Another older image….I messed with some photos from our trip to Portugal a few years ago, and came up with this….
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Edge of Town
Here’s another digital image from several years ago, which I unearthed the other day. I think I posted this one back on the old Mister Anchovy’s blog. How many of you have been visiting since that time?
Jonathan Luther “John” “Casey” Jones
Let’s start with Furry Lewis then move forward in time to the Grateful Dead….
Both interesting songs….but let’s go way back to 1910 and hear Billly Murray and the American Quartet. This tune appeared just 10 years after the Cannonball Express train wreck it was based on.
Landing
This is a digital image I created several years ago. Time to give it another look.
Remembering Ellie Mae
One of the best dogs you’re ever likely to meet….
Evidence
Evidence
I don’t recall what year I made this painting. For the most part I’m bad with dates, although I associate certain paintings which exhibitions I showed them in, and that helps. It was during what I suppose was some kind of period in transition for my work. Evidence is a fairly big painting for me (those of you who know my paintings know that in recent years I’ve done mostly smaller paintings) – I think it’s about 6 feet wide. It’s painted with acrylics.
Evidence still resonates with me as a painting in which I was searching for something, searching for an image in amongst the flotsam and jetsam which is my visual imagination. It’s one of those paintings that just doesn’t seem to fit, and I don’t know if I’ll ever exhibit it. I’ve kept it here in storage, but I haven’t looked at the actual painting in some time. I was going through some photos tonight looking for something else when I came across it, so I thought I’d share.
It might be interesting to put together a show of oddball paintings one day, the ones that don’t fit neatly into a package. I have a few of those kicking around. Here’s another – this one from 1998.
It’s called Terminal Beef. This painting has some elements of some earlier paintings I did, but to me it has an unsettling awkwardness that I’m both attracted to and repelled by. This is another painting I’ve held onto.
New Paintings
I started into a group of new paintings tonight. I have 8 canvases set up in my little basement studio and I started painting on 6 of them. I’ll add the other two and more into the mix sometime later. I mentioned in an earlier post that I’ve been stalling.
All I can say about tonight’s work is that I laid down some paint. I had a starting point in mind (you have to start somewhere) but my mind was racing way beyond that even as I was brushing in the first tentative little ideas.
The beginnings of paintings are both everything and nothing. The first session sets a kind of tone for the activity to follow, but at the same time, I know I’ll be wrestling my way through dozens of ideas, motifs, and so on along the way, leaving the beginning marks as ancient history, to be buried and forgotten.
4th St.
I came across various covers of the tune 4th Street Messaround on YouTube, and I realized I know two tunes about 4th St. The first one is that old Memphis Jug Band tune. They were a great band and were very well recorded. If you don’t know their material, I highly recommend it. The Memphis Jug Band were active from the 20s right into the 50s. Their personnel changed quite a bit along the way but no matter, it’s pretty much all excellent.
The other 4th St tune I know of is Positively 4th Street by Bob Dylan. Here’s Lucinda Williams covering it…
Happy Days in Long Branch Baby!
Mark Twain on the banjo….
The piano may do for love-sick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles and slate pencils. But give me the banjo. Gottschalk compared to Sam Pride or Charley Rhoades, is as a Dashaway cocktail to a hot whisky punch. When you want genuine music — music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth’s pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose, — when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!
– “Enthusiastic Eloquence,” San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, 23 June 1865
27th Street 