Previous issues: Spring 2002 | Winter 2002
Fall 2001 | Summer 2001 | Spring 2001 | Winter 2001
Fall 2000 | Summer 2000 | Spring 2000 | Winter 2000
Fall 1999 | Summer 1999 | Spring 1999 | Winter 1999
See the Gallery for some exciting detailed images of the artist's work.
Sunday, September 22, 2002I finished the tryptic of gala apples. It's odd how solid they seem together, but how they barely can stand up on their own when separated.
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Click on the images to see a larger version of the tryptic.Today marks the final day of an exciting summer season. I've been to many places that I've never been before, from Ann Arbor to Chicago to Madison to Mystic. I went through some physical and personal trials like I've never imagined, and Heather has been by my side through every part of it. At the close of this season I feel drained and feeble from several particularly taxing weeks. I'm looking forward to getting my strength and stamina back as I rise to meet some of exciting challenges that lie ahead in the weeks and months to come.
Read on...to Fall of 2002
Friday, September 20, 2002I continued to work on the tryptic of apples. It is an interesting challenge to juggle the development of all three paintings together as one. Very small cues help maintain the continuity of one painting to the next, but these will obviously all stand up on their own as individual pieces. I should easily be finishing these paintings tomorrow.
Thursday, September 19, 2002I'm finally back to work in the studio. I decided to try a warm-up version of the tryptic I'm planning on a trio of small canvases. To keep things simple I have only three apples, with each apple being painted on its own canvas, and with a different background color on each canvas as well. If this comes together successfully I will start planning a larger and more ambitious version of this tryptic in the upcoming weeks. I'll have to see if the gaps between the canvases are too distracting for me to execute a seemingly continuous image across the separate panels.
We had fun in Durham last weekend, and aside from almost constant rain at the exhibition we enjoyed spending time with my family.
Friday, September 13, 2002I finished the painting and now I'm racing out the door to head to North Carolina, for the Durham Centerfest this weekend.
Click on the image to see a larger version.
Wednesday, September 11, 2002
Day of RemembranceToday I had an impacted wisdom tooth extracted, and somehow I managed to continue working on the painting of eleven gala apples. I would love to finish this piece early enough tomorrow to be able to go into Philadelphia to retrieve some paintings from the museum. It won't be easy, but I'll give it my best. In many ways, none of this seems very important.
Tuesday, September 10, 2002We had a great weekend in Wilmington, the weather was great and a few paintings found new homes. It was amazing how exhausted I was at the end of Saturday's show. I guess it's what I should expect after my first show back after what I've been through.
Today I started a mid-sized canvas of eleven royal gala apples. Heather suggested a fairly vibrant green backdrop, and I decided to run with it. I'll be scrambling to see this piece finished before we have to leave on Friday for Chapel Hill, for the Durham Centerfest show this coming weekend.
Friday, September 6, 2002I finished the painting of a small bunch of asparagus before bolting out the door for the Brandywine show.
Thursday, September 5, 2002I continued work on the small painting of a bunch of asparagus, but I did not manage to finish it. For some reason I'm having a hard time concentrating, but I will have no choice but to wrap it up before I have to leave for this coming weekend's show in Wilmington tomorrow afternoon.
Wednesday, September 4, 2002Today I arranged a small bunch of asparagus in front of a light blue backdrop, and started a small painting. If the asparagus doesn't wilt during the night, I should be finishing this painting tomorrow. If I have time I'll immediately jump into another painting, possibly using some brilliant blue prune plums we picked up at the farmer's market yesterday.
Tuesday, September 3, 2002I'm recovering from the surgery, bit by bit. My voice sounds great, and the pain is not the first thing I think about anymore. There are certain doors you just have to go through alone, and I'm glad that Heather was there to help once I made it through to the other side.
Today I started mixing some colors and arranging some objects. Tomorrow I should be started on a painting.
Wednesday, August 28, 2002We're finally back in Cleveland. Tomorrow morning I have to be at the hospital at 6:00 am for surgery, and should be back here at the hotel to recuperate for the rest of the day by 10. I'll tell you, there is not one part of this that I am looking forward to.
We spent today at the Cedar Point amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio. We were on eleven different roller coasters, and I've learned a certain troubling helplessness after being repeatedly strapped into a big steel cart that gets towed to the top of a ridiculous incline and then dropped down an equally ridiculous decline on the other side. I'm not really a roller coaster kind of guy, but I wound up being addicted until I was turning green by the end of the day. Now tomorrow morning I'll be strapped to a cold steel cart and dropped into a similar plunging sense of helplessness all over again. Ah, isn't life just grand?
I just hope that green really is my best color.
