just for the sake of nostalgia, this is a shot of my last painting show at the fantastic wellsville creative art center in wellsville ny. i had about 40 paintings up. a gem of a place run by two great guys, andy and marshall. they made the show (called goat and woodblock) so simple. the drive there was a gift from autumn. it was well attended thanks to a and m’s planning. i’d do it again in a heartbeat.

collection of carey manies, 24 x 24″, oil and acrylic on board. the one legged lonesome bird, passing judgment on you, and he’s not happy. i run near the niagara river, and the seagulls will often stand on the railing, facing the water, balancing on one leg, thinking of Macdonald’s wrappers and loose fries. one leg. is the other one tucked away for warmth? i figured maybe if he can make a leg disappear that he can hid other things too. like a little pipsqueak arm, ready to bop you one. but about the leg…maybe it is missing? maybe it is the same seagull i’ve seen and he only has one leg. maybe his name it tony and he is too lazy to hunt for fish (or fries) so he just hangs out on the railing and zones out. maybe he’s sad. or bored. and he probably doesn’t care for the nasty factories across the street. his chest pattern is what he knows, like a tattoo. he has become his environment. his long arm is decorated with what i think of as the “screen gems” design that i remember coming on before certain cartoons in the early 80′s. must have been a production company? but the graphic similar. the shape of the bird reminded me of doing some paintings a long time ago for the aquarium of niagara…and part of my pay was to be able to meet the animals. i got to hold a penguin, which was incredible. it felt like warm firm plastic.

during summer i turn into an insomniac. late night tv is not reasonable, but i do it anyway…flipping, flipping, flipping and then a nature show. score. there was an incredible encounter between a bear and a lynx that summed up everything in my world. the pair were curious about each other. slowly dancing around in a circle ala west side story. they would punk each other a bit and then let out their audible code, which was either understood or not understood, whos to say. im taking about the type of sound that a broken moog would make. played in a hockey arena. come to think of it, the bear did sound like the goal siren. they should switch celebratory sports music with animal sounds.

i loved those few minutes of tv. couldn’t stop thinking about it.

beneath that batman mug is a lynx, but after repainting him a bunch of times, i wiped him out and somehow found the vintage batman mug on ebay. it seemed to me to be as bizarre as the lynx, just more silent. bat, lynx, man…the encounter, communication, it would have been just as good. the bear now has the nostalgia caught on his claw is is unsure of how to proceed. the lighbutlbs are there to add warmth to the scene. now its a party and party lights are important. romantic.

and anyway, when i was in undergrad and trying to figure out how to make art i remember robert rauchenburg saying “if the moment cant be as fresh and strange as everything going on around you, then it’s false”. he aslo said that in black mountain college, joseph albers gave him “permission to go on thinking the way i was thinking”. so the mug stays.

collection of jim zito. oil and acrylic on board, 24 x 24″. batman turns out to be an idiot. the odd backstroking man letting out a powerful cloud of mist in the background came from looking from my elementary school workbooks. some of them had these surreal summer of love type illustrations in them, but this was in the mid 80′s…so stylistically an odd inclusion. the publisher probably a jefferson airplane fan. the water treading batman waits. stares and smirks and waits. whats next? the watery scene comes from the summer float that my friends and i do every summer in the lower niagara river, a few miles after the falls. we get in, float for a few hours and let the current take us. the drops remind me of getting rained on while already wet, the enormous amount of splashing that goes along with the float and the cooling mist of the falls.

i seem to recall making this drawing in pittsburgh while waiting for a stir fry to arrive. i’d say 1995. a fun little guy. my friend tom kegler and i used to joke about making drawings of anatomy as we assumed it to be. in other words, drawings as admission of just how little we know about how the world works. whats a spleen, where is it, what happens if it fails, how large is it, does it have the ability to reason, does it stay up to watch conan too?