Day: November 2, 2009

I think this portrait of Izzy will be shown and offered for sale in the show

 November 2, 2009 – Spent much of the day culling through photos to choose those to be shown in January, at the Redux Gallery, in Dorset, Vt., where I am giving a talk and offering some photos for show and sale: “Portraits Of My Life,” my first gallery photo show. I am doing a  second photo show in August at the Lower Adirondack Regional Arts Center (LARAC): “Last Days of a Dairy Barn,” showing photos taking from the John Clark farm in Belcher last summer.
  This art stuff is strange to me. It’s a cumbersome process, going through thousands of photos, taking them to the Image Loft in Manchester, Vt., where they will be printed, matted and framed. These photos – of my dogs, animals, farmscapes, Kinney Road – will go into the show, which is a representative and broadly defined series of portraits of elements of my life in recent years. Photos tell stories, and I get emotional about mine. We are trying to put them together as cheaply as possible so that they can be sold as cheaply as possible.
  I am excited about both of these shows. “Portrait of My Life” will open January 9 or 10 and the photos will be on display in the gallery throughout January. I am foregoing the gallery wine and cheese thing for a talk and Q & A.

  A pincushion tells a story, like anything you take a photo of. This one is mystical, close up slightly magical, the stuff of magicians more than threaders.

 Watching me work. Sharing my life. I put the camera down on the floor and called him. He
usually obliges.

 Art that is useful and inexpensive. There’s an idea. Lots of artists tell me that art has been hijacked by people in museums and galleries who have narrow ideas of what art is and who gets to create and see it. Recessions are like a lot of things in life, sparking good and bad things in their wake. Art, like writing, is changing. People who change with it have no choice but to get creative. Enter potholders, symbol of our times.

  Wow, I love the colors and mysticisms in this photo, the real soul of a pincushion. Lots of things just hit – the right time, the right light, the right lens, the twitch in my heart that imagined what the photo might be. Lucky.