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Something warming from the NYTimes, a slide show about a woman who likes to walk.

P.S. I know I’ve been a delinquent blogger lately. It’s been a hectic couple of months. I have missed you.

Oh, man. I inhaled The American Painter Emma Dial this weekend. It’s a fantastic novel about a NYC artist’s assistant who paints the paintings dictated by her famous boss. It’s the best, most real depiction of painting I’ve had the pleasure of reading or seeing on film and it’s deliciously quotable, too…

There is nothing sexier than a well-drawn line…

I was trying to build my world around being a painter. I worked tirelessly, fantasizing about the picture I was making. all the pictures to come, and what it would be like when they took on another life out in the world, apart from me. I never doubted that painting was my future…

When we got stir-crazy we went to the bar. Irene and I spoke contemptuously of some of the bar’s denizens who wore painter’s clothes and had not made a thing in years, or the ones who hid out in graduate school rather than face the difficulty of earning a living and figuring out hot to build a life as an artist. There used to be loads of people like us around, young and old, artists working without much thought for the business side or the academic side… But I did not know them anymore and I felt, thinking of Michael’s studio where I painted five days a week, that I was missing out…

Cannot think of a better summer read for an artist.

My favorite thing about NYC is the layers. It’s just layers and layers and layers of stuff everywhere you look. I had the pleasure of visiting the great city last week. Here are a few of the things I thought you might enjoy.

C.B. I Hate Perfume
Do you love the idea of scent as art but hate regular perfume? If so, I joyfully recommend C. B. I Hate Perfume to you. It’s a wondrous perfume gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with over 300 scents to take in (if you can). The offerings range from a few specialty blended perfumes to a collection of singular accords with names like Old English Novel, Suntan Lotion, Ginger Ale, and Wet Mitten. It’s a magical place. Swoonworthy, actually. If in Brooklyn, you must go.

Richard Serra at the Gagosian
Those of you into encaustic painting should check out Richard Serra’s show Solids at the Gagosian. The show – which runs through December 20th, 2008 – features a series of topographical drawings made with paintstick. (I wonder what brand he uses?)

Here’s a bit about how the drawings are made from the one-sheet at the show.

Melted paintstick is poured onto a hard surface on the floor or a table. Sometimes a sheet of window-screen is placed on top of the liquid paintstick. Then the paper is laid down, either on top of the screen or directly on top of the liquid paintstick. Pressure is exerted on the back of the paper with a hard marking tool and the front side of the paper picks up the mark. In this series no direct drawing is done on the front of the paper… In the Solids series, as the layering of gesture increases, so does the accumulated mass and perceived weight. The effects of compression, torsion, the surface tension of the material and, finally, gravity, all work, as the paintstick coalesces to produce widely varying textures.

So basically… printmaking. For me, these pieces are all about their compositions. The textures are interesting. Integral, even. But it’s the compositions, seen at mid-distance (those raggedy edges!) that thrill me.

Garden of Earthly Delights
Did you ever wish you could see the Hieronymus Bosch painting, Garden of Earthly Delights, interpreted in dance? I didn’t! But I had no idea how beautiful it could be. Martha Clarke’s production at the Minetta Lane Theater captures the joys and horrors of being human in a sensual, scatological, ariel dance performance supported by live musicians (percussion, cello & wind). The painting’s always been a favorite of mine in a Where’s Waldo kind of way.

To see it bigger, click here. It’s intense, I know. But that’s life, eh? (At least in New York.)

For all you art lovers on the East Coast… There’s a GREAT show of encaustic paintings by Gail Gregg at the Luise Ross Gallery in NYC. Check it out if you have a chance. The show runs through December 21, 2007.

My favorites from the show are made of paperboard packaging material, unfolded, laid flat and coated with encaustic. They’re still and powerful with a tribal, mask-like quality. Enchanting.

Here’s a picture of Richard Serra’s “Intersection II” as viewed from Terrace 5.

If you’re anything like me, once you enter a space like MoMA, you don’t want to leave. There’s too much to see! Leaving the building for lunch is a non-option. Thank goodness they’ve got not one, not two, but THREE restaurants to choose from.

The Modern, as elegant as it appears, was easy to rule out. It’s closed for lunch on weekends. (”Phew!” My pocketbook breathed an audible sigh of relief.)

So we trekked up to the second floor to check out Cafe 2. A waft of cafeteria air hit hard as we approached the cave-like entrance. Ugh. But hungry museum-goers that we were, we suspended judgment ’til peeking at the menu. Cafe 2 serves up a mix of fancy-schmancy, Italian-style cafeteria food. Although many items seemed appealing on their own, as a whole, the menu came off heavy. Cured meats and cheeses; garlic laden antipasti; cheese filled panini; that sort of thing. Although Cafe 2 would have sufficed fine in a pinch, we decided to pass and put our appetites in the hands of the chefs at Terrace 5.

