“No Justice” is the latest installment in the Democracy Series. It was inspired by a photo of a boarded-up storefront on East Lake Street; unfortunately, I can’t credit the photographer, as I failed to record the name when I grabbed the photo and I can’t find it now.

I must admit, I did not expect to find this melding of storytelling and abstraction as engrossing and satisfying as I have. I want to continue exploring this format beyond the Democracy Series.

Giclees of “No Justice” are now available on my website here. I’ll also have them with me this weekend at the Uptown Art Fair.

Here’s a map of the new footprint along Lake of the Isles. I’ll be in Booth C-12. Hours are Friday, August 7th, 1-7; Saturday, August 8th, 10-6; and Sunday, August 9th, 10-4.

On September 12th and 13th, I’ll be participating in the Edina Fall Into The Arts Festival. I’ll send more info as we get closer.

Perhaps I’ll see you at the fair?

Take good care,

Carol

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Unwieldy definitions of p
are probably better than none, howev

and thus never uses it in a painting or makes a painting called “Unwieldy Definitions.” AI never smacks itself on the forehead and says, egad, I’m an idiot! It never snags a thought on the mind’s murky bottom, then spends long minutes coaxing it to the surface so it can live as a sentence.

My point is not so much AI Bad! as Human Inventiveness Good! You’ve got to have ideas to make ideas, so sit yourself down and have them. Combine papers or objects or concepts that don’t appear to go together until they do. Accept that friction is part of it. Make the kinds of things that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

The Edina Art Fair is this coming weekend. I’ll be in Booth 233 on West 50th Street, just east of the intersection with France.

My friend Megan Murrell is the featured artist. She’s a lovely person, and very deserving of the recognition. The show looks to be well-curated. I’m looking forward to it.

The Stone Arch Bridge Festival is Father’s Day weekend, June 20th and 21st. I’ll be in Booth 114 between the Central and Hennepin Avenue bridges.

On August 7th, 8th, and 9th, I’ll be participating in the Uptown Art Fair, which is returning after a two-year hiatus (sort of — but that’s another story). They’re moving the show site from Hennepin and the Greenway to the Lake of the Isles area. I’ll have more details for you before then.

I’ve been busy on the next installment in the Democracy Series, but since it’s me painting it, and not AI, it’s not yet in a fit state to be shown. Instead, I’ll leave you with a photo of our Minnie Pearl, who looks even prettier today after she got a bath yesterday.

Thanks for reading. Take care.

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Traveler, your footprints

are the only road, nothing else.

—Anotonio Machado

There’s been an awful lot of unthinkable to try to absorb this year. I suppose it’s not surprising, in such times, if we find ourselves in places we couldn’t have predicted. Although I’ve been thinking about abstracted realism for awhile, my new work, the Democracy Series, isn’t like anything I’d been imagining. In late January in Minneapolis, it just became the thing I had to do. There are two paintings so far, but there’s a third one in the works, which is why I’m not too self-conscious about calling it a series.

I’ve never been a figurative painter so it was interesting working out what to render and what to abstract in If Not Us. I’m happy that the figures seem so . . . painterly.

I’m also pleased with the lilac and ultramarine palette of We The People. There was a lot of trial and error on the protester section but I’m mostly satisfied with where it landed. I do like all the small delights to be had in the crowd.

Giclees of the Democracy Series paintings, as well as most of the rest of my sold catalog, are now available online here on my website. Five percent of the proceeds from sales of the DS paintings will be donated to States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit providing direct support to states working to protect elections and the rule of law.

How many DS paintings will there be? I have no idea. The madness of this time shows us the speciousness of thinking there’s supposed to be a path. None of us knows what’s coming next. There is no road but the one we make.

Fair season opens for me this coming weekend, May 9th and 10th, at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden Art Fair. The following weekend, I’ll be doing Art-A-Whirl for the first time. I’ll be outdoors at the Logan Park satellite site, Monroe Street and 13th Avenue in Northeast Minneapolis. Here’s my first half schedule:

Hope to see some of you out there.

When is a painting done? When it’s sold, of course.

Historical District (40x30”) got an extensive re-working over the winter. I broke up the right two-thirds and introduced more white space. Before, the painting was so dense that the eye didn’t know where to settle. This is much improved, I think.

No Story (24x12”) also got a revamp. It’s still a lively piece but it’s been simplified (believe it or not) in structure and color harmony. It’s rather an elegant painting, if I do say so myself.

Several other pieces received lesser updates, and they’re all stronger for it. In art, as in writing, editing is an indispensable skill.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Thanks for reading, and please stop by and say hello if you’re at one of the Minnesota art fairs this summer. Take care.

