O'Keeffe's Abstract Relief...

I have a love\ hate relationship with Georgia O'Keeffe, I love her feminist realization, I love that she was married to one of the greatest photographers of the modern age, I love that she went to the Southwest and owned it with her imagery. My hate problem with her is that some of her paintings can be loosely described as having as much interest to me as a chick-flick, in fact, they may be the still version of a chick-flick with their vaginal and labiatic verve. But when I read that The Whitney Museum was having a show of O'Keeffe's abstract work, well I asked myself, O'Keeffe did abstraction? So I went to the show, wondering if it further my love or my hate relationship with Ms. O'Keeffe. When I got to the show it was quite obvious Georgia did abstract, in fact she did it before every one else did it. In 1914 at the grand old age of 17, she created extraordinary abstract imagery with charcoal and paper. It was so far out there I'm sure some of the art crowd at the time must have thought Georgia had come from anther planet. There are over 100 paintings, drawings, sculptures that each delight with their self sufficient individualism. After her early abstractions she discovered her imagery that included flowers, landscapes, object and still life's but in the 1940's she returned to abstract and that's when the sexually suggestive abstractions were first assigned in her tableau. The show is like a slow wave that covers you in warm ablutions. And to put a cherry on the cake there are photographs by Alfred Stieglitz of Georgia throughout her life. She lived to the grand old age of 99. I left the museum feeling grateful for what Georgia had given us all in the last century. She was a great relief even in the abstract...

All Is Gold...

The goblins of the world wide web or the bogey man of blogger played a trick on me by making my last week's blog disappear into the ether of 'where did it go?'. I thought I had posted a little ditty about Halloween but when I tuned in this week it wasn't there, lost in the deep dark hole of cyberspace. I kind of think of it as a kind of Hades with the River Styx flowing through it and the river is a flowing garble and babble of words floating into a fiery lake. Oh well enough of my cyber-mythology, fall is here on the Upper East Side, gold, orange, yellow, brown all in autumnal bliss with smells that hearken deep seeded memories from past lives. One of my own is of playing high school football, the smells bring me back to the gridiron where aches and pains still vibrate in my body from all sorts of violent collisions, hamstring pulls, sprained ankles and concussions. Ah those were the days. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, fall on the Upper East Side and what a fall this has been, lingering on with a mellow inspiration and visual deciduous fireworks and with the Yankees winning the World Series it makes things glow even brighter. Walking down Fifth Avenue the psychedelic Central Park streams in my periphery. I sip on my green tea and take in the rapid fire international voices that flow from the lips of the tourists that are visiting all the cultural heavy weights that hold down the Avenue. A waft of sunny wind blows golden leaves down the sidewalk, making it look like a golden byway, gleaming and seeming to levitate all the pedestrians in its way. It is fall on the Upper East Side and all is gold...

Kandinsky Inspires The Guggenheim...

As part of it's 50th Anniversary the Guggenheim has a retrospective of Vasily Kandinsky the painter who inspired the building and has been a favorite of the Guggenheim family since the beginning, Solomon was inspired by Hilla Rebay to purchase large swaths of the painters aesthetic creations that he made famous by writing the creative treatise, On The Spiritual In Art, a must read for those that never understood, will never understand and don't want to understand abstract art. The show is voluminous, so voluminous that I'm surprised the building hasn't floated away. One hundred paintings and sixty drawings line the spiral of the museum in an overpowering transfusion of mind addling images that left me sucking air from my dizziness after looking at them all. But I digress. First thing is the always questionable way of setting up a retrospective at the Guggenheim, it starts at the bottom and you climb up the spiral to the last days of the master but I don't roll like that, I roll down hill so I headed up the elevator to watch Kandinsky devolve from his airy images of spiraling and musical motifs to his youthful landscapes that fill the canvases to the brim. I actually feel that Kandinsky got better as he got younger. This is not to denigrate any of Kandinsky's work, I like it, I really like it, it's just that I feel that looking at one Kandinsky gives me as much inspiration as looking one hundred sixty, in fact, looking at one hundred sixty Kandinsky's was like eating two or three meals in one sitting, it made my head light and my body heavy and my spirit, the real thing that Kandinsky was trying to reach, well I guess it was nourished...

New Gallery On The Block...

I was going to go out and tour some of the Upper East Side Galleries when I was called by my friend, Werner Hoeflich, who said he had a piece up at a gallery on 79th Street. So I stuffed my buds in my ears to listen to some Cats Stevens; I don't know why but Peace Train and Moonshadow make me feel happy these days. On the way I stopped at Viand and bought a hot tea to-go. I burned my tongue on first sip, (there must be a McDonald's like lawsuit I could get some litigious lawyer to support), then I took the top off to cool off the molten Darjeeling and was immediately bumped by a nanny chasing an escaped toddler and spilled the acid hot tea on my left hand, I tossed the tea into the street bin and began caressing my paw. I shook it and blew on it and I thought there were blisters but realized it was the spilled milk from the tea. I almost turned around and walked back, feeling the walk could be cursed, but not to be deterred by innocuous thoughts of doom looming I doubled my efforts and turned up the music. I arrived at the DFN gallery at 74 East 79 Street and was surprised and a bit saddened that it had replaced one of my favorite galleries for years the Adam Baumgold gallery. Fortunately, I found out from the new director, Rick Davidman, that Adam had moved down to 66th Street so he was still officially on the Upper East Side (hooray). The show at DFN was an eclectic collection of portraits by the gallery's artists. It was amusing, entertaining, serious and well displayed and though it might sound like I was less than enthused, I was actually paying more attention to my still hot hand, burned tongue and a catalogue and card of the upcoming show that opens, Wednesday October 7, New Drawings of Susan Grossman. The card soothed my burns; the drawing was hypnotic and looked more painterly than any drawing I had seen before. I grabbed the catalogue and flipped through it with my scalded hand and my burnt tongue licked my lips. These were large delicious charcoal and pastel on paper that riveted my attention and these weren't even the real things I was looking at. After I stopped drooling I took out my camera to take a picture of a painting on the wall of a cowboy on a horse with a lasso but unfortunately my camera was out of batteries. I groaned and left the gallery realizing that bad things happen in threes and maybe my bad luck had passed with the burned tongue, burned hand and burned camera. I looked down at the Susan Grossman card and knew it was so...

