Artists Painting the Ordinary

My brother George sent me a link to the painting up above. It is called "Don Valley on a Gray Day" and it is by the artist William Kurelek. The painting is at the Art Gallery of Ontario and dates to 1972. George was just up in Toronto admiring the picture in person.

George and I share certain views on art and we both admire this picture no end.

There is a hidden crucifix in this picture. Kurelek was a Catholic convert and that had something to do with that. However that is a matter for another day. For now, what George and I admire about the painting is that Kurelek took a view no one would think is anything special, and depicted it so creatively and realistically.

I think this guy was influenced by Andrew Wyeth. A while ago I sent George and interview I found on YouTube with Andrew Wyeth. I will have to find it again and link to it. In that interview, Wyeth talked about how he loved dull landscapes with nothing in them. He didn't use the word dull but he meant that, kind of static. He found them interesting. I cracked up when Wyeth said about his famous painting "Christina's World," that sometimes he thought it would have been better without Christina in it. That is something I will never forget!

It's interesting to me how all these guys, the Don Valley painter and Andrew Wyeth and Charles Burchfield too, they worked with crazy uninteresting scenes that conventional artists would not ever have noticed or thought about painting. I identify with that way of thinking. I was thinking that way naturally when I began drawing things around Buffalo several years ago. Someone told me that my pictures reminded them of Burchfield, so I started researching Burchfield, and I loved learning that he thought that way. Burchfield believed that an artist did not have to live in Paris or Venice to create great art. What he saw before him in West Seneca was all he needed.

These artists knew you could do something interesting with anything. There was one artist, maybe it was John Singer Sargent, used to carry a chair and just set it down anywhere and start drawing. 

Sargent did a lot of paintings of great European scenes so I am not sure he was the one who did that. I will have to do some Googling. However he did leave advice I agree with and that reflects what we are talking about.

"You can't do sketches enough," he said. "Sketch everything."

He added: ".... and keep your curiosity fresh." However I prefer my abbreviated version. 

"Sketch everything."

Even the Don Valley Parkway!

West Side story: Sketching Holy Angels

I hate New Year's
What's wrong with the old one?
Resolutions...
Who could ever hold one?

Our great friend the cabaret artist Guy Boleri penned those immortal lines in his musical version of "A Christmas Carol." Scrooge sings them.

Much as I love Guy's musical, I am no Scrooge. I love Christmas and I love New Year's.

Resolutions? I am full of them!

One is to write in this Web log every day in 2020.

Another is to sketch every day.

OK, with both resolutions I think I will make it six at least out of every seven days. Because there will be one day once in a while when you just cannot get to it and then you do not want to bog down.

But so far on the sketch front I am doing pretty much perfectly!

I have gone out every day in 2020, minus one because it was impossible. And I sketched the last three days of the old year as well.

One thing I drew was Holy Angels Church, pictured above, on Buffalo's West Side.

Now I will sound like my old Web logger self and point out that this was Leonard Pennario's church when he was a boy. And when he came back to Buffalo in the last year of my life and I met him, he asked to go back to the church and have a look. We did that.

Pennario had his moment and gazed at Holy Angels. He said, "She looks beautiful."

That is an old-fashioned thing that I love. Ships and churches are feminine and so are a lot of other things.

My great-uncle Andrew, the Rev. Andrew Kunz, was treasurer of the order of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (Pennario always referred to them by that full formal name) and was at Holy Angels for something like 50 years starting in 1905 or thereabouts.

All these things were in my head as I sketched. So was F. Scott Fitzgerald who also went to Holy Angels School, for a little while anyway. I kept thinking of him, of Leonard, of my Uncle Andrew.

I also brooded about Holy Angels closing. It is scheduled to close next year, I mean this year. What a crying shame. I am glad it was still open when Pennario went looking for it. So I thought about that too.

