Open Mind

"Open Mind"

2001, pen, with coffee and gouache on cocktail napkin, 4.75" x 4.75".
Doodles courtesy of dives in Chicago.

It seemed to go with yesterdays post.

The rainstorm is getting colder and tonight will be the end of a period of temperate weather including some 60 degree days. I ran out in the rain to grab this last floppy rose. I think this will be the last one for awhile and it smelled so beautiful - rare and fine.

Old Work will be New Work

Ideal View, 2002, crayon on masonite, cropped from 10" x 10"

An old drawing I found today which is adaptable for a new project.

I found it for a reason. Art is cannibalism.

You Can See It From Space.

I went for a walk/run/ride today to work off some of the gravy and pecan pie and started in the Forest Preserves which was lovely until I got to this area. The Desplaines River divides Maywood & River Forest and borders a beautiful preserve of indigenous oak savanah.

This Google satelite image (above) shows the area which is east of the Lake Street Bridge in an area loosely defined by the Cook County Forest Preserve. Unfortunately, there have been at least five cases of construction debris dumping in the recent past.

I'm going to do some research on private funding for clean-up and send this link to the local and state rep's. If anyone knows of a model for local waterway clean-up, please let me know.

And it looks like at least one municipality dumped a bunch of old light poles.

Columbus Park Refectory - The Loggia

I get bored doing yoga in the same place so now I'm occasionally engaging in the practice in beautiful outdoor settings. I would like to call this Air Hatha. Anyway - it led me to the Jenson designed Washington Park on Chicago's far western edge. It is incredible lovely.

Insider Art

"Stateville Art Show" 28" x 36" by Prisoner #66720

oil on burlap, 1970

Collection Keith Bringe

I found this piece of prison art at a junk store on the west side. It's only signed with a number and there is an official prison label, as well. I wish I knew more about it as I'm thinking about selling it. The colorful supergraphics belie the inmate's true feelings about the prison which are clear in the monochromatic guard tower and wall landscape inset. If y'all know any prison art collectors (violent prisoners creepy exploitive collections excluded) please let me know.

Studio Field Trip: Lloyd Natof Fine Furniture

S L Natof Furniture is located in Chicago's West Loop neighborhood

Today I spent a few pleasant hours at Lloyd Natof's furniture studio. He is incubating a collection of beautiful pieces right now. We talked about his preference for veneers as opposed to solid hardwood and it seems we always spend one or two minutes talking about Lloyd's great grandfather - Frank Lloyd Wright. He doesn't wear his famous forebear's identity on his sleeve but he is involved and he is interested in the history - especially the approach to design.

Lloyd Natof working at Taliesin near Spring Green, WI, 2006.

Natof enjoys a lot of commissioned casework for clients that include the MacArthur Foundation and some of Chicago's best families but he revels in free-standing furniture. Lloyd currently has around twelve one-of-a-kind pieces for sale. Prices range from around $500 to $6,000.

Lloyd's portfolio holds pieces of superb and durable craftsmanship using luxuriously figured veneers in bookend layouts that have been stained or dyed with a playful pallette. Surfaces are hand rubbed and pollished. Yes friends, in most ways, Lloyd is old-school. People often remark on an Asian feeling in regard to details.

Lloyd observes, "Veneer got a bad reputation because people inherited their grandmother's bedroom set from the 1930's. The adhesives that were used back then were really affected by humidity so you had chipping and veneers lifting off. There are still some purists who insist on 'hide glues' but since world war II, there are many synthetic alternatives. They are much stronger." Ed. note: The term "hide glue" is not derived from the invisibility factor. Think -boiled down horses.

Lloyd sited a historic example of organic glue's temperamental side. When the Metropolitan Museum of art received a piece from the famous art deco master Emile Jacques Ruhlman "the furniture was kept in a van in the New York heat and humidity too long and the surfaces fell off. Off course, the museum just glued them back on."

Lloyd's use of veneer expresses his serious commitment to environmental issues. It's a simple equation. Rare species of wood are really beautiful. Studio furniture often uses rare species of wood. We can get hundreds of well crafted, durable and beautiful pieces from a single tree by using veneers. Isn't this a moral responsibility as well as a valid aesthetic? He has participated in a Chicago Furniture Designer's Association exhibition on the "greening" of furniture design. Natof puts it simply and elegantly, "It's a better use of a tree."

