Vermont Paintings

While I was apprenticing at Bread and Puppet, we spent one evening down the road at The Museum of Everyday Life checking out a great exhibit on matches, drinking Long Trail beer, and getting devoured by mosquitoes. Once it got dark, we settled on the lawn in front of a makeshift movie screen (read: sheet) and watched a film from the 1960's by Jack Smith. I had never heard of Jack Smith before, but learned that he was a contemporary of Andy Warhol. They did collaborations and things but Jack Smith was against using consumer culture as a vehicle for his art the way Warhol did, so he is not nearly as well known, but he should be! His work is a little bit elusive because he tried very hard to make it unable to be reproduced, but some recordings are available anyway.

The film we watched was called Normal Love and there may have been a plot, but I wasn't too concerned with that. I was too focussed on what a cool sensory experience I was having-- It seemed to me that it was almost like many paintings in motion. I loved the music as well. Here is a few minutes of Normal Love that I was able to find on youtube:

It was like watching beautiful image after beautiful image lit up on this square in the middle of a very dark, mountainy Vermont landscape with a ton of stars. I wanted to imprint that image on my brain so that I could paint it when I had access to my oil paints.

So that is what I have been doing. I started out using film stills and movie clips from Normal Love that I found online and then started transitioning to filling the movie screens with my own images. It is a series-in-progress, and so if any artists out there in internet land wanna throw some constructive criticism my way, I would be grateful.

I wish the image quality had been better on the owl one. Alas! I have a couple more in the works.

The following has nothing to do with Vermont or Bread and Puppet or Jack Smith, except that those experiences are getting me inspired to paint again, which has led me to finish up some projects that I let fall by the wayside. I wanted to post those as well.

This first one is a landscape from Ithaca.

And this next one is a nightscape I did waaaaaay back at Earlham and never finished. I still don't know if I would call it finished, but I am certainly done with it.

Three cheers for painting!