Day Ten in New Zealand

Today I drove from Motueka to Blenheim after two days of hiking in the Abel Tasman National Park where my path wove in and out of temperate rain forest, tidal pools, tidal flats, sandy beaches, warm humid coves, and dry warm rocky points.

I met with the owner of Gravitas Wines today over a spit cooked lamb a Sauvignon Blanc called Wandering Piano. It is a name I like very much. I always considered pianos to be kind of sessile creatures and not prone to perambulating. This one has been on the move for over 14 years apparently - Kazakstan and London to name a few. A client whose name I cannot mention has comissioned me to do a painting inspired by the Sauvignon Blanc. I am to drink and paint.

Tomorrow I return again to the same vineyard to learn more and taste the soil.

Twin Cities Live

While away my paintings were featured on Twin Cities Live with designer and TV host Cy Winship. You can view the entire program on their website. Then click on Tuesday, December 17th and you'll find there is a link for Local Arts!

NWA World Traveler Magazine

In the December 2008 Issue, click on The Buzz...

New Zealand Post #1

This is the beginning. I leave in three hours barring any delays. I am finally excited and present to the adventure of having three months with no itinerary. I only have an intention to create art inspired by the shore. Simple.

Live Auction at Studio

Location: My Studio
Date: Thursday, December 4th, 2008
Start Time: 8:00pm
Preview: 5:00pm - 8:00pm



Auction Items:

Emergence #1 58"X44"


Emergence #2 48"X48"



Emergence #3 48"X48"



Emergence #4 48"X48"



Strong Night, 36"X48"





Chromatic Orgasm (triptych) , 36"X48" each canvas

Alex Kanevsky in Synecdoche

One of my favorite living artists. Alex Kanevsky. Interviewed Here. Has his paintings in the new movie Synecdoche, New York by Charlie Kaufman. He offered this advice to young artists:


"The moment something works well and is under control - is the time to give it up and try something else.

Put all your eggs in one basket. Precarious situations produce intense results.

Forget subjective, it is mostly trivial. Go for the universal."

On The MARQ

Artist Event At Woman’s Club

by Sarah Ramsay

T Lee Fine Designer Jewelery in Minneapolis, MN

Time:

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

6:00 - 9:00pm

· wine and hors d'oeuvres
· Music by Cellist Diane Tremaine
· Sign up to win a $500 gift card,
two diamond pendants, and one of three gemstone pendants

Location:

Tlee
18 University Avenue NE (Across from Surdyks)
Minneapolis, MN 55413

Parking available in the West Photo parking lot

Music Sketch #27

at the Woman's Club of Minneapolis, MN

You are cordially invited to
An Evening of Experimental Art, Music and Inspiration


Music Sketch is an experimental improvisational conversation between music, visual art, and dance:

James Tyler O'Neill - Piano
Dave Madson - Bass
Aaron McCabe - Trumpet
Ryan Johnson - Drums

Penny Freeh and Emily Tyra - Dancers

Painting and audio recording available for purchase.

Friday, November 21, 2008
6:30 p.m. Light Supper
7:30 p.m. Showtime

The Woman's Club of Minneapolis
410 Oak Grove Street
Minneapolis, MN 55403
612-813-5300

Tickets: $39.00

Advanced Reservation Required
For reservations, please call The Woman's Club of Minneapolis at 612.813.5300.

This event is part an exhibit of new original Music Sketch Paintings created privately within the last six months. Exhibit runs November 1-December 31, 2008




Music Sketch #25, 60"X48"

Art Attack 2008

This is the fall event where you may see the greatest number of artists displaying their recent work at the Northrup King Building of Minneapolis, MN!

The painting below is one of many new paintings exploring familiar movement in a new color palette...

Thursday, November 6th
(First Thursday)
5:00 - 9:00pm

Friday, November 7th
5:00 to 10:00 p.m.

Saturday, November 8th
12:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Sunday, November 9th
12:00 to 5:00 p.m.


To the website gallery...

Music Sketch #25
October 28th, 2008

With new guy Ryan on drums, Dave Madson on bass, Aaron McCabe on trumpet, and Jim O'Neill on the keyboard. We reached a synchronicity we've been striving for.