Lloyd Natof's left hand features a ruler tattoo.
"It works really well - I use it a lot."

S L Natof Studio - visits by appointment only.

Hotel Cassiopeia at the Court Theatre

SITI Company's production of Hotel Cassiopeia at Court Theatre is deeply flawed but reveals moments of radiant poetry and surreal glam.

The title of the play is exactly the same as the title of a mixed media masterwork by American artist Joseph Cornell (1903 -1972). The work of art in question is a shadow box collage composed of found objects - a broken clay pipe, a metal rod supports a sphere that can roll back and forth, fragments of astronomical maps and cheap paint. These abandoned things are layered with such awed respect for their mystical power that the whole evokes a kind of longing and a deep desire for memory.

I have appreciated Cornell since I was a kid in high school taking classes at the Art Institute of Chicago*. Thanks to a pair of visionary Chicago collectors, AIC has the largest representation of this brilliant, indigenous American genius.

Cornell's contribution to our visual language is GREATLY UNDERAPPRECIATED. His shadow boxes, collages and even his short films have fostered so many imitations, homages and adaptations that long ago they made a seamless transition to background.

Cornell's layered, collaged style has been appropriated by soulless advertisers, lesser artists (myself included) and even some pretty good filmmakers with rarely a peep of credit or respect. It is my feeling that Mr. Warhol owed a bow to Joe Cornell, too.

And what makes SITI, the Court Theatre job so difficult is the fact that they attempt reconnaissance with Mr. Cornell, himself. The authenticity of Cornell's work and the lack of confessional details about his deep process provide too many opportunities to fail.

Scraps of Cornell's life are on the table: an insular family life devoted to a severly disabled brother and dependent widowed mother, idolatry of popular feminine characters - Lauren Bacall, ballerinas, waitresses. There's simply not a lot to go on and you know what happens when you assume...

Five Words for Posterity; "Too Much Gold Spray Paint"
Mr. Cornell was creating authentic stage sets in his work - imaginary platforms for rich imaginary characters. When repping an artist whose internal world and sense of nuance allows him to combine sand and newpaper in a stunning new level of shibui, you've got to get the "look of it" right. This was not accomplished at Court. The sets, material and lighting seem plastic, fake and tawdry compared to Cornell's brilliant sense of authenticity, romance and his elevation of the mundane to the divine.

Don't expect Hotel Cassiopeia's structure to jive with other plays and films about great artists. "Lust for Life", or in recent times "Basquiat" both had linear narratives. Hotel Cassiopeia presents fragments while grasping at every straw from the experimental theatre bale. One might say Cornell's work is especially prone to this approach but some sense of dignity and reserve is missing.

Regular Chicago theatre goers will no doubt draw comparisons to TMLMTBGB's production of "Boxing Joseph Cornell" which was a moderate critical success and a memorable creation. I believe "Boxing" succeeded because it did not attempt to imitate Cornell's visual style and steered clear of personal historiography.

On the other hand, at the Court production I fell in love with several actors. Ellen Lauren as, ironically, "the Ballerina / Lauren Bacall" lifts us out of this play and into Cornell's rationale for idolizing the divas.

Through January 8th.

Special thanks to Howard White - for the ticket.

*Another amazing coincidence today - after the play I saw my old teacher from those high school Art Institute classes in the lobby. Twenty-seven years ago Betty Blum taught me Museology (museum studies) through a State of Illinois Gifted Program. I was a sophomore and this class introduced me to the work of Joseph Cornell.

I've seen her a few times over the years. Betty is wonderful - funny and smart and after us dim, bratty kids she went on to work as the coordinator and interviewer for this amazing archive - The Art Institute of Chicago Architect's Oral History Project.

The Project is so important. Quite a few of the characters represented in the archive have since passed on to the big drafting room in the sky. Most of them are really entertaining especially an old friend of mine - Jim Ferris (1925 - 2002)- who was a compatriot of Mies van der Rohe.

Pointy Hats

"Pointy Hat Archetypes - The Gang of Four"

2001, gouache on board, 7" x 7".