Thursday, August 22, 2002I worked last night until dark and collapsed, after finishing the smaller canvas and coming very close to completing the larger one. This morning I put the final few marks on it, and now I'm packing my bag and heading out the door to Chicago for this coming weekend's show.
Click on the images to see larger versions.After the show we're traveling on to Madison, Wisconsin to visit a cousin and her family. After a few days there we'll head back, stopping by in Cleveland, where I'll undergo surgery to reconstruct my voice. Those of you who have ever spoken to me in person are aware of my unusually raspy voice, the result of a partially paralyzed voice box. On Thursday of next week I'll undergo surgery to restore my ability to speak clearly and easily. I haven't really had time to be nervous about the surgery, and we integrated it into our schedule the same way we would integrate the elements of any art show.
If I can find a decent connection for my laptop I'll hopefully be able to provide updates from the road. Otherwise, I'll see you all when I return home on Friday the 30th.
Tuesday, August 20, 2002I continued to work on the painting of three gala apples. As soon as I had the entire surface covered with the second layer of resolution, I pulled the painting off of the easel and swapped it with a smaller canvas. I then immediately started the same painting again on the smaller canvas. After the first few layers of paint have a chance to set overnight I'll spend tomorrow building up a surface on both paintings and hopefully finish them by the end of the day.
Monday, August 19, 2002 Heather's BirthdayHeather and I had a great weekend in Mount Gretna. We were set up right next to the legendary pop artist, Jeff Schaller, which made the weekend quite a bit more enjoyable. Many of our friends from other shows were also there, including the painter/printmaker Sasha Meret, surrealist painter Phillip Singer, batik artist Chuck Kaiser and my very good friend, the landscape painter Steve Brehm. As it turned out I traded a painting for some glass jewelry made by Julia Skop-Duax from Buffalo, New York, as a gift for Heather for her birthday. On Saturday Heather made a connection with Julia and her friend, the abstract painter Ilania Kaplan, and on Sunday I had a chance to meet them and see their work firsthand. When Heather expressed an interest in having one of Julia's pieces, the wheels started turning. And as soon as we settled on a trade, Jeff Schaller jumped in and started wheeling and dealing as well. Julia returned to Buffalo with two great paintings, and Jeff and I adorned our loved ones with some amazing glass jewelry.
I started a painting today of the three gala apples that have been sitting by the window since the middle of last week. This will be short and sweet, because we'll be leaving on Thursday morning for Chicago for the Port Clinton show this coming weekend. My new firewall/router arrived, so the whole network is back up and running and the two main cameras are back online. I'll spend more time looking for a camera source for the streaming Windows media StudioCam page when I return from Chicago.
Happy birthday, Heather.
Friday, August 16, 2002I spent today in a haze. Yesterday I went to the dentist and had my teeth whitened. Now I have these brilliant and unnaturally white choppers that don't even look real. Of course this is all in the interest of facing my public with my best possible face. Because my teeth are especially susceptible to staining for the first 48 hours I've been recommended to not drink any coffee or tea or eat anything with a strong pigment, like tomato sauce, soy sauce or jams or jellies. So for the past day and a half I've been eating nothing but white foods, pasta with a little olive oil, an egg white omelet, bananas, soy milk, white crusty bread, and for a special treat last night I had vanilla ice cream. Who knew there was so much white food? Until this morning I would get an occasional jolt of blinding pain in one of my teeth, but thankfully that has passed. Without coffee today I feel as though I'm moving in slow motion, and somehow I managed to set up my display in Mount Gretna for this weekend's show. The day was sweltering hot and the sky was bright but hazy, so by the end of the afternoon I had an amazing chainsaw headache. I could barely open my eyes when I met Heather when she arrived on the train from Philadelphia. I'm feeling worlds better now, just in time to get some sleep and head off to the show in the morning.
Thursday, August 15, 2002I'm continuing to not get any painting done. Yesterday my firewall/router died, so I'm down to only one computer, which is not one of the two that runs the cameras. After several hours spent on the phone with Netgear technical support, they're sending me a new firewall/router. On the upside, I finally got Windows streaming media working. You can see what I have so far on the David Oleski Streaming Media StudioCam, and of course you must have the Windows Media Player to view this. I will continue to figure things out and develop the code before I decide how to best integrate it into the website.
Tuesday, August 13, 2002We're back from an excellent weekend in Mystic, Connecticut. We were stuck driving back from the show on Sunday night, not arriving home until well after midnight, after several days of minimal sleep. As a result I'm totally exhausted, to the point that I feel as though I'm barely able to function. I started mixing some colors today and then gave up. I hate this sense of not having the energy and control to dive right back into painting. Hopefully tomorrow I'll wake up feeling a little more aggressive toward setting up some more challenges for myself.
