Once again I’m conscious of the swift passage of time.  It doesn’t seem like eight months have passed since my last post here, but when I count up the months, there are eight of them.  Not that those eight months have been uneventful.  On October 25, my wife Ann and I were overcome with joy when our daughter Kate gave birth to our first grandchild, a healthy little girl whom Kate and her husband Devin Maroney named Claire.  Claire has been the light of our lives ever since.  Her image appears below, in her Easter finery, four days before she became six months old.

Now to the arts.  Neither of the paintings whose images appeared in my last post was sold, but that is often the case at the Labor Day Show.  Makers of jewelry seem to make the most sales at the event, perhaps because as opposed to 24″ x 30″ acrylic paintings priced in the hundreds of dollars, jewelry tends to be small, relatively inexpensive, and a person can wear it.

I took part in another advanced acrylic abstract workshop in the fall and completed a number of paintings based on the spectacular outdoor photography of my nephew Dave Pellegrini of Malden, Massachusetts.  On the unanimous advice of my colleagues in the workshop, I entered one of those paintings, “Purple Haze,” in the Yellow Barn’s curated members’ show.  Unfortunately, in yet more evidence of the subjective nature of some artistic assessments, the curator did not select “Purple Haze” to appear in the show.  So it goes.  I did appreciate the support of my colleagues.  An image of the painting appears below.  The other paintings from the workshop will appear in the Prints and Paintings section of the website in the near future.

During the winter months, I varied what I had been doing and took a Yellow Barn course called “Approaching Abstraction: Watercolor” from a Georgetown University art instructor named Ann Schlesinger.  It was a fun course, in which we did a series of watercolors and collages, some abstract and some not.  I will be including a selection of the pieces I am most pleased with in the Prints and Paintings section as well.

At present, five of my colleagues in the advanced acrylic abstract workshop and I are preparing for a group show, “Abstractly Speaking,” in the Park View Gallery at Glen Echo Park.  Each of us will be displaying four or five paintings; images of all five of mine — “Purple Haze,” “After Zao: Beanstalk,” “After Diebenkorn,” “De Kooning Colors,” and “After Diebenkorn: Work on Paper” — appear either in this section or in the Prints and Paintings section of the  website.  The show opens this Friday, May 3, with an artists’ reception from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., and will be open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., until Saturday, June 2.  My colleagues have produced some interesting work.  I hope lots of people will drop by and see it for themselves.

Finally, on the literary front, over the past few months I have been revising several dozen poems that I will be submitting to Rennie McQuilkin, my publisher at Antrim House Books, in the hope that he will judge them as worthy of publication as he did the poems that make up Food for a Journey.  The revision process is almost completed.  We’ll see how the poems turn out.

I’ll try not to wait eight months before posting again.