Two days ago I received notification from the folks at Artomatic that there's a possibility of a show in late August, early September. Artomatic is one of my favorite things in the entire world, so that made me happy, but I immediately started thinking about what to show. Should I use it as a venue for the dessert series? Should I try to sell some really good pieces that haven't had sufficient exposure? Should I hang the Atlantic Ocean Series, or the street corners paintings or just a selection of largish pieces? I ended up staying awake until around 2:30 a.m. thinking about the possibilities.
Meanwhile, I finished Part One of Ninth Street Women. My head is still spinning, so I'm trying to hold off on Part Two, as this is a 1300 page book (at least on my e-reader) and it's siphoning off a chunk of what would otherwise be working time. But it's very informative, and educating me on what was happening in the art world in New York City just before the time I started art school there. I am fascinated by the stories of how the artists found their way from Modernism into Abstraction. And it's been a revelation to find that they truly were starving; I'd always thought that was an exaggeration.
Some of the places are familiar to me; as a young art student, I'd been inspired by tiny, colorful plastic boxes I found in a store; I planned to fill them with assorted objects or perhaps suspend them in resin and then place them in an old wooden cigar box, a la Joseph Cornell. We bought my wedding ring at a little jewelry shop on 8th Street. The Carmine Street apartment of the De Koonings was across the street from my husband's apartment. And I'm very familiar with Washington Square and the NYU buildings.
As I try to work my way through my own paintings, I find myself considering doing a piece in an abstract sttyle. The last two times i tried this the pieces turned out to be a total disaster. But I might try it again.
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