We're really back, after a quick trip to the Atl (looking all sunny and beautiful, shiny and promising), we have come back to the pattern of our daily lives. When we returned there was a solicitation for an art auction to benefit an Atlanta based art mag in our mailbox. It was addressed to me but written to my friend who skipped town for Charlotte a little after we headed back here. Guess when you're gone, you're gone.

No matter. Atlanta was chugging along nicely for what we could tell. The people, places, and details we had packed in our memories were still mostly there. I managed to stumble upon the painter who now rents my old studio. Apparently the paint is still so vivid on the walls that it is seeping through some coats of white paint.

Detrius, remains, and remembering were so much on my mind, that Rebecca Desmarais' work in the Gathering show at Agnes Scott College , made me cry. (Suppose I have to read the other James Elkins book now ). But Demaris gathered togther so many adandoned objects in such a careful and beautiful way, I was deeply affected.

So, now, I'm sure mr stepping friend moose frog goat potato whatever stepper will comment, and I hope you will travel back to someplace you've once been and I'm off to draw some more.

take care,
Rachael

The work-a-day, work-a-day routine kept me busy this week. Lotsa busy, lots of promise, some frustration, and plenty of cups of coffee but now we're nudging towards the weekend. My paints came in the mail. The Red Sox won. We're headed back to Hotlanta this weekend for a wedding. I'll tell ya all about it when I'm back in town.

Check out this wonderful new (at least to me) studio blog To Leave a Mark that I found at Carolyn's blog  and have fun this weekend, you troublemakers...

take care,
Rachael

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