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With that said, I’m not sure how much I will even write about it all. I woke up exhausted this morning. At the beginning of the surge, it felt like the rest of the country was going about its business largely oblivious to the cruelty that was playing out on our streets. That was awful. There were times when I felt like I was losing my mind. Obviously, that’s not the case any longer. But, as I write this, those f*ckers are still here. They’re still terrorizing people.

My wife’s and my main contribution has been delivering food to people who cannot safely leave their homes. I was surprised to get up one morning and find an article in the New York Times about the church-based relief effort we’re involved with; I’d thought we were trying to keep it a secret. I guess it just got too big to hide. Anyway, here’s a link to the article, in case you’re interested. The day after the article appeared, ICE staged ten or so vehicles in the parking lot of the restaurant next to the church. They’re big on intimidation, those guys.

ICE has been up and down our street several times that I’m aware of, but it’s nothing like we’d be experiencing if we lived ten blocks north or east of here. At one end of my block is an elementary school, and at the other, a children’s music school. On the day of the first big protest downtown, the -10° before windchill day, we noticed our street filling up with cars. Bundled-up parents and children carrying signs were making their way down to the music school. I grabbed my sign and joined them. The woman who owns the music school was leading the children in age-appropriate chanting and stomping (the latter primarily intended to keep them moving in the cold). Some of the parents joined in, too, but, clearly, this was the kids’ opportunity to protest. School-aged children in the Twin Cities have been powerfully affected by the federal intrusion; schools have been particular targets. My friend Beth Hawkins writes about it here. The parents were mostly focused on patrolling the perimeter and steering the kids who got too cold towards one of the braziers that had been lit in the courtyard. After the protest, I found a sign on the street in front of my house.

Alex Pretti was killed the next day. There was a call for a citywide moment of silence, and at 7 p.m., we went outside with our candles. Everyone was streaming towards the elementary school so we joined them for what turned out to be a full-blown candlelight vigil. There were hundreds of people there, of all ages. We formed an oval that stretched across the parking lot and playground, and held our candles in silence for a long time. Eventually, a man started to lead everyone in singing, but I had to leave then as I’d only dressed to be outside for a minute or two. You’ve seen the memes about attacking a people descended from Vikings in the middle of winter? Those meme-makers clearly didn’t have someone like me in mind.

While Spoonbridge and Cherry is the piece of sculpture most associated with Minneapolis, my favorite sculpture is the Minnehaha Bunny at the corner of Portland and Minnehaha Parkway, where I walk with my dogs most days. We decorate him for every holiday and in response to current events (and when I say “we,” I mean people unknown to me who have taken it upon themselves to do this, which is the kind of energy that’s driving the whole of Minnesota right now). Anyway, I have never loved the Minnehaha Bunny more than I love him now.

I guess the thing I most want to emphasize to you is, everyone’s doing something. They’re tapping in through their local, organic networks. I didn’t know about the events on my block before they happened; our son is 27, and I haven’t been part of a PTA for a very long time. (The PTAs have been doing heroic work, by the way. This week I put in a call to the elementary school to ask if we could serve in an alumni capacity.) There are so many things that need doing right now. Observing (which has grown quite dangerous, constitutional protections notwithstanding); rapid response (ditto); protest; humanitarian relief; school escorts and patrols; supporting restaurants and immigrant-owned businesses; funding rent relief. There are many, many people doing absolutely essential things that I’m not brave enough to do. But driving into targeted neighborhoods to deliver food to frightened people requires a bit of nerve, and it is also essential. There is enormous strength, and comfort, in everyone acting together, everyone doing what they can.

Friends, before this is over, all of us, everywhere, will probably be called upon to do this.

I haven’t been able to paint worth a $^%#@ lately so I don’t have anything new to show you. However, I did want to let you know that these three paintings —

— have been juried into a mixed media exhibition, “The Mixed Effect,” at the White Bear Center for the Arts. “The Mixed Effect” will be showing in the main exhibition hall from February 9th through March 27th. We’re planning to attend the Community Reception on Thursday, March 5th, from 6 to 8 p.m. The White Bear Center for the Arts is located at 4971 Long Avenue in White Bear Lake. Please stop by if it works for you. Community and Art are everything right now.

Take care. Be good to each other.

Carol

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But it hasn’t been dreary in the studio! I came away from fair season thinking (1) I needed a more cohesive body of work, but also (2) full of ideas about new things I wanted to try — yeah, good luck squaring that circle. Right now, I’m focused on number 2: pulling the threads, experimenting with the things. I want my work to be cohesive, but more than that, I want it to be better. It may be a piece of blind faith on my part, but I’m trusting that, so long as I proceed with a little method, cohesion will sort itself.

