Haley House Bakery Cafe

A view of the Haley House Bakery Cafe on Washington Street in Boston, MA.  It's a 16x16 oil on canvas.  It's the second of the two paintings I made for the silent auction, which will be part of the festivities honoring the Haley House Community's Fiftieth Anniversary on December 2-4.

23 Dartmouth Street

A 12x24 oil on canvas view of a building at the corner of Dartmouth and Montgomery Streets in Boston's South End, always known to me as 23 Dartmouth.  It's the site of Haley House, a soup kitchen,  and much more now, which will be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in December.  The painting will be available in a silent auction to benefit Haley House.

Store Front

A store front at the corner of Dartmouth and Montgomery Streets in Boston's South End, which had a big part in my life many years ago.  Today it's been gentrified a bit.  A 9x12 oil on canvas.

South End Stoop

Here I'm revisiting an old project of a couple years ago, painting views of Boston's South End.  This is a 9x12 oil on canvas.

Haley House

A 9x12 oil on canvas of Haley House, otherwise known as 23 Dartmouth, at the corner of Dartmouth and Montgomery in Boston's South End.  I spent much time in this building many years ago.

Last Piece of Wallis Paper

Only a single 8x10 pastel tonight of a South End location, the corner of Tremont and Dartmouth, but, alas, I used my last piece of Wallis paper.  The previous seven pastels came from the same pad.  Pastel artists all know that because of "production problems" they can't get Wallis paper now, and maybe never.  

Visual Translations and What de Kooning Was About

The top is an 8x10 pastel and the bottom a 9x12 oil, both of South End locations, interpreted.

In the Shiff book on de Kooning, he quotes an anonymous reviewer who wrote, "[de Kooning's] real subject is the aesthetic sensibility as it responds to the shock of the beautiful buried forms and rhythms in the objects and processes of the world...He has never been exclusively an abstract or figurative artist."  So there it is.  Now you know.

Two South Ends and One De Kooning Joke

I could only manage to make two pastels of the South End today.  Both are 8x10 as the previous group.

I've been reading a fascinating book, Between Sense and De Kooning by Richard Shiff, that explores De Kooning's painting philosophy with many detailed and nuanced examples.  Hopefully, I can write more about it later.  I did want to mention one more De Kooning phrase that Shiff repeats, one I hadn't encountered before.  De Kooning can be wonderfully irreverent.  He once said that the paintings of Mark Rothko were "blurred Albers".

Studies of the South End

This past weekend I visited Boston's South End, where I used to live years ago before it became gentrified and outrageously expensive.   I spent hours walking about taking a few hundred photographs.  From this group I made the above four pastel studies.  Unlike Brooklyn, which is a mixture of old and new with lots of patina,  the South End is fairly uniform and residential, but I think I can still make some interesting images.