My Love Affair with Alice Neel
Alice Neel, artist supreme.
The permanent status of coronavirus living for the last 18 months has me feeling discombobulated and unattached. My head and my heart are not in communication because if I think too much my heart breaks and if I feel too much my brain implodes from fires and floods and the playpen politics of the U.S.…
Since March, just about when we were at the anniversary date of living with a pandemic for a year, I began drawing women in cramped spaces. In one series, she is lounging on a daybed. The daybed is based on one located in the Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is dated…
I love this painting because … her eyes are forlorn; but she reaches for the pink and blue ether above. her other hands are as strong and firm as the couch; and yet her body is painted transparently enough that her interior is on view. She is constrained by the massive gated door, but there…
Steve and I have friends that live on a mountain near Margaretville, NY in the Catskills. On our way, we pass many red barns, their rectangular bodies balancing a triangular roof, painted a deep Venetian set within a lush green pasture. Wildflowers dot the roadside. A few years ago a little 12×9″ oil painting emerged.