5:07: .fred armisen (born December 4, 1966) is currently my FAVORITE comedian.just now saw him on the late night talk show where he's just in the band playing guitar. he doesn't have to SAY anything. when the camera pans to his face, i laugh out loud. love his surreal humor
3:47 update: as you may have guessed, i'm still confined to the house. this bug is still in my body & i have very low energy, which is why i'm trying to work on stuff i can do lying down. sorry to have so little to share. stay tuned; i'm very anxious to start the next painting and am feeling ready to begin the larger versions, which will be very interesting.
morning post: an art consultant in L.A. who represented my work 20 years ago recently sent me an email wanting to return a set of transparencies of my paintings of interiors from that period. they arrived via FEDEX a few days ago. i haven't had time to digitize them, so i'm shooting them by placing them on a light box. not perfect, but they will give you a peek at my work from that pre-web world. most of the originals are in private collections in houston. below: 2 examples of the paintings. comparing them to my current parade series, i'm finding the parade paintings far more interesting. they're obviously affected by the abstract collages i've done over the past few years, and have, i believe set me free from the pitfalls and possible restrictions of making realist paintings.
arikha: Socks, Paris, 1998 oil on canvas 15 x 18 1/8 inches
in an earlier blog post, i referred to the late avigdor arikha, and how i feel an affinity towards him. when his work started moving in the direction of abstraction, his friend giacometti advised him to continue on his realist track, and to paint only what he could see in front of him. i think that was spot on advice for arikha. the reason i'm telling this story is that i'm discovering that my path is a realist path. and that all my compositional, coloristic, spacial inclinations can be expressed within that space, which is, it appears, my natural space. which doesn't preclude experiments in abstraction and the pure joy of making marks unrelated to subject matter. they remind me of what it is about my great heros valsquez, hals, and company that excites me. the pure painterliness. the joy of making marks.