It's Creative Harvest time again!

It's hard to believe that it's been almost a year since the last Creative Harvest exhibit at the Hopewell Museum in Paris, KY. Each year, the Stoner Creek Arts group in Paris puts on an exhibit through the auspices of the Hopewell Museum to showcase work by Paris area artists. I submitted Amor Aeterna and My Heart Dreams In A Sea of Stars as my two entries.

Amor Aeterna, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 20x24 inches

My Heart Dreams In A Sea of Stars, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 24x30 inches

Last year's event was a lot of fun, and I hope the same for this year. The opening will be Friday, October 2nd from 6-9 p.m. If you can make it to the opening, I'd love to see you there. Click on the link below for directions.

Link to Yahoo Map directions for Hopewell Museum

Hopewell Museum website link

The Block Party at Failte in Lexington on September 18th was also a lot of fun. Liza Hendley-Betz had the Lexington Irish Dancers there and we got some pretty good turnout, though not as much as the previous block party. The block party was a way to build awareness that the very unique businesses caught up in all the Limestone construction that runs from Euclid all the way to Vine are still open. Failte was a great place to show my paintings and collages and I'm very happy for the opportunity to have shown there for the evening. I'd put up some pictures but I have got to remember to seriously carry extra batteries for my digital camera. I flew out the door without spares. I'll not make that mistake again.

I'm no longer working at the Paris-Bourbon County Library part time and it has felt weird not going to work Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Had to make myself remember not to turn left on 7th Street or that I no longer have to drive at warp speed to get there from Lexington. I miss my friends there but the time I have gotten back has been spent working on my next painting which is a 30th anniversary portrait of Charlotte Harwell. If any of my Paris library friends are reading this, I'd love to see you at the Creative Harvest opening Friday.

I've also been working on a blog posting for my current round of collages from The Penny Dreadful series but I'm not satisfied with the photography of one of the pieces. It's time I set up a new place to photograph my work that is more evenly lit.

Missed an opportunity to show work at the Courthouse Square Art Guild in Carlisle if I remember the name of the group correctly. I was interested in showing with them but it didn't quite work out this year. Hopefully in a future exhibit. I understand they had 190 entries for their current show which is impressive for a fairly new art guild in a small town off the usual beaten path. Valerie and I recently drove through Carlisle for the first time and found it architecturally much like Paris in that their Victorian era downtown is very intact and as alive as any small downtown can be in these trying economic times.

As I said earlier, if you can make it to the Creative Harvest opening, I'll be glad to see you.

Here's hoping for a very creative autumn!

Amor Aeterna

"Next day the memories of these things,
Like leaves through which a bird has flown,
Still vibrated with Love's warm wings;
Till I must make them all my own
And paint this picture.
So, 'twixt ease
Of talk and sweet long silences,
She stood among the plants in bloom
At windows of a summer room,
To feign the shadow of the trees."

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1870

The Rossetti quote is from an unpublished poem I found on the Rossetti Archive. It fits perfectly how I feel about the subject of this painting, Valerie. I started this painting last November and through the intensely over scheduled months finally finished it last Sunday. I had promised to tell the story of how it all came to be but I don't think I'm going to keep that promise as I first envisioned it. In this day and age, I don't think anyone would want to read such unashamedly over the top recountings of how Valerie and I met, got separated and found again. It started in the freshman registration line at college, becoming fast friends, developing feelings that we were too shy to tell for whatever reasons, ending up with other people down the road. Years of separation follow and we live surprisingly parallel lives never forgetting the other until one day Valerie recognises Charlotte Harwell's portrait on my website and signs my guestbook. It took many more years until we were finally together again but in all that time our love was never forgotten and grew all the while. We need never be parted again.

I wanted to celebrate that journey with this painting.

The background is a little place called Cushendall in Country Antrim in Ireland circa 1899. It was in a Victorian coffee table book called Pictures of Ireland published in 1899. Because Valerie is a huge fan of the Pre-Raphaelites, I wanted to paint her in that style as much as possible. My work has kind of split off in two directions both still Victorian but I enjoyed very much revisiting my older Pre-Raph style and seeing how it looks years later.

Yes, Valerie has been mentioned a lot in the blog of late but that cannot really be helped as she and Charlotte have had a lot of impact on who I am as an artist over the years. My next painting is the 30th anniversary of the first time I made an image of Charlotte Harwell and there are a number of collages in progress in what I now think of as The Penny Dreadful series. More about that in the coming days. Paintings that I've mentioned in recent blogs are still coming along slowly. Next Tuesday will be my last day working at the Paris-Bourbon County Public Library and I will have more time to catch up on painting etc. I will be sad at leaving such a cool group of people but I can't keep up the pace and still have the time and energy to paint.

