I gave out my last Moo Card tonight at a Designer’s Meetup in Manhattan and was hoping I’d have a new set in my mailbox tonight when I got home – and I did.

Here’s my favorite of the set – I usually order 2 boxes (200 cards) and the second set will probably show up Thursday.

I did this self portrait tonight.

Here’s the thoughts I had about this painting tonight as I micro blogged them on my Twitter stream as Tweets.

I painted a self portrait tonight at my studio in Brooklyn, it’s one of my best – will post to www.artnewyorkcity.com later.

Occasionally, when I feel like I just want to give up painting, I end up doing some of my best work. I have debated if I put in enough time to have a studio space worthwhile, lucky if I make it over here once a week.  I could come over more often but then I’d have to party less at art openings, opting to go make art instead of attending openings.

But part of me is restless; I can’t seem to live with the solitude Art demands. It’s as if I need to be around where “it’s happening”, absorbing and synthesizing of the crowd.  Being alone, like I was tonight, is ok from time to time, but more often I’d rather be around people and that’s the conflict in my nature that makes me question if I could really be a successful visual artist.  Visual artists, unlike musicians and dancers, usually require solitude and isolation to create…and I fear isolation and then, just as I’m ready to give it all up, some energy jumps out of me and takes over, and I am hanging on for the ride.

 I feel, at times like this, as if my life energy jumps into the work I’m doing…and creating the work is not at all like most people think it’s as if every stroke is its own composition and the result is subtle symphony made up of thousands of strokes that reverberate.  But there’s no words that actually describe this process…though I believe this makes paintings have a life of their own and allow viewers to feel the art speaks to them, even hundreds of years later.

Tonight, as I was finishing my self portrait I experience a curious sensation, that my portrait seemed to be “thinking”, as if part of me was trapped in the painting, and the painting was looking out at me.. Eerie…the I comforted myself by telling myself that I’m the creator, though part of me wondered if the painting was the reality and I was the creation.  

 

Oh well, it makes a good story, esp. when alone in a big studio with the eerie feeling of presences…and then I left to go home and I stopped to have coffee and some blueberry pie, a reward for having done something right in my life, a life filled with wrongs and misunderstandings, where so much of my life is not quite as I’d want it but that I have the ability and this point in my life to capture all these sensations both in words and paint  

 If all else in my doesn’t quite work, at least this part does, and I got better as – got older now I need to go home and post that painting on www.artnewyorkcity.com and www.theanalyticsguru.com      

While I was up in the New England area this week I was getting a flood of thoughts, some of which involved painting, but I didn’t have time to write them down.

Thinking back to Cezanne’s Composition, Cezanne composed space by pushing things back and pulling other things forward – in fact, it was a mutual operation – when you did one thing, you affected something else – which ended up sounding like a Boolean equation (Truth Tables and all):

Source: Wikipedia

And that got me thinking – thinking of Hans Hoffman’s ideas of Push and Pull using color which was an extension of Paul Cezanne’s (it’s also the subject of a paper by Maxson J. McDowell titled – Cézanne and Hans Hofmann on Pictorial Space (see, I do know what I’m talking about here – I came up with this not even knowing about the paper).

 

What if – in looking at Art work – at least, work that proposed to be about 3 dimensions on two dimensions – flat work or nearly flat work that had a sense of dimension – if it could be looked at in this way – as a series of equations – equations that could be processed by software designed for that purpose?

What if we could create a program that would scan a painting (assuming the colors and lines were well represented) and show the areas as “push and pull” along with suggestions about opening up space in the work.

Would such an idea help? It might move people beyond where they are to another level with their work – even it it’s not the end goal itself.

 

Cezanne – Still Life with Apples

I believe technology is at a level now where this could be accomplished, probably with not that much work – though it’s hard to say as I don’t think it’s been tried before.

Just a thought on this Saturday where I really do need to stop blogging and start getting ready to go out -talking about Push and Pull – we can extract that idea into our entire life (at least I can) and I’m pulled now, to get ready – which means I’m pushed away from this post.

I saw two openings tonight but only one was worth writing about – Eleanor Antin “Helen’s Odyssey” at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts.

 Plaisir d’Amour (after Couture) from “Helen’s Odyssey,” 2007

The photo, masterfully done – was inspired by Thomas Couture’s Age of Decadence which I’ve seen a couple of times when visiting Paris (see below):

A couple of my favorites are Constructing Helen from “Helen’s Odyssey,”and The Tourists from “Helen’s Odyssey.

Saw several people taking pictures though I don’t know why – all of the photos at the opening are online.

 ”…As a pioneering conceptual artist, Eleanor Antin has engaged in a dialogue with history for nearly forty years. Ronald Feldman Fine Arts is pleased to exhibit Antin’s latest work, in which she turns her gaze on the Trojan War. Through Helen’s Odyssey, Helen of Troy is finally allowed to speak for herself in a series of imagined scenes from the life of the two Helens. For in her pursuit of the Spartan queen, Antin has discovered two women, a charming blonde engaging the seductive pleasures of luxury and desire, and a demonic dark Helen smoldering with disgust and venting her rage on her admiring victimizers. In these nine large-scale dramatic photographs, warriors, artists, gods, and goddesses emerge in a set of luminous archaeological retrievals from Helen’s historically fragmented life.”

The only thing I’m wondering about is how easy it is to color my perception of these works!  I walked out of the gallery (after a glass or two of wine – they were small glasses of red wine) and wondered past some more galleries on Broome street – saw a storefront that had similar types of large display photos and that told me the idea of doing historical photos – parody, if you will, is actually not uncommon.

Then I decided I’d seen enough and went home.