“Untitled (for now)” has at least one fan: my younger brother, who’s been one of my biggest supporters as I’ve pivoted from lawyering to painting, but who’s not a huge admirer of abstraction. He likes a story, and who can blame him? (A typical conversation: Me: “I’m pleased with how the criss-crossed lines activate the negative space.” Him: “I see a rhino!”). He’s happy I’ve finally made a painting with a narrative element so he doesn’t have to invent one. (Postscript to the comments: No, he never saw a rhino in THIS painting. Sheeesh.)

I didn’t set out to make a cityscape (I actually began this painting with a photo of the interior of an old barn), but as the vibrant building emerged, I had to let it become what it wanted to be. What I like best is that this is a 40”x30” painting that’s basically composed of two shapes — oooh, that feels daring! I’m pretty happy with the grungy neutral building too — how it collapses into the main one, sky polygon up top. I added the figures for scale; the piece seemed to call out for them. To be honest, I’m still not sure how I feel about them.

Anyway, did I mention that I’ve been experimenting?

In November, I took a three-day online workshop with abstract collage artist Anna Carll. Anna’s paintings are gorgeously dense and tangled, yet filled with space. I find them fascinating, enigmatic. If you don’t know Anna’s work, here’s her website and here’s her Instagram.

The workshop was great. Anna’s got such brilliant ideas about composition, using different kinds of shapes to create depth of field in your paintings. This is my painting from the class. I like it; it’s interesting. But I sort of backed into it, not grasping till the end how everything fit together. I’m working on a new one now. We’ll see what happens when I’m more clear-eyed from the outset.

In the meantime, it’s cold out there. Drink plenty of water, enjoy the holidays, be good to one another.

Take care,

Carol

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You asked. (Well, a few of you asked.) I’m doing a workshop! “Mixed Media Papers & Composition” will take place on Saturday, October 18th from 1:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. at Starcell Studio, 10525 Florida Avenue South, Suite 123, in Bloomington. The cost is $125.

In the first portion of the class, we'll paint an assortment of collage papers using a gel plate. We'll explore shape, pattern, texture, layering and transparency. In the second portion of the class, we'll begin to consider composition. What makes for a satisfying mixed media painting? We'll look at value, color, line, contrast, movement, etc. We'll talk plenty of process along the way, including what to attend to in finding your own style.

Because this workshop will be highly interactive, enrollment will be limited to five people.

I’ll have enough materials on hand for everyone but if you already have your own gel plate, brayer, preferred acrylic paints and/or paper, spreading tool, stencils, stamps, etc. — please bring them! My hope is that everyone’s going to want to continue on once they get home so you’ll eventually need your own set of supplies — I can make suggestions in a separate email if anyone’s interested. Just drop me a note — carol@carolweissenbornart.com.

You can register by going to the Workshops page on my website, which is here. (Update: a little Squarespace quirk that I’ve just discovered — after you add the workshop to your cart, the program does not take you automatically to the payment page. Instead, you have to click on the cart button in the right hand corner to get to checkout and complete the transaction.)

Starcell Studio is a lovely space in Bloomington offering a mix of classes focused around creative play and connection for adults. They’re having an open house on Saturday, September 13th from 1 to 3. I’ll be there, along with other teachers giving fall workshops. I’ll be demonstrating some of the techniques we’ll cover in the class.

Wishing you well —

Carol

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Art fairs and gardens and long walks — under the pall of democracy’s decline.

I’m practicing my cognitive dissonance tolerance. How can you not? Because life is short and sacred, and you don’t want to waste a moment of it despising it. But neither do you want to allow yourself to become inured, unfeeling. Paying attention is its own kind of resistance.

Some days it’s tempting to let Joy in through the front door and send Bleak around to the back. Other days it’s tempting to do the opposite.

But if what I want is to be present in my own life and to bear witness, I’ve got to keep working to admit them both.

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“These feathers / will not make a bird”

A line from Tess Gallagher1 that’s stuck with me over the years. I’m more than a month into my latest 40x30 piece and I’m still on tenterhooks as to whether it’ll resolve into a painting. It’s gonna suck if all I’m left with is a pile of feathers.

So, as anyone who has ever decided to tackle the oven hood the night before a big cross examination can attest, I did what you do in the face of a little stress: I procrastinated.

Which is why, one day, I found myself thumbing through my stack of failed canvases (i.e., piles of feathers). Canvases, meet scissors! I wound up with a few simple smalls that I like quite a bit.

