Drawing with Giant It’s Labor Day weekend. The holiday doesn’t remarkably change my work schedule- I’m happily drawing away in my studio. It’s true that this particular weekend says “the END of summer” like nobody’s business. That said, it has allowed some serendipitous activities that happen only when I enjoy a sense of briefly unstructured [...]
Category Archives: Asides
A lesson from Jerry Kessler
July 19, 2011, 5:35 am
I have had the stoneware pieces that I own by Jerry Kessler sitting on my desk for over a week and a half, as if somehow they would inspire some profound thoughts about the significance of his death. Craig and I have known Jerry and Deb Kessler for thirty years. We met in Omaha when [...]
American art
March 22, 2011, 8:57 am
Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley, 1768 “American art did not exist until 1945.” Thus, in what can certainly be described as a “sweeping generalization”, one of my art professors consigned a legion of artists to fine art purgatory. And, in one of the most egregious lapses of critical thinking in my adult life, I [...]
Roadtrip
March 3, 2011, 6:23 am
It was a remarkable afternoon. In the balmy temperatures of a Thursday in the midst of February – a sixty degree day not a week after we had endured cold in which the daily high did not rise above minus eight- I stood in one of the galleries at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, [...]
“Good to go!”
January 12, 2011, 6:22 am
As I ran along the snow-covered trail, I took account of two marked changes in my morning routine. Because he was having some “geezer issues” attended to, Buddy was with our veterinarian Dr. Bock, who thought that Bud’s swift recovery from said issues could be expected. It was odd to be running solo- even more [...]
Doing just a little bit more…
December 14, 2010, 6:44 am
Standing back and regarding her handiwork, the woman who has ministered to all the medical needs of our family for the past 20 years, proclaimed, “Well, if you can live with those bunions, the scar that you’re going to have on that knee won’t present ANY problem!” The subject of her statement was my own [...]
Thieves Market … or “Mom! We made thirty-six hundred dollars!”
December 6, 2010, 11:20 pm
In her high-pitched, four-year-old, most excited voice, Maggie Campbell crowed to me through the phone receiver, “Mom! We made thirty-six hundred dollars!” The year was 1984. I was in Omaha, and I had sent Craig and Maggie off to the Thieves Market in Iowa City with a Datsun pickup loaded with my engravings. I was [...]
Happy Thanksgiving!
November 22, 2010, 9:55 pm
Holstein / 7″ x 8″ on Scratchboard / Thomas Agran In the gallery, this is the season when artists make certain to deliver work in a timely fashion. It’s a busy, happy time- a harvest of work done in solitude. Amy Plymat’s painted silk scarves are piled beside Thomas Agran’s beautifully rendered scratchboards of classic, [...]
Orthodontics Through the Ages, or How I Spent My Winter
April 22, 2010, 7:04 am
Dr. William Olin I have done a lot of crazy things in a lifetime lived as a “working artist”. Pair that status with a lifetime spent with Craig (easily the most outrageously creative person I have ever known), who seems to have an inexhaustible supply of great ideas, often, (but certainly not always!) executed by [...]