Thursday, August 8, 2002As it turned out I never had a chance to actually paint this week. I did spend some time arranging and rearranging different objects, and I started some preliminary sketches for the mammoth undertaking of a tryptic of three large canvases of an apple arrangement. If it actually works it will be a smashing crescendo to my summer season of painting.
I'm getting ready for my show this weekend in Mystic.
Tuesday, August 6, 2002I had two fillings today, and my jaw is throbbing from where I got the injection of Novocain. It's comforting to know that I'm enduring such pain in pursuit of good oral hygiene.
I'm continuing to get the website back up and running. I think the streaming video cam is working again, but of course there's been minimal content with me being tied up with all of these other details. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be starting on a small painting.
I've been toying with the idea of setting up streaming media on the website, with full motion video and audio. Heather and I have enough colorful conversation during my painting sessions that I can't help but think it would be fairly entertaining for an audience to hear what goes on in the studio as well as see it. I can't figure out some of the details of configuring my firewall and the encoder, but I feel as though I'm getting closer and closer all the time. If anyone thinks they may have some input regarding the set-up and delivery of streaming media content, I'm all ears.
Monday, August 5, 2002I'm back from my excellent weekend in the Hamptons, only to find that the hosting server for the website has been hacked and the site hasn't been up and running in two days. For lack of a better immediate solution I had the website switched to a different machine, meaning that everything has to be uploaded from scratch. I'm sure everyone will be finding missing pages and broken image links, so as always I will greatly appreciate any assistance you can offer as these errors pop up. I finally got the streaming video cam working, so I'm sure I'll be struggling with configuring that again as well. Hopefully the transition to the new server will be fairly fast and painless.
Thursday, August 1, 2002The painting is finished, just barely, and I'm leaving right now for the weekend.
Click on the image to see a larger version
Wednesday, July 31, 2002Now the painting of asparagus is becoming a real struggle. Nothing is coming easily to me, and it seems as though I've scraped out more paint than I've put on. I'm trying to avoid finding too many areas of consistent stripes that will threaten to create the patterns that will cause areas to flatten out. I really do feel totally overwhelmed by this painting.
Tuesday, July 30, 2002I continued hacking away at the big painting of a bunch of asparagus. Parts of it are starting to come into focus, but other parts are still defying any effort I'm making toward seeing this paint actually turn into a painting. I imagine by the end of tomorrow this should start to really snap together.
Monday, July 29, 2002As I promised, I'm finally back to work on a new painting. For some reason it feels as though it's been several weeks since I've been painting. Of course being totally rusty I feel somewhat overwhelmed with the size and difficulty of this piece, but hopefully things will get easier tomorrow. At the end of this session nothing seems to be going well, but I realize that this is the standard discomfort I always feel at the beginning of a painting, when I feel as though every mark I make is one step closer to crashing and burning while the whole world watches.
Friday, July 26, 2002Alrighty then, so everyone is wondering where I've been all week.
The past two weekends in Cleveland and Ann Arbor were fun and productive, and I returned with a few less paintings in the van. Since returning I've been getting some rest, taking care of some business and drinking plenty of fluids. An interview I gave the day before I left was run in the weekend section of yesterday's evening paper, so I'm sure the eyes of Lancaster are wondering why I'm not actually painting on cam right now. Yesterday I did manage to start mixing colors for a new painting of asparagus, but too many other details crowded my afternoon for me to make any more progress than that. Today I'm getting ready for the big local show in Lititz tomorrow, and I'm about to leave to see if I can start setting up my display this afternoon. The mayhem of the Saturday morning setup is always a bit much for such a large small-town show.
Ultimately I'll be back at work in the studio on Sunday, or by Monday at the latest. I promise.
Wednesday, July 10, 2002I finished the painting of a carton of strawberries. I'll post the finished image after I return from my midwest trip, sometime early in the week of the 21st.
It's two o'clock in the morning, and I'm still scrambling to get everything packed and ready to go. I'm totally exhausted, and I can't wait to sleep for a few hours until the final loading of the van early in the morning. If anything exciting happens, I'll try to post it in the journal, otherwise, I'll see you all later.
Monday, July 8, 2002Today I started a very small painting of a carton of strawberries. This will give me a chance to play with a few more odd color combinations. I should be finishing this tomorrow, just in time to wrap everything up before leaving for the shows in Cleveland this coming weekend and then Ann Arbor the following weekend.
Sunday, July 7, 2002I finished the painting of a small bunch of asparagus bound with a red rubber band. This is a striking and solid painting, and I think I'll spend more time investigating this subject again in the future.