A friend of mine has been talking to me lately about legacies and I hope mine is that the paintings outlast me and that it could be seen that the subject in each one was loved.

Showing at Failte-the Irish Shop

I have the distinct honour of showing at Failte-the Irish Shop on North Limestone in Lexington, KY during the Gallery Hop, 18 September from 5-8 p.m. It is a delightful shop that can use all the support it can get during the street construction that is currently going on. For directions click on the website link at right, Failte Irish Imports

The website includes a map and parking directions.

Below is the announcement from the Failte newsletter. Come and show your support for local art and local business. It's well worth the trip downtown!

BLOCK PARTY

On September Friday 18th we are having a block party from 5pm -8pm.
It's the same night as the gallery hop and We are having Our very own Artist.
Patrick Lynch will be displaying and selling His lovely pieces of art. check out His website:
http://www.beautifulpast.net/

We are are also very excited to announce that the Lexington Irish Dancers will also be there doing a jig or two for Us:
http://www.lexirishdance.com/

And now for something a bit different

To Recall the Life That Arose Before My Eyes, 2009, collage, 18x24 inches.
Click on image to enlarge

I Now Know What I Must Do, 2009, collage, 16x20 inches
Click on image to enlarge.

In late 1997, during a terrible painting block, I took up making collages as a way of looking at what I was doing through a somewhat different filter. I'm not in a painting block now because Amor Aeterna is very close to completion but I thought I would revisit the collage. There are a couple of different schools of collage that are incorporating Victorian imagery into their work. The current school is what I think of as the Somerset Studio school of collage which uses not only images but also text, small objects and may also extended to multiple movable panels etc.

An older school of collage is the kind where the image maker has a stack of Dover clip art books filled with wonderful Victorian images and from other sources they've saved of a similar type. Later practitioners of this school make use of computer scans to arrange their compositions etc while others still use photocopiers, scissors and Mod Podge (tm) to create their collages. I decided to be of the old Mod Podge school.

The first two of my collages are posted here. I've saved a lot of material over the years and started looking at it again recently. Instead of mounting my collages to a sheet of cold press watercolour paper as I did in 1997, I decided to mount them to canvas panels using the different sized panels allowed greater freedom of composition. This necessitated making enlargements of my backgrounds and then piecing them together onto the canvas panel. I cut out all of the elements I wish to place on the background and rather than just rough cut and slap them down, I cut out everything very carefully including negative spaces in say the crook of a figure's arm or some part where when cut out would reveal the background.

I also looked at the particular line quality of each element with a view towards matching it. I wanted the collage to have a visual logic to it so that each part would be believable as a whole. One of the developments of the modern photocopier is that you can print images in reverse if desired. In the closeup of the collage below, the lady in the middle ground has been reversed so that her shadowing matches the troubled gentleman in the foreground as well as the lighting of the ruins behind them. The composition is being treated exactly the same as though I were doing a paintings.

I Now Know What I Must Do, detail
Click on image to enlarge

The use of colour is designed to stand out from the sepia toned collages I see so much of which is to say the collage is meant to be brand new rather than a weathered and aged object found in an attic somewhere. The colours also are tied to my normal painting palette but in the case of collage I use transparent glazes so as not to obscure the underlying original detail. My colours are described as jewel toned in my paintings, I wanted to maintain this quality in the collages.

I also want the collages to suggest their own stories in the viewer's mind. Fans of the writing of Wilkie Collins and J. Sheridan LeFanu and other Victorian writers of the mysterious and the fantastic will have no trouble conjuring up narratives in their minds. However, I found that viewers completely unfamiliar with the conventions of the Victorian novel easily came up with universal narrative to describe what they thought the collages were about. Steampunk is a fascination of mine and some of my 1997 era collages were definitely steampunk and some of the 2009 images will revisit some of that territory with a new eye. In the end, the themes of my paintings and my collages are not all that far apart if at all.

Your experience may vary.

The Moody Blues-music for a desert island, a lifetime, the soundtrack for so many paintings and a dream that came true.

The Moody Blues 1969: Mike Pinder, Justin Hayward, Ray Thomas, Graeme Edge and
John Lodge.