Shameless Self Promotion...

		Gallery On The Green, Pawling, New York
		This exhibit is a collection of studies and paintings of real and imaginary flowers inspired by the gardens, garden stores and countryside of Duchess County. The studies are all painted on found paper and cardboard and the paintings on canvas and board. This eclectic grouping of paintings created with mixed media and collage, bursting colors and unusual found objects come together to express the personality of each flower in a flamboyant, captivating way. "I was immediately struck by the intense physical nature of Charles’ painting," said gallery owner Michelle Farnum, "they are dynamic, full of life and color." Long is a self-taught painter, who has painted for 25 years and been in over 50 one man and group shows worldwide. His mercurial work begins with the creating of an abstract background using mixed media, collage and found accoutrement creating a chaos, from this chaos he works outward slowly drawing out an image until it is fully expressed. He has worked with images ranging from Stonehenge, fish, seahorses, cups, butterflies, still life’s and angels. He was described in Time Out magazine in London as "cunningly expressive". He is represented by Art Movement in London where he lived for six years and has been represented by Project Room 88 in New York City and now is showing at the Rogue Gallery in Chelsea. He has had a home in Pawling for fifteen years.

Walk Don't Drive...

I like to walk as anybody who reads this knows, but I got the big idea to drive out to the country so I got a car and drove to my apartment and parked in a space so I could transfer my dog, some boxes and other things to the car, I put my warning blinkers on and ran into my apartment so I could get the transfer of those things done without being ticketed, when I got into the apartment the phone rang and like an idiot I answered it. I never answer my phone because of fear of advertisers, politicians, bill collectors, the IRS, enemies of all kinds and the dreaded recorded win a million dollar scam. But I answered anyway quelling the fear of the unknown and lucky or unlucky for me it was friend from far away who wanted to talk. So I talked and talked and talked and when I was finished I put the leash on my dog and threw my things over my shoulder and headed out the door. There I stood squinting at the place where my car was parked, trying to imagine it still being there, trying to will it back, questioning if I had parked there at all, walking up the street to see if perhaps it was somewhere else and finally ending up in the same place and looking up at the, No Parking Anytime, sign that somehow I had not seen. Had I been towed or had it been stolen? In reality stolen would have been a lot better than towed. I went back to the apartment. I called 311 and was informed that my car had been towed to the pier at 38th Street. When I heard this I was amazed at the quickness and black-ops precision that the New York City traffic department had towed me and informed the communications department of the towing in less than an hour. I wondered why the rest of the city's services could not perform with such efficiency. I headed to the pier and I cannot go into the bleakness of the place, it's like going to prison for two hours but on-top of being held hostage you are forced to pay 185.00 dollars for the tow and another 95.00 for the ticket; so basically I could have flown to Vegas played Black Jack and stayed the night for what I payed because I wanted to drive out to the country. The prison that you arrive at has about twenty chairs and about fifty pissed off people. The people who work behind the bullet proof glass are nicer than I would be dealing with a legion of people who had their automobiles disappear off the streets of New York City. Of course,everyone of them have an excuse for why they parked where they parked and those alibis are usually given in outrageous rants to the people behind the bullet proof glass. After my two hour sentence ended and I showed all the proof of ownership and paid my pound of flesh I walked through the mammoth space crammed with every kind of car imaginable to my car. I drove the car to the garage and headed home deciding to walk in the city rather than drive to the country...

RIP Summer...

It makes me sad, makes me mad; it's been a strange summer with rain and death soaking us with it's misery. Maybe all the notable deaths this summer is why it has rained so much or maybe its global warming, but that wouldn't explain why there was not one day over 90 degrees in June and July. But what of all the deaths; last count it was over 20 distinguished citizens that had been put to rest so far this summer including amongst others, Dom Deluise, Micheal Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Walter Cronkite, Billy Mays, Karl Malden, Davids Carradine, Chuck Daly, Steve McNair, Robert MacNamera, Merce Cunningham, Frank McCort, John Hughes, Les Paul, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Robert Novak and now Ted Kennedy. That's a hell of a list no matter where you stand on any subject. Rumor has it it has been the most remorseful summer of all time and we still have about 20 more days. Is there meaning behind all this death? If I knew that I wouldn't be writing a blog. It has served to prove the maxim that life is short, live life like it's your last day of life, life is fleeting and live life to the fullest among hundreds of other ho-hum philosophical adages. As I walked down Fifth Avenue watching people of all ages, races and philosophical leanings, I thought of the list of luminaries that had passed and what they have done to inspire and lead so many; there has to be people who will take the place of these great people because what they have left behind is the way they lived and an inspiration for other people to live there own lives...