I’ve been getting more inquiries about commissions lately, so my husband has been bugging me about getting better information on the website.  Now I know why I have been putting off improving my site: I’m no computer programmer and I suck at Photoshop.  I know I don’t have information about my process on there yet, but hopefully by the beginning of next week– getting the stuff I do have there now took me the whole day.

In other news: we’ve done the move to Baltimore, my resting heart speed is much lower than it was in New York, and all my stuff is in storage.  I go to Pigtown (West Baltimore) at some point soon to see a studio. No luck on the studio front near MICA, which would have been ideal: I could have walked to work!

The last couple of Fridays I’ve been painting these three-hour short portraits with my friend Kristin at Rob Zeller’s school in Bushwick, Brooklyn, The Teaching Studios of Art (she is a teacher there).  They have a nice set up there with a lot of bounced light, so it feels really airy and certainly very different from my dark, cramped studio.  This painting looks anime to me – the model, Anna, is an actor, and had this startling red hair (dyed, but no less charming for non-naturalness) and beautiful big eyes that were made even bigger by her dramatic eye-make up.  Thankfully, Rob had some cadmium orange lying around…

People sometimes ask me why they should be interested in contemporary realism when there is the camera, and cheap, good digital photography is now everyone’s hobby and expertise.  The answer to that question is another blog post.  I think that most people just assume that contemporary realists must use photos in making their paintings; accordingly, most people think that the highest compliment they can pay to a realist artist about his or her work is that it looks “just like a photograph”, which is well-intentioned and thus nice to hear, but isn’t really what I was going for.  I think mainly the statement is supposed to convey how impressively real the figure looks, and because of the absolute proliferation of photography and digital images, we come to see reality through the eye of the camera lens; in other words, we no longer really know what “real” looks like on its own.

Before I went to Water Street Atelier, I practiced copying master works from good images I found in art books. Because I had a very naive understanding of color– both as it relates to photography, reproduction and paintings– I tried to copy the exact color I saw in the color copy I’d made from the Jansen.  During and after Water Street, I’ve never used photos in making my art work, except for now.  I recently was commissioned to create a portrait of a woman who is deceased.  Her son, who commissioned me, asked me to capture her when she was younger and gave me two small 4 x 6 black-and-white photos to use.  His wife, who like his mother is Haitian and has a similar build (though I wouldn’t say similar face), sat for me and I am using a little color study I made of her as the basis for the color on the final painting.  It’s been a challenge, but a lot of fun too, to think through the problems and advantages relying on photography poses, but mostly fun to compose the painting with disregard to what is (and is not) out there in real life.  In other words, no need to worry about any one-to-one (or one-to-?) correspondence between the painting and reality, between “appearances” and “things in themselves”, to evoke Kant.

The immediate impetus to write a little bit about this came from an article in Sunday’s NYTimes about a reunion of Norman Rockwell’s former models.  According to this article, apparently the artist was very specific about the pose and expressions his models, who were mostly friends and acquaintances from his hometown in Vermont, would take.  However, a “photographer was always on hand and took numerous pictures, which Mr. Rockwell would refer to while painting.”  The person or the scene in his paintings was often a pastiche from many people and many photographs.

“While Mr. Rockwell took certain characteristics of his models — the particular curve of a smile or width of ears — his illustrations and paintings were highly staged, models and Ms. Moffatt said. Mr. Rockwell would often photograph each model individually and add them to a painting. Sometimes he would take features of one individual, a strong arm or prominent nose, and paint or draw them on another person. For ‘Going and Coming,’ for example, he photographed Ms. Clark’s grandmother sitting in a chair, then painted her riding in a car.”

An article in the NYTimes today reminded me of discussions we used to have in school. We used to talk a lot about why and how representational (or “traditional”) art fell out of favor during the Post-War era.  The Times article describes how the South Bronx artist Robert Seyffert is trying to revive the artistic legacy of his grandfather, Leopold Seyffert, who made a successful career as a portrait painter of the wealthy and influential in the Gilded Age.

“Modern art sort of killed my grandfather,” Robert Seyffert said. “He was seen as too traditionally academic.” – David Gonzalez, for the New York Times.

We just got back from Crown Heights in Brooklyn where we were test-driving a Volvo. I’d never been out there before, and when I told the owner how nice her block was, she said that it looks nicer than it is: apparently, there have been some shootings outside her place.  I nodded knowingly.  I understand about shootings (at least in theory)– I just spent the last week in Baltimore.