Being in Europe

To generalize. The experience of Europe is a little maddening in a good way. It wakes up sleeping parts of my mind and then suddenly I must do something with them. Now there is more to deal with. A sleeping dragon poked opens an eye.

A couple new music sketches

Anticipation is building for Music Sketch #27 - the next public performance of Music Sketch on November 21st at the Woman's Club of Minneapolis. Well, my anticipation is building anyways. Jim and I have been practicing quite a bit, and it seems like we are beginning to figure it out somewhat. Sometimes I would try to lead and have the music follow the paint and sometimes jim would lead and I would let the musical imagery guide my work, but it always turns into something else. Our dynamic is back and forth. Here are some pictures of the last few...



#19




#21

Choreographer's Evening at Walker Art Center

A still from the film, Found You by Emily Tyra and Caroline Fermine. Shot by me. It will be part of Choreographers Evening at the Walker Art Center.

“[An] annual smorgasbord of classic, offbeat, up-and-coming, or just plain zany talent.” —The Rake

Choreographers’ Evening 2008 features: Battlecats, Maggie Bergeron & Company, Tim Cameron, Jaime Carrera, Mary Easter, Judith Howard, Nicolas Lincoln, SuperGroup, Tamin Totzke and Dustin Haug, Galen Treuer, Emily Tyra and Caroline Fermin, Pramila Vasudevan, and Chris Yon.

For more than 30 years, Choreographers’ Evening has served as the major gathering for the Twin Cities’ vital independent dance community. Witness and celebrate the remarkably diverse range of Minnesota dance—from established choreographers playing with new ideas to some of the freshest
talent on the scene. This evening of short works has ranged from ballet to clogging, classical Indian dance to Spanish flamenco, dramatic dance-theater to comic vignettes. Curated by Sally Rousse, vaunted dancer/choreographer and cofounder of James Sewell Ballet.

A Natural...

Stephanie wanted to shoot some painted nudes, and these are my shots from the evening. Thanks to our graceful and patient model.

Music Sketch 15 & 17

Tonight I finished a painting that I had started four months ago. The initial painting was created as a live music sketch with an audience and we finished the painting without one. Finally there is resolution to the story of this painting whose beginning was tainted by very bad news delivered by a dear love interest only hours before I began it in April. The eve of this painting's creation was marked by jealousy and a bruised ego, and the eve of its completion is of resolution and completeness.


the final painting "A Grey Day in London"

Here is an image of the painting as it was left on April 3rd, 2008 after Music Sketch session #15...


the initial painting

I call it "A Grey Day in London" based on the imagery that Jim's music created in my mind. While the final painting above barely shows the grey that existed in the previous painting beneath - it still peeks through - a reminder of the shame of the past and the completion of the present.

Body Painting

As a canvas a body presents a unique opportunity to work with an existing narrative. There is no way around the fact that it has its own story and its own way of expressing - one cannot do anything but work upon it rather than create a completely new thing.

El Chipi Chipi

El Chipi Chipi is up for auction on ebay

This extremely popular painting exhibits my classic style of calligraphic line and rich bold colors. Its energy and movement is like a dance - like the El Chipi Chipi dance which gives this painting its name.

The painting is a signed original and no copies or Limited Editions have been issued for this painting.

It was inspired by a Venezulan dance and it's featured best in this clip from the Motorcycle Diaries. It is interrupted only briefly by Che's dialog with someone else's girl.

On ebay it says that I will only ship to the US, however, I am willing to arrange shipping to Canada and Europe.

email me with questions...

Good luck bidding!

Bone Painting

As I continue to diverge in my work I find such pleasure in the unexpected. This particular piece was one such unexpected pleasure. For the lovers of my colorful vibrant swirling work - fear not - these are parallel concurrent divergences. The bone painting marks the beginning of a new path much like the black and whites did. This is certainly a very different aesthetic!

