Day: March 18, 2011

This beautiful oil painting is by Robert Nunnelly and hangs in the “Dish” restaurant in Greenwich, N.Y., one of our favorite places to eat.

On June 4th and 5th, The Bedlam Farm Pig Barn Gallery, a project of my wife Maria Wulf, will present its first art show in the Pig Barn at Bedlam Farm. The public is invited. The hours are tentatively set for 10 to 4, Saturday and Sunday. Further details available on Maria’s website.

The show is called “From The Everyday To Art,” and will focus on found objects and other mundane and ordinary objects that are made into art. Diane Swanson (who helped organized the wildly successful Gallery 99 show) will present her paintings, including some that incorporate computer parts. Jack Metzger of Cambridge, N.Y.,  will show his photographs and sculptures made from found objects. Maria will present potholders, quilts (I’m pestering her to sell her sketches, but she hasn’t decided.) Serena Kovalosky of Whitehall, the founder of the Open Studios Tours in Washington County,  will show her much decorated and honored gilded and painted gourds. And I will be showing and selling notecards and two or three photographs that Maria is choosing. Maria has some very different ideas about presenting and selling art, but she can speak for herself.

This is Maria’s project and her show. The Pig Barn Gallery was her idea, and she is curating, choosing the arts, and fixing up the Pig Barn, a small and beautiful barn behind the farmhouse.

A reminder that this is an art show, not a dog or animal show.

It’s been suggested that we are nuts to open the farm to the public, but I’m not worried, and we will have some help on hand. I think this is a great use of one of our beautiful barns, which sits empty most of the time. Maria is putting in lights, but has decided to otherwise keep the Pig Barn intact. It still has the stone cauldron where many a pig met their end.

Maria plans a number of shows in the Pig Barn. This is the first public event offered at Bedlam Farm, and while it poses some challenges, we both think it’s time. It’s a big step for us, the farm and Maria. She has a lot of ideas about art, the space and future shows. So the public is invited.  Attendance is free.

All the art will be offered for sale and cash, checks and credit cards will be accepted.

The Million Acres Farm barns have survived the winter, thanks to their good and steep angles.

Rose and Fried and Maria and I went for a walk up the hill this afternoon, and I got mesmerized by our shadows.

Still learning Imovie. I’ll get there with the new program.

And so it seems finally to be Spring. We are seeing some grass, and although there is plenty of snow, the songbirds are here, the donkeys are nibbling at the grass and the earth seems to be coming out of its shell. I have been working hard trying to figure out video editing and it is a lot more complicated that still photography, which I do not intend to ever give up. Still, video work is helping me see the world differently, yet again. I am taking my former girlfriend out to dinner as she is working hard.

This has been a beautiful week filled with good friends. We are very much enjoying them.

The video revolution continued through the night. Lost all the video I shot yesterday,but got things working this morning, the Panasonic is talking to Imovie again, after the odd and destructive spat. Technology, like life, is not a straight line. I am re-shooting some of the video I took yesterday, talking to Lenore about the children’s book “Meet The Dogs Of Bedlam Farm.”

I hope to have it done today. Lots of questions ringing in my head after my lessons with Dave Bigler Productions in Saratoga yesterday. How many videos should I take? How do cutaway, and break up motion. I told Dave and Terry that I wished to keep myself and Maria out of the videos as much as possible. The celebrity thing can get strange sometimes, and I want to keep some space around our lives. I story-boarded the Lenore video and am shooting different angles and in different ways. We’ll see.

I am coming to see that as I have dealt with some issues and change, part of my work is owning up to what I have decided and how I want to live. I am sorting through the Fear Machine that is part of American life and making some choices. I have reconstructed my own health care system. Health care is not, for me, an argument about whether doctors or medical technology is wonderful or not. It is a question of how I wish to live, (or not live)  not how I wish to argue.

I will not have large amounts of money with which to retire. I hope never to retire, but I also understand that given the choices I have made in life, I will not be sitting on large amounts of money with wish to relax and give up worries about the world. Not my life.

I am also considering this in regard to the news. I used to work in the news business, and I understand that modern media is not about presented a balanced or genuine view of the world. It is, like Storm Center, largely a fear, controversy and tragedy machine. People are addicted to the things that disturb and frighten them, and this addiction is a superhighway to living an unconscious life. I am well aware of the tragedy in Japan and think about it, but I will not watch the news all day for updates on tragedy. It is just not good for me, and I don’t choose to do it.

A neighbor told me that if people don’t vote, they have no right to talk about the civic life of their communities. I said I thought voting was a choice, and people had the right to decide whatever they wished about voting. People tell me all the time that is wrong to buy dogs when there are dogs in shelters, and I always wonder about that. Why shouldn’t they get the dogs they want, not the dogs other people tell them to get?

Life is a series of choices. I want to make my own decisions in life, and own them. I am responsible for them. Not the people who are always telling other people what they must do or need to to. A good way to get caught in the Fear Machine.