10-17-13. Photo of a memory.

10-16-13. "The Lightning Field", a 1977 land art work by Walter De Maria.

10-15-13. "Sea Glass", a 2011 painting by Tiffany Bozic.

10-14-13. The Boss, a 2013 book of poetry by Victoria Chang.

10-13-13. "Lasso", a 2007 artwork by Harm van den Dorpel.

10-12-13. Spiral staircase.

10-11-13. Incense.

10-10-13. Iron Man serving doner kebab, or shawarma.

10-09-13. Girl on a pogo stick.

Hortensie (522)

"Hortensie (522)", oil on canvas, 24x24 in. For sale on Etsy.

A vivid vermilion caracal sits among hydrangea blooms. I call her Hortensie. There are three layers to the painting. The blue hydrangea was a real silk hydrangea sitting in front of me while I painted. The caracal was my drawing from a photo in a library book. The background was my drawing of a still image from a Vine video that I made of cut hydrangeas for sale at my local Trader Joe's store.

I use randomizers to select my subjects and colors. My main color was Hortensie, a shade of light blue and color #522 in Naomi Kuno's Colorscape book. My secondary color was vermilion. The Hortensie color name provided one of my subjects; "hortensie" is the German word for "hydrangea". My other randomly selected topic was African wildlife. When I studied African wildlife books, I liked the lesser-known caracal (Latin name Caracal caracal, nice and easy to remember...). Caracals are not superstars like lions, leopards and cheetahs, but they have a very distinct and memorable appearance with their flamboyant, lynx-like ear tufts.

The soundtrack for this painting was a Pandora station based on jazz music by Dafnis Prieto. I selected it because I searched for a place with music and hydrangeas. That search led me online to Madison Square Park in NYC. Dafnis Prieto is one of several musicians who have performed at the park, which has displays of hydrangeas in its gardens.

10-08-13. Sailboat.

10-07-13. Maxwell in Morgan Co., Indiana.

10-06-13. Man in purple jumper, a 2010 painting by Australian artist Peter Booth.

10-05-13. Our travel thermometer.

10-04-13. Inside our freezer.

10-03-13. Our family room couch is covered with stuff.

10-02-13. "Helmet Head No. 3", a 1960 sculpture by Henry Moore.

10-01-13. "Pale Blue Dachshund", a 2011 sculpture by William Sweetlove.

09-30-13. A 1972 Fisher-Price houseboat.

09-29-13. The cover of my passport.

09-28-13. A woodcut from "Tectonic Plates", a 2010 exhibit by New Zealand artist Sheyne Tuffery.

09-27-13. Nude man with a Hula-Hoop during a 2013 performance in NYC.

09-26-13. Police officer with a kitten.

09-25-13. "Cleats", a 2010 sculpture by Rachel Owens.

09-24-13. My vitamins.

09-23-13. Jacks.

09-22-13. Martha Rosler thrusting a rolling pin in her 1975 video "Semiotics of the Kitchen".

09-21-13. Maxwell's rubber duckie.

09-20-13. My pinky finger.

09-19-13. A Yamaha SHS-10 keytar like the one we got for Christmas in the 1980s.

09-18-13. Mario and mystery boxes.

09-17-13. Flying saucer candies.

09-16-13. Untitled (Glass in Airplane) (1965-74), a photo by William Eggleston.

09-15-13. Our unused fireplace.

09-14-13. Charlie Chaplin in a 2009 drawing by Karl Haendel.

09-13-13. The trapdoor to our attic.

Oh, Calcutta! (180)

"Oh, Calcutta! (180)", oil on canvas, 24x24 in. For sale on Etsy.

It's a football player with a giant apricot floating over his butt, standing in a field of cilantro. Let me explain how this happened. It isn't surrealism, this isn't dream imagery. It's more of a puzzle. Like many of my paintings, it started with word association. My goal was to represent the color Calcutta Curry (a shade of yellow that is color #180 in Naomi Kuno's Colorscape book). So, as I often do, I took an oblique approach to the problem.

Right now, I like for my paintings to have three layers: a real object sitting in front of me, a drawing of a detail from a photo, and a drawing of a still from a video in the background. The cilantro in the foreground is based on a real plant that I bought at Meijer. Why cilantro? Cilantro was the first ingredient of a Bengali curry that I never actually got around to making. (Bengali because Calcutta, or Kolkata, is in the Indian state of West Bengal. Is some of the rest of the painting starting to make sense? I'll get to that...) 

The next layer is the floating apricot. I deliberately selected the most butt-shaped fruit I could find. I would have preferred a peach, but the apricot had a better shape. Why a butt? The title "Oh, Calcutta!" comes from a slightly dirty French pun, which became a dirty painting, which inspired a nude Broadway musical in the 1970s. I found it when I searched for a "soundtrack" for this painting, which ended up being a Pandora station built around the track "Oh, Calcutta!" by the funk band The Meters. There's a lot of Hammond organ on there...

Finally, the football player. He plays for the Cincinnati Bengals. I made Vine videos out of found footage of the Bengals, then selected a still with one of the players sticking his butt out just so. 
Oh, Calcutta!

09-12-13. Project Google Birdhouse, a 2012 project by Taiwanese designer Shu-Chun Hsiao.

09-11-13. A man wearing elbow patches.

09-10-13. "WE LUV STRUGGLIN'", part of Sterling Ruby's Monument Stalagmite sculpture series, made in 2013.

09-09-13. Dog sharks that we saw at the Indianapolis Zoo last week.

09-08-13. Maxwell got his first haircut yesterday.

09-07-13. Maxwell and his Dada in Hamilton Co., Indiana.

09-06-13. Capes.

09-05-13. "French Horn, Unwound, Horn Against Ground", a 2001 Oldenburg/van Bruggen drawing.

09-04-13. Harold and I on a San Diego beach in March 2009.

09-03-13. Man wearing a parka.

09-02-13. "Rootbeer", a 2011 artwork by Bhakti Baxter.

09-01-13. "The Character and Shape of Illuminated Things", a 2013 sculpture by Amanda Ross-Ho that we visited today in Chicago.

08-31-13. A hectic dinner at Little Goat in Chicago tonight.