Skipping over a lot of emotionally-excruciating details that may not be prima facie relevant to an “art blog”, I will say that the Baltimore police department has a very skewed perception of New York City.  To them, New York is the gritty big city (as Lily Tomlin said of the city in Big Business: “crack whores, rapists, fiends, and white slavers- it’s a pistol”) and little ol’ Baltimore is WAY better off in terms of crime than NYC.  Perhaps that’s true in real numbers, but not in percentage terms, given that Baltimore’s population is a fraction of New York’s.  Toby and I discussed how safe we’ve always felt in New York, even in Hell’s Kitchen, which if you’ve read my previous post, you know to be quite, um, “colorful.”  However! The Gothamist just reported a THREE-PERSON STABBING on my street- like two doors down- that happened last night!

Well, I lost a lot of sleep last night after thinking that I had accidentally deleted my blog. Technology is not intuitive for me, but people say that it’s something to use to your advantage and it seems like most people who do well these days are somewhat internet savvy.  So I created this blog, about a year ago now, and I have not been a very frequent blog poster since the inception, mainly because (a) I’d rather be painting than posting, and (b) though I do like to write, I felt a bit hemmed in by the “work” nature of this blog.  In wanting to keep this blog professional, I think I made it a bit boring for myself.

When I woke this morning after finally getting to sleep at around 5/5:30, I felt calmer. After all, I’m no Hemingway, I don’t know if I have a lot of people reading this, and– most importantly– I’m moving.  The end of one phase in my life, the beginning of another.  The end of one blog, the beginning of another.  I like parallels, especially when they are forced.

My friends know and my gallery knows that I’m moving away from New York, but I have been keeping it to myself when it comes to my “professional life” — partly because I know I’ll be in and out of New York a lot still because of work obligations and commissions and things I have got going on (and friends of course), but mainly because I don’t know what this really means for my life as an artist.  People ask me what it’ll be like to be away from other artists, as I am moving to Baltimore, which is not exactly a cultural mecca, and I say I don’t really know (since my day-to-day existence in New York is pretty introverted, and I don’t go to as many museums and gallery openings as I should anyway).  Some others have said still that it’ll be a good move: I can be a big fish in a small pond, but that type of thinking has never struck me as sensical (perhaps because I never think about size). I worry about getting models in Baltimore, just because it’s a smaller place, but I suppose I’m looking forward to the cheaper real estate prices, because then I can have a sweet studio.  Anyway, Baltimore is a big unknown, and that’s scary.

My husband is in academia, and was on the job market this year. When he and I were making the decision about what job offer he should accept (ultimately, we were stalemated between New York/Columbia University and Baltimore/Johns Hopkins University), I kept thinking that if I had a better sense of my life and purpose, I’d realize that there is a One True Purpose which has been driving me all my life and should continue to drive me in the future.  If I were a better person, a better self-evaluator, I would know my OTP (One True Purpose), and then I could program the decision-making machine with the correct parameters and whatever result it would spit out, I’d follow it, no questions asked, because once I come to a decision logically, I’m pretty good at bringing my emotions in line.  The OTP has eluded me.  Those of you whose OTP is God, I’m jealous.  Those of you whose OTP is career or money or family, I hope it leads you to where you want to go.

What I did in the absence of OTP was to make a list and assign numerical values. I’m kind of a big feeler, so I don’t know if being a feeler is consistent with being quantitative, but I’d say I’m fairly quantitative.  I like “running the numbers,” and balancing my checkbook gives me a sense of control and purpose and even a weird kind of elation.  (I know, I’m rolling my eyes AT MYSELF.)  I assigned what I saw as all the relevant issues to two categories: LIFE and CAREER.  LIFE included things like where to raise children, my own intellectual happiness, emotional supports, where Toby would be happy, and CAREER basically meant painting well and perhaps networking opportunities (which I avoid almost as much as blogging).  Ultimately, I thought New York won out on LIFE and may be lost a little on CAREER just because the idea of finding another studio space in Manhattan stressed me out.  The stalemate resulted not because Toby disagreed with this artificial decision-making paradigm, but because Baltimore won on CAREER and LIFE for him.  So Baltimore it was.

In hindsight, the whole LIFE/CAREER dichotomy doesn’t make a lot of sense to me– I feel that I am just who I am.  How could I have a good life without a good career, and vice-versa?  I am an artist, and even when I’m, say, scrubbing the toilet, I’m still that same person.  It’s not like just because I pick up the toilet wand instead of a paintbrush that I’m now in “life” mode.  It’s of course waaaaay too strong to say that I’m trying to make the toilet beautiful with my stain-fighting detergent, but I just know that everyday, whatever I’m doing, I’m doing it as myself.  That self happens to be an artist.