So much is conveyed in this piece - it is like a shroud or swaddling or bedsheets or something. It is as if something has been un-tombed. The bones lie in stark contrast to the softness of the "sheets." They seem somehow cradled and held in a careful, yet carefree manner. The sheets seem to move and flutter as if moving through the air. It is life and death and sleep and care - the hardness and longevity of bone against the softness and fleetingness of textiles carried by wind or tossed off a bed. The imagery is both haunting and beautiful. For me, it is the simultaneous horror of finding bones in one's sheets and the sacredness of beholding some holy relic.

The bones are from a goose I found while teaching outdoor science to a group of school children in Upstate New York. "You never know what we'll find!" I would say, "when you think you've come and seen it all - there is always one more thing." That is how I hope this piece and many of my pieces are viewed. That when one has been satiated with an image - I hope there is always one more idea spurned, or one more detail illuminated. With that we'll never suffer boredom.

Medium

Today I went to a spirit medium and received messages from; yes, you guessed it, my mother. Now, I had to go do something as a few of my spiritually connected friends were getting messages and I figured I would try to go straight to the source. When I arrived for my reading I was told that it would proceed like I was listening to one side of a telephone conversation and that I should not expect anything in particular since I could not dial directly, and we merely had to accept whatever call came in!

It was a mesmerizing hour of one way conversation as my mother came through very similarly as she did while she was living - extremely talkative, vivacious, insistent, and a little impatient. She spoke of things that only a mother would know and it assuaged any skepticism I might have held about the work of people that communicate with the spirit world. By the end of the reading I was in kind of a heightened state of awareness and awe. Everything seemed different. Of course as I walked out I thought of all the things I could have asked when I was given the chance to ask questions. However, none of it seemed to matter. It doesn't matter if I ever get a clear answer about why I was sent to a Catholic School for six years!

One of the things I can share of the reading was that my "spirit guides" came through and spoke about my working as an artist. Apparently the creative force within burns so hot and the path is so clear that there is no danger that "you might go be an accountant. Furthermore there is an unraveling or unleashing going on now and in the future that is leading to greater and greater freedom and creativity. I was glad to hear that a creative recession is not likely in the spiritual forecast. They also said that I need not get all crazy and go to Tibet on a spiritual journey - "just keep painting," they said. I could have told them that, and it is fun to have congruency.

Black and White Paintings

Here is the full series of the black and white paintings so far. They explore what is hidden and what is unsaid; what is covered, and what is revealed. Rather than swirling lines these explore the use of characters in a language of mark making that I explore. The black and white characters are layered over each other with varying opacity to create a visual effect where the viewer can feel as if it is possible to step into the text.

This painting was the first ever of its kind and gave birth to the exploration of emotion without the extra information that color provides


Hidden #1, 120"x72"



Hidden #2, 84"x72"


Hidden #3, 120"x72"


Hidden #4, 96"x72"


Hidden #5, 120"x72"


Hidden #6, 120"x72"


Hidden #7, 120"x72"


Hidden #8, 120"x72"

Ballet Perfomance

To celebrate the birthday of my late mother on July's First Thursday my friend Sally Rousse performed a short ballet of my mother's life and death. It was an amazing impromptu dance that was arranged only days earlier and commenced without announcement. It was a touching and deeply moving piece to say the least. Many in the room were moved to tears within the first few minutes and were obviously affect by the sheer beauty and magic of Sally's trained and improvised movements. The unexpected unfolded as we watched her pour salt across the room, kick at props, twirl herself into bolts of fabric, and finally lay down and stare into the audience with the abject vacuous eyes of a woman without recourse. Applause was slow to follow as we sat stunned by the sheer power of the six minute piece choreographed to Leonard Cohen's Dance me to the End of Love.

"Dance Me To The End Of Love"

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We're both of us beneath our love, we're both of us above
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

First thursday, July 2008

Thursday, July 3rd
5:00pm - 9:00pm

This First Thursday includes complimentary Barbecue!

Please join me at the gallery/studio to talk, eat, drink, and view two new paintings.







July 3rd is also the birthday of my late mother. I invite you to join me to quietly celebrate that with me as well in whatever way we see fit...

