2 PM: i didn’t sleep too well last night. today at noon our friend david arrived with his assistant to remove the old pump from our well housing and install the new one we got in salida this past friday. it’s a complicated procedure, since the old one is a bit smaller, and the new one had different size fittings. the bladder broke on the old one, which as a result is filled with water instead of air. so he’s working on pumping out the water before lifting it out of the deep well housing and beginning to install the new one. as long as all this takes, we’ll be without running water, so we’ve filled some jars to have drinking water until he’s done. this rather deep well services both our house and my studio. when we had the water tested, they said it was some of the purest water they’d seen. it’s a deep vein, coming down from the peaks of the sangre de christo mountains above our house. there are no farms or grazing on the land between our well and those peaks. the taste is really amazing, and it feels wonderful when you take a shower or bath.
when i got to my studio i was aware of the time, waiting for him to arrive, and i was not in a state to paint or even stretch a new canvas, which i had planned on doing. looks like it will be another skinny one, this time 66x16”. but i’ll have to wait till tomorrow to cut the canvas & stretch it.
view from the roman agora, athens 1976 oil on linen 32x46”
neoclassical building, kifissia. watercolor 14x6.5” private collection, athens
this is an opportunity to take a look back at work i did in the early ‘80’s, when i was a member of fischbach gallery, then located on 59th st. in manhattan.in 1980, i had just returned from my 15 years in greece, where neoclassical architecture was a major theme in my work. at the time. the watercolor on you see here are just two examples from this period.
the view from the roman agora is one of a series of paintings i made looking out my studio window in the plaka neighborhood of athens. in the lower right corner are columns from buildings in the ancient roman agora (market) whic was laid out just beneath my studio windows. directly behind me was the acropolis. in good weather, my windows were open and once i actually witnessed a greek fellow walking up towards the acropolis with an american tourist, to whom he was trying to sell this “admittedly run down but very well located property.”
DETAIL of a 1981 nyc architectural painting
in nyc, i was living in an apartment on the upper floor of a building overlooking central park west. my passion for architecture translated into a series of paintings. i rode around manhattan on my bike, hasselblad around my neck, and shot photos of arcitecture bathed in that characteristic new york light, which even matissse commented on. i don’t have any of this work in my collection; all these paintings are in private, corporate and museum collections, mostly in new york.
st. patricks cathedral 1981, 40 x 60” oil on linen private collection, new york city