My Ostraka: History II: xxv

 Autumn and Faculty Biennial ExhibitionWe have had such a rainy spring, summer and autumn here in Illinois, I marvel that we all haven’t molded and turned various shades of green.  For the moment, I have given up my back deck, the ladybugs and oak leaves and moved to my living room and fireplace.  I traded a cord of good firewood for a landscape watercolor last year and have tried fiercly to make a dent in the pile of wood my good friend Carl has provided. So it is wonderful to type to the crackling of the fire, a nice compliment to the rustling of leaves on my back deck where I usually write.

We had our Faculty Biennial exhibition open Tuesday night and the exhibit runs through January 31, 2010.  There sure is plenty of time to see the show.  I am showing one of my major paintings from a series I started in Vermont at the Vermont Studio Center in 2003.  What a superb place.  The paintings I did there are seminal to my current artisitic concerns.  I made my first painting using a rare and beautiful Egyptian sculpture referred to as the ‘Royal Fragment” while I was in Vermont and I showed this first painting in the 2003 Faculty Biennial exhibit. I am showing a new one featuring the archaic landscape I have used for this series along with a mirage – Marilyn Monroe – in the desert as she faces (cajoles?) the Sphinx of Giza.  I love the quote from Grace Hardigan, who sadly recently died, “The past and present is part of a continous cloth.”