oil on canvas, 11 x 14
The Provincetown Art Association and Museum holds an annual Winter Members’ Show. I’ve entered this painting, Right Here!
This painting is available for purchase, priced at $385. The show will be up from November 10 – January 8, 2012.
This piece, a cross-post from Horizons of Significance, has grown during the writing, pushed ahead by the ambition of its title, only slightly modified by the insertion of the word “Notes…” I’m resisting the urge to break it up into my customary 1,500 words. I need to break that habit as much as we all need not to get too comfortable with the bite-sized nature of blog posts in general, a “rule” I’ve already stretched with my “average” post!
I’ve had this gestating inside me for a long time. Somehow it has surfaced now, with the catalyst of a post by Achille Mbembe, at the height of the “Dog Days” when we’re all distracted and feeling a bit lazy… So be it! I hope you’ll give it a look, and perhaps save it for later when crisper air brings renewed appetite. This may be as close to a “Manifesto” on Art as I come! So with some trepidation, here are,
I’ve spent my adult life in the shadow of the Banks Schooners. Growing up looking out across one of their greatest harbors as the dwindling number and growing decrepitude of their bastard descendants, the Diesel powered draggers followed by the ungainly modern trawlers, left the sea as bare above as they had the waters below.
The following is an excerpt from Something for Nothing. A reluctant rum-runner contemplates the schooner he loves and feels he’s betrayed.
Another cross-post from Horizons of Significance,
The following is an address to be given at the first session of a class at a school that as far as I know does not yet exist. Nor do I know who the students might be, or their circumstances. What I do know is that I’d like to be there, at the front of that room, confronting their eager or timid faces, with the prospect of a long series of sessions to follow, and more after that.
A cross-post from Fine Lines,
To will a new form is unacceptable, because will builds distortions. Desire, too, is incomplete and arbitrary. These strategies, however intimate they become, must especially be removed to clear the way for something else – a situation somewhat unclear, but which in retrospect becomes a precise act….
…The closer I get… the more intensely subjective I become – but the more objective too. Your eye gets sharper; you become continuously more and more critical.
There is no measure I can hold on to except this… making.
Philip Guston, Faith, Hope and Impossibility XXXI Artnews Annual 1966