This has been a summer of dreams come true and last night was yet another one. Valerie and I travelled to the Palace Theatre in Louisville to see The Moody Blues play live. I loved their music ever since I heard Nights in White Satin on a little AM radio when I was a child in the late 1960's. Okay, to be six or seven years old and love a very intense song about love is a pretty strange thing, but true nonetheless. Anytime the song came over the radio I was completely entranced and I treasured it so much that it was easy to call the song up in my mind whenever I wanted or needed to hear it.

By the end of the 1970's, I had found a couple copies of the 45 rpm single of their biggest hit Nights In White Satin with the song Cities on the flip side. The single got heavy play on my Sears Silvertone stereo. While I was in college in the early 1980's, I started saving up money to buy their albums and ordering from some long forgotten place that still had original 1960's and 70's records still in the shrink wrap. Hearing the entire Days of Future Past album was quite a revelation. Soon, I had everything from 1967-1981 and completely immersed myself in the world of their music.

Over the years, those records got me through both the good and bad years of my life, a touchstone that never failed to resonate. A lot of paintings were done with the Moody Blues playing in the background. I ended up buying duplicate or more accurately, replacement copies of favourite records that I had worn out. I have five copies of Days of Future Past, two of To Our Children's Children, Seventh Sojourn and On The Threshold of a Dream etc. I have some of the solo Justin Hayward/John Lodge records too.

The Moody Blues sang a lot about lost love, that one love that was never forgotten which tied nicely to the themes of my own paintings. They sang about Camelot and knights and to my mind that made them a rather Pre-Raphaelite band at times. They also sang a lot about hope and joy and they were fearless in being true to themselves even when the musical tide turned more cynical and base.

The Palace Theatre in downtown Louisville, Kentucky where they played last night is this incredible restored 1920's Spanish Baroque Revival place where nearly every square inch is pure eye candy. The ceiling of the entrance hall is covered in portrait busts of composers and writers and occasional statesmen of the last two or three hundred years, The performance hall is rich in statuary and the Spanish revival architectural style.

The Moody Blues 2009: Graeme Edge, John Lodge, Justin Hayward

When the room lights went down and the spotlights went up, The Moody Blues took the audience on an amazing musical trip through the decades. The band is down to three original members, Justin Hayward, John Lodge and Graeme Edge with Ray Thomas having recently retired. They added some new members for the tour to cover the flute and keyboards and had a second drummer on the riser. Without going into a huge review of the show, I'll say that The Moody Blues were as good or better than ever losing none of what made them great and having the experience and the good fortune to carry that into a fourth decade. At the end of the show, they thanked the audience for keeping the faith. I, in turn, thank them right back.

In the autumn of 1980, I was pining for a young lady for whom I was too shy to tell her how I really felt and the Moody Blues were spinning on that Garrard turntable singing songs that seemed to know exactly how I much I loved her.

Near the end of the summer of 2009, I sat in the theatre hand in hand with that very same lady I pined for all those years ago. We have a song we consider "our" song, it's from one of the more recent albums and it's called Bless The Wings That Bring You Back. After all the years of songs filled with longing and of lost love, the Moody Blues still sing about the love that was never forgotten. Only now it is the love that is found again.

The Moody Blues have a website with lots of interesting tidbits and information about what they're currently doing. You can rest assured that if I'm not listening to hundred year old records on my gramophone, I'm probably listening to these timeless musicians.

Thank you Justin, John and Graeme for the continuing journey....

http://www.moodyblues.co.uk/index_main.html

Paris Artwalk photos 17 July 2009

I'm running a bit late with this but here are pictures from the most recent Paris Artwalk that was held on 17 July 2009. For this Artwalk, I ended up displaying alone as Cliff Sullivan could not make it this time. Cliff, if you are reading this, we missed you and Melissa. Hope to see you next time!

The first picture (click on any photo to enlarge) is of the love of my life Valerie Powell. Valerie made this Artwalk an even more wonderful experience. I'm waiting until I finish the painting Amor Aeterna to tell a little something of our story which reaches back many many years. This was taken before Artwalk opened and I was getting shots of everything.

The next picture is of the sandwich board Valerie and I put together out of plywood lying around our garage and I velcroed poster frames to it so I could easily swap in informational posters or other material. The board includes two rings mounted at the top to tie the balloons to. Artwalk days are notoriously windy, this one was no different. In the background of the photo, Marilyn Campbell is coming up the street with the balloons that denotes an Artwalk participant.


