Recent Paintings

Recent Paintings and Drawings

well here’s my first oil painting effort…inspired in part by one of my favorite poems, by one of my favorite poets…
 
Anecdote of the Jar
-by Wallace Stevens
 
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

…inspired by pictures from a boat trip the family took many moons ago, a bright sunny Caribbean landscape…

..I’ve spent a lot of time over the years on the water…Lake Michigan, the north Atlantic off Boston, the Florida Keys, the Bahamas, the greater Caribbean…and with the weather what it is right now in Chicago, perhaps I’d rather be on a sailing ship, headed for temperate climes!

…I already have some favorite painters when it comes to the old masters, and the Frenchman Paul Cezanne, one of the leading lights of early modern painting, is just about at the top of my list right now…so here’s the man, as close as I could come to one of his (many!) self-portraits…

…this image doesn’t look like much, but I’m actually quite proud of it…first off, it’s the house I grew up in, at 1706 Lydia Street, just off the corner of Lydia and Lorraine, in good ol’ Waukegan Illinois…and secondly, I had set myself a challenge: use a very limited palette of colors, use ONLY one brush, a big fat thick round one, and then complete the painting in less than ten minutes…mission accomplished:)…
…and the technique here coincides somewhat with what I’ve been trying to do (with limited success so far) with my pictures in general – try to paint very loosely, and try to create the ‘illusion’ of detail, without actually adding the detail itself…this picture might be an exaggeration of that process, so perhaps I’ll go back and add some detail…but at least from a distance it really does look pretty nice:)
…anyway, it brings back so many memories for me…it makes me happy and sad at the same time, if you know what I mean……..
 
…here’s Bridget Rose Dugdale, the British heiress turned IRA sympathizer…in 1974 she stole nineteen old masters -which included a Vermeer and a Velázquez- as a bargaining chip to advance the republican cause. Before masterminding the heist, Rose had hijacked a helicopter and dropped bombs in milk churns on a police station in Northern Ireland.
After Rose’s first, smaller robbery, the judge gave her a suspended sentence: “I think the risk that you will ever again commit burglary or any dishonesty is extremely remote.” One critic called this “a legendary display of poor character evaluation.” Months later, Rose stole paintings worth £8 million.
Rose referred to her radicalization as “a calm political act,” but no one at the time seems to have heard her: the media of the 1970s painted her as the dupe of her socialist boyfriend, ignoring her Oxford degree and doctorate in economics, and her strong political convictions.
“Women terrorists are more fanatical and have a greater capacity for suffering,” says theorist Walter Laqueur. “Their motivation is predominantly emotional and cannot be shaken through intellectual argument.”

…Darci was in one of what she calls her ‘Back Widow moods’…so I tried to catch that…but I think she’s just too young and sweet to really pull it off…

…it’s Easter Week!…and here’s Laura, looking elegantly retro, fitting just right into her little black dress (Coco Chanel might be impressed)…along with her best costume jewelry and her ’40s Easter Bonnet…parade begins soon!…

…on a personal note, here’s my sweet Nixie, as if she’d grown up to be the belle of the ball:)…

…among my interests I probably cherish poetry above all, and over years of reading I have my favorite poets, but John Keats is special, he was one of my first loves (along with Shakespeare) and holds an honored place in my personal pantheon of writers…so here’s young John aged nine, at first glance (with that hair and those seemingly delicate features) perhaps looking a bit frail or girlish…but no! young Keats was a terror! ready at the drop of the proverbial hat to knock the block off anyone who annoyed him, or had the nerve to hassle any of his siblings (Tom, George, and Fanny) to whom he was fiercely loyal…he wrote in his ever so short life (he was only 26 when died of tuberculosis) some of the finest poems in the English language, in particular his incomparable series of odes…and as fine a writer as he was, if you read his letters, you might believe as I do that he was an even better human being…

…as I thread my way along spiritual highways and byways, I wouldn’t want to ignore our wonderful Protestant brethren!
…so may I present Robert Elihu Whitfield Remington Jones- evangelical preacher, fierce abolitionist, fiery orator, and one of the central figures in America’s Third Great Awakening, begun in 1858…he was a young yet influential follower of Dwight L Moody, and later a co-founder of the Young Men’s Christian Association and the Freedman’s Aid Society, both so important in offering succor to the wounded and to newly freed slaves during the Civil War and throughout the Reconstruction era…

…adding to my religious theme, here’s Rabbi Feldman, an emigre from Minsk, caught in the midst of one of his ‘burning bush’ visions…

…for all my Catholic friends (lapsed or no), here’s Sister Mary Angelica, fresh off johnny’s easel:)…
…with a special shout-out to all the Holy Child girls:)