Of course I stole the above title from Jimmy Buffet’s “A Pirate Looks At 40.” Then I doubled it to make it age appropriate for me and thought that made it a good theft. Decade markers seem to invite rumination about aging, the meaning of life and other equally cheery stuff. My wading into that swamp was interrupted by a brief trip to Yoshi’s Jazz Club in Oakland to hear Lee Ritenour and Dave Grusin. At 72, guitarist Lee Ritenour is the youngster. Besides being known as an excellent keyboard artist, Dave Grusin, age 90, has done just about everything in the music business. To say that their performance was cooking, would be to put it mildly. Was there a message in there for me?
While contemplating the answer to this and other esoteric questions, I encountered an article in The Guardian about Dave Hampton an English painter who is 97 and although not widely known, has an impressive body of work. He is currently enjoying an expanding awareness of his paintings and his first one man show at a gallery in Bath, England.
Check out the article about Dave here: The Guardian 3/18/24
It finally became clear that what I need to focus most on is just showing up and doing the work. As Dave Hampton says, “I don’t paint because I want to. I paint because I have to.”
It’s time to go………
Back In The Studio
It may have taken me a while to get the message, but I showed up and completed another large format canvas. “An Empty Sky” (44”x33” Acrylic on canvas) started with a photo I took looking out of the window of an airliner as we departed Seattle.
How long did it take to make this painting? I took the photo in 2022, worked on it digitally last year and painted on the canvas for most of March. So, did it take two years to complete the piece or was it only a month? I’m not sure if it matters.
It went something like this -
One More Thing
In other art related news, I’ve donated Offshore to The Crocker Museum’s ‘Big Names Small Art’ fund raiser auction which will take place online from May 10 ~ June 2. There is more information about the auction here - Crocker Auction
Offshore is a small mixed media piece - 12”x12” digitally altered photo and acrylic paint on a plywood panel. It was originally intended as a study for a larger 36” square format canvas. If I’m going to use it for that purpose, I have to get the canvas fairly well along before I drop off the study at The Crocker on May 5. Better get busy.