Terrace 5 is a light-drenched space with an outdoor balcony that overlooks the Sculpture Garden. Score! The menu is seasonal and limited (a handful of special entrees complemented by a fresh mix of soups, salads and appetizers). We cobbled together a meal of salads and seasoned almonds topped off by a chocolate-hazelnut sundae with salted caramelized peanuts and caramel milk chocolate glaze. Just my kind of thing. The only drawback was waiting time… We’d have squeezed in an extra half an hour of museum time if we’d skipped table service and gone the cafeteria route. Alas, what’s a hungry girl to do? Overall a spendy lunch with a beautiful view. Worth every penny.

The Richard Serra exhibit at MoMA runs through September 10th, 2007. It’s spectacular. Since it’s already been thoroughly reviewed in the NYTimes, the New Yorker, Slate, etc. I won’t compete by adding mine. But here are a few impressions from the show.

MASS
These pieces are massive! Awe inspiring. They inspire many questions like how were they made? How were they carried to the museum? Installed? Are they dangerous? And how the heck can the museum’s floor sustain all that weight? Not many answers to be found in the museum’s literature. But a cashier in the bookstore tipped me off to a YouTube video of the installation you may find interesting. Curiously, first hand accounts were hard to come by. None of the museum’s staff we spoke with were around on installation day.

THE PASSING OF TIME
Like a film or a piece of music, these pieces require the passing of time in order to be perceived. The larger pieces are simply too large to take in from a single angle. You literally need to walk around or through them to understand them. Even then, they kind of bend the mind. More like landscapes than any other sculpture I’ve seen.

MANUFACTURED AGE
Serra’s rusted steel reminds me of a genre of painting that’s been popular here in Boulder for the last five years or so. Very much about surface and texture. Manufactured age.

BIRD POO
The bird poo on Torqued Ellipse IV in the Sculpture Garden made me laugh. I wish I could have viewed everything outside. Serra’s massive new works on the second floor seemed constrained by the space. I wanted blue sky overhead. A picnic. And distance to view them from.

LOVE
Minimalism. Yum.

I’ve been away. In New York! Again. (A vexing personal issue has required four trips to the Big City in nearly as many months.) The wonderful thing about all this New York travel is the spectacular art I’ve been able to see.

This time my husband Andy and I checked out the Richard Serra exhibit at MoMA. A full report to come later this week. But for now, let me shed some light on last week’s quote about the big and the red (that old art school saw) which came to mind after viewing Mr. Serra’s work last Sunday. Not because it’s not good. But because it’s astonishing. Because it’s big. And rust red.

Ooh, friends, I wish I had a picture for you. But your vivid imaginations will have to do. I just returned from another quickie trip to New York and here’s what I found… Kale gardens! Spectacular! They’re wee little gardens made of flowering kale and mossy bits accented with the occasional plastic flower or two. They thrive on street level windowsills and ledges, near where the garbage cans and recycling bins hang out. They have kind of a feral, aquarium-outside-your-apartment vibe. Charming. Wish you could see them in all their scraggly glory. Pictures next time. I promise!

Ooh! I had the exquisite pleasure of checking out the Martin Ramirez exhibit at the Folk Art Museum in New York a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been feasting on memories of the show ever since.

Ramirez (who’s work was unfamiliar to me before I saw it in New York) was an outsider artist, a schizophrenic who produced nearly 300 drawings during a fifteen year confinement at the DeWitt State Hospital in California.

Seeing the show gave me the feeling of peering at a map of the human mind. Ramirez’s drawings have an urban quality. They’re dominated by tunnels and orderly processions of trains, cars, iconic cowboys and deer nibbling at the edges of suburban gardens.

Ramirez’s use of strong black lines to define man made spaces brought to mind the sketches an inspired engineer might make in the early stages of planning a city or highway. Precise. Lines and stripes. Light and dark. Flat and deep. Paper bags patched together to make a beautifully layered surface just right for each drawing.

What is a tunnel to an engineer? A city? A garden? Are the human environments we build for ourselves the inevitable conseqence of our human minds? Or a freak accident based on a long forgotten circumstance a long time ago?

I love this stuff. If you’re in the neighborhood consider checking it out. The exhibit runs through April 29th.

