Regular posts will resume tomorrow, when my house will be empty again.

Meanwhile, the Atlantic Community, a "collaborative weblog and network for research, analysis and commentary on American society & culture", refers to "Blessed Art Thou".

Miami Artzine reviews the art fairs, noting "Requiem...." !

The New York Times reviews "Pricked: Extreme Embroidery", and mentions yours truly (delighted).

Time Out New York included "Pricked: Extreme Embroidery" as one of the best exhibitions of 2007.

Best wishes for a warm and peaceful holiday.....
Blogging will be light for the next week.
May you get through the season without having to visit the icehole....
So many good things happened during the Miami Fairs*, (and I have neglected my homelife & xmas preparation for so long) that I have really not had a minute to post much about the Art Basel experience. I still have a list of artist's names that I hope to post with links before the new year. Bear with me, please. I did lie in bed at 3 a.m. last night waiting for my sleeping pill to kick in, looking at the amazingly comprehensive coverage that artist Joanne Mattera's blog provides... with lots of pics, worth a look. There is an emphasis on work that is like hers in the images (something we are all prone to do) , but I hope to balance that soon with quirky, sometimes dark, often figurative references that I noted during my Miami experience. Have a safe & happy holiday!

*(I have a gallery in Chicago that is going to put up some hair embroideries)

So what do I do when I am not staying up half the night painting? I stay up half the night making truffles & buckeyes for xmas. And because it is a special time of year, Radley gets the empty peanut butter jar to work on.
Within a week, there will be 11 people, 2 dogs, and a cat here.

On the art front, several of my pieces will be at the Palm Beach 3 art fair in the Chelsea Galleria booth. The fair opens on January 10. Spent all of yesterday packing & shipping 3 pieces that will be shown at 31GRAND Gallery in NY, in a group show entitled "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter". The NY show also opens January 10... that's where I will be that night, and I can't wait!

A great review of "Pricked: Extreme Embroidery" with lots of pictures at whipup.net

Indulge me for a non-art moment as I refer you a chilling gallery of Christian "Haters" (as opposed to "Christian Haters") that I found.

Via Extreme Craft, a show for all those people who really only come to art openings for the free wine.

The Hardest Part of Being an Artist (for me)

Reading things like this Washington Post article by William Booth (which is highly entertaining and worth a read) about the Art Basel carnival:

Also In: Paul McCarthy's disturbing Chocolate Santas. Also, seemingly, sneakers. Not one pair of Nikes, but an installation of rare special-edition sneakers arranged by British "filmmakers" Nick Relph and Oliver Payne, who stuck bottles of Chateau Latour into the shoes, and from the necks of the wine bottles draped cheap plastic sports watches. It's multi-hyphenate mash. Get it? Trust us, you do. It's not that hard.

"It's a portrait of themselves," explains Kelly Taylor of Gavin Brown gallery in New York. "It's where they are, where we are at, now, literally, here." Taylor waves an arm around the convention hall, buzzing with the chic gobbling up seven-digit art like cucumber canapes at a homeless shelter. So they're making fun of us and they're selling the whole series for $200,000? Genius. What if you just wanted one sneaker? Nothing doing. "This has to go to a museum," Taylor says. "Just look at it."

Yes, genius. It has to go to a museum. I wish I would have thought of making a commentary on art fairs that was as complex and layered as theirs. Sigh. And people wonder about the suicide rates of artists.

A friend of a friend (who, as I heard it, was fortunate enough to be seated next to an art world VIP on his plane ride into Miami, who set this whole story in motion) gives a breathless account of his exciting first trip to Art Basel Miami, revealing, "As an artist, it’s the single most important career move I’ve made." (note to self: book a first class New York-Miami flight now for next year, or maybe several.... fly back and forth between these destinations several times daily in the week preceding Art Basel.) ; )

Hilarious. A friend of mine was at a party in Miami. He was asked who did the best art restoration in the area, my friend said he thought it was a guy named Jim Swope, based in West Palm Beach. My friend woke up this morning, and decided to do a Google search to make sure he gave the guy the right name, and turned up this, including a post-graduate, dark-haired yours truly in an image that I had never seen, with yet another variation on the spelling of my name. The followup story is that while working for Jim in Georgia, I got word that I got the tenure track teaching job at FIU in Miami, moved to South Florida, and he and I became great friends.

A thoughtful essay from David Byrne's Journal on the branding of artists (oh, and their work too), a subject near and dear to my own heart.

My friend Elmer sent me this link to the Roberta Smith review of Lucien Freud's show at MOMA... an exhibition I will be sure to catch on my next trip. I am a big fan of his paintings, but have a special affection for his more neurotic, early work.