On March 19th, 1996 she committed suicide one month after a heartbreaking episode with her current husband. What can I tell you that would be worth reading? The experience gives me first-hand experience with the depths of human existence. I understand rage, loss, confusion, depression, sadness, abandonment. All of these are so close to happiness, passion, forgiveness, love, and bliss that the understanding of one extreme informs the other.

The most incongruous part of her untimely death and seemingly sudden spiral into depression is that I knew her as such a vivacious spirit and feisty maverick. She was the black sheep of her family - the youngest of three daughters. When she came from Quebec at 19 years old she spoke very little English and faked her way through the interview process when she wanted to get a job as a stewardess. She would tell me that she worked so that she could take time off and all my life I knew her this way. As a stewardess she learned English, traveled the world, and eventually met my father in Tahiti.

As a child she played in the woods a lot - caught bullfrogs, kept them as pets and dressed them up in doll clothes for tea parties. She climbed trees, slept outside, and didn't notice boys until she was in her twenties. Her family thought her strange, and she would eventually pass on the weird genes to me. My sister got her good looks and similar vibrant personality - I just got the weirdness and the inclination to eat a lot of salt. She would eat raw rhubarb with salt and passed on this habit to me. She had a taste for oysters, fish, scallops, and wine. Well, maybe not a very distinguishing palate for wine as her penchant for Franzia White Zinfandel could attest. While I hate the White Zin now I actually enjoyed her permissive nature as a child and drank it with her.

Seriously, she was strangely permissive - she would leave the house so that I could have raging parties, and actually booked a hotel room and packed a cooler for my prom date and I in high-school. Anyways, about the weirdness: she just enjoyed things that were so foreign to most of her suburban contemporaries. Aside from having a nice little house and mini-van we were anything but similar to the other suburban larvae living in Metro-Detroit wasteland.
She had this inclination towards dead things, old things, and odd esoterica. A nice list of some of her oddities ought to be interesting:

• She joined a rock and fossil hunting club and took her two children to quarries to mine for crystals
• She was a garage sale antique fiend and would bring home taxidermy specimens
• She collected artifacts, furs, teeth, bones, and elephant hair bracelets
• She collected giraffes and snow babies later in life which is so heinous and was seriously scarring to me
  
• She couldn't properly pronounce H's or contractions like can't or won't
• She couldn't say "worm" without it sounding like "warm"
• She allowed me to have a pet raccoon when I was six, and a checking account at 14 years old
• She virtually denounced the Catholic church but thought I should endure six years of a private school run by nuns
• She had a huge and very heavy fur comforter-like-thing that was made from the thick dark fur of Chinese dogs.
  
• She brought a six foot African giraffe carving onto the plane as carry-on
• She dealt out no punishment when the neighbor caught me making and detonating bombs in the backyard - when I was in middle school!
  
• She let me play with electricity as a child
  
• She encouraged my desire to create a museum in my bedroom when I was six and helped me build my collection by buying me a horse's skull from a garage sale
• She liked tent camping and long road trips with two young children
• Before my father she dated mountain men
• She ate raw egg yolks with salt and put the egg-whites on her face as a mask
  

More later...

some pressing errand

Beyond fame and fortune lies an integrity of spirit necessary to carry one toward the highest expression of self and the highest expression of humanity. That highest expression can no more be that of nobleness, grandeur, or righteousness than it can be of squalor, laziness, and evil. It is all of these things. The highest expression of humanity and self is that of honesty. The fullest honest expression of the human experience as it has been told and retold for thousands of years is the artists quest. This quest is the highest errand and its rewards lie beyond any earthly promise and perhaps even beyond any heavenly rewards believed or true for we know not what they are.

What rewards are there then - the admiration of peers - the adulation of critics? From where do the boons come? From within? The feeling of a job well done? If there were a reward would it ever be enough if it came from without rather than within? Where then? What then? It could only come from within; that internal pleasure and knowing that one's work is being done and one's being is working towards some goal that can never be reached.

The work of the artist carries no reward worth working toward. To play on myth: the quest has no reward - the scrolls are blank - the hoard of gold is worthless, and no amount of heavenly virgins can satisfy the ache and wonder of the human mind.