Another day, I was browsing through my old art photos on my phone. Though my work’s evolved, I found there were pieces that I still regard fondly. I collected these paintings from their owners (thank you!) and arranged to have them professionally photographed.

The original smalls and giclées of the older work will be available at my July shows:

• Minnehaha Falls Art Fair, Minneapolis. Booth 906. We’ll be off the main track, not far from the food trucks (“fire in the hole!”). Friday July 18th, 3-8; Saturday July 19th, 10-7; Sunday July 20th, 10-5. Minnehaha Falls Art Fair

• Loring Park Art Festival, Minneapolis. Booth 55. Near the Westminster Stage, along the portion of the lake closest to Willow Street. Saturday July 26th, 10-6; Sunday July 27th, 10-5. Loring Park Art Festival

On August 23rd and 24th, we’ll be returning to the Chicago area for the Port Clinton Art Festival. And on August 30th and 31st, we’ll be in Milwaukee for the Third Ward Art Festival.

But, perhaps, I’ll have a new painting to show you before then?

Take good care, everyone.

How do you explain the passage of time to a group of aliens who exist in a kind of everything everywhere all at once reality, who (apparently) neither age nor die?

[FIRST ALIEN]: Baseball? What is this?
SISKO: I was afraid you'd ask that. I throw this ball to you and this other player stands between us with a bat, a stick, and he tries to hit the ball in between these two white lines. No. The rules aren't important. What's important is, it's linear. Every time I throw this ball, a hundred different things can happen in a game. He might swing and miss, he might hit it. The point is, you never know. You try to anticipate, set a strategy for all the possibilities as best you can, but in the end it comes down to throwing one pitch after another and seeing what happens. With each new consequence, the game begins to take shape.
[SECOND ALIEN]: And you have no idea what that shape is until it is completed.
SISKO: That's right. In fact, the game wouldn't be worth playing if we knew what was going to happen.
[FIRST ALIEN]: You value your ignorance of what is to come?
SISKO: That may be the most important thing to understand about humans. It is the unknown that defines our existence.

I’m starting to think it’s the most important thing to understand about making art as well. I usually start with some sort of plan. Sometimes I even create a Photoshop sketch. But once I begin applying paint and paper, it all starts to shift. Each new move is a consequence. Even when what I’ve just laid down generally conforms with what I’d envisioned, it invariably presents a difference as well, some element I hadn’t anticipated. Each new application of paint or paper changes the areas surrounding it. Building the painting is about responding to the consequences with new consequences. And so on and so on, until the thing takes shape.

I must admit, I haven’t always been comfortable with the uncertainty inherent in this kind of art practice, but I’ve come to treasure it. If only I could learn to embrace the unknown so willingly in other areas of my life.

I’m gearing up for fair season.

This coming Mother’s Day weekend, I’ll be back at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden Art Fair, booth number 718. I’ll be showing some new work . . .

. . . as well as some feel-new pieces that have undergone a facelift.

The Sculpture Garden is, of course, a lovely and iconic venue, and I’m thrilled to be returning. I’ll be introducing a new product, giclee canvas wraps. They’re available at an friendlier price point than originals for those who are concerned about a tariff-saddled economy. Tbh, I’m pretty psyched about the cool wrapped edges.

Last year at Sculpture Garden, a number of visitors to my booth announced that they were buying Mother’s Day gifts for themselves. Doesn’t that sound like a great idea (hint hint)?

On June 7-8, we’ll be at the 57th Street Art Fair near the University of Chicago campus in Hyde Park (where I graduated from law school an eon ago — it should be fun to go back, not to mention much less stressful). The 57th Street folks have been active on social media and, I’ve got to say, the art is blowing me away. I’m so honored to be included. If you’ll be in the Chicago area that weekend, please come on down!

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Also — look. This is a crazy time, right? It feels like we’re already well into the Yeats poem at this point. The center hasn’t held. The falcon hasn’t heard the falconer. You may have some idea of how to cope with it; I sure as hell don’t. So please. Let me have have the facile comforts of check marks and a bullet-pointed list. If only for a moment, ☑️ feels like agency. It feels like order.

It’s illusory, of course. I’m writing to you in February about a January topic because Covid consumed most of my January. It wasn’t so much the fever, which came and went pretty quickly, as the tiredness, which dragged on and on. Still, it was just illness. Normal life-happens loss of control. It doesn’t tax my brain, unlike the morning headlines.

Anyway, I’m here now. Happy new year.

One of the items on my list reads PAINT LARGER.

That’s actually been my goal for awhile now. This piece, as-yet untitled, was inspired by our travels in Italy in 2023. I’m pleased with its textures and architectural elements, the stacked stories suggesting a place built up over long years, the pops of color hinting at a rambunctious present.