I am on another road trip, but managed to photograph my newest embroidery before I left. I had something completely different planned for these overalls, and had already embroidered two words, but en route to Miami, I decided to spontaneously embroider something more relevant to the art fair, as I planned to wear the overalls to the opening. I usually print out my text and make patterns, but these were embroidered freehand, in the car, en route to Miami when I should have been sleeping, but couldn't. I worked on them intermittently through several days whenever I was not occupied, but they were ultimately finished 15 minutes before the press opening of Art Miami, followed by my husband keeping watch while I changed from my back-up outfit into the overalls, in the car, a few blocks from the fair.

Some pics from Miami... food, not art.
At the Rubell breakfast, hundreds of peeled, hard boiled eggs. Most people were just photographing them, but some people were actually eating them.

Bacon, surrounded by rubber gloves for takin' bacon.


Croissants, for the more trepidatious.

... and every kind of spread you can imagine. (If I would have seen the Nutella earlier, I might have partaken).
Decompressing and unpacking from the trip (and the NY trip from a few weeks back, truth be told) is taking longer than expected... today I unearthed my camera, tomorrow the Moleskine notebook. So far, the most accurate & amusing account of the fairs is at NY Arts Magazine.

Still recouperating from the long drive home, pulling a trailer... my body feels like it has been pulling the trailer sans car.

It was an eventful trip, will catch you up and post names/links of cool work I saw within the next 24. Came home to a house (and husband) suffering from weeks of neglect... there is much cleaning and "being extra nice" in my future... oh, and I almost forgot...xmas!

Just gave permission for "Blessed Art Thou" to be used in a textbook entitled "Media & Society", to be printed by Oxford University Press Australia.

Stranger than fiction...

More on "Blessed Art Thou"...... art imitating life, or life imitating art? I could not have scripted this....

My new painting got a mention in the Sun Sentinel.... I am thrilled, you know, ....of all the art in all the fairs, etc.
(the revised adage is, "as long as they spell the LAST name right", which they did)

Finally, a report from Miami.

Been SO busy... hope to catch you up more, but here are some highlights:

Here is Art Miami, collectors lined up, before the red ribbon is cut.
The light above my new painting was unlit for the first hour of the press preview. I went up to the lighting guys, clasped my hands in front of my chest, begging, and said, “I worked on this painting for 9 months, no one can see it, because it is in the dark, could you please light it? They were having trouble with lighting in various parts of the fair, so there were anxious dealers slipping the guys money, and hanging around at the bottom of the ladder waiting to grab them when they were finished with the job that they were doing, but my heartfelt plea (and my equally tenacious husband, who was one of the guys hovering around the base of the ladder) worked, and they came to light my piece... about 5 minutes after the Vernissage TV guys got sick of waiting and left. Such is life. Let it go.
My gallery decided to pull out one of my older, but major, ("I Let Him...") pieces and hang it at Art Miami, which meant that there was something for everyone, as this piece is very different from “Requiem...”.

Here is the new piece "Requiem... For Wassily & The Ineffable",
hanging opposite the Black and White Gallery from NY, who had some really cool things hanging, and were very patient with all the lighting guys fixing my work, and the friends who came by and stood in their space while taking pics of my new painting.

Here is a shot of my two works at Chelsea Galleria.... Blessed Art Thou and Fate of A Technicolor Romantic.

I feel that the work in the fairs that I have seen so far is stronger than ever before, though I am hearing that sales are not too good at any of the fairs compared to recent years. I am growing tired of one liner works, or work that is about obsessive process, with no content.

I leave the house at 9 a.m., and get back in the wee hours.... will sleep NEXT week.

"Requiem.... for Wassily & the Ineffable", 2007, triangular shaped canvas 79 x 116", acrylic & oil on canvas.
(click on any image to enlarge)





The triangle is a reference to Kandinsky and his concept of the artist as prophet, inhabiting the position at the tip of a triangle moving upward, with the rest of the world following.

I have inverted the triangle, with the swirling vortex of a contemporary art fair hovering above an artist working alone in the studio, posing questions about the empowerment/disempowerment of the artist (and Art) in relationship to the contemporary art world. This formal inversion addresses an entire market theoretically built upon the apex of the artist as a conduit for visions beyond articulation, then questions the fate of the ineffable when packaged as just another commodity of luxury and status.

The bottom of the painting was rendered entirely in luminous oil glazes, while the top is acrylic with a toxic green oil glaze over all except the art.

The painting will be on display at Art Miami from Weds Dec 5th through Sunday Dec 9th at the Chelsea Galleria booth, # 149. It's a huge painting, difficult to experience from a jpeg, so please stop by to see it if you are attending the art fairs. I will be at the Vernissage on Tuesday night, wearing my latest Art World Truths piece.

Also, in case you missed it first time around, "Blessed Art Thou" will be shown at Chelsea Galleria in the Wynwood district of Miami through the month of December.

Finally, my NEW WEBSITE is up, with new work, bigger, juicier pictures, and a format that is much easier to navigate. Many thanks to my amazing brother, who has been laboring over it for weeks.

I am currently enroute to Miami, with paintings in tow. Wish me luck.