piano

London Chicago

Jami, at Trafalger Square. Raining in London - who'd of thought. She's beautiful.

From our trip to Chicago last Fall, a Braque (I think): you'd think that I could distinguish a Braque from a Picasso, but I can't always. Something about Braque's composition is formal and stiff -whereas Picasso's compositions move and have more a lower key of color. Braque's more likely to use black to outline forms. So it seems to me. So Braque.

The Most Beautiful Smile

In early January Jami and I patrolled London looking for the best cozy spots to eat and drink. Here she is smiling with shear delight in a pub, probably in Hampstead.

Meditation on Cape Anne

I had a show recently: 17 paintings and 40 drawings water colors, and this is one of the water colors that sold. I only sold three pieces. This is one of them. Sure, I'll miss it. But it feels good that something sold. I was hoping for better success, but the process of building the business end of art is incremental.

Christa Gestalt, Jami and Grace, Sign of the times, Whitney

Another provocative painting taken under non-optimal circumstances. Yes that is my foot.
Here's Jami with Grace - the apple of her Aunt's eye.
This is a sign we saw in Nashville. Jami and Jennifer, her sister, thought it an audacious pun.
This is Whitney playing guitar in the back section of the bookstore. By the window is my cousin, Cheryl, and in the upper left corner is the lower right corner of a large painting of mine.

I've got to get a photographer

Atlanta Traffic

Atlanta traffic is much like the sea. The sea, though, constantly flows. The sea provides a sense of calm, a sense of wonder - there are many songs extolling the power and grandeur of the sea. We never say that about the traffic. Traffic though has a grandeur. Especially when some of Philip Glass's music is in the background: serialism has the effect of enhancing the sense of flow and the speed, where everything is changing but remaining the same.

Three Graces

This image of the three graces was a gift to one of my groom's men. I can't remember who got this. Still the three graces provide a strong mythological image: femininity, mystery, beauty, and transcendence.

Annunciation Macabre

I imagined a darker, more brooding Gabriel, bringing his message of orgasmic theophany, to Mary, a young jewish girl. That's her looking in the mirror. Mirrors provide a speculative function. The photo is a bad photo with lots of background junk - we laugh at this kind of presentation in galleries and art schools, but I've got my MFA, so there.

Louise, the Hoskins place, Jami

Piranessi and modern times

A washed out shot of a New Mexico painting

This photo was taken by a photographer for the AJC using a very expensive camera, and it doesn't show the richness of the color or texture of the paint I'd gotten here. Photography of artwork is a tricky thing, and I'm not anal about it myself, except when faced with the limitations of what is possible. A painting is superior to a photograph exactly for those elements of surface manipulation and image integration that a photo, when done by a professional art photographer, provides a metaphor for what is seen. A photo of a painting is a double metaphor, the painting being the first metaphor.
Now I know that I said "superiority of painting to photography" and that's bound to cause a stir, but photos have their own surface manipulations and image integrations: perhaps I should have said that the vocabulary of painting doesn't translate well into the vocabulary of photography and vice versa. That is: it's asking a lot of a photograph to reproduce a painting.
Well that was unnecessarily complicated.
What I painted here was a spot near the middle of nowhere. Those from New Mexico know just where this is: near nowhere, insight of the mountains, covered with scrub, the road indistinguishable from the surrounding dust and rock. Overhead is a cloud that appears to be raining, but the rain is evaporating high in the air. Or else there is a cloud 100s of times bigger than the mountains it looms behind. At your feet there is a bit of bone, and in the blue shadows of the thistle a small creature rustles away, out of sight.
A map says that there is a watercourse around here, but you don't see one: but not being one to argue, you call it a draw.

Here are our wedding pictures

http://www.wscottchester.com/darkroom/proof/?client/fredandjami

2 honeymoon photos, one blurry, one focused

Dad, me and Jami at my M.Div. graduation, May 2007

This is one of the best days of my life. I'd won the preaching award - and burst into tears, and here were my dad and Jami, who is now my wife. Later we celebrated with oysters and beer. A raw bar had just opened in Oakhurst and we were just beginning to enjoy it.

More fun with John the Baptist and Salome

JB "When Salome's dance caused me to lose my head, things seemed bleak."
Sal " I was young and I didn't always anticipate my actions' effects."
JB "But thanks to support from our families and community, we've been able to move beyond our initial difficulties.--We're expecting our first child in November."

Annunciation

If only I had a better reproduction of this painting. I painted it back in 1999. It now resides in Birmingham, AL. Gabriel comes down in a flame of fire. Mary, well imagine: a young girl receives an angelic visitation and becomes pregnant. There's more going on here than meets the eye: it begs to be portrayed in a sensual, fantastic way.

Apollo and Daphne

Eight years ago I painted this. Mythology gets me going - the whole gods and mortals doing incredible things, turning into trees, etc. is captivating. And here Apollo almost grasps Daphne only to be thwarted by Zeus who turns her into a tree as an answer to her prayer: "Zeus save me."
In my version Daphne turns into a field of kudzu - that's a southern twist. The woman I sold this to didn't know anything about the myth. She bought this painting because it went well with her sofa. She claimed to have lived in Pensacola, FL but when I mentioned kudzu to her, she looked at me and said, "I've never seen anything like that. I don't know what you're talking about."

Today's Water Color and Drawing

I have got to get some better reproductions. The bottom pen and ink drawing is a Salome and John the Baptist. Not that this is what actually happened: for me, Sal and JB exist in a realm of symbols; their lives continue, intertwined by history and myth. She, the dancer and lover, and he, the prophet and authority figure. But see, he looses his head. JB exists as a bifurcated person: his head and body are disconnected, and can only reconnect in the presence of the dancing girl. Or alternately: the dancing girl needs the head of the prophet to authenticate her own existence. Or this is an embematic story of the delphic oracle: Salome, a dionysian ecstatic conjures prophecy as a cutting off of human function.
The water color on top is about the church being released from its bureaucratic functionaries.

Felix Culpa

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I painted this last fall. Now it is hanging in a show I'm having in Decatur. My wife, when she first saw this immediately took this from the studiio and put it in the house. I like it for its interracial Adam and Eve, the exoticism of the coral snake Satan, and the feel of a Rousseau painting.