Wrote Mikhail Bakhtin:

” I must answer with my own life for what I have experienced and understood in art, so that everything I have experienced and understood would not remain ineffectual in my life….Art and life are not one, but they must become one in me, in the unity of my responsibility.”

This quote appears in a book review by Gary Saul Morson in the October 2014 issue of The New Criterion.

“Before Flight”

‘What’s Next’

One of these paintings was selected by a jury for a prestigious Manhattan show, and the other was rejected by another. It all depends on the judge, I know in my objective mind, but my subjective self wonders how and why. I see the strengths and passion that went into each.

In ‘Before Flight,’ I painted fashion designer Kristin Costa as her career gets ready to take off. Intensity of purpose and devotion to craft are traits of hers that I admire. She wears a bird mask from her collection based around fairy tales, and a dress designed to represent a B-52 from her collection entitled “Maintain Radio Silence.” She has packed her bag and is ready to go, with a little bird as her familiar in her right hand.

‘What’s Next’ was inspired in part by a notorious murder-for-hire in Atlanta of a socialite by her estranged husband. After years of investigation, prosecutors were able to link a pay phone call to him from the killer who dressed as a flower delivery man. My model, however, is fully prepared to answer the door and take care of herself.
That is the stance I best adopt to deal with the killer competition process!

The author Marilynne Robinson, profiled in the New York Times Sunday magazine, recalls the most valuable advice she ever received. ” ‘You have to live with your mind your whole life.’ You build your mind, so make it into something you want to live with,” she describes her teachers saying.

Becoming a painter means continually building my mind and hands. Some days I wish they stacked up more soundly. The portrait pictured above is one in a long series of attempts to show a woman betrayed and disappointed. Not there yet, I know, and so I must strengthen my heart to treat my tools well.

On the teaching, and learning, of representational art

The best a teacher can do

Is lay out for you

A clear explanation

Of the way he

(Less likely, she)

Views

The way to abstract

The buzzing confusion

That meets our eyes

From which

The best of any age

Has extracted and then,

For our future delectation,

Presented seduction

In which, through manners divers and select,

Our eyes are directed

Into scenes that convey

What the sensitive thought,

What the rationalists felt,

The ways the world works.

Who Will It Be

Selected for the September show at the Atlanta Artists Center by juror Kay Bragg.