...and Calvert says, "We don't get no respect!"

Well...it was really Rodney Dangerfield. But in what I've now discovered to be a much longer running dialogue with the US government, Calvert Vaux stated his view of artists and their work in an 1852 article in The Horticulturalist, " that it was time the government should recognize and support the arts." Calvert Vaux was an architect and landscape designer. He is remembered as the co-designer (with Olmsted) of NYC's Central Park. Another project of Vaux's which I adore is Olana, Frederic Church's house, upstate along the Hudson River. Church was a member of the Hudson River School of painters along with Thomas Cole. Church's paintings abound here in the city including the New-York Historical Society and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"The next conversation I have with President Obama is to beg for a secretary of arts," Quincy Jones said in a recent radio interview. He wants the new prez to create a cabinet level post. I'd have to agree with him. Maybe we'd finally get some respect!

Artists, art and politics aside, I'm always amused by six degrees of quirky. I listen to Jones' jazz when I paint along with Eric Dolphy and Miles Davis. The image above is one of Church's iceberg paintings — a subject that floats me. I also LOVE the iceberg paintings of Gregory Amenoff, who moved out of his studio on the westside of NYC, where it was next occupied by abstract artist, Cora Cohen, who is curating a show I'm going to be in, opening March 8 (more on this later) entitled, "Snippets Samplings Static." I also painted icebergs for a while, while I dreamed of going to Antarctica.