Since we're between two important 'pointy hat' calendar archetypes - Halloween (witches) and Christmas (Santa) I'm going to post this old attempt at a sober analysis.

Peter & Keith, Yosemite

My old buddy Peter Rothblatt sent me a very funny present today. This pic of Peter and I was taken at Yosemite. It is one of my favorite photographs in the world...ever, period, well except that I'm wearing one of those neck snugglies that makes me look like I have a strange beard. Peter and his wife Mae are two incredible people. The gift and seeing the image made me think of this poem by William Butler Yeats:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

1893

My Old Art

In preparation for a new show of paintings I went through a bunch of old work today. It's an awful feeling - looking at old work. It takes great confidence or naivite (or both) to be a working artist. When you show your stuff to the world you open yourself to judgement, ridicule. Here is some old stuff -

"Farm Troubles", 1998, mixed media on paper, cropped image from 10" x 10" original.

"Gris-Gris Voodoo" 2001, mixed media, 2.75" x 6"
Doors Open

This is a miniature wardrobe from a small edition of 12 pieces.

"Backstroke" 1999, monoprint, 10" x 10".

"Double Profile", 1998, mixed media, 5" x 5".

"Julie's Vacation" by Nancy Abrams

Nancy Abrams was born in St. Louis and has been a working photographer and journalist for more than thirty years. She spent most of her career in the Alleghenies of West Virginia so she has developed an amazing portfolio of hundreds of negatives that document the natural beauty and dissapearing traditional culture of mountain life. Nancy currently lives in Millburn, NJ and is attending the New School's writing program while she restores a 1950 Frank Lloyd Wright inspired house.

I met Nancy circa twenty years ago at he Uptop Farm near Terra Alta, WV. Her vivacious intellectual curiosity and sense of humor hooked me and we spent hours walking through the woods and baking around the fire at night.

This picture is so meaningful because it represents among the hardest working woman I know.
Julie Osborne is a Nurse Practitioner and mother of two from Chicago. More on Julie, later.

Nancy and Julie are sisters to me.

Belle

I grew up on the far south side of Chicago. My neighbor lady was a woman named Belle Haims. She took care of me and really adopted me, in a way.

My mother said, "I brought you home from the hospital and Belle immediately scooped you up. She fed you for the first couple months of your life."

That always seemed strange to people but my mother suffered profound depression during her pregnancy with me and was probably grateful for the help.

And so Belle became a loving, constant and nurturing presence until she moved away when I was twelve years old.

It was an unusual relationship. I was culturally Irish and went to Roman Catholic grammar school and Belle was a Jewish mother of extraordinarily pure yenta-ness. I had Catholic guilt in the morning and Jewish guilt in the afternoon, with the fabulous, zaftig, over-the-top Belle.

Probably in her late forties when I was born, she was a very, very curvy woman who wore a sturdy girdle every single day. She had her hair done weekly - and the style was always a varnished variation of a helmet or a swoopy-do like Marlo Thomas on "That Girl". And it was always a monochromatic, unnatural color - most often blue-black but sometimes platinum blond or red-orange.

Belle dressed in the height of 1960's style. Her devoted husband Hyam "Hy" Haims was a "shoe guy" - a wholesale shoe salesman whose customers ranged from cheap stores on Milwaukee Avenue to couture houses on Michigan Avenue. Belle had dozens of pairs of the best, most outrageous shoes to match tight, sequined dresses in electric blue or embroidered shantung shifts in emerald green. Between Hy's business and Belle's family every week brought another big party - a bar mitzvah, wedding or anniversary to dress for.

She was the daughter of the head of the Rabbis that certified Kosher butchers so Belle really was a Jewish princess. She was a smart and big woman and she would rock me so tightly between her gigantic reinforced torpedo breasts and rock me singing "ahh-ah, ahh-ah, bay-bu-lah".

Belle treated me like a person and we had long wonderful conversations about the neighborhood or who was on the Mike Douglas Show that day ("It looks like Totie Fields gained some weight").

When I was twelve she and her husband moved away. There was a flight of jews from Chicago's south side to the near north suburb of Skokie in 1976. The neo-nazi's had moved into Marquette Park (where ten years earlier, Reverend King was hit with a brick). It was a hateful time and things were uncomfortable. We pretended like it wasn't because of those crazies. Belle would say, "We're moving to our retirement home."

