfortably they resemble mentally unbalanced family members and friends. 

 How dispiriting it is to see a really dysfunctional working-class family yet again: that awful East Coast gritty old city neighborhood, their lives like sagging wet paper bags, the kitschy sentimental decor of stifling tiny living rooms. And no one really has anything to do.

Well, Russell really does get all that quite right, doesn’t he? 

Oh, the plot. It’s about fanatic team loyalty,  an amateur dance contest,  off-track betting, Philly cheesesteaks and infidelity.  Bradley Cooper, cast in a serious role (supposedly he was fabulous at the Williamstown Playhouse starring as The Elephant Man) jogs in a trash bag (I am trash) and makes wildly funny and boundary-violating remarks frequently.

Jennifer Lawrence seems stunningly convincing as a depressive widow.  I’m not sure she was really smart enough to contrive the device by which she heals Cooper, but it was kind and doomed to fail but it doesn’t.

Her mercy is tender.  I wish the happy ending hadn’t been such a certainty.  But then, they all had to keep living with the the real elephant-in-the-room man, Cooper’s father, played by Robert de Niro, innocently, truly, madly deeply bonkers.  So even though he gets to buy the restaurant he wants, we suspect he will bungle it, and the duration of their victory will be shorter than they think.   

So, the silver lined cloud may have a few more bumps left for the ride after the curtain rings down on the lucky winner/loser victory scene which closes the film: a Sunday afternoon TV family football gathering. All is the same yet all is changed.

MY ARTWORK: 2012 The Flag Series

Black Flag 

 Each of these flags is painted on board.  The series continues as a new monochromatic color for a flag presents itself to me to be painted.

Pink

Red Flag

Brown Flag - fabric, burlap, rice, lentils, newsprint