Then gradually as happens, all the thoughts fell away and all I thought of was shadows and angles. That is a wonderful thing about drawing. Your mind gradually clears of everything except what you are working on.

Here is a photo I took when I was through in case I needed to refer to it. I try to remember to do that when I am folding up and getting ready to go home. The sun finally came out!

After drawing all week I can say that the sun has been out during that time for all of 10 minutes, total. This is bogus, you know? I can see why John Singer Sargent liked to work in Italy. I tried to get the sun in there when it came out. You always have to work fast because it will not be there long!

That happened again to me today, the sun coming out late and just for a bit, when I was drawing a shopping strip with a hair place and a halal market. Buffalonians can try guessing where I was. I think I will post that one tomorrow.

This is my year!

I will be unstoppable!

The art of Kmart

I did another Buzz column -- yikes, what is this, week five?

I cannot believe I can be this consistent! Of course miracles happen when someone is holding you to a deadline and Howard is. I am like a trained horse. I need deadlines.

One thing I loved about this week's column is I got to work in my sketch of Kmart, up above, which I am crazy about. Urban sketching at its finest!

Kmarts are falling right and left but ours here in North Buffalo has been dodging the bullets rather well. I did the above picture from my car on a cold day last winter.

Kmart is not Monet's pond of water lilies but it is something. I loved drawing the carts. I always love the details.

I did the Kmart sketch for my friend Ryan who loves Kmart but I would have drawn it in any case and Ryan knows that.

One day I will paint Kmart in the style of Monet, Van Gogh, and John Singer Sargent.

That reminds me.. I may have mentioned, I have that kind of New Age-y habit of writing my goals, every morning. You write things in the present tense, as if they have already happened. And lo, it comes to pass! At least that is the idea.

Every day I write: "I draw and paint like John Singer Sargent. I play the piano like Leonard Pennario."

Now we shall wait and see!

The thrift shopping we do in the spring

Even though it's freezing out I know it is spring.

There is the matter of the daffodils, up above. It may take a sharp eye to spot them but they are there!

There is also the matter of  I cannot stay away from thrift shops.

I have a lot of work to do so I do not go special. But I work in a quick stop on my way from somewhere I have to be. For instance yesterday I went to the chiropractor. On my way home I could not resist popping into Goodwill.

Hardly had I stepped inside when from across the crowded room I saw it -- a gigantic framed print of John Singer Sargent's "Daughters of Edward Darley Boit." Here is a picture of it from the Boston Museum of Fine Art, where I believe the picture lives.

And I have to say, it was darn near as big as in that photo. And framed the same way, too. I recognized it as soon as I walked in. I have been studying Sargent recently because I have been noticing that he and I have in common certain ways of thinking and perceiving things. Howard laughs at me because I am cooking dinner and listening to curators and other eggheads giving lectures about him.

Back to "Daughters of Edward Darley Boit." It was $15, purple price tag, darn.

That was not the color that was half price! Yellow was half price if memory serves me.

Where would I put it? That was another consideration. I just have so much stuff, you know?

I could have overruled both those considerations. However, that fine ostentatious frame was chipped pretty visibly in spots. That was what finally made me make the decision I did, which was ...

No.

That evening Howard said, "I'm surprised you could resist it."

"Me, too," I admitted. "If the frame were OK I would have bought it."

Howard asked, "Was it an original?"

I said, "Howard, no, it was not an original! People pay millions for this guy's stuff!"

I had to pause to imagine the greatness of the situation were I to be able to reply, "Yes, it was an original. And I like the idea of having an original Sargent. But where would I put it? And it had a purple price tag --

Howard stuck to his guns. "It could have been an original. You never know. People don't know what they have in their houses."

Watch, he will turn out to be right. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts will all of a sudden report that "Daughters of Edward Darley Boit" is missing.

And here it is at the Town of Tonawanda Goodwill. Turned down by me because the price tag was purple and not yellow.

Howard would sure have the last laugh!