Colmar France is about 300 miles from Nice. So I dont think I will be visiting Schongauer's Madonna soon. This is the medieval painter's masterpiece and I love the colors in it. I love the religious medieval paintings. They are such gems to me, though often I feel they are stuffy and oppressive, I am still drawn to the gemlike quality of them.

Last night I saw "Inside Job". I highly highly recommend this documentary of the financial crisis that occurred on wall street. Die hard liberals should especially see this. Now I am not liberal or conservative, democrat or republican. I look at each issue independently-just so you know where I am coming from. I dont defend any of the major parties. I like reasonable, intelligent, fiscally responsible, caring and generous people in short. I like Eric Cantor, Bobby Jindal for example. The fact that they are republicans is not important to me, I just really like them. But whatever your bent is see the documentary 'Inside Job'!

" There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." such is the last line in the Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder. What a beautiful book!

This is a new series I am working on in graphite on paper. It is called 'concealment'. I have four more images for this series but will post them later. I have quite a few projects going on right now and will try to get some images up as soon as I can. This series is about ways of hiding, and concealing the face.

I will address the removal of this blog entry at a later time.

I dont really worry about "finding my voice" or not. What does it mean? What is a voice? What is meant by "my voice"? Actually, I know the sound of my voice so it cannot be that. I have my ideas, feelings and opinions, and my interests, my passions etc. I know what they are and they also are subject to change. These thoughts and feelings are the content of my voice. They are the what I have to say. The means I chose to express them is my voice. I think its like learning a language. The greater your vocabulary, command of the structure, the more you can express yourself. So in that way I learn as much technique,and medium that I can. Then when I decide what I want to express I choose the medium and techniques to use to best express it. I am constantly learning and growing. It seems pointless to concern myself with finding my voice.

This work in progress is an Ode to a Loved One. The loved one is my father who passed away several years ago. He was a landscape architecht and in this is the image of a Ginko tree, the oldest know tree that has no natural plant diseases it succombs to. My father loved this tree among many others. The faces on the tree are those of his grandchildren whom he was devoted to. In the background is Syria, the Atlantic Ocean which he crossed to come to live in Margate, NJ. A short time after my father died I was driving through my town of Highland Park and passed a garage sale. There was a very large lantern layed out on the lawn among other garage sale items. Intrigued I had to stop and inquire about the lantern. What I found out was that the lantern was from Damascus, Syria! Well that is where my father was born and lived for the first 14 years of his life. I had to purchase that ande this brass frame you see in the picture. The owner of the frame and lantern had worked and traveled in Syria and said that there was a shop in Damascus hand making these lanterns. So I took a piece from my father's childhood with us to our new home when we moved. This was filled with meaning to me bring a piece of past with us. I now am working on this oil on this panel who thanks to Lucky Jo for a bottle of wine cut to fit the frame for me. Thanks Jo. It seems so fitting to use this frame from Damascus, my dad's birthplace, to encircle his final resting place across the ocean.
The Writing is the Eulogy my brother Joe wrote. It is absolutely beautiful, Joe you are a wonderful writer. I couldnt express anything better than this.