I was hoping to have another large piece ready to show you but it’s got its back arched and won’t get into the carrier. Next time.

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Like most people possessed of an ordinary talent, I have to work at it.

But color isn’t everything in art. It isn’t even the main thing, for me at least. I’m more interested in value than color. But, you ask, isn’t value just an attribute of color? All colors have a specific value, that’s true. I’m referring to the distribution of those individual values, the scaffolding of darks and lights that causes a painting to stand up. It’s what you see when you look at a painting from across a room.

Hot take: Get the value right and it scarcely matters what hue you choose.

(Okay, maybe not scarcely. It matters less than you might think.)

So wouldn’t you know it. With both of my new paintings, the element that sealed the deal wasn’t value. It was color.

I’ve been working with these elongated canvases for awhile but for some reason hadn’t thought earlier to explore my favorite shape, strong verticals, in what would seem to be their natural habitat. The painting was a slog at first. The shift came when I introduced dioxazine purple into the bottom left quadrant. Then I paired it with sap green. I rarely use this green, had, in fact, forgotten that I owned any until I went rummaging through my paints. Here’s the thing about sap green. It’s never going to be the star of your team but it’s the kind of player that makes all the players around it better.

You’ll notice that the middle section is pretty uniformly mid-valued. Color, not value, is doing the work here, and I’m fine with that.

This painting went through god-knows-how-many evolutions. I loved the Tchaikovsky-colored hills but struggled to create a painting around them. It finally came together when I surrounded the saturated color with raw neutrals and grunge. A marriage of opposites may be my favorite thing to do in paint.

You can see these paintings (and more!) this coming weekend at the Red Wing Fall Arts Festival in downtown Red Wing. Saturday October 12th from 10-5 and Sunday October 13th from 10-4. I’ll be in Booth Number 14 near the intersection of Bush and West Third Streets. It should be a lovely weekend to take in the fall colors and the art.

Overheard at the art fair:

Mother: “I don’t want to hear about it anymore. I understand the status of your Band-Aid.”

During fair season it’s been a challenge to paint as inefficiently as I’d like. I need to make mistakes. I need to lay paint down and take it off, attempt solutions that produce new problems, learn what will work by trying things that don’t. Maybe “mistakes” is the wrong word for this as I think of it as part and parcel of the creative process. In any event, it takes time.

“Painting has a unique relation to time. A painting that has been done quickly has a different energy from a painting that has been done slowly. A painting that has been done quickly is like a newly decorated room and the air is fresh, empty and echoing. A painting that has been done slowly is like a room that has been quietly lived in: it acquires a mysterious stillness.”—Celia Paul

I’ve made plenty of mistakes on the business side since taking my art on the road. In general these feel less unavoidable and salutary than the art mistakes. But in the year that I’ll become eligible for Medicare, I’m grateful to be doing something that lands me on my ass from time to time. It’s good to stretch, always.

Nice people at the fair: “Look, we’re not buying any art today so let us buy you a beer.”

Me: “Uh, okay.”

Upcoming Events

• This coming weekend, August 3rd and 4th, I’ll be at the Powderhorn Art Fair , Booth Number 147, which puts me, I’m guessing (I haven’t seen this year’s map) on the northeast side of the lake, maybe two-thirds of the way down from the rec center? I had such lively and interesting conversations with people at Powderhorn last year, I’m looking forward to this year’s fair. Hours both Saturday and Sunday are 10 to 5.

• Red Wing Arts Fall Festival, October 12th and 13th (more info to come)

Man at art fair whose mother was married to Art Garfunkel for two years.

Now I’ve got to go watch videos so I can learn how to use the mat board cutter I just bought (one of the aforementioned business mistakes: paying framers’ prices for custom matting). If you look for me at Powderhorn, I’ll be the woman with the neatly matted prints and intact fingers. It’s best to stay positive.

<gulp>

I’ve been hard at it, covered in paint till the wee hours. It’s beginning to catch up with me. I’ve dunked my paintbrush in coffee and wine, which might have qualified as interesting artistic choices if I hadn’t been planning to finish my beverages. I’m losing stuff — phone, glasses, scissors. I logged into zoom for court the other day on a screen festooned with drips and blobs. Apparently, a good portion of the paint I’d been flinging around in my studio-cum-office that morning had failed to hit its mark.

But the work’s coming along. A little sample of what I’ve been making recently:

Some funky 12x12” boards . . .

. . . some long patterned pieces . . .

. . . and a few of these cube whatchamacallits.

Here’s my fair schedule for now. I may add events. I may not. It’ll depend.