As you can see in this picture, I've set up a gramophone near the door. Valerie is listening to Fritz Kriesler play the Meditation from Thais. I thought that since gramophones appear so often in my paintings that I would play 78's during Artwalk as a way of attracting people inside. It worked like a charm. We probably had over 150 people troop through to look at the paintings as well as participate in an unintended sociological experiment with the gramophone. People who encountered a device playing music that used not a single watt of electricity and was completely mechanical seemed to have three reactions to it--fascination as they had never seen such a thing before; nostalgia as they or someone in their family had a wind up gramophone, and to my surprise, terror. That's right, terror. When small children were involved the two major reactions were either fascination or terror. The gramophone was big and loud, and sometimes a child would ask me what it was. I realised the best answer was to say "an iPod from the 19th Century". Then they seemed to understand.


In the interest of full disclosure, the gramophone I brought was a modified "His Master's Voice" typically found on eBay. It's functions completely like an original machine but the horn, tone arm, sound box and wood cabinet are only about seven years old. The only "original" parts are the motor and turntable. Alas, the machine is fake but it plays quite nicely for what it is. I had intended to bring my 1907 Columbia BI Sterling that is actually featured in the paintings but the threat of rain made me reticient about transporting it outside.

A final note about the gramophone. I had been taking photos with my digital camera which worked perfectly until I started playing the gramophone. After about the second record, my camera would immediately drain batteries. Valerie went out and bought me another package of batteries from the nearby Dollar store. I then proceeded to drain all six batteries in less than five minutes. I usually photograph in "Museum" mode without the flash to extend battery life. Camera had worked perfectly up until that point. So as a result, I didn't get any crowd pictures when the restaurant was packed with people. A few days after Artwalk, I got around to putting in another set of batteries and the camera has worked perfectly ever since. Ghost hunters take note: the rapidly draining batteries is a classic sign of something afoot when paranormal activity in a place is suspected.

Among the many people I talked to over the course of the event, I had a nice conversation with Clay Wainscott from Lexington. When the old (and much missed) Bistro147 restaurant was in operation in Lexington, I shared wall space with him there. He also used to write very sensible and well thought out essays about art under the pseudonym of Les Moore for the ceased local paper Nougat. (Sonny Sizemore, if you're reading this, I still have your painting of the gramophone safe and ready to bring back to you)

In the picture below Valerie and I are standing in front of the painting I did of us called Dreaming True. All pictures below taken by Beth Hensel with her trusty iPhone.


The next picture also shot by Beth, Valerie and I do a little waltz while the gramophone is playing in between moments of the space being packed with visitors.


It is always a treat when the people who model for my paintings make it to Artwalk. This is Norma Gilpin who is the model for the lady in the boat in the night sky paintings and a dear friend.

Beth took this picture of Valerie and I towards the end of Artwalk, happy but tired. We spoke to a lot more people than I had previously seen at Artwalks past. It was a pleasure and an honour to introduce Valerie to friends and acquaintances. She was a huge help to me in ways too numerous to mention here.

As always, I wish to thank Marilyn Campbell for hosting me and for the refreshments and everything she brings to Artwalk. Marilyn makes it fun. I also would like to thank my Paris library friends for stopping by, Valerie and I enjoyed seeing all of you.

The summer is flying by. Hope everyone is having a good one.

Paris Artwalk photos--24 April 2009

Another Paris Artwalk has come and gone. First I'd like to thank Marilyn Campbell for hosting Cliff and myself once again. Marilyn was great as always! I am very appreciative of everyone who stopped by especially my co-worker friends in the library world, it was great to see all of you. I was also thrilled my friends Norma Gilpin and Beth Hensel were able to stop by as they are the models for two of the paintings I had on display. A special treat was to finally meet fellow Pre-Raphaelite art lover Rebecca Chamberlain who is an artist and art historian from Winchester and a dear friend of my friend Polly Singer. Rebecca also has the Ladies Historical Tea blog linked from my blog.

Turnout was pretty good, though once again the wind blew away our marker balloons that showed we were participants and we might not have gotten quite as many people as we hoped. For the next Artwalk, I will probably makes some larger signage and get my own sandwich board and rig up something to attach the balloons to.

Update: this is a link to Cliff Sullivan's blog on the same event with pictures

http://cliff-cliffsart.blogspot.com/


Click on the images for a larger view

Patrick Lynch and Cliff Sullivan

My paintings on display just before the start of Artwalk.

Some of the crowd later in the evening. When the exhibit space was crowded, I never had a chance to actually take any pictures.


Cliff, his friend Brandy and his wife Melissa laughing at something one of us said. They are standing next my two favourite paintings of Cliff's.

My very dear friend Norma Gilpin who modelled for the lady in the boat with a gramophone paintings My Heart Dreams of a Sea of Stars, Calling Me Home To You,For The Stars Help Me, And The Sea Bears Part.