I stumbled across Anne Ryan today. Lovely, sumptous surface and color and collages I am hungry to see closer.

In the context of a little old gallery exhibit brochure I found several images of collages and this little story...

It was the usual artist's dinner after a show opening in the early Forties: about twenty fellow artists and their friends met on their own turf in the Village for a Dutch treat celebration. It was a gala gathering at home after the exposure uptown. In those days, even with the refugees from the war zone in Europe, the art community in New York was small, almost familial. This was a dinner marking the opening of a show by Jackson Pollock. The artists came down from uptown on a Fifth Avenue bus and poured into a little Italian restaurant on the lower East side, There were close to a score of us, Pollock and Lee Krasner, Jackson's brother Sanford McCoy and his good-looking wife, Giorgio Cavallon, who already had shown for many years, Mother, me, and some veterans from Paris. We sat at two long refectory tables, and waiters kept filling our glasses with cheap red wine, red ink we called it. Pollock's show had opened at Peggy Guggenheim's, but no critic had shown up to review it. In that period, if a paper was going to write about an exhibit, the critic went for a look a day or two before it opened to the public.

There was spaghetti. More wine. Fruit and more wine. Everybody was talking, and presently one of the artists (I forget who it was) pounded the table with a real thump. He shouted, "They don't care! The critics! The galleries! The museums!" We all listened with a sense of agreement. "They just don't give a damn! And where does that leave us- it leaves us free, free to do what we want, the way we want to, to paint in our own special way, like Pollock's done."

- from a 1987 Washburn Gallery exhibit brochure, Anne Ryan & Circle, who quoted from "Anne Ryan, A Personal Remembrance," by Elizabeth McFadden, 1984

So that's what it is then. Artists making what we need to make (like this and this and what gets remembered are the loud guys at the table, the wine spillers, but the listeners and the wine pourers and the tiny collage makers ought not to be forgot.

Make, look, pour some more wine and speak up why dontcha?

take care,
Rachael

And I have seen a lot of slide shows. Go see the Trachtenburgs when they come to your town. Hard to explain, easy to enjoy.

Take care,
Rachael
more here

Everyday Matters entry today rings true . Go Danny. Be bold, be honest, keep talking, keep drawing. I plan turn my computer off now and remain resolved to do the same. Oh, yeah, and to get me a haircut.

see ya
Rachael

It feels like this in my neighborhood. There is tremendous light, color, and transparency. I'm pulled back to my paintbox. Here's hoping your direction is charted by joy today. Maybe I sound like an inspirational speaker but really I'm just a goofball.

take care goofballs,
Rachael

My gut pointed in the direction and some smart women like Alanna and Carolyn and Anna and Elise and Marja-Leena wrote to me to encourage me to continue what I'm doing. Each told a story of their own decisions of what to blog, how much to share, and some doubts about whether or not info they share would be deemed important to others. It strikes me as funny that I don't feel these doubts in some other art blogs, but I'll think that through and maybe say more later. All I know is that, the writing here is as real as I can be and if my posts mix my daily routine and the art I want to talk about, well, that's honest.

Honestly, I have been bracing the new chill in the air and drawing and waiting for some paints to come and thinking about the surface on some Romare Bearden collages.


On Friday, I listened to an interesting interview on the Tavis Smiley show with David Driskell and more here at this project .

But the other project, I've been up to is playing the google game and scoring a small person victory with the phrase clerstory tungsten . Clerestoryis about the only word I have retained from my brief love of medieval art (Meyer Shapiro at Moissac and Dorothy Glass at Buffalo were enough to get me fascinated. Here's a google game lite to play at work.

I'm off to volunteer at a community arts event, meet some kids that like to draw and try to remember to get some photos of the leaves that are keeping my eyes busy. Honestly, amazing crimson and cadmium yellows all over my street which such amazing contrast to the gray, rainy street...

more soon, troublemakers, take good care!
Rachael