Friday, November 27, 2009
My Place is Coming Together
A detour for a moment, from the Artblog: I've been putting so much time into painting the walls of my place, it feels like a real accomplishment to now be entirely FINISHED, as of this past Wednesday morning. The place looks good - but very raw and blank with nothing on the walls - yet. However, after having worked so hard to patch the scars and pull out nails, even moly bolts and a raft of telephone jacks, it feels almost criminal to go ahead and immediately put in my own hooks to hang paintings! Oh well, I will get over it.
I remember the first time I visited friends in an up-scale NYC high-rise. It struck me that even in their expensive apartment, space was very limited. In my rural background a home might be shabby, but there was always almost unlimited space. Another thing back then - the apartment doors lined up along long hallways looked to me like pigeon coops, certainly no place I would want to live. Well, now here I am on the 13th floor of a building with 600 residences, and the hallway looks like this:
My unit, #1320, is all the way down at the end, on the right. Whoopie!
That hallway is so unrelentingly beige! Oh the sacrifices we must make! Fortunately, the fabulous location and access to the city advantages more than compensates for living along a pigeoncoop of a hallway. And I like the idea of walking from all that beige into the splash of color and life that I intend to create in my personal space here.
Now I am so much looking forward to getting back to using my small brushes. My next big project is HUGE. I've been asked to create a portrait of Frances E.W. Harper. Harper was a black author and poet, a member of both the 1st Unitarian and the Mother Bethel AME churches in Philadelphia, and a leader in the abolitionist and suffrage movements, b. 1825, d. 1911. There are three known photos of her, plus an engraving. I've copied the photos from the files at the Philadelphia Library Company, and now need to find out what colors and fabrics/textures she might be wearing in this photo (Please contact me if you have any ideas or input on this!):
This is such a strong pose, and I love the period photographic background.
I remember the first time I visited friends in an up-scale NYC high-rise. It struck me that even in their expensive apartment, space was very limited. In my rural background a home might be shabby, but there was always almost unlimited space. Another thing back then - the apartment doors lined up along long hallways looked to me like pigeon coops, certainly no place I would want to live. Well, now here I am on the 13th floor of a building with 600 residences, and the hallway looks like this:
My unit, #1320, is all the way down at the end, on the right. Whoopie!That hallway is so unrelentingly beige! Oh the sacrifices we must make! Fortunately, the fabulous location and access to the city advantages more than compensates for living along a pigeoncoop of a hallway. And I like the idea of walking from all that beige into the splash of color and life that I intend to create in my personal space here.
Now I am so much looking forward to getting back to using my small brushes. My next big project is HUGE. I've been asked to create a portrait of Frances E.W. Harper. Harper was a black author and poet, a member of both the 1st Unitarian and the Mother Bethel AME churches in Philadelphia, and a leader in the abolitionist and suffrage movements, b. 1825, d. 1911. There are three known photos of her, plus an engraving. I've copied the photos from the files at the Philadelphia Library Company, and now need to find out what colors and fabrics/textures she might be wearing in this photo (Please contact me if you have any ideas or input on this!):
This is such a strong pose, and I love the period photographic background.