A History of Art part 13

I put in a few hours at the Studio this afternoon. I started with the SoHo gallery section, redrawing the brick wall and putting some art on the wall. My first trip to SoHo was summer 1989, just barely out of college, and my friend Dave was in town. We went into the city to meet up with our painting professor Bill Barnes, doing desk duty at the Bowery Gallery on Wooster. But we also spent time walking up and down the blocks, going in and out of dozens of galleries. The thing that made the biggest impression on me that day was a show of watercolors by Graham Dean- large portrait pieces made of torn and collaged pieces, paint both washy and bold, with really bright intense colors. Very different from what we were taught in watercolor class.

Some time later I did a black ink monotype based on a photo of our mutual friend from school, Belle Abenir. To make the print more exciting I decided to color it with some of those bold intense colors. The results can be seen above. Not really like Dean's work, but I liked it. Sent a photo to Dave, still down at school, and he also liked it. I made arrangements with him to submit it to the William and Mary Review, an arts/literature magazine put out once a year. My submissions during the years when I was still a student were always rejected, but this time I got in. (it may have been as much because of it being a portrait of Belle, friend to some on that staff) When it was time to pick some art to put in the gallery section my first impulse was the Dean painting we saw, and part of it is there behind the column, but I decided to put my Belle print in the more visible space.

I devoted the rest of the session to working on a large structure based on Piranesi's Carceri (Prisons) etchings. These are a series of prints, odd Gothic fantasies of dungeons, loaded with columns of stone, bridges, beams, stairs, arches, etc. It serves a few functions in my print. First, I have always enjoyed them. Second, the architectural elements can form part of my tower's structure. Third, I intend to put bits from other favorite historical art in the space created. This was my least resolved section on the paper sketch, leaving me a lot to figure out now. What's here is rough- the perspective is all over the place (an issue sometimes with Piranesi's originals as well), and I need to work that out before finishing the architectural detail, not to mention the figures. Looks like I may be stuck in this dungeon for a while.