It’s February and I wish I were in Florida thawing out, but no such luck. Instead, I am in the studio in the midst of making sausage. New work is bubbling up, but it hasn’t quite gelled yet.

Last month I mentioned that my paintings were informed by photographs and now that process has reversed. As my paintings became more and more abstract, so did my photographs. What I was looking for was an image that was of something real, but looked and felt like a painting. Here is the evolution of the work in images:

See the full collection of photographs here.

HISTORY SPOTLIGHT: PAIRINGS - Follower of Velasquez and Ribera

FROM THE LIBRARY : THE LOST MUSEUM

The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art, by Hector Feliciano reveals the story of the systematic pillaging of Jewish-owned artwork during World War II.

It focuses on the fate of the private collections of five families, including Rothschild, Rosenberg, and Berheim-Jeune as they are passed through the hands of top German officials, unscrupulous art dealers, unwitting auction houses, and those in the museum community who turned a blind eye.

I highly recommend that you follow up this book with the novel Address Unknown, by Katherine Kressmann Taylor, which brings to life the insidious spread of Nazism through a series of letters between Max, a Jewish art dealer in San Francisco, and Martin, his friend and former business partner, who has returned to Germany in 1932, just as Hitler has come to power.

Not since Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, have I read something so well-constructed and so chill-worthy.

ART SPOTLIGHT: DIFFERENT AS

When I said my paintings were informed by photographs, this is a case in point. The Thread Series was a group of paintings I did by “drawing” with threads on colored paper, photographing them, and then making paintings from the photographs. So, in effect, these are representational paintings.

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