I went to a party last night for the 40th birthday of Spot Draves (I interviewed Spot last year at ArtNewYorkCity, Webmetricsguru and SmartMobs) in the East Village (3rd street and Avenue A, to be exact).

The party turned out to be very much an art crowd, several well connected Artists, Dealers, Writers and Producers/Publishers were there and many people who wanted to mingle.

It was a lot of fun – I stayed 3 hours, till right after midnight and left, though I could have and maybe should have stayed longer.

Made many new contacts and gave out perhaps 20 cards to people, most who didn’t have cards to give back to me but who will hopefully look up this blog and the work I do.

Into The Blue – Oil Pastel on Canvas Paper – 36″x72″ – Marshall Sponder, 2008

Anyway – before I came to Spot Draves party I was over at my studio painting for a few hours and did this work – which I suppose might not be done – but which I decided to stop (looked better than I thought it would) called “Into the Blue” (above).

Been working out a lot of feelings and was having a hard time getting started yesterday – found that painting realistically wasn’t working for me and I started with the idea of “waves” that I saw in the Gustav Courbet exhibition at the Metropolitan on Friday night

(see Friday night jaunt at the Metropolitan – best ever ).

While I had both the Corbet and Poussin show in my mind while painting this – the Courbet exhibition dominated my thoughts with the idea of “ocean waves” while Nicolas Poussin’s  uncanny sense of cobalt green’s and light olive colors, that it’s much easier to see in person, (looking at the work – Poussin’s more subtle passages of color and lightness don’t come across as well in the photos of Poussin’s landscape paintings which was the subject of the Metropolitan exhibition – but they are present if you are viewing the paintings directly on).

Someone I spoke to at Spot Draves party last night is a painter and teaches painting in New York and saw the Poussin show – he said that Poussin’s later drawings showed signs of a nervous shake – something I wasn’t aware of (maybe Nicolas Poussin got lead poisoning or something other disease that caused tremors – didn’t know about it – now I have to go back and take a closer look and the drawings and paintings). The same guy said many of those landscapes attributed to Poussin were not really by him – but I don’t know for sure if that’s true or not.

And thought about all those things as I painted – and let my feelings out – full force – Into The Blue.