Andy and I arrived at the IFP Market on Sunday, the 17th, just in time for orientation. (Many thanks to my cousin Carol and her husband John for dropping us at the front door.) Registration and orientation took place in the Puck Building, an elegant, historic structure with an ethereal ballroom on Lafayette St.

The first thing we encountered was a phalanx of filmmakers handing out postcards on the glass steps in front of the Puck. This was a great intro. to the Market as a big part of the experience is the handing out and receiving of postcards. More on postcards later…

First registration. Pretty straightforward with one notable exception and that’s that the energy in the room was intense! Not a bad kind of intense, just surprising. I expected something more easy going (it being a Sunday and all). But this was Manhattan. And not just anywhere Manhattan, but Orientation Day at the IFP Market, a gathering of ambitious film-types from all around the world here for the sole purpose of promoting the heck out of their films. Yikes! The energy was contagious. After about a half an hour of standing around slack-jawed I felt ready to dive in.

Holy cow! New York is an amazing place. Andy and I arrived in Manhattan for the IFP Market on Sunday (the 17th) and it felt like we helicoptered into the pages of a “Where’s Waldo” book. It’s like the city is an interactive collage made up of layers upon layers of architecture, advertising, graffiti, dirt, people, clothing, pigeons, air conditioner drippings, spat-out-gum, cobblestones, vermin, voices, strange breezes and trash. The scene changes each day which is fascinating. After spending so much time looking at and thinking about the wax cities the bees make I can’t help but think of New York as hive-like macro-organism inhabited by its creators who are always in the process of fine tuning, perfecting and changing their magnificent home.

WHERE WE STAYED
We stayed at the Incentra Village House on 8th Ave. in Greenwich Village. It’s a sweet little guest house. Our room, the Lahore, was beyond charming. Furnished with antiques. Shelves filled with books (which made me feel right at home). A kitchenette outfitted with a mini-fridge, a microwave and vintage china. A clean and (by New York standards) spacious bathroom. The softest sheets ever. The place was almost hobbit-like with its cheerful, painted walls and winding stairs. Our third floor room was plenty quiet and provided an engaging view of the goings-on in the street below. We spent very little time in our room at the Incentra, but the time we were there felt restorative and enchanting. I’m already plotting my return.

WHERE WE ATE
The food in New York was fabuluous – not a single morsel passed my lips that didn’t make me swoon. Although I’d have been delighted to eat out at fancy restaurants three times a day our budget didn’t allow for that so we made do by patching together a diet of goodies purchased at the nearby convenience store, street food and a few nice meals out on the town.

Here’s a list of things I loved, that I came home craving, and look forward to returning to for more…

• The best pizza I’ve ever had (chased by chocolate cannoli) came from the San Genarro Festival in Little Italy. I played it safe and stuck to cheese slices from the vendor on the corner of Spring and Mulberry (which were heaven to me) but if we’d stayed another day I’d have ventured out and tried the vodka pizza, which looked good with its swirls of mozzarella cheese embedded in a spicy, vodka sauce.

• Rocky Road Rice Pudding from Rice to Riches. Rice to Riches is one of those only-in-New-York kinds of places that sells just one thing… rice pudding. But they sell it in so many variations, with so many toppings that you can’t help but come back for more. Kind of like your favorite ice cream place. But with rice pudding.

• Chocolate from The Chocolate Bar, a sweet little chocolate shop specializing in retro chocolate bars, multiple varieties of hot chocolate, chocolate tea, candies and truffles. Habit forming.

• Good Restaurant. An inviting place on Greenwich Avenue near the Incentra. Light, flavorful salads, phenomenal bruschetta followed up by banana chocolate bread pudding. Friendly, upbeat atmosphere. Great service. Reasonably priced. I wish we had a Good here in Boulder. I could eat there every day.

WHERE WE SHOPPED
Well… we were so busy with events related to the IFP Market that I didn’t get much shopping in. Although I poked around SoHo enough to know I want to go back.

We checked out the honey display at Dean and DeLuca. Respectable but not comprehensive. Still – a beautiful grocery experience. (An aside… most of the corner grocery markets we ran into were nothing more then glorified convenience stores with wilty produce. Is this where people really do their grocery shopping? Horrors!)

Stumbled across a too-cute-to-be-true home appliance store called Pylones that sells cheery, whimsical items for the home (ladybug egg timers, prince and princess dust pans and brooms, giant calculators). I bet Pee Wee Herman shops for the playhouse here.

And oh, let’s not forget the shoe place in SoHo with cashmere ballet flats.

The amazing thing about New York is that we stumbled into all these places without trying. They were just there. On the way to and from lunch, to and from the hotel. Imagine what we could have found if we were actually looking…