Vintage Photograph and New Watercolor

I took a color printing course many years ago in NYC at the International Center of Photography. I only mention this by way of an attempt to figure out what year I took the photograph of Schatzie’s Prime Meats. Reckoning from the time of my course, the photograph below was taken about twenty years ago. […]

Defining a Shifting Identity

Ever since I had the good fortune to visit the The Identity Shift Project site built by Jessica Safran a fellow NYU alum and Julie Hassett Sutton, fine art photographer, everything I read seems to be about shifting identity.  When you think about it, life is about shifting identity. One forms his or her identity […]

Vintage Fig Tree

Today’s vintage watercolor is mostly a pen and ink sketch. I used to spend hours trying to draw the fig tree in the back yard. You can see that this one was drawn at the end of fall. (Yes, autumn does come to California.)  I remember being relieved that there weren’t many leaves to draw. […]

Commission

My wife had a photograph of a vase with red and white flowers. She wanted my rendition of it in watercolor. Since the photo was hazy and, for some reason I could not transfer it to a larger screen, I looked for a similar picture. Last week at the graduation party, I took some pictures […]

Lower East Side

I have been thinking about New York City lately. Joy and I will be visiting in February for my mother’s 90th birthday party. She checked with me to see if we would be coming. When I said yes, she said, “Good, I’ll hold on until then.”   That’s my Mom. I have mixed feelings about […]

Still Waiting

Potential muses Well, inspiration didn’t come knocking today as I hoped it would.  There are some potential muses on the horizon, so to speak. Out of five avocado pits, two of them sprouted a root (one each). I kept one in water and planted the other in a small pot. Oh, and by the way, […]

No Respect

I’m reading The Art of Cézanne by Albert C. Barnes and Violette de Mazia.* This is their introduction to Cézanne’s work in the first paragraph of chapter 1: “To the uninitiated, Cézanne’s paintings seem strange to the point of bizarreness, alien to all the traditions of painting; but to the student who has grasped the essential nature of […]

Back to Doodling

Instead of drawing my back yard for the fourth time (Back Yard, Back Yard Take 2, Trying to Understand Cézanne), I just put brush to paper and started with a random stroke. Today’s experiment: I started with a blue streak. I recently purchased paints made with honey! (Yeah bees!) This particular color is cerulean blue deep. […]

Another Vintage Watercolor

It is very interesting reviewing my older watercolors. As I mentioned yesterday, I lived in New York City for a very long time and loved photographing anything that caught my interest. I also love book stores. There were actual book stores when I lived there. I photographed the Argosy Book Store, which used to be […]

Early Watercolors

I was looking through some of the photographs that I took when I lived in New York City. I loved the light at certain times of day and was always on the lookout for interesting shadows and shapes. I love the organization of the shapes and the light on these particular pipes I passed in […]

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