Click on the image to see a larger version.Today Heather and I visited some new clients, and we had a great time enjoying beverages and lunch. Another painting found a new home, and we found some new friends.
Saturday, July 6, 2002I worked until dark, and I'm really exhausted, and I'm still not finished with this painting.
Friday, July 5, 2002I finally finished the painting of three green apples.
Click on the image to see a larger version.I started a painting of a small bunch of asparagus bound with a red rubber band.
On a side note, I was accepted to the Bethesda Row art show in October.
Thursday, July 4, 2002 Independence DayI painting, we relaxed, and then we went out for pizza and ice cream with my mother.
It was a good day, and tomorrow I'll finish this painting.
Wednesday, July 3, 2002Yesterday I committed to what now seems to be the standard configuration of three green apples in a row. Today I continued to develop the painting as I continued to recover from this bothersome summer flu.
Monday, July 1, 2002Yesterday I started mixing colors for another painting of green apples of an unspecified configuration. It seems there is suddenly a demand for even more paintings of green apples. This morning I delivered a large piece to an office building in Wilmington, where it became part of a permanent corporate collection. I'm still not over being ill for the past week, and upon returning I jumped on the chance to kick back and relax for a bit. Drifting in and out of a feverish torpor I watched the afternoon sun change colors and grow dim. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be back on my feet.
Friday, June 28, 2002After several more pounds of paint, I finally finished the painting of two apples.
Click on the image to see a larger version.I'd like to do at least one more large vertical format painting. We'll see what happens on Sunday when I'm back in the studio.
Thursday, June 27, 2002I raced to finish the painting as the sky grew darker and darker with the impending storm. I gave up when I realized that the camera image was entirely black. Tomorrow should see the completion of this painting, and hopefully the start of another. I'll have only tomorrow to work on a new painting before I spend Saturday at the sidewalk art show in Lititz, assuming the weather is favorable.
Wednesday, June 26, 2002Yesterday's session had to be cut short so I could drive to Philadelphia to pick up some new frames. I immediately put one of the frames onto the small canvas I finished two weeks ago, and then swung by the southwest side of the city to deliver the painting to a very pleased client.
Today I continued to work up the surface on the new vertical format painting of two granny smith apples. Tomorrow should see this painting nearly finished.
I'm continuing to brainstorm on some different ideas of ways to approach this new minimalist view of the fruit arrangements with this vertical format. I'm perceiving the empty space as having a certain quality of weight and presence, and I feel that there is much more to explore concerning this.
Monday, June 24, 2002I dove into another vertical format painting of two granny smith apples. Maybe one day I'll be able to keep one of these nice paintings for myself for a change. Yesterday's image seemed to just snap together, and I started brainstorming different ideas to be pursued within this theme. Different colors of apples was the obvious variation. Then I thought of making a band of apples, some of which would be cropped as they ran off the edges of the canvas, creating bands of color from foreground to subject to background. Then the thought hit me of continuing the painting onto adjacent canvases, creating a tryptic which would allow the arrangement to stop short of the outside edges. Of course a tryptic of 40 by 60 inch canvases would be really huge, but wouldn't that be fun? Of course I started toying with the idea of getting another giant easel, and of course I'd have to rearrange my entire studio to view even only two of these canvases side by side. And the notion of working all three at once to maintain some sort of continuity would require even more space. It's hard not to keep thinking bigger and bigger all the time.
Sunday, June 23, 2002In the crushing heat of the afternoon I finished the painting of two granny smith apples.
Click on the image to see a larger version.In the true spirit of one-upmanship with myself I'll attempt to execute another painting of this same subject tomorrow.
Saturday, June 22, 2002I continued work on this odd vertical composition of two granny smith apples. For the most part I circled the canvas, building up the surface and further defining the color. Tomorrow should see a few specific hits of color and detail which should see this piece all but finished. It's odd not having the wide screen view and all of the spatial cues that I would be pushing and pulling to create the dynamics of depth.
Friday, June 21, 2002 Summer SolsticeOn this first day of summer I started slamming down paint on this odd vertical composition of two granny smith apples. I feel that I'm coming one step closer toward creating an abstraction of color fields within the vehicle of the still life. This is both exciting and unsettling, and I'm looking forward to developing it further in the next few days.
Running non-stop for the past few weeks and then to Florida and back has me feeling fairly run down and almost ill with a summer cold. The sweltering heat of the day is intertwined with the sweat of my fever.
Let's hear it for summer.
If you find yourself hungering for yet more dramatization of the angst of a painter, see Spring 2002 for the previous season's struggles.
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