Buds, not just for Spring

One of the best things about being an artist is one's artist friends. This is myself and Stephanie Patton. She does installation, painting and performance art among many other art forms.

I find her to be positive in the face of adversity (so important for an art career), warm, generous, and always ready to laugh. I visited with her on my recent trip to Louisiana. She's been showing a lot recently both in New York and Louisiana and is enthusiastically teaching art to kids as her second job.

One of my favorite performance works's is her character, Reynella Rose Champagne. Reynella poses, performs and gets press for the songs she writes like, "Beer is my Best Friend." The image here is Reynella as Manet's Olympia circa 2003.





I met Stephanie originally at the Vermont Studio Center. We collaborated on a project and I also participated (she's persuasive) in her production of "Fountain of Talent" (bottom, middle photo). That's me playing the 'tit fer (Cajun triangle) while singing "Diggy Liggy Lo" with simultaneous translation into English and Korean. I get by with a little fun with my friends.

NE/SW/SSW/SW/W/E

My head is spinning. I've been out west, north, south and now finally back east. I feel as gaudy as this Rosy Spoonbill who flew overhead one afternoon. I'm back for the duration (at least for a few months this time) so expect some daily blogging. And new art, photos, "movies" and souvenirs coming up. Thanks for all your patience!

Same/Different

Two boats seen by us in western Louisiana. Same/Different, both lovely to look at. I particularly like the Barbie hood ornament on the car boat.

Visual Souvenirs

Here are some visual souvenirs from our recent trip to Louisiana. Just when you thought you'd missed the slide show...

The Snake Bird

This Anhinga a.k.a. the Snake Bird, snapped by Kurt, is fascinating to me. It is a water bird related to a Cormorant. The Anhinga's feathers are not waterproofed by oils, and so can get waterlogged, causing the bird to become barely buoyant. However, this allows it to dive easily and search for fish under the water. It can stay down for significant periods. It has to spread it's wings to dry in between fishing expeditions. When it's in the water with body submerged, the long neck and head looks like a water snake (I don't know what biological advantage there might be in looking like a snake rather than a bird.) It scoops up fish with it's beak and pouch kind of like a Pelican. A bird of southern swamps, the Anhinga is also known as the Water-Turkey. Tastes like chicken?

Oh, that question...

As you know, I've been away and will be off again this weekend for another week. I've been traveling in places short on cell reception and internet access. I actually had to make a call last week while standing in a swamp in two feet of muddy water. I used one eye for dialing, the other for tracking a few alligators who were lazing nearby. I'll blog as much as I can meanwhile and then I'll be back for a good long stay. Nice to be chatting with you again—I suffered from severe blogmissitis!

Continuing with our media thread, Stacey Williams-Ng is painting a new series in which the paintings are a response to the significance of social media, and in particular, to status updates. As we know all too well, status updates are a mainstay of social applications like Twitter and Facebook, answering the question “What are you doing right now?” The result is collaborative and democratic—everyone is visible, and equal.

In her heavily textured oil paintings, figures are seen performing mundane tasks, such as cooking pancakes or reading while other more quixotic pieces contain no explicit narrative other that the status update that inspired it, such as the peculiar “Rafiq A. Spring…the end of my winter of discontent or just the next pithy chapter?”

On the road again...

Travelling without cell reception deep into the mountains, Really. Will be offline until next wednesday. In the meantime, here's a new movie — companion to my paintings in an odd sort of way. It has beautiful music by Conrad Cummings. That's one of the benefits of being an artist, while you always have doubts about your own work, you are never unsure about how wonderful and brilliant are the efforts of your friends. If you crave more of Conrad's music...




Michael's Snow — a film by Susan Shaw

Michael’s Snow is a reference to two very different kinds of seminal events in my life. The first has to with art experience. I saw Michael Snow’s Wavelength in 1967. In the film a camera zooms slowly—from the end of a room to a photograph of waves on the wall at the opposite end. The zoom is accompanied by a sine wave as it gradually progresses from its lowest note to its highest and passes through color filters, film stocks, positive and reverse exposure. I have never seen the film again but it has always remained with me—thus I know it was/is a seminal art experience.

The second has to do with sadness and loss, relational in proportion to the people I love. When I made this film I thought it was about snow, now I know it is about the winters of my heart.