Category: Drawing

My office is smack in the middle of the Chelsea art district and I often pop in for an art break at lunch or on the way home from work. There is such an endless variety of interesting things to see; more and more work is figurative these days, which I find is pretty helpful in sparking thoughts for the sort of drawing I’m doing. I am always interested in what gets into galleries, what’s condsidered ‘legitimate’, though I remind myself that this is not necessarily synonymous with the’ the best’. Nonetheless, much of it seems to have earned its place there and I am less mystified by what this world and this industry is really about, the more often I visit. I think my earlier resentment and incomprehension of the Art establishment has been replaced with a sense of wonder at all the ways creativity manifests and is recognized.
Drawn while sitting on my little stool, tucked in a corner, on a day when the galleries were busy with tourists and weekenders. This giant portrait ogled me from across the road. I returned the compliment.

This was drawn on the way to work, early, the sun still at an acute angle from the East. I added the colors later, trying to recapture that feeling of high contrast and harsh morning light. I continue to be intrigued by the power of compliementary colors. (“Nice orange. ” Why, thank you.”)

While we were away, so were our hounds, Joe and Tim. They went to stay with the Globuses (their breeders) and various relatives in Fire Island.The highlight of their vacation was when Joe, a natural hunter, escaped from the compound and went over to the neighbors where he found a dead (and non-rabid) raccoon. Tim (Robin to Joe’s Batman) followed. Their various cousins stayed safely at home.
We were hound-less for quite a while upon our return as it took forever for Captain Ron Globus to make it back to the city with his boarders. We consoled ourselves by sleeping in and missing morning walks.

Joe and Tim brought some friends back to the City– a pack of fleas. They were both scratching and nipping until Jack and I took them for a scrub. Normally, we wash them in the kitchen sink but this itchuation called for professional help. We scooted them right over to the Village dog wash and soaked them in some special flea bath until they were squeaky clean and calm again.

Though I try to control the temptation to use blue shadows in my paintings, I love the way these worked against Joe’s ginger fur. In fact, let’s be honest, I rarely avoid the temptation to use blue shadows. I’m sure if I was lady, I’d wear blue eye-shadow and coral lipstick like my mother-in-law Phyl used to.

I have been quite busy launching some new advertising for Chase over the past couple of months. You may have seen my newest spots on the air for the new Chase Freedom credit card. If not, check ’em out here (click on Watch TV Spots).

Anyway, making these spots was fairly arduous and involved endless long nights in a studio, watching digital paint dry, drawing (and painting with tea) and eating biscuits. We also created half dozen digital kaleidoscopes that are in magazine and newspapers and wild posting around about.

One of the most interesting things about the project has been that we bought the song, “I’m Free” by The Rolling Stones and then worked with Moby, Fatboy Slim, The Postal Service and Hot Chip to reinterpret it. Mick Jagger sings the vocals and everything is brand new. The Stones are releasing our music as an album on iTunes in the next couple of weeks and we are about to do a new round of “I’m Free” remixes with other great artists.

I was appropriately melancholy on the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, thinking about how things have changed and how much damage has been done to us all by those maniacs in the caves of Afghanistan and the conference rooms of Washington, D.C. I have been speaking out against this madness since the beginning and it seems that finally the rest of this country is coming to its senses.
Meanwhile, it was a sunny lovely day (I call it ‘9/11 weather’ as it’s always like this on this day) and so I drew the buildings that are still left standing in my hometown.

I have watched this new Frank Gehry building go up on the West Side, bit by bit, every day on my way to work and am really falling in love with it. At first it seemed so un-New York, like many of the new cartoon-colored, glass boxes cropping up in the current building boom, but watching its undulating windows reflect the clouds is really stirring. The construction of the underlying concrete structure was fun to watch, seeming completely off kilter and doomed to collapse (apparently people regularly called in during that phase, to point out to the contractors that they were doing something horribly wrong). It also seemed like there were a lot of problems with the complex, twisted glass; panes were regularly swopped in and out.
Sometime I pass right under the building on the West Side drive but usually I admire it from 10th Ave. across the rusting elevated train tracks (soon to become a public park) and the umber tenements, a lovely juxtaposition of 19th, 20th, and 21st century New York.

Seventh Avenue was blasted through the West Village in the late ’50’s, cleaving buildings, leaving unusable little triangular lots, and wreaking all sorts of havoc across the organic twists of the old Indian paths. Streets go higgledy-piggledy and then stop abruptly. The only thing that got completely away from me is the scale of the truck on the left hand side which, to correct my screw-up and as a tribute to Lucinda Rogers, I made transparent-ish.