In this self portrait, Mabel Dwight , 1932, looks like she saw truth. Honest and real and committed to observing.

It's getting easier and easier to see the prints and she's once again getting some recognition, her story told, her wit, wonder, and composition seen, and those prints preserved and considered as more than just social record. Sure, there's some social record in there, but there's also a hell of a lot of the balance between carefully weighed lithographic decisions and the instinctual, the impulsive, the need to see. It's there too in Martin Lewis, the kind of looking that so carefully sees the real moment that seventy years later it still feels true.

Just wanted to share.

take care,
Rachael

My week has been a busy one (lots of work, lots of painting, lots to spur my thinking) and now I have so much to say (and so little time before I really should sleep). I'll breathe deep and then tell you...

I got a little email from Anna kindly telling me that Franklin is discussing Peter Steinhardt's book. That same day I spoke with someone who had just moved here from San Francisco and was looking for the $3 drop in figure drawing classes he used to have. Why doesn't Rochester have that? After some small talk about giving up sun and city living, I told him the truth, there are no $3 classes but we have 9 week classes, 3 hours each for $225 (less if you join the museum). I knew from the Steinhart book that the fellow from San Fran was trading in a vibrant figure drawing scene for a town built on photography, not drawing. There are dozens of drawing groups in the bay area, unionized models, and an established and well nutured culture of traditional drawing. Upstate New York has a lot of things I love, but I have yet to find these three things. I wasn't too quick on my feet to remind him of the amazing photo scene here (artists need not worry about getting good slides in this town) or the newspapers which are currently competing with each other to give artists attention, or the number of people I've met who are well read and have years of experience carefully looking. Truth be known I think he was coming to me not for a solution but for a chance to be heard. I bet he missed the variety of places to draw and I bet the longer he is here, the more he'll see. I was glad to have a transplant come in seeking out drawing. I see it a lot actually, there is a real hunger folks have to slow down and draw. The Undressed Art records of a real movement towards drawing, even if, some towns don't have models unions and practically free figure drawing classes yet. It's nice to know there are 'drawers' drawing, the story of why we do it being told, and some good talk goin' on about these things...

I have also been reading the Scarry book On Beauty and Being Just. And just find myself, staring and staring at things like the dying tulips on my table. Bold reds, crazy, passionate forms, these flowers are amazing.


And I think that everything I see is informing everything I paint is informing everything I teach is informing eveything I learn and on and on and on and on... That's why, maybe, somehow, right now, the new paintings feel right. A mix of this, a mix of that, and soon I've got more paintings spread out on the floor all more chaotic than I thought they'd be. There's a battle for control going on with some of the little troublemakers, but the thing is that I am learning to let each painting have it's own story, it's own statements, own confusions and own clarity. I can step away from these troublemakers for a good solid workday and then see them again.


Even in a week like this when there is a good amount of dayjob hectic-ness, of proposal sending (sent!), of less sleep than I'm used to and more worry about every little thing. I worry for naught, if I can just keep my balance with those brushes, those colors, those forms. So I will go on forming and reforming each little painting as if it was it's own little world.


OK, for real, now, I'm off to sleep.
Take care,
Rachael

It's a cold simple life I lead, my friends. There's plenty of warmth, mind you, but as we are learning this first year of being back in our northern home-land, winter is a good time to settle in, clean up, sort out and read. I'm stll reading a little book about beauty and ethics by Elaine Scarry. But my daffodils are dead. The tulips are pretty pooped, too.
Scarry's book is lovely when she conjurs beauty in her description of a palm tree she has learned to see as beautiful.
Or speaks truth, she writes:
When I used to say the sentence ( softly and to myself) "I hate palms" or "Palms are not beautiful; possibly they are not even trees," it was a composite palm that I had someone succeeded in making without even evet having seen, close up, many particular instances. Conversely, when I now say, "Palms are beautiful," or "I love palms," it is really individual palms that I have in mind. (pages 19-20)

But my patience is tested in the second chapter and I'd rather just get to painting.
Aesthetics issues are interesting to artists , no doubt, but I am keen to paint, not read, today. Cold but true.
Take care,
Rachael

It's amazing to walk on a dark cold night in a white haze of snow. Thick, thin, wet, cold, falling everywhere and then these thin dark trees.

The more I look around, the more I listen to stories, I'm entranced by and connected to the history of and culture in Upstate New York. After reading about Lily Dale, I listened to a local radio interview about a new book about Maggie Fox, on which was mentioned the Spirit House in Georgetown.

There is such a thrill to find these wierd little stories in the cold, in the dark, in the history, in the now of this place. Nice to be here.

Take care,
Rachael

What did Winslow Homer doodle when talking to a dullard? When did Stuart Davis decide to paint rythym instead of draw revolution? Why all the itinterant painters (the Johann Mengels Culverhouses that wandered from Holland to Albany to Utica to Syracuse and presulably back again)? The Terra has just announced a big gift to the Archives of American art and soon, my friends, we might get answers to some of those questions...
American Art News

The Terra Foundation for American Art is pleased to announce a $3.6 million grant to enable the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art to increase access to its collections worldwide.

The grant, the foundation’s largest to date, will fund a comprehensive, five-year program to digitize a substantial cross-section of the Archives’ most important holdings, including the papers of a highly diverse range of artists and arts-related figures from the eighteenth century to the present.

At the end of the program, nearly 1.6 million digital files will be available free of charge on a newly designed Website of the Archives of American Art , with select files available annually.

I find it pretty exciting whenever, wherever information central to the study of culture and ideas becomes more accessible.

Alright then, off to work,
take care,
Rachael

"What they call talent is nothing but the capacity for doing continuous hard work in the right way."- Winslow Homer