"Drink Me"

Oil on museum quality ampersand gessobord panel 6" x 6"

Before you say "Jeeze, Adams can't paint a round bottle to save his ass." let me say that this particular vessel has the weirdest shape. Flat on two sides with square diamond nipples, then ridged on the adjacent sides with a slightly curved front. Curiouser and curiouser; could this have been the model for the little bottle Alice found on the table in wonderland?

" ... round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words `DRINK ME' beautifully printed on it in large letters. It was all very well to say `Drink me,' but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. `No, I'll look first,' she said, `and see whether it's marked "poison" or not'; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked `poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.

However, this bottle was not marked `poison,' so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off.

Until recently, painting a still life was as unfamiliar to me as being 10" tall was to Alice, and sometimes just as frustrating. I have great respect for my fellow artists who can render inanimate objects with precision. That is not where my heart lies. I am much more comfortable painting organic subjects, be they fish or fowl, man or beast. I thought I would step out of my comfort zone to portray this little medicine bottle, which is on loan to me by some dear friends from Virginia. They brought me a treasure trove of miscellaneous brick-a-brack to inspire me during my recent creative malaise. I think it is safe to say they have the largest collection of cobalt blue glass on the East Coast. This panel may be another "unique" as I found the painting of this somewhat tedious and I am afraid it shows. Hey, at least I was swishing paint.

"Antique French Hobby Horse"

Oil on museum quality, archival ampersand gessobord™ panel - 8” x 8”

While in Paris this past January, I went to Les Puces de Saint-Ouen which is also known as the Clignancourt Flea Market.  What a treasure trove of imagery.  From the look of it, this hobby horse was enjoyed by countless French boys and girls.  Well, perhaps maybe just the girls, given the floral pattern of the saddle, but then those were simpler times and powdered wigs and makeup was de rigueur and there was no clear line between what was masculine and what was feminine.  Barbies for girls and GI Joe for boys would come much later.

I chose to reach back into my distant past and use a technique that I used during my "mime" period.  When I was contemplating a career in art, I thought of becoming a fashion illustrator.  I loved the wonderful flowing lines of the sketches in my mother's Vogue and Harper's Bazaar magazines by René Gruau and Cecil Beaton.  I had no thought of actually designing the couture but I did want to draw it.  All that exposure to the fashion photography of the time seeped into my brain.  Placing figures pictorially on a grey seamless became my modus operandi.  Richard Avedon and Irving Penn had this wonderful shade of grey that soon found its way into my work.  A blend of equal parts alizarin crimson, yellow ochre and Prussian blue mixed with white lead was the perfect grey.  Oh sure, any combination of complementary colors will produce a neutral grey, but by using this triumvirate, you could pull it in all directions.  Want a greener grey? -- add more ochre; a cooler grey, more Prussian and so on.  The extraneous elements in the reference added nothing to this painting so I edited them out completely and, taking a page from my own book, I simplified the composition to its bare bones.  I think it works.  Click on the word "mime" and it will take you to the old theatre paintings that I did in the 70's.  A mime is a terrible thing to waste.