These are from this summer, all in my mom’s neighbourhood.

I’m working with photos for a few days to distract myself from some technical difficulties with the other series I’ve been working on. I’ve looked around to see if anyone else is doing a similar process with inks, pencil and encaustic, but haven’t seen any, so I’ll go back to experimenting with the propane torches tomorrow. So far nothing big has caught fire or blown up, that’s good anyway.

Earlier this evening I was showing a friend the website of one of my favourite photographers, Michael Eastman – his Cuban and Italian photos are incredible. Then I learned of the death of Roy DeCarava, another amazing photographer. I was trying to pick a few of his photos that I liked best, but it is so hard to choose. This is one of many, and this, and this. They are so evocative.

Now that I have loaded my photos onto this post I’ve decided I don’t like the way they look small. I love how art has such a different effect at different sizes (except when it doesn’t work small on my blog). I spent the day at an art museum with some friends recently, and was loving the difference between various pieces close up and at a distance. And the texture, that fantastic delicate texture of drawings and miniatures, it’s all completely lost in reproduction.

These are details of one of the paintings in the stash that inspired Barbara Levine (former director of exhibitions, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) to write ‘Finding Frida Kahlo‘. The trunks of materials (diaries, letters, recipes, paintings, stuffed hummingbirds, and so on) have been called forgeries by some interested parties in Mexico (ArtSlant article, NY Times article, Christopher Knight’s take), and I am curious to see how this all plays out.

Detecting forgeries is a difficult art, because the science can be faked (although sometimes people are so sure of their ‘eye’ that they refuse to believe scientific evidence to the contrary, e.g. de Groot insisting that ‘Merry Cavalier‘ was by Frans Hals despite the fact that some of the paints used were not developed until long after Hals had died), and of course mistakes are made both ways (a collector of Rembrandt burned one of his paintings thinking it was a forgery, later it turned out it probably wasn’t).

Both those claiming these were Frida Kahlo’s belongings and those crying fraud have a stake in the outcome, influencing the way they see these pretties.

I do love Frida as a deer, a friend almost bought this version years ago, but didn’t, because it would have been a quite a stretch financially – of course looking back he thinks it would have been worth the sacrifice. So often in life it would be nice to have the benefit of hindsight ahead of time, eh?

Click the link below to see more:

“Finding Frida Kahlo” by Barbara Levine from Princeton Architectural Press on Vimeo.

The warm colour of this piece doesn’t appear when I put it on the blog, nor the texture, of course. I love it when I get to visit art I’ve only seen in reproduction and can finally see the surface and the real colours. Size also has such an impact, whether because a piece dominates the space or because it is small and draws the viewer in, and none of that comes across in a book or on-line.

At this time of night my wish is for more hours in every day, there never seem to be enough daylight hours for anything I do with colour. Plus more hours in the night for composing. And calorie-free chocolates.

I started this piece with a chalk sketch of a lovely 10-year-old I know. She has a beautiful wavy blond mane and a lovely singing voice, neither of which shows up here. I love her eyebrows, their angle gives her a vulnerable look.

Sometimes when I sit down to compose a new picture I can’t figure out how to start, the visual equivalent of writer’s block, I suppose.  Suddenly I can’t remember how, as if I’d never done it before, and I swear it happens every third time I sit down to sketch out something new – absolutely ridiculous.

After struggling for a couple hours somehow I finally tap into it, then spend the rest of the night sketching out new pieces.  Until when I should be getting up the next morning.

Luckily, there’s the work of creating the final versions before I do it all again.

This window is in a beautiful building in the village my mom lives in, it was abandoned 19 years ago.

In my art I like to use images from my life and the places I’ve explored.  Damaged old buildings evoke so many emotions, and questions.

This piece is not finished but I haven’t figured out where to go with it next.

This is what I’ve been finishing up this week, another architecture + script.  I love gothic anything, I haven’t put the buildings in my work much, but I do use this old Italian handwriting frequently.

All the travelling has stopped (for now) after a weekend at a beautiful town up the coast for a wedding (also beautiful). My computer celebrated by coming down with some dreadful, barely fixable condition, and now, after everything it went through as a cure, I’m having a hard time finding my stuff. I may have to learn quite a bit more about computers to get everything re-organized, adding to the chaos of moving back in to my regular life.

It has not been enough to keep me from thinking about a trip to New Orleans in March though, I’ve been dreaming about the food, music, and the architecture.

For this I used the image of my mother’s doorway – sitting here I can smell the stone and plaster walls (unless my sister is cooking ratatouille, bread pudding with ginger toffee, or some other deliciousness). The house dates back to at least 1595, the records before that were lost when the town was sacked in 1576, and when she moved in the only plumbing was a sink underneath the window to the right of the door, all cooking had been done in the fire.

I love row houses because I love town noise, and my mom’s house is so accessible when someone drops by for a visit, but my dream house would be a ‘portland’, a row house with a long strip of garden behind.  I recently stayed in a beautiful example of that in a medieval town outside London while visiting relatives (including my most adored aunt and uncle who are fixing up a barge in the gorgeous port of Sandwich), the garden was 40+ feet wide and 630 feet long, on a south-facing slope with orchard, pond and nuttery.  Perfection.  An upscale version, built 70 years after the one I stayed in, is Rothe House in Kilkenny, which has been restored and opened as a museum.  It would be great to be part of a project like that, they did such a good job on the gardens and orchard, and next time I’ll definitely spend more time in their library.

This is one of the pieces that doesn’t seem to be quite finished, but I’m not sure what it needs.  I keep going across the room to look at it, but the solution has not jumped out at me, so I will let it sit a while then try again.  It’s funny how time can change what one sees in a work.

I am listening to a frog out in the woods while I work but the birds are quiet now.  I’m going to take a dozen of the apples weighing down the trees out back and make a crisp, then take the fiendish hounds for a long run on a trail nearby, they weren’t with me for the last two months of travelling and the one I adopted last year didn’t do so well with the separation (she stopped eating and lost a lot of fur).  The dogs I’ve rescued from shelters seem to do worse when I’m away, plus she is a dominant dog and doesn’t like the boss being absent, so long walks now that I’m back are essential.

Hopefully the time outside will be enough so that I can look at the pieces I’m unsure about and know what they need.

My three+ months of travel will come to an end soon, it’s odd making that transition from mobile to stationary.  No more thinking about which stamps to use, or how much money to exchange, and no scramble to get Ryan Air boarding passes printed to avoid a penalty at the airport that is bigger than my ticket cost.  Post-travel life always feels so quiet, too quiet, but it will be nice to have predictable internet access, plus it’s easier to cook in my own kitchen.  Except that I love to eat but am not that wild about cooking, so I don’t care about that last one.  Oh well.

In these last weeks I’m getting a bit of work done, but I have several pieces that I am 90% happy with and can’t decide what the missing 10% is, very frustrating.

No art today because I am travelling, all packed to Ryan Air’s precise requirements.  These are photographs I took during a drive with my sister the other day, all things we won’t see for a while.  The farmer who sold us honey that day insisted that we come down to pick the tomatoes with him so that we could appreciate the layout of his farm.  The tomatoes were amazing with some herbs we picked and chevre on bread.