ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH...AN ARTISTS PARADISE

        Back in the early 2000's we spent a short time in Colorado, namely Boulder and Estes Park.  If your not old enough to remember the 1960's, visit Boulder Colorado.  It is like a flash back to the old days where you can still see VW love vans with flowers and peace signs all over it, pop art and gray haired flower children walking around.

        There is of course rock climbing if that's your thing, it's not mine, I get sweaty palms just thinking about it, but the scenery is spectacular.  But I just wouldn't climb up there to paint it..

        We had friends there and they showed us every thing there was to see.  I always feel more creative when I'm in an environment like that, everything from sidewalk cafes to open air art galleries, it just gets the juices flowing.

        Below is the view you get of the Front Range Rocky Mountains while driving to Estes Park

        In the middle of Estes Park is Bear Lake, a beautiful lake way up in the mountains, it's like God painted it there

        Sitting right beside the lake is an old lodge, shown below, if it looks familiar it is the lodge they used when filming  The Shining in 1980, a psychological horror film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson.

        What a great place to visit and don't forget to take your paint and brushes.

ENJOY THE JOURNEY MY FRIENDS...ZMAKEY

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MATTER ANTI-MATTER

        World's colliding, cultures not co-existing?  What is this world coming to?  

        It  probably hasn't changed since the first civilization on the planet, but we think it is getting worse.

        I can remember my grandparents saying to me in the 1960's, boy am I glad that I'm not growing up in this generation, the world is getting worse by the day.  

        Well they were probably right, it is getting worse by the day from their prospective, but I think the correct observation is that it is just changing.  The world has been a mess from the very beginning, with no apparent end in sight.

        With that memory of what my grandparents said to me years earlier and thinking the same thoughts with my own children, and their future, I painted Matter Anti Matter , a combination of old blending into new, evil pushing into good.  

        No matter how you view it, the world is constantly changing, life is constantly changing, and for better or worse if we are to survive and thrive in it, we have to adapt to it or try to change it.

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YOU HAVE GOT TO LOVE WASSILY KANDINSKY

   
        If you enjoy abstract art and appreciate abstract thinking, then you have got to love Wassily Kandinsky.  I guess that you have probably figured out by now, based on my previous blogs, that I love artists that view the world with an abstract slant, and use color to achieve it.
        

       Kandinsky once wrote "I remember that drawing and a little bit later painting lifted me out of reality".  In Kandinsky's works of his early period, we find specific color combinations, which he explained that "each color lives by it's mysterious life".

        Kandinsky once recollected two events, which affected his creative future; his visiting the French impressionists in Moscow in 1895, and an emotional shock he experienced from K Monet's "Haystacks", and an impression of Rihard Wagner's "Lohengin" at the Bolshoi Theatre

        In 1912 He published "Concerning the Spiritual in Art", turning upside down the established idea about art in general, this book became the first theoretical foundation for abstractionism.

        During the wartime, he named this period of his creativity,  "a really picturesque fairy tale".  Because of the shortage of materials the formats of his pictures became ever less, up to that moment when he was compelled to be content with gouache painting, which is a type of paint consisting of pigment, a binding agent (usually gum arabic) and sometimes added inert material, all on a cardboard format.

Below are three paintings from the period:Complex Simple 1939, Colorful Ensemble, 1938 and Sky Blue, 1940.

    To quote Kandinsky "Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with "reality" next to the"real" world.  Deeper down, it is subject to the common laws of the "cosmic world".  And so a "new world of art" is juxtaposed or placed side by side to the "world of nature'.  This "world of art" is just as real as concrete.  For this reason I prefer to call so-called "abstract art" "concrete art".

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Swirling Brick Wall...Where realism meets abstract

        In 2000 I owned a flower shop with my wife, I wanted to paint a floral scene and decided to make the flowers pleasing and normal, but I loved the idea of a swirling wall which defies the laws of physics.  That's why I love abstract art.  

        Many of the paintings I did in those days were to be placed on the wall behind a vignette with 

an antique piece of furniture, several objects placed around and a silk floral arrangement strategically placed in the middle.  It really sold the flowers.

      

        I don't think I would enjoy painting if it didn't have some intrigue or hidden meaning though.  I especially love the colors in this piece, it really lights up a room.

        It's fun to toy with realism and abstract art at the same time.

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GEORGIA O'KEEFFE...What a delight

        After several years of painting, I discovered Georgia O'Keeffe, and what a delight she was.  I love some of here statements and her body of work was amazing.
      
