Some much better photos (than my studio snaps) of Paintings from the Lost Forest are now up on the Yumart site. Check them out.
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Wingy
My dad liked a lot of old jazz when I was a kid. He was one of those guys who could hear a horn player on a jazz record and tell you who the player was. And if you gave him the name of a racehorse, most times he could tell you about the bloodline. Even though his horse-betting jazz-playing days were well behind him, I think it was something deeply rooted. He used to tell me about the day Wingy Manone came to town and played the Colonial Tavern. My father bought him a shot of booze and sent it up to the bandstand. Wingy told the band to play on – “I’ve got a sponsor”, he said, and he joined my dad at his table.
I asked him lots of times why he gave up playing music. Sometimes he wouldn’t answer. Other times he’d say he was a good “reader” and a good arranger too, but he couldn’t improvise. Sometimes in his later years he talked about picking up the clarinet again, and I was all set to go out and find him one, but when I’d bring the subject up, he’s say, “One of these days I’m going to do that” and then he’d launch into one of his old stories.
He loved that old jazz though, Wingy Manone and Kid Ory, and Satchmo and the rest, the Basie Band, with Jimmy Rushing on vocals. Cab Calloway singing Minnie the Moocher. Jimmy Dorsey. Benny Goodman. He could listen to Benny Goodman all day. Lester Young. Duke Ellington. He loved it all until the bebop guys came along.
Iko
Anyone remember the Dixie Cups version?
When spring really starts….
In our lakefront Toronto communities, the change-over from winter to spring and from fall to winter is marked by the local sailors taking their yachts out of the water before the freeze and putting them back in when the idea of sailing again becomes palatable. The cranes were out the other day and the harbour is already full of (dare I call them) boats.
For those who can’t get to the gallery…
Photographs of my paintings will give you an idea of what the paintings are like, but my work has a lot of variations in texture and surface quality that are really hard to see in a photograph on the internet. Still they still provide an opportunity for people to review and refer to the images, and for my friends out of town, a chance to see works they might otherwise not be able to see at all.
So, I’ve created a blog page that features a slide show including all the paintings in my exhibition at Yumart (and one that is at the gallery but not hanging). I’ve included titles and dimensions and the year they were painted – many of the paintings are very new but there are some from 2013 and also 3 older paintings from 2006 that I included with this group. I had a version of this page up the other day by request and I’ve updated it and made a couple minor corrections.
Paintings from the Lost Forest
Here are some pictures from the opening reception today for my new painting show at Yumart, here in Toronto.
Aretha
We had a great time tonight at the Aretha Franklin show at Roy Thomson Hall. At 72, she looks great and sounds great. Aretha came to Toronto with a big band including a full horn section, vibes, B3, guitar, bass, a couple drummers, some singers and a woman playing tambourine who I can only describe as a force of nature. Great performance.
Delta blues meets visual blues
For some years we have been interested in what I guess you could call folk art or outsider art or art by “untrained” artists, and we’ve been following the Slotin auctions which occur a couple times each year. There’s one this weekend, called Delta blues meets Visual Blues. These auctions take place in Buford Georgia, but you can register for the auction and access it on-line in real time. You can see what’s happening in the auction hall live and you can enter on-line bids, competing with in-person and phone bidders for works in the auction. This is an extensive auction which takes place over two days. We’re going to miss the Saturday action because I have my own art exhibition opening up at Yumart Saturday, here in Toronto, but we’ll be following the auction on-line on Sunday.
Need more days in the week please….
I completed several paintings I had on the go during the first couple months of the year, in preparation for my exhibition Paintings from the Lost Forest, which opens up at Yumart on Saturday afternoon. My little basement studio looks empty with the works out of there. There are 16 paintings in the exhibition, all small paintings, many of them very new. A couple of them are barely dry. It’s time to take a break from painting for a couple months to work on several other things I have going. This is troublesome, as I have some ideas floating about my skull for approaching a new series of paintings.
Next up, we have three commissions for mosaics set to go, and we’re working on some initial preparation for all of them. Two are birds, a blackbird and a cardinal, similar in approach to our previous bird mosaics. The other is a large garden bench, a project we are cooking up with Ruth Arnold, a wonderful wood carver, which will incorporate stone, wood and mosaic.
Meanwhile, I have to squeeze out a little time to get going on some banjo necks. I’ve been planning to make a gourd banjo or two for some time, and as well, there is a plan afoot to make a pair of salad bowl banjos with my friend Jamie. I have a nice piece of oak for the necks, thanks to my friend Chuck, and I’ll buy some specialty woods for the fingerboards.
Playing banjo is one area in which I’ve been very disciplined. I try to practice every day, even if it is a short practice (years ago when I was learning one of the sword tai chi forms, my teacher would say, “touch your weapon every day”….it applies to banjo too), and some days I’m getting an hour or more practice time in. I think the work is paying off quite a bit as I’m playing with more confidence as I develop some technical chops, bit by bit. In June, I’m going to the Midwest Banjo Camp for a long weekend of banjo immersion. That will be a great opportunity to start playing with other people.
I’ve been working in spurts on a novel for some time, which is suffering from my inability to find sustained periods of time to focus on it (not to mention the fact that I’ve never written one before). I’m hoping to complete a draft of the whole story this year, even if that means I still have lots of revision and rewrites to go. That’s an arbitrary deadline, which I’m sure I’ll try to talk myself around at some point.
All this and trout season opens up this weekend, and two or three weeks after that, we’ll see if this long winter of ours helped or hindered the morels this year.
I think we need an extra day each week. Let’s make it a weekend day so every weekend is a long one. I’ll pass the sign up sheet around….
Trouble in Mind
Trouble in Mind is a song that has been around the block a time or two. It was written by a jazz piano player named Richard M. Jones and recorded first in 1924 by Themla La Vizzo (vocals) and Jones on piano.
Here’s an old-time version by the Locust Honey String Band…
Jerry Lee Lewis does a great version….
It works as a Western Swing tune too. Here are Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.
And it’s a pure blues…Big Bill Broonzy
27th Street 