20 year watercolors

They Took Everything Except One Odd Thing

Singly focused on one thought filling the mind
an instinctual rage that the camp was attacked
the outsider crossed from them into us.
I'm driven by a need to attack only barely aware of what I don't know.

They had said you have been robbed.
No, they said, sorry to hear about it
and I knew not about what
pointed in a direction, I spit nails
     pounded them into the ground
           with each step.

Only after the police left
did my mind empty.
After being so full of just one thought
my mind was blank
I wandered aimlessly around the crime scene, my apartment.

If it was worth taking it was gone.
I wasn't even staring at the empty spots
or filling the incomplete list of what was gone, what was missing,
just wandering like the way you enter a room with purpose and then forget what it was
searching for what was missing from me
what had been but was now an emptiness.
Truth be told in this modern age
they took everything except one odd thing:
my desire for things material -- objects that do not fill the loneliness of emptiness inside
would that I could leave the chain off
leave the door unlatched on the place
where my desire to consume is housed.

Watercolor paintings

In 1992 I was taking art lessons from a children's book author/illustrator who taught me as much (more?) about life as art. There were maybe a dozen of us taking the lessons. We learned various mediums and often painted along the stream behind his barn. Recently I was looking through some packed away things and found the old watercolor pad. Since it happened to be twenty years later I decided it might be a fun project to use the other side of the pages to paint new things. Hopefully I'll find the time before the year end to do 20 of my 20 year series. What follows are the 1992 painting followed by the 2012 flip sides. They were painted on 9" x 11.5" paper and digitally cropped.

1 - 1992

1 - 2012

2 - 1992

2 - 2012

(This kitty a copy of masking tape art by Kayt Hester, so all credit and copyright is hers.)

3 - 1992

3 - 2012

4 - 1992

4 - 2012

OHNY: Flux Factory >> Living Room

We participated in Open House New York (OHNY) and did it the best way for our first time with a Flux Factory tour in a big yellow school bus. The bus took us to a number of spots on the tour and it was a really great day. We ended up at Flux Factory (which was a scary time because they were loosing the space, but according to their site things are looking around).

Someday I may share our pictures (the picture on the right is FF's), but I wanted to at least mention how great Flux Factory is and encourage you to learn more if you're interested in arts organizations.

OHNY: Flux Factory >> Living Room

We have wanted to participate in Open House New York (OHNY) but the past couple years did not work out. Yesterday we decided a bus tour put on by Flux Factory was too much to pass up. The tour was called Living Room and brought us to some great locations on a yellow school bus. The most amazing stop though was Flux Factory. Started by a group of philosophers it is an artist live/work space that excites the imagination. I'm both impressed with what they did and surprised that it seems such a rare occurance. Why are there not hundreds of communities like this given the high concentration of interest in the arts in the NYC area, the ridiculous cost of real estate, and the number of ware house type buildings?

B

Brush & Ink

I've been trying to paint a little recently. I've so far just done some copies of other artists' work, but hopefully I'll ease myself back into my old ways. It's been so long that my confidence isn't high enough to tackle original work, so it's just some reinterpretations for now.

The girl eating toast is from the comic Black Hole published by Kitchen Sink Press. The monkey (upper left) is from a blogger's business card (he said it was from a collection of free images). The sitting woman with her head on her knee is a Schiele from 1918.

The fun thing about posting them is that my camera has face detection software and the little box appeared for the two women, which is a vote of confidence in my art ;)

The monkey didn't get face detection. I'll head to the zoo and see if real monkeys get face detection. Then I'll know if I paint good monkeys.

B