Beauty in My Time and Place

Beauty vs. The Modernist has been a hot topic in art blogospheres lately, as if they are mutually exclusive (not for me). This idea probably started when curators were, are driven by having "new eyes" discovering the new and the shocking. Beauty went out of favor then, I guess because it was seen as the low hanging fruit. This does not make beauty irrelevant , it just means it is not fashionable. Fashion comes and fashion goes..beauty is forever.

There is common beauty (beauty we recognize, such as a sunset, scenery, alove betwen a mother and child). Then there is uncommon beauty (a plastic bag dancing in the breeze ie. American beauty). And there is superficial beauty (candy). But what brings beauty into our lives and keeps it there is not the prettiness but the meaning. And this brings me to the picturs above.

I did this picture in first grade, out of cut paper. I was raised in East Boston, a working class, what would be called a disanvatanged neighbor hood, inner city, industrial, and squeezed between the airport and ship yards. It was not pretty but to me it was and is beautiful. Amongst the most beautiful things in my nieghborhood were laundry lines, full of colors and shapes and stories. It was my chore to hang out the laundry and its something that I love to watch my mother doing, I loved to do it and I love to do it to this day For me, it's beautiful and meaningful. So though this piece is ostensibly about the Pied Piper, it's really about my own time and place and my first laundry line to make it to an exhibition.

And now this takes me onto my current project, another Laundry Line series based on the laundry lines of colorful Burano, Venice. When I went to Italy for the first time, I felt as if I had come home and what did I find the most beautiful thing in Italy to be? The Laundry Lines. I have been painting them ever since. You are looking at my gouache studies done and hanging in my Boston studio. There are eight studies, total, small and in color. I am working out the colors, the sizes, composition and problems here. After being generally satisfied with what I have built (to hang as a street but to sell individually), I worked up , what I call 'blue prints" line drawings done to scale so I know what size panel to build. I dont paint to fitcommercial size panels, I make THE composition I want and the panel is made to my composition.

My panels are being built now. I will begin painting them at the end of this month, October. They will be eight to hang as a street. There are another ten that are individual, all on their own.

So what is beautiful? That which is pleasing and meaningful, beautiful on the outside and beautiful on the inside. In Venice, when one woman wants to compliment another she will say; "She hangs a beautiful line." Need I say more?