• Minneapolis Sculpture Garden Art Fair, May 11-12th: What a gas to get to show my stuff in the shadow of Spoonbridge and Cherry! The first-ever Sculpture Garden Art Fair is taking place on Mother’s Day weekend. My mom, rest her soul, would have loved that I’m painting, but she’d have hated my work. If you bring your mother to the inaugural SGAF, she might feel similarly, but hopefully, you won’t.

  Minneapolis Sculpture Garden Art Fair

• Edina Art Fair, May 31st-June 2nd: I learned a newbie lesson here, namely, wait to accept your invite/purchase your booth and you’ll likely be consigned to the nether regions of the fair. I probably won’t be anywhere near the intersection of 50th and France, but I’ll be somewhere — maybe **fingers crossed** close to the Beer Garden?

  Edina Art Fair

• Stone Arch Bridge Festival, June 15-16th: Father’s Day weekend. My dad probably wouldn’t have cared for my art, either, but he loved a good festival. This one’s a classic.

  Stone Arch Bridge Festival

• Ann Arbor State Street District Art Fair, July 18-20th: One of three art fairs that run concurrently each July, drawing something like 400,000 visitors — a little daunting for an introvert like me. But I don’t see the Michigan contingent of my family nearly as much as I’d like so it was an easy yes.

  State Street District Art Fair

• Powderhorn Art Fair, August 3rd-4th: My second year at Powderhorn, where I met some of you. Please stop by and say hello!

  Powderhorn Art Fair

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Anyway, Pat was asking after my art, as, bless her, she is wont to do, and I mentioned that I’d recently been working more with collage. The next time I saw her, Pat had a box for me. When I went to lift it from the trunk of her car, my back muscles froze in disbelief. What did she have in there, the Encyclopedia Britannica?

“Collage material,” she pronounced.

I poked around in the box after I got home (number of big books, check) but I was caught up in a project at the time so I left it. Fast-forward a few weeks: I’d reached the possessed-but-stuck stage with a new painting, which, trust me, is not a comfortable one, and I had the thought, it was grasping at straws, really: maybe there was something in the box. A found shape, a stealth color. Something that could be used to unify, or disrupt. An amulet that would ward off stuckness.

So I dug into the box. I say this in the most admiring way possible: that shit was weird. Pat told me later she’d picked up most of it at an estate sale. There were books on M.C. Escher and Andrew’s pop, N.C. Wyeth; a sheet music booklet for the vaudeville song “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” with a picture of Betty Grable on the cover; and — this brought me back — a copy of Alfred’s Basic Guitar Method, Book 2, the program from which I’d been taught as a child, though I never made it past Book 1.

Underneath the sheet music I discovered a copy of “The Warren Report About President Kennedy’s Assassination,” printed on bound newsprint, now yellowed; and the February 2, 1969 edition of The Minneapolis Tribune Sunday Picture Magazine. The entire issue was devoted to Apollo 8, the first crewed spacecraft to 1) leave low Earth orbit and 2) reach the moon (the actual moon landing took place six months later.) It included the first-ever photographs of an Earthrise and the far side of the moon.

The person whose things were now mine had been a photographer. There was a trove of prints: shots of tree roots, iris petals, sunflower cores, pear skins; small-town garages and movie theaters; winding rural roads guiding the eye to a vanishing point; the Foshay Tower back when it still commanded the Minneapolis skyline.

There are worse ways to try to know someone than to learn their enthusiasms. Though I never discovered my person’s name, I felt like I’d been gifted with some inimitable part of them because I’d seen what excited them. It turns out that was my amulet. The random bits of life are life.

This painting is for you, unknown friend.

P.S. — Because it’s big (for me), and scaling up is hard, dammit, I can’t resist showing it off in situ.

(Also, were there even any art museums in Miami when I was young? I know it’s all chichi and Art Basel-y today, but then?)

We were, however, a board game family. Or, more accurately I suppose, we were board game kids. I discovered art by way of Masterpiece, the old Parker Brothers game. The rules, such as they were, were silly. You tried to outbid the other players at an art auction, but a good percentage of the paintings turned out to be forgeries. I can still remember how this rankled — your fortunes in a game should have something to do with your own wits, they shouldn’t be governed solely by dumb luck.

But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the game I was interested in; it was the set pieces, the paintings. There were two dozen of them, ranging from Bernardo Martorell’s St. George and the Dragon to Picasso’s Sylvette (Portrait of Mlle. D.), a half-millennium of art reproduced on 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 inch note cards.

