Praeterita

My wife, Patty, left Tucson for the Midwest in May to spend the whole month directing and teaching at writing retreats in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan. Seeing as I was alone at home for all that time, I decided to use the four weeks as an at-home artist's residency. A real residency, of course, means you go to a location where you are given the use of a studio for a period of time to spend almost all of your time working. The advantage of such a retreat is that you leave the routines of your daily life behind and concentrate on making your art. The at-home residency, while I still had to do some freelance work and do the shopping and chores each week, is an opportunity to tune in to the same state of mind, if not from the same state of semi-isolation. My goal was to see if I could find a new path forward from the Crow and Hands series I've worked on for the past three years. The image at the head of this blog post is one of the first results: using the same imagery and mar...

  During my recent trip to Barcelona in Spain, I took the opportunity to revisit some places associated with the year that I lived there (1993 to 1994). Back then, I did a postgraduate degree in painting there, through a UK art school that ran a satellite "study abroad" program in the 1990s. The school rented two buildings for the twenty or so artists: one in the heart of the Gothic Quarter, steps away from the Museo Picasso; and one in Poble Nou, a working class district on the eastern edge of the city. The first photo above shows me in 2022 in front of the building in the Barra De Ferro, a narrow side street between Carrer de la Princesa and Carrer Montcada in the Gothic Quarter. The building accommodated an office for the course leader, a printmaking studio with press for the printmakers, and small partitioned studio spaces for artists. In common with most of the buildings in these narrow medieval streets, it was constructed with thick stone walls, a heavy wooden door, and...