I missed her but she would come visit occasionally and we would talk on the phone. She came to graduations - always shiny and with strangulating hugs.

Belle died suddenly during gall bladder surgery, when I was away at college. I went to sit shiva and the funeral home but not to the graveside service. I've missed her.

This is a true story. Thirty years later - yesterday to be exact - I was riding my bike through Forest Park - a suburb adjacent to mine. One tree lined street led to the next and I soon ran into a fence surrounding a cemetery.

As I circled around to the front, along a busy highway I got a strange feeling. I suddenly remembered when I was nine or ten years old Belle took me on a long car ride. We went to a graveside and placed rocks on tombstones.

Now, I had this strange deja vu feeling that this was the cemetery. The entrance appeared and the sign for "Jewish Waldheim". I pulled my bike up alongside the office. I went inside and there was a very nice woman. I told her that I thought that someone I knew had family buried there. I gave her Belle's family name. The nice cemetery lady's computer was already turned off but she called out to a colleague. After they spent a couple minutes searching through files I was getting ready to leave. I was unlocking my bike outside when the office people called out, "Oh yes. Here's your lady friend."

It was amazing standing there with the autumn light and decades floating like flecks of dust in the air. The caretaker gave me a map of the funeral plots with Belle's "address" written in ball point and an "x" and I took off on my bike.

Finding her grave was a surreal experience. It took around forty minutes of walking through rows, pushing overgrown weeds aside. The late autumn sun was coming directly from the west, leaving long shadows from the monuments. When I found Belle and Hy I felt such a sense of warmth. My eyes burned but I didn't cry.

The wonderful thing about Jewish tombstones is the use of small porcelain transfer photographs, often with protective bronze covers. I lifted the cover and there was Belle, exactly as I remember her (see above). I cleared off her tombstone and that of her husband, Hyman Haims ("My daily greeting in the driveway between our houses was, "Hi, Hy!").

I found some pebbles which is the custom - you leave pebbles so that the deceased or other family members will know someone was there. I lined them up above her picture. Then I heard a voice in my head - as clear as a bell echoing across the cemetery, "You call those nice pebbles? That one looks like tile grout."

I chuckled to myself. She had a great sense of humor. I miss her. The effect she had on my life is impossible to measure.

Postscript:

http://www.loggerheadsmovie.com/

Inside the Buddha

This conservation x-ray of a bosatsu buddha is really fascinating to me because it is expressive of the artist's process.

What the viewer sees at the end is a carefully constructed smoothness but that very smoothness may be comprised of improvisation and piece work.

Click on the photo for a larger image.

"Un-natural Acts" by Frances Kenna

One color stone litho on cream stock, 1981.

I just scanned this lithograph by Frances Kenna titled "Unnatural Acts". Its not numbered or dated but it's on a rough cream paper. It's obviously a drag queen.

I think she told me she saw this gal in San Francisco.

It's in terrible condition because it's been laying around the Uptop farmhouse for twenty years but it's clearly worthy of saving.

Frances is an artist and art teacher (you would have loved to have Ms. Kenna) originally from South Carolina. She lived the last twenty or so years in Preston County, West Virginia and a part of that was spent living in a barn. She does ceramics, as well as graphic work. One of my favorite Frances' pieces is a vase that takes the form of a cow's pendulous belly with udders.

Welcome to Rarenest!

It's amazing to think that the dancing baby is passe, over, a relic of a bygone virtual world. It was a symbol of a new and real ethos of computer aided design and it caught fire as an internet icon.

Blogs galore, now. I've been enjoying them as a "lurker" for awhile and I felt it was time for me to get on the superhighway.

So here I come, kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

I wonder what will replace blogs because I know as soon as I've grasped the fundamentals of this communication technology - everything will change again.

It was the same way with 8-track tape players (I still miss the ka-chunk as my Simon & Garfunkle cartridge changed sections).

And then I collected cassettes by the shoebox - mix tapes that represented hours by the record player waiting for the needle to drop.

And I was so proud to buy a new CD player a few years ago.

Now it's all Ipods.

I'm a conflicted luddite.

I really enjoy technology and what it can accomplish but I am very traditional in my artwork.

We'll see where this blogging takes us.