        If I may quote a paragraph  from the book O'Keeffe by Benedikt Taschen.  Her popularity and outstanding position in American art, are attributed not only to her painting, but to her remarkable personality.  
        Her career as an artist spanned over a half a century, a period ranging from the early days of modern realism to the abstract tendencies of the fifties and sixties.  The fame of her pictures, which resonate with excessive force of color and encoded sensuality has long since traveled across the Atlantic.

        Her subjects, above all her magnificent flowers and her New Mexico landscapes, reflect her intimate bond with nature.

        In 1914 she had read Wassily Kandinsky's Concerning The Spiritual In Art, which had just been translated into English.  Kandinsky's fundamental thesis, namely that color and form should no longer be indebted to outward appearances in nature, but rather to the feelings and "inner world" of the artist, would have an enduring influence upon O'Keeffe's attitude to painting.

        O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art scene in 1916.  She made large format paintings of enlarged blossoms, presenting them close up as if seen through a magnifying lens and New York buildings from the same era.  She became known as the Mother of American Modernism.

        In 1930 O'Keeffe wrote to William Milliken, director of the Cleveland Art Museum: I know I can not paint a flower.  I can not paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning but maybe in terms of paint color I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at the particular time.

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LIVE FLORAL ART...what a thrill

        Back in the 90's my wife and I owned a flower shop.  I loved the creative aspect of the business, but I never cared much for the stress that came with it.

        The flowers always had to be fresh, so they had to be sold quickly, also the pressure of making sure that every wedding was perfect, was a lot of fun but maddening   Also we had several corporate clients that relied on us to make awesome arrangements to impress their customer and   several celebrity customers who used us to send to their friends and family.

        We never disappointed them but it took its toll.

        Floral design came easy to me, being an artist.  Every arrangement had to have the same basics as a good painting; Structure, Balance, Texture and Color, and not just any color, but colors that made sense and mirrored the mood of the occasion.  My favorite combination was anything using monochromatic colors, which were very warm and comforting.

        It was like having your art come alive, and it was completed in minutes, and very exhilarating I must admit.  On holidays, my designer and I would literally do hundreds of arrangements in one day, it was very tiring but fun.

        That period from the mid 90's to the mid 2000's, while we were in that business, I painted many floral pieces, mostly on canvas, but several on windows blinds and even on a glass window, all of which I still have.

        I think working with flowers every day kept me extremely creative and that's a great place to be.

       

        The best part of my experience with floral design was the availability of fabulous vibrant colors.  It was fun to go to the wholesale house to pick out the flowers for the day and as you are choosing them you are imagining what creation you will make.

        I still do silk arrangements for churches and friends, it's almost like doing a painting because it will last more than the two weeks of a live arrangement.

        In closing this blog, I would strongly encourage any artist reading this piece to try floral design, its the ultimate painting.

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I SAW PRESIDENT KENNEDY ONCE

     When I was young, I stood in front of the podium with my mom in a suburb of Pittsburgh to watch President John F Kennedy deliver an impassioned speech.

  
     We came within 10 minutes of shaking his hand that day, but he received a phone call right at the bottom step of the grand stand from where he had just finished speaking. Later we found out that the call came from Washington D.C. informing him of the Cuban missile crisis.  That information was confirmed years later when I saw a special on the Cuban missile crisis on the A&E television network and there he was on the phone just as I remembered

        How does that relate to art you ask?  Well as I watched him speak, "larger than life", the worlds most powerful man.  He almost glowed.

        What a surreal scene, Kennedy passionately speaking, about I can't remember what, with a large western Pennsylvania mountain covered in green foliage behind him.  The breeze blowing and him constantly moving his famous brown flowing hair off his brow.

        My point in writing about this memory is that anything you experience in life can inspire you to be creative, even if it occurred in years past.

        That experience left a lasting impression on me, not only Kennedy's charismatic presence, but while I was standing there in the crowd, I glanced around at the surrounding area, every building had a police officer on the roof with a rifle.  What I later found out was that even the mountain behind the President had several police sharp shooters on it to protect him.

        It's a shame that Dallas wasn't as safe.  But in fairness, Dallas was a much larger and more complicated area to secure, never the less, what is past is past.

        You know with such a vivid memory of that event, I never did paint the scene that unfolded before me.  As I look back on that experience, maybe I will someday.

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