I found the paintings by turns puzzling, charming, shocking, mysterious, preachy, fantastic, cryptic, soothing, engrossing. I didn’t love them all. Renoir’s On the Terrace was, even then, too pretty for me, El Greco’s The Assumption of the Virgin, too didactic.

My preteen imagination latched on to the paintings in which the action was frozen mid-scene: Winslow Homer’s The Herring Net, Gustave Caillebotte’s Place de l’Europe on a Rainy Day, and that most narrative of narrative paintings, Hopper’s Nighthawks.

Chagall’s The Circus Rider made me think that the soul has a color, and it’s blue.

I remember feeling all angsty about Jackson Pollock’s Greyed Rainbow. Why was this Art? What was wrong with me that I didn’t get it? It felt like an inside joke of some kind, one that I was meant to be the butt of. While, today, I’m completely and happily reconciled to Pollock, I remain familiar with the angsty feeling — it still overtakes me from time to time in the contemporary wing of my local art museum.

One of the Masterpiece paintings is an obvious forebear to the art I make. But, looking back, I’m unable to remember anything I thought about Hans Hoffman’s The Golden Wall. I guess it didn’t make a big impression on me.

A decade later, I was living and studying in Chicago. I wandered into the Art Institute one day and THERE THEY WERE, my Masterpiece paintings, in the pigmented flesh (the Art Institute affiliation is noted on the backs of the game cards, but I hadn’t retained that information). The first one I spotted (I can’t remember now which one it was), I was like, oh my god that’s from Masterpiece, and then, improbably, I spied another. At some point it dawned on me: they were all there. I got as close to each painting as I could, greedy to drink it in with my own eyes: brushstrokes, edges, how paint was lacquered or dabbled on, oh wow signatures. I stood back to allow the effect of each to wash over me, observe how its color vibrated or whispered, absorb the architecture of its values. The next day I went back and did it all again.

It would sound overly theatrical were I to say that that day at the Art Institute was the second-most formative experience of my painting life (Masterpiece being, of course, the first) so instead I’ll say this: on that day, I was newly on my own, a thousand miles removed from other people’s crap decisions, beginning to become comfortable with thinking what I thought and valuing what I valued. The Masterpiece paintings came to represent that for me — as, in truth, they always had.

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But for the lady at the Y, I’d probably have opened this newsletter with a self-congratulatory riff about how I checked “pass” on Black Friday and ended up at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Well, screw that. Did you go shopping on Black Friday? I hope you made a killing. I hope you early-birded and BOGO’d and red-tagged like nobody’s business. And I hope that parents everywhere scored tons of amazing gifts that would’ve been out of their reach on any other but that vulgar consumerist day.

As for me, I was at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. To the extent that my Black Friday peevishness had to do with my dislike of crowds (answer: a large one), the joke was on me, because over the holidays everybody and their brother brings their out-of-town relations to the local art museum.

On the third floor, I came across these compact box assemblages by a new-to-me artist, Hannelore Baron (1926-1987). My photos aren’t great. I was sure I’d be able to find better-quality images online, but I couldn’t, which kind of blows.

Baron’s materials look like they came from the scrap heap — battered wood, metal and glass; tatty fabric and paper. Old string, used to devastating effect. The pieces are littered with strange, furtive writing, which can appear child-like or unhinged. The boxes felt like artifacts to me. I wanted to touch the history they described, even though it was plainly awful.

The box on the top (Baron didn’t title her works) seems the most unmitigated in its awfulness. It resembles a door. In the place where the panes would be, you expect to see light, a hint that something thrives inside. But the darkness is absolute: nothing thrives here. The door is bound shut with profligate amounts of string and wire: nothing escapes from here, either. A piece of wire passes through the door frame and concludes outside the structure in a useless dangling hook, an object lesson in gratuitous cruelty.

In the long box on the bottom, seven objects are arranged horizontally against a monochromatic background of greys and browns broken up by isolated patches of red, green and yellow oxide. Several of the objects include markings/drawings on light backgrounds, making this both the most colorful and most value-variegated of the assemblages.

The work is a far cry from cheerful, however. The second object from the right is a board imprisoned under a mass of string. The object to its left looks like a weapon or cleaver, with frayed prison-striped fabric comprising the blade. Objects four and six from the right feature crude drawings that look vaguely figurative. I have no idea what that drawing is on the first object; what’s unmistakable, though, are the frantic markings trying to obliterate it. The far right object is balanced (that seems the wrong word somehow) by the one on the far left: X, crossed out, cancelled.

The fifth object is a stick figure portrait of an undeniably adult woman. The woman’s presence here feels a bit miraculous. Her body twists away, but her face meets us full-on. The wide-set smudge-eyes look straight ahead. Here I am, she seems to be saying, amidst all this, I am here. In one stroke, Baron captures both the pervasiveness of evil and the possibility of transcending it.

