Tushy of The Daffodils

Daffs are one of those ubiquitous flowers that I used to detest. They are everywhere at this time of year. Poems about them haven't moved me. Sunday walking through Central Park, I discovered something about a daffodil I do like: their back side. Suddenly a flower I've known all my life, looked different, interesting...the connection of stem to petal turned this very ordinary bulb into a mysterious funnel.

I realized I had been rear-ended by a daffodil.

Being Jenny Holzer

Easter Sunday: The Guggenheim Museum: The Third Mind:
American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989

The museum commissioned Ann Hamilton to create a site specific installation in the museum rotunda. Her work, human carriage (2009), "is a mechanism composed of two elements: book weights made from thousands of cut-up books that ascend and descend the rotunda via a pulley system, and a pair of Tibetan cymbals encased in a white silk bell carriage, which cascades down the balustrade along the rotunda spiral."

"Human carriage is a metaphor for the power of the transmission of ideas through books, which, in the artist's words, "leaves no material trace but which might forever change you."

Like most shows at the Guggenheim , it makes the most sense to start at the top and walk down the ramp. The human carriage descends from the top of the museum. One person from the museum actually ties the books onto the pulley and starts the carriage moving. As a result of loading the books onto the pulley, some little bits from the books fall to floor. If you are like me, you immediately pick them up. And try to make sense of these random thoughts, which someone in the universe once put together in a coherent fashion.

We're all makers...

"We're all makers, we're all artists,
we're all hackers, we're all in this together."

- Mr. Jalopy

First Drops of Paint On The Canvas

The First Day of April
at the
Water's Edge Garden on Randall's Island.

The first drops of paint
on the garden canvas.

It’s A Bit Sketchy

Two artists,
two great shows,
in one gray day,
at the end of March.

The experience of viewing a Bonnard painting is related to way I view a garden.

On the first walk around the current show at the Metropolitan Museum, I identify the “objects” in the paintings – a vase, a bowl of fruit, a chair. On the second walk around, the objects disappear and all I see are colors and textures. Wallpaper is pattern, flowers are colors, and figures are shapes. On the last walk around, my brain goes back to the narrative and the structure.

In a garden, I immediately identify the plants. On the second pass, I am consumed by texture and color and light. The garden is like a Bonnard interior. The structure fades away and sensual pleasure takes over.

Perhaps, the most interesting part of the Met exhibition is a little room off the main gallery, filled with small calendars (3x6) Bonnard kept. These datebooks are covered with scribbles…ideas for paintings or just ideas.

Another artist, far from Southern France and the art world, also drew only the everyday objects and scenes in his native Idaho. James Castle, an artist born (1899-1977) deaf, who didn’t read or write, currently has two shows in New York. Without a big review in The New York Times, I would never have paid attention to his work. He used found paper, soot from a wood burning stove and spit to make small drawings of his everyday surroundings that are sublime.

Bonnard never painted directly from “life,” he used the drawings he made as reference points to create his paintings. Castles’ work is his drawings, watercolors and constructions.

With everything I love about the Blackberry, Iphone, and Ipod, these scribbles and drawings remind me how much is conveyed by the hand of an artist.

Can anything digital replace it?

Pierre Bonnard
The Late Interiors
January 27, 2009–April 19, 2009
Metropolitan Museum of Art

James Castle Drawings: Vision and Touch
Knoedler & Company
19 East 70 Street
Until April 25

James Castle
Ameringer Yohe Fine Art
20 West 57 Street