It is only the answering of a call that has the artist create. It is without reward to create. What of beauty? What of evil and good? Even these lack honesty - to judge and deem beautiful, ugly, evil, grotesque is base. It is superficial and trite. One can look beyond these judgments and see further toward the truth - the asymptotic truth that can never be reached. At this truth there is no good and evil though the human experience may seem to be full of such categorization. Truth lies beyond these in some universal constant that is expressed in us as emotion and instinct.

Somewhere between emotion and instinct lies for us the beauty of humanity where we act and react wondering if we act and react of our own free will. Is it all written? Is there destiny or fate? Even these become parochial views when considered in the universal context. What plan can exist inside of our expanding universe - our breathing universe that we have the pleasure of knowing now as being on the out-breath. Was there a Big Contraction before the Big Bang? That is a question that guides this artist.

With this question, no reward, and a commitment to create with honesty one can be left lost unless guided by some higher knowing.

Ico Gallery, Tribeca

The next show will be in Tribeca, NYC at the Ico Gallery!

Opening Reception
June 6th, 2008
7:00pm, Classical Performance, Opera
8:00pm - 10:00pm, Cocktail Reception
Show Continues until June 25th
Afterparty details to follow....

27 N. Moore
New York, NY 10013

Map

Other Artists:

Barbara Allen
Brenda Warner
Liz LaBella
Petra Nimtz
Steven Krueger
Sumner Crenshaw

My Sister in USA Today, April 30th, 2008

Follow this link and click on the image of the dog's vest to view the full gallery of images:

http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2008-04-29-therapy-pets_N.htm

Tahiti and Mom

My sister and I have decided to disinter the ashes (cremains) of my late mother and bring a portion of them to be scattered in Tahiti. The remainder will be used to create two paintings - one for each of us.

I share this with you, dear reader, because you are my witness and my companion on this adventure. If you have experienced my paintings then you have been present to something inside of me, and I would like to continue to share the artistic journey as it unfolds.

This idea of exhuming the beautiful and ornate blue urn that has lied underground for 12 years is a bit confronting to say the least, and yet it seems perfect. My sister emailed me to offer the suggestion of bringing "Mom" to Tahiti only days ago on the same day that I had been researching the use of cremains in various unconventional ways. However, I had not even thought of my own mother's cremains, nor had I mentioned it to my sister, ever. We hadn't even spoken about my mother in a long time. The timing of her writing seemed serendipitous. What are the chances of me just happening to be reading about putting cremains into reef balls, paintings, or shooting them into orbit (which is all kind of a random reading topic for me), and my sister just happens to write with a seemingly random suggestion of bringing our mother's cremains to Tahiti? Seriously.

Why bring her cremains to Tahiti? That was where my parents met and fell in love. We will complete a circle there - we will leave part of her there where we began. The time has come for us to be complete, and I'd like to share the journey of completing with you. When you see the paintings or other works you'll know what inspired them to be.

Now I have to figure out how to obtain the cremains and the urn from the cemetery. Legally, of course. We're not grave robbers. However, I do have a tendency for breaking fragile ceramic things and therefore the responsibility of carrying the urn at anytime should trustingly lie with my sister.

May Day Soirée

Please consider attending the MAY DAY SOIREE benefiting Camp Get-A-Well-A, and bid on a painting of mine!

Thursday May 1st, 5:30 - 8:30pm

Minneapolis based Camp Get-A-Well-A (CGAWA) serves hospital-bound children and their families across the country (and regularly operates at Gillette & Children's locally.) From campfire sing-alongs, to arts & crafts, carnivals, canoe rides, s'mores, and even nature hikes, CGAWA is the only camp that brings the learning, laughs and memories of camp to children in the hospital. It's free to the hospital and free to the families-- so far they've reached over 7600 campers, and they have several requests for more camps -- but cannot reach more children without raising more money.

Their first fundraising event is at the new Joffe MediCenter (just 2 minutes outside Minneapolis at I-394 at Penn) -- where you may enjoy beer and wine plus signature cocktails from locally-produced 45th Parallel Vodka and food from local celebrity chef, Philip Dorwart. Parking is easy and the event is free.

for more: www.campgetawella.org/maydaysoiree