Baron, who was Jewish, was twelve years old on Kristallnacht in 1938, when a mob of townspeople broke into her family’s home, ransacked it, and beat her father with a hammer. Baron’s family eventually managed to flee Germany, settling in New York. Not long after they arrived, Baron had the first of her “nervous breakdowns,” as one art reviewer termed it as late as 2016. “Nervous breakdown” is a phrase I associate with my mother’s generation, and, specifically, with my mother, who, too, experienced disfiguring trauma. It tells the sufferer that the problem is them, that they’re flawed and weak and contemptible. After her first crisis, Baron recalled years later, her uncle, a doctor,

“gave me some sedatives, even took me to some psychiatrists, bought me two dresses and told me above all to keep my state of mind an absolute secret from the outside world.”

Baron battled PTSD, depression and claustrophobia for the rest of her life. She died of cancer in 1987 at the age of 60.

While she was alive, Baron was ambivalent about making an explicit connection between her own history and her artwork. She felt the world’s injustices deeply, and personally, and she wanted her art to speak to the condition of others in extremis, political prisoners, civil rights protestors, victims of war and torture.

Baron called her work an “art of concealment and protection.” I love this, though I can’t be sure what she meant by it. Is it a disjunctive “and,” denoting concealment and protection as separate activities? Or a conjunctive one, suggesting that concealment and protection are of a piece? I’m inclined to read it the second way. For people who’ve endured significant trauma, nothing feels safer than having the ability to hide.

Stormy and Katie strike a pose.

Still.

Once we got there without dying, however, Italy was spectacular. It was a pageant for the senses. We were lucky enough to travel with friends who’d lived in Rome, one born and raised there. The only bad meal we had was the one we had without them, we non-Italians lacking the precognitive faculty that lets you size up a restaurant without setting foot inside.

I doubt we’d have discovered Italy’s rooftop bars on our own. Two of these photos were shot from Rome’s rafters. The other is a street-level view of Montalcino. I love everything about these compositions -- the stacked, angular shapes, the contrasting verticals and horizontals, the terra cotta palette, the textures, the wear. I’ve not had much success thus far abstracting from photo references, but honestly, I haven’t really tried very hard.

These photos have me reconsidering. Stay tuned.

My next project isn’t a commission because I refuse to call it that. My not-a-commission will be larger and more colorful than anything I’ve done lately. As you can probably tell, it scares me. I’m waiting for materials to arrive.

In the meantime, I’ve been making lots of these textured transparent collage papers.

They’re all variations on a technique taught by UK artist/tutor Sally Hirst as part of Drew Steinbrecher’s Gel Printers Summit. I find it curious when artists working now describe themselves as “self-taught.” Is that really possible in today’s connected world? I suppose you could, with some effort, wall yourself off from Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, artists’ websites, the welter of online courses – but why would you want to? I remember when I opened my first Facebook account. I was so stupidly optimistic about the poetic possibilities of the status update. Who imagined then that the world wide web would become such a magnet for the basest elements in our natures? Then again, the manner in which the internet has democratized the means of creative production was also largely unimaginable to me two decades ago. And that has been life-giving.

In any event. For me, it’s “self-directed” rather than “self-taught,” and I keep directing myself back to Sally Hirst. Sally is warm and rigorous, inventive and restrained. She experiments like a scientist with her materials. She talks coherently about abstract composition, which is rarer than you might think. There’s something very – this is going to sound bad when I mean the opposite – “teacher-y” about Sally. She reminds me of Mrs. McKinney, my 12th grade English teacher (no one used “Ms.” back then), who was incisive, uncompromising, drove me to do my best work, but could not for some reason remember my name at a time when her remembering would have meant the world to me. (That is, of course, unfair to Sally. I’m sure she remembers people’s names.)

I linked to Sally’s information above but here it is again: Sally Hirst, Artist & Tutor

You get lifetime access to any course you purchase. That’s helpful for anyone who, like me, tends not to work linearly.

My painting “Rite” was accepted into Robbin Gallery’s 28th Extremely Minnesota Art Show, which runs now through December 3rd.

I like this piece. I made it fairly recently, meaning while the world was going to shit, and also while I was coping with personal loss. In it, I see both awfulness and beauty, which is what I’d hoped.

The opening reception is Thursday, November 9^th, from 5:30 to 8 p.m.  Please do stop by if you’re in the area. The Robbin Gallery is located at 4915 North 42nd Ave in Robbinsdale. Regular hours are 1 to 5 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and from 1 to 4 p.m. on Sundays.