Can't believe I'm done! Ready for installation at The Gladstone Hotel tomorrow! All my paintings are stacked, a coat of varnish now dry, corners stapled on for travelling; I put up a price list page at my website and emailed the info to Jacques, who's curating the show. The dog is walked. My walls look bereft and empty of their colourful paintings. As I get these paintings ready for transporting tomorrow, I wonder which ones will come home after, and which ones won't. Art sales in Toronto have not been good overall this year. It's been a tough year for Galleries. Yet I linger over my paintings with love and care. It'll be a terrific show! I can't wait to see everyone else's work! More pics will be coming.



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Figure, 2013, 17" or 18", Week 2, rough draft, Klean Klay (I think) iPhone4 photo. First time I have ever sculpted a figure, so be gentle!



The last image, posted yesterday also, was photo manipulated with a filter.
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I've never sculpted a figure before. This is the 2nd session, with maybe a dozen sessions to go. Hey, it's close to Halloween (those wire arms!). It's intriguing, this process of clay and sculpting from life, and very challenging. An iPhone pic that I used a filter on. She's about 17" or 18" tall (if she were to stand).



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Parchment Figures: Doubles, Doppelgängers, Clones, 2010-2013, 24" x 30", 61cm x 76.2cm, oil, acrylic, gold leaf on stretched canvas.

So much has been going on that I haven't written about in my blog. One whole wall of my living room is now a working studio, and as I was moving canvases I came across this one. And began working on it again. That's it for now... it's taken days, delicate work ...photo is best I can do at the moment - it was taken in direct late afternoon sun, colour not bad but not quite the shine you'd see if you looked at the painting.

Below, a slideshow of the past of this painting.



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I woke up this morning remembering my mother, who passed away a year ago today. I am glad she is not still in the nursing home going through what she was going through. She died at 89, after a long life - the way it's supposed to happen if we are lucky enough. The grieving through the last year has been different than for my Dad, who died too young at 62 of an illness he fought against as hard as he could. I am not haunted by the months of her dying the way I am still by my father's. She was ready to go. Surely to live long enough to reach a place of acceptance of one's natural death is an inestimable gift. Yet I have still grieved, and acutely at times. I think it is only this week that good restful sleep has begun to return. They say grieving is 4 seasons, a whole year, before you open again fully to the life you are living. It doesn't hurt so much; I can walk by the nursing home where she passed away peacefully on a beautiful warm, sunny day and feel grateful that she has escaped its confines. There is peace.
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Selfie last night... if the new fashion is wide frizzy hair, why all I have to do is comb mine (though you can't quite see how wide it gets in this late night bathroom mirror pic). Ran the iPhone 4 shot through a few filters, still a bit on the yellow side.

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Had this prose poem public for awhile, thought I could handle it. But I've encrypted it. Sorry.

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Cate Blanchett inhabits her character, Jasmine, in Woody Allen's latest movie, Blue Jasmine. It is her story, and she grasps it in her teeth like a gold dollar and does not let it go even when it dissolves into dust. She possesses the screen. Her collapsing world is revealed through a babble that Jasmine addresses to anyone who will listen. We see flashbacks along with her attempts to create an afterlife to the life she had. She plays her character with a sharp, complex, brilliant fervor that dips in and out of an acerbic snobbery and a madness that is aware of itself and yet is unable to surmount itself. Jasmine attained the status of wealthy socialite by marrying a Wall Street financier (Hal, Alec Baldwin) whose companies were a construction of empty cards and the dizzying fall into shame and poverty with a fractured hubris only Cate Blanchett could convey. Characters destroy each others’ lives through financial usury. The aftershocks of embezzlement lie at the heart of Blue Jasmine. This is the story of what happens after the swindlers have moved through people's lives and left them destitute. Woody Allen, with references to Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, weaves a story of facades covering facades with the fierce, raw emotion of a volcano of a woman boiling at the center.

Woody Allen, the aged and beloved comedian, a prolific filmmaker who... READ MORE


(My article/review on Blue Jasmine was published by KJ Mullins, the editor of newz4u.org.)
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