My life is more than my work
MUSIC: I love it: my subtitles My life is more than my work, and my work is more than my job are lyrics from a song by folk singer Charlie King. Though a child of the rock and roll era, I’ve begun a segue into jazz, though I’ve tons more to discover. I can hardly believe I lived on the same planet at the same time as Ella Fitzgerald, and never knew her work until after she was gone. Besides Charlie & Ella, my iPod holds lots of Herbie Hancock as well as Sara Bareilles, Céu, Johnny Clegg, Rachel Yamagata, and Sophie Milman (her cover of Peggy Lee's Fever is amazing!). Santana's Dance Sister Dance (Baila Mi Hermana) morphs from a Latin dance number into a jazz piece, so it rings my bell twice. Their Abraxas and Sir Elton John's 11/17/70 are two albums that the decades haven't dented at all.
DANCE: I also take in lots of modern dance, mostly at BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the U.S.A.'s oldest performing arts venue since 1861. The companies of Pina Bausch, Mark Morris and Twyla Tharp are favorites, and we were excited when the Mark Morris Dance Group made their home in Brooklyn, right across from BAM. Mark always insists on having live music for his dance performances, something dwindling away otherwise, after the orchestra's union was broken. The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is also excellent; rarely on BAM's guest list, but worth traveling to.
VISUAL: I love viewing art, especially painting. Our museum memberships are currently down to just the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in the top 7 great art museums of the U.S (the other 5 are the Smithsonian Museums, the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, & the Philadelphia Museum of Art). We walk about Soho art galleries as well, though; and in the coming fall we'll take a membership at the Rubin Museum of Art: Art of the Himalayas. It's a very specific and not well-known area of art, but it's beautiful work, wonderfully displayed, and guided by the most knowledgable & enthusiast docents! It's been awhile now since we travelled to Merion, PA to see the astonishing art collection of the quirky Dr. Barnes … the Barnes Foundation is now moving the collection to Philly, so it'll be more easily accessible when it's there.
34" x 40", oil on canvas, untitled
LIZ HASKEL (anagrams to "hazel silk"): It's fortunate I enjoy art, since Liz, my partner since 1980 (really!) and counting, is a wonderful painter, as you can see here, on her website, in her ArtSlant entry, and on her Facebook fan page (all made by me). Her website has an art bio, including a listing of her many past shows.
Liz's paintings almost always have an amorphous background; a softened, fuzzy-focus human figure, figures, or parts; and a small, sharp, tight object, usually another living thing. She often uses herself as a model, through photos I take for the purpose. She likes the 34" x 40" size, in either orientation. Her work is usually oil-on-canvas, though she's been experimenting with jute. Her colors are brilliant and her style of painting very flat (the oil painting is not built up thickly anywhere): folks sometimes mistake her work for acrylic paint as a result. All her works are untitled, as she believes her art should speak for itself without words, despite these words of mine. Her canvases are identified with year and sequence on the back; e.g., her first 2 paintings finished in 2006 would be marked "2006/1" and "2006/2".
40" x 34", oil on canvas, untitled
The photos at the top of every page of this site are Liz & I standing on the same Park Slope, Brooklyn street corner, 7th Avenue & President Street, in 1980 and again in 2010. I call 30 years a good beginning. Yes, that was what I looked like before I gained 30 years.
