POST #150: ONLY AN ONLY CHILD…..

My late husband (he died ten years ago) was a Clinical Child Psychologist. He would walk into my studio, take a look at the cast of characters I was working on and declare: “Only an only child would do this!” And he was right. Growing up, I longed for brothers and sisters, not realizing until much later that all my friends who had brothers and sisters considered them pains in the neck and would have gladly been ‘only’ children. I think about his comment a lot now that I live and work alone.

"Celestial Figure"
2017 oil on canvas 68"x44"

For many years, I used artwork to create “company,” people to talk to. Because of that, the figures I paint, while not realistic in a photographic sense are very “alive”; that’s my goal. They have to “talk to me,” make eye contact.  It’s a magical process and I honestly don’t know how I do it: at some point I’m looking at the figure I have just drawn on the canvas and that figure is LOOKING RIGHT BACK AT ME! It’s weird! We make eye contact and TALK to one another. (No, I am not going mad from being alone) I used to fill my studio with paintings of people to make up for the siblings I never had and now it’s for the friends and family I have lost.

"Street People"
oil on canvas 55"x24" each

For the past year or two, I’ve largely abandoned figurative work for architectural fantasies, imaginary urban landscapes built on years of teaching art history and living in New York. When people do appear, they are shadowy, mysterious figures that haunt the rooftops, often astride imaginary pre-historic beasts, as if the city were a giant painted cave. Every once in a while I long to come back to the real world and do some ‘people painting’. The figures I am working on now are a warm up for a series of paintings of 125^th Street in Harlem that I plan to work on this winter.  I started exploring Harlem over a half century ago when I attended the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan on 135^th St. At the time, it wasn’t the best neighborhood in New York, but it was definitely among the most visually interesting. Then came the drug plague and Harlem was out of bounds - especially after dark. Fortunately, it’s once again a safe and colorful place. I can walk around with my unobtrusive IPhoto camera and nobody notices they’re being preserved for posterity.