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After Rivera, 2020, 11.5" x 7.5", graphite
$550
Maybe I'm a bit odd when it comes to art museums. I only look at five or six paintings in the whole museum. I know exactly where they are and I go straight to them and will spend an hour staring at a single painting, until I almost black out. And then I can "see" it. What he or she was trying to do. And, how they did it.
At SFMOMA, Diego Rivera's The Flower Carrier is one of them. There is a geometry to it, the arms, the hands spread out from the weight, the colors balancing the visual load and the idea that this man is about to stand up and carry that basket. Diego painted work. Sometimes murals full of many workers building a whole new world. But here it was one man and his wife, I'm guessing. Like Mick sang, a true beast of burden. A hero carrying thousands and thousands, of all things, flowers.AFTER Rivera742,960 -
Lenape, 2016, 11.5" x 7.5", graphite
$550
This place has a lot of history. The Lenape, or more correctly, the Lenni Lenape lived along the Hudson River for 10,000 years. The other natives called them that. It meant The Original Man. The Lenape migrated from California, made it across the Mississippi and landed here. The hunting, the fishing, the farming, even the sunsets. Lots of reasons to set up shop. Enough with the migration.
Finding reference drawings or paintings of the Lenape was tough. I read about the three feathers, how they wore their hair and started sifting through photographs Edward Curtis took of ancient Indians living on the Reservations in Oklahoma.
A man, at least 80, the three feathers, the Lenape hair. I wanted to bring him home, back along the Hudson, not angry, but young and proud about everything the Original Man had done.
For 10,000 years.
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Golden Gate, 2014, 11.5" x 7.5", graphite
$550
Baker Beach in San Francisco is kind of a joke. It's that nice. The indigo Pacific washing up on the Carhartt colored sand. The rocks, the cliffs, even Sea Cliff (a neighborhood where homes never get sold, they get inherited), the Marin Headlands, the Golden Gate, and the bridge that spans it.
I would take a six-iron and a couple golf balls on Saturday morning. No one was there. Supposedly I was there to walk the dog but he mostly just ran and ran and ran. I would practice long bunker shots. And watch the seagulls hanging motionless in the updrafts.
The mist, the cold, the taste of salt on your lips. I will never forget Baker Beach.
Ever.
742,960
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