Manic Sunday - The Art Life

 Devil's Pool

I'm truly enjoying the challenge of documenting Devil's Pool. My method is a lot like the one I used when photographing Market East in Philadelphia before the gentrification. First you get to know the regulars and gain their trust. A person with a big camera in such a small area is not going to go unnoticed when aiming it at people. Second is that you ignore the tourists who visit the Pool only once because it's a very social media thing to do. They try to play it up for the camera thinking that those photos will end up on Instagram, TikTok or Facebook and then look at you weirdly when you tell them that you don't post to a  social media page, wall or whatever. I can see this project extending into another season.

The Dumpster Nightmare

Over the last year or so I've been having two reoccurring dreams. The least worrisome of the two is that I'm a little old man selling my art on a sidewalk in center city. I have a blanket spread out with a sign saying "Anything for $5 ". Depressing doesn't come close to the feeling that resides in me after having this dream. Most likely because there's a good chance it could happen.

The second dream or nightmare is that shortly after my death all my art ends up in a dumpster. The decades of paintings, works on paper and photographic prints filling a big metal box. The ignorant people tossing it in calling me a hoarder. I actually wake from this dream out of breath, angry with a racing heart. The thought of what's going to happen to my life's work pops into my head a couple times a day now because of this dream. Right now I have close to 100 paintings on canvas, hundreds of works on paper and thousands of photographic prints stored in boxes, albums, hanging on the walls and tucked into any empty space I can find. The number of artworks is only going to greatly increase over the next decade and for them to be treated like piles of newspapers in some recluses home scares the hell out of me.

Watercolor Portraits

I really sped up the progress on these small portraits and am now making 3 a day. If I could find a steady source of material I could probably paint 5 day for the rest of the year. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with all of these.