Miss You Already, Lou Reed

Miss You Already, Lou Reed

Oil on canvas, 10x10

sold

Lou Reed has died, and I find myself darkly, deeply sad.

I always loved the guy, for what he did, what he said, what he meant. Lots of his songs didn't really do it for me, but his music, in general, always did, if that makes any sense. I could tell a Lou Reed song a mile away - and that's something I can't say for a lot of musicians.

Far as I could tell, Lou Reed never wanted to be anything other than Lou Reed. He never seemed to want to be cute, or a star, or commercial. He wanted to be himself, and to express himself, and if the world didn't like it, too bad.

Brian Eno said that though the first Velvet Underground album only sold 30,000 copies, "everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band." You can count me in that 30,000. My little band, Petite Mal, couldn't have been more unlike any of Lou Reed's bands - except that, in its soul, it was. We never wanted to be anything but what we were, good, bad or indifferent.

Peter and I had the good fortune to see Lou Reed not so many years ago, in Kingston, NY. We were in the second or third row, and Reed gave a great performance. He was weathered, and yes, he was dark, but he had that rock and roll gleam in his eye, and he sang his heart and his soul, and you just knew he'd lived the way he wanted to live.

Far as I could tell, Lou Reed tried pretty much everything that crossed his path, and he was unapologetic about all of it. Everything he did, everything he took, everything he sampled colored his life and his music. And in the end, that's what got him. His liver gave out, and complications from the transplant took his life today, Oct. 27, 2013.

The world is just not as good a place without Lou Reed in it. 

Where He Loves to Fish - and a New Booth Shot

Where He Loves to Fish

Oil on canvas, 20x60

Please contact me for price and delivery information

More than a few friends and acquaintances have expressed incomprehension or at least surprise at our decision to move from the culturally and commercially rich area where we lived in Connecticut (near Mystic) to the rural and undeveloped Eastern Shore of Virginia. 

And as we were driving home from Salisbury, MD (a sign of just how out there we are is that Salisbury constitutes a shopping and dining metropolis for us now), I tried to look with fresh eyes at this area. I imagined that I was a person driving through here for the first time, and wondered what I really saw. 

I saw flat land and a big open sky, for starters. 

I saw a huge amount of corn, some of it so high that you can't see the first stories, and even part of the second stories of the houses. 

I saw wealth and I saw poverty. Big new homes, carefully kept older homes, and houses dilapidated, with sagging porches, rusting cars, unkempt land. 

And I realized, for the first time, that we have landed in one of the very last undeveloped places on the entire Eastern Seaboard. Most of the rest of those undeveloped places are, I believe, in Maine. Aside from that - think about it! - the East Coast is mostly all built up. 

Here, there are a lot of places like Quinby Bridge, where Peter loves to fish. The water here is the Machipongo River. It has a big tide, and when it's low, is pretty much all mud. It's filled with oysters and crabs, turtles and fish, tons of birds - and when we were there the other day, we saw a skate. 

This quiet, this diversity, this wealth of nature and beauty, this is part of why I love it here, and am so very grateful. 

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GENERALLY, WHEN YOU apply to be in a juried art show, the jurors want not only to see your work, but your booth as well. 

Booth shots have to be carefully staged and carefully shot. Jurors don't want to see slanting sunlight, distracting desks, cluttered walls, price tags, pet portraits, your name, or any artist junk. And jurors apparently hate booth shots taken at shows. So the only thing to do is set up the tent in the yard and take photos there. 

The tent was up for a day and a half while I finished "Where He Loves to Fish." Everyone in the neighborhood drove by and slowed down while the tent was standing. What are those crazy people with all the dogs doing NOW? 

So here's my booth shot for the next series of shows. I like it - what do you think? 

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CONNIE METTLER, who runs the extremely helpful Art Fair Insiders website, is asking for your participation in a survey about art fairs. What's your favorite? She'd love for you to vote, to post the link on your Facebook page, all that jazz. And why not? It's easy and it's fun. 

To nominate your favorite art fair, click here:   http://www.artfairinsiders.com/profiles/blogs/america-s-best-art-fair. Voting for the best will follow at a later date!

Nominations must be submitted by Aug. 31, so Get A Move On! 

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Dog of the Day

Gotta love that Corgi face!