So when I realized it might be tabula rasa for this blog (I know, I’m so good at coming full-circle), I thought, here’s a way for me to blog for myself, as I start a new phase in my LIFECAREER (notice the absence of the forward-slash here, indicating the rejection of the dichotomy that was proposed in the first place).  No more blogging because I’m trying to “market my career.”  Just blogging because I want to, and dang it if the 21st century has rejected the PROFESSIONAL/PERSONAL dichotomy as well.

Godaddy.com has been a complete waste of time and money for me.  It’s definitely the cheapest hosting out there, but have you seen the company’s website?  It’s like if Times Square in New York were a website.  Going to their website is like trying to find the Red Lobster on 42nd Street if you can’t read maps or signs.  Streamline any time, Godaddy?  Well, Godaddy.com has been a complete waste of time and money for me– until today. They found my blog, and restored it.  But not before I wondered whether it was what I really wanted.

One of my earliest blog posts was of the painting I was doing of the view from my studio window in Hell’s Kitchen, on the West Side of Manhattan.  I started my larger painting last fall after first doing a smaller study (a few days), but had to put it aside for a while during the winter.  I started working on it again last month and just finished it this morning (and I mean, I really finished it: it’s been varnished, photographed, and cabbed down to Eleanor Ettinger).  Here is the shot of the painting on the easel.

I have been in Hell’s Kitchen for almost 4 years now.  The area is sometimes referred to as Midtown West (if you’re being generic) or Clinton (if you are in real estate and don’t want to have to say the word “Hell” to describe the somewhat uncategorizable neighborhood that was the background to West Side Story, the scene of the infamous 2008 Weekend-At-Bernie’s episode in which two men rolled a dead guy to the Western Union on 9th in order to cash his social security check, and the choice parking spot of last month’s failed Times Square bombing– no smoking gun, but there was a smoking Nissan Pathfinder).  Ah, yes, Hell’s Kitchen: I shall miss you. Except, of course, on Broadway matinee days, St. Patrick’s Day (when you are covered in green vomit), and New Year’s Eve (when you are covered in vomit-colored vomit AND confetti).

The pink building on the left in the detail is Worldwide Plaza whose offices include the white-shoe firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where many of my diligent former law school classmates while away the days– and nights–accumulating the accumulatable: billable hours. The white building with the green roof is PPAS, the Professional Performing Arts High School.  It’s not LaGuardia High School, of “Fame”-notoriety, but I like to imagine the lives of the school’s current students– at least as much as I don’t like to imagine the lives of Cravath’s current associates.   The building with the diagrid glass facade is the Hearst Building, and the two matching towers next to it is the Time Warner Center, which I visit a lot actually– the first few floors are like an upscale mall.  Having grown up in Houston, I’m a bit anti-mall, but I actually go to Time Warner a lot because I’m bourgeois and I like Bouchon and Williams-Sonoma, and Hell’s Kitchen has a dearth of bookstores, but the mall has a Borders (the worst Borders in existence, but a Borders nonetheless).  That brownish-yellow building with the yellow stone accents, I have no idea.  In the foreground we are facing the back of Restaurant Row there.  I have actually never eaten anywhere on Restaurant Row because it reminds me a little bit of the main drag in Guilin, in Guangxi Province, PRC, where all the restaurants worked really hard to market themselves to travelers. I guess lots of cities that get guests and tourists have some strip like that, where everything is prix fixe and translated into multiple languages and the hosts call to you from just inside the awning. Guilin was just one of my earliest experiences of that.

My painting, “Inspiration Lies on Top”, was accepted at the 79th Annual Hudson Valley Art Association Exhibition at The National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, in New York. The HVAA was founded by a group of Hudson River School painters and began meeting at Jasper Crospey‘s studio.

The show is up July 2nd through the 30th. If you are interested in viewing the show, please call The National Arts Club at 212-475-3424 for viewing hours because I’m not sure you can just come straight in since it is a private club.  Thanks!

A friend of mine, Rebecca, is posing for me right now.  Here’s a quick point-and-shoot image (apologies for the fish-eyed-ness of the image).  I’m on my second pass right now. She’s in Europe, so the painting is on hiatus for the moment.

I haven’t been posting this month too much because of some family things that have been keeping me busy, but last week I did get to paint my friend, the art historian Ross Finocchio.  Ross is working on a dissertation of Henry Clay Frick and his collection.