Pink and Blue

Two new paintings, both rather small and the subject matter light...

The first is The Key To My Heart, that is to say, sweet words and poetry. They put a girl's head in the clouds. She has keys where her ears should be. The world is pink cotton and heart candies.
Acrylic on paper and silk with 22k gold leaf. 25 x 32 cm.


Not so the Blues, which is jangly chords and piano keys and sheet music, not sweet music. Smoky blues and stained glass.

Acrylic on paper, silk and velvet, with ceramic tiles, cowrie shells and glass beads. 22 x 25 cm.

The Tease

This tiny tidbit is a very small part of a larger painting done to inspire my friend, Vanna Vechian, to write another bedtime story for us. You may remember that she wrote the very erotic Coffee Bar after a couple of my coffee paintings had been arranged in a collage.

This time the setting is quite different, but no less intriguing. We will be transported back in time to another era. But you will have to be patient and allow Ms. Vechian to weave her spell. This tidbit is just to whet your appetite for things to come.

Looking Good For Michigan Artists!

An nice article by Christina Hall about the end of our fight with the City of Grosse Pointe Park:

Grosse Pointe Park Drops Fight Over Yard Art

The article appeared right next to another article about my fellow artist Ed Stross, who has been in a fight with the City Of Roseville for seven long years for painting the word, "Love" on his outside studio wall. He has won another victory in the Michigan Court of Appeals, which has ordered a new trial:

Roseville Muralist Avoids Jail

Things are looking up for Michigan artists today. Let's hope, for the sake of this great State, that it stays that way.

The Flower and the Fire

She's a complicated woman.

Acrylic on paper and silk with amber, 22k gold leaf, lavender and tobacco. 25 x 34 cm.

Men of Letters

It would seem ironic that the small objects that can free minds and bodies and promote justice are at their best when bound tightly, chained together in rows in a galley and forced to pull together.

Galley:

Nautical.
a seagoing vessel propelled mainly by oars, used in ancient and medieval times, sometimes with the aid of sails.

Or: (formerly, in the U.S. Navy) a shoal-draft vessel, variously rigged, relying mainly on its sails but able to be rowed by sweeps.

Printing.
a long, narrow tray, usually of metal, for holding type that has been set.

A pair of hands types on an old-fashioned keyboard. An inkwell is open and papers with love poems lie strewn on a tabletop. The inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, Sequoyah, points to his letters –writing was referred to by the Indians as “talking leaves” - on a sheet of paper which billows away from the typist like a sail on a ship. A Naval report from the 18th century is printed in the newspaper of the day. Rowers bend to their task as they traverse a world map and rough seas. And an invisible Printer pulls at the handle of his press as the rowers pull at their oars.

These are the Men of Letters.

Acrylic on paper and silk with coffee, lead letterpress type, decals, glass beads and yellow metal. 37.5 x 41 cm.

A Ghost of Myself

After voting yesterday my son and I paid a visit to the Detroit Science Center to see the “Accidental Mummies of Guanajuato” exhibition. Detroit is the first of seven cities on the tour of the mummies. Because of certain soils and certain dry conditions, mummies occurred naturally in Guanajuato and have been a tourist attraction for years. They are on view in this exhibit.

It was a very gentle show of very quiet, long-dead people. The overriding impression was of a dull brown, the color of a worn-out paper lunch bag. Everything had become a shade of that color, from the parchment-like skin stretched over fragile bones to the ribbons and bows and buckles and stockings left clinging to the remarkably tiny, mostly very Indian bodies.

Years ago one of my professors brought to class the mummified body of a cat that had squeezed under the crawl space of his house and died. It was beautiful in death in a pose of agony that was nothing more tragic than the slackening of muscles and jaw. It had taken on the exact same brown color as the human bodies in the exhibit. It was almost weightless and there was no odor at all, except the soft odor of dust and earth. We spent hours drawing the twisted form, understanding the form and the process.

At the exhibit I came face to face with the figure of a woman who had been very old when she died. She was fully dressed in a formerly colorful skirt and shawl, with a full head of white hair and, as tiny as she was, gave the impression of a woman who was secure in a certain level of power and intelligence. I knew at once she had been a witch before even reading the copy. And that she had been loved.

She greeted me with her hollowed-out eyes as if she knew me, and seemed to invite me to come over to the other side for a visit. So I painted this portrait of myself as a ghost, faded and brown and haunting empty rooms with chains rattling and my jaw hanging loose, too. The map in the painting tells us where we have been and where we might be going.

Acrylic on paper and silk with feather border. 32 x 40 cm.

New Marching Orders

My next legal challenge has arrived! My 18-year-old son, voter registration card and picture ID in hand, was not allowed to vote in Tuesday’s elections because Michigan has a law that one must register 30 days or more before the election at hand. Supposedly this is to give the city clerk time to send the voter registration. But he had the voter registration! And when he went to the Secretary of State in order to get his license, he had to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was an American citizen and a Michigan resident by providing all the relevant documents.

He has lived in this very house all his life and we can prove that handily. So why shouldn’t he be allowed to vote?

The other little known fact is that IF he had registered to vote 6 months before his 18th birthday, he would have been allowed to vote in this election. But how many people know about that exception to the 30 day rule? Very few, I’ll wager.

So we are writing a letter to State Representative, Tim Bledsoe, who seemed very interested by the issue at last night's party. Hopefully we can get that law modified to reflect an individual voter’s reality.

It’s always something, isn’t it?