Chicken Bones & Banana Peels

Double-chocolate muffin, French Vanilla coffee and a half dozen smiles from my lady’s behind the counter at Jake's Bagel. It's how I begin each day. 15 minutes later I am switching on the lights in my studio and checking my emails. Routine is what I enjoy these days.

Today I had a fellow artist come with a dozen questions for me. To get into my studio she needed a chocolate muffin and my second cup of coffee in her hand. I no longer have students, just artists who have questions about painting and about the business of being a professional artist.

"This is what I do,…" precedes every answer I give her. The usual questions are on her list and I give my usual answers. Then comes “how do I price a paintings?” Maybe it was that second muffin, but I find myself opening up to her about my art and giving her my reasons for pricing. Pointing to a painting of one of my model's breastfeeding her baby, I tell her that painting isn't for sale at any price. I explained it was that moment when the baby looks up at the mother and the mother is looking down at her baby. That moment when true love radiated through the studio. That moment embedded itself in that part of my brain where I store all my future paintings, only it wasn't a future painting, it was the present painting before me. Babies don't cooperate when it comes to posing. With my heart racing, it was an all out painting frenzy to capture that moment.

I told her how this painting changed things, how I looked at art and the business of art for me. Wanting to show this painting, I sent it to an OPA show with a higher price on it so I would get it back. When I got it back the painting was in the box I had sent it in, only in the box someone had placed their garbage. Chicken bones, a half eaten sandwich along with a banana peel. It took a week for me to regain my senses.

There are people out there who have a problem with the nude, and here I had entered a painting of a mother in a bathrobe breastfeeding her baby. Someone who packed my painting for returning it, had this problem with nudes. This was my first such experience showing nudes. I had heard from other artists such stories but never encountered them personally…

Blank Canvas as a Dust Cloth

How did I come about? I wonder about this when I paint sometimes and I write about it in my blogs, reliving my childhood in stories. In my head the beautiful women I paint are the girls who were counselors at the playground. The ones who came to my aid when a bully ripped my sketchbook away from me, and bandaged my knee when I flew off a swing. They were the lifeguards who kept me out of the deep end until I could swim. Cousins, resting and reading in a hammock, along the river at Uncle Al's cottage. These images are with me when I paint. Mrs. Clemen, teaching her son Donny how to cook, comes to mind when I paint my model Anne teaching her nephew how to play like they are cooking in my studio. I had no idea that when I was studying to become an artist I would fall back on childhood memories for so many subjects to paint.

For years these memories sat in the dusty parts of my brain waiting for when a white canvas would be the dust cloth, dusting those treasures off to see if I can recreate those memories with a model. My cousin, asleep in the shade of an oak tree, catching a tiny ray of light in her open hand. For a moment, her white soft hand with that spot of light held me, feeling the breeze and the sound of the leaves high above. Put away in a corner of my brain, forgotten till a ray of light came through my studio window and I asked Jordan to pose so she could catch it. Only then did the memory of my cousin Barbra come back to me. The sound of the breeze in the trees filled me with fond memories. Memories relived through my open studio window, a breeze and the light through the tree outside, and the patient and lovely Jordan posing and resting.