Sketchbook
This is where I share drawings, news and writings.
12/14/11
Thank you Laura Romanski for hiring me to paint this sweet portrait of her cats for her mother for Christmas. I hope you like it. This watercolor is 9 x 12″.
12/4/11
New watercolors and photos showing at Grouchy Gabe’s Grill in Croton On Hudson December – February.
9/13/11
The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine will host an art show curated by Fredericka Foster showcasing artist’s response to water. I was invited to share two digital pieces as part of their Digital Documentation Project.
Water—an essential element of life—is the focus of our next major art exhibition. This September we will kick off The Value of Water, a 6—month exhibition including many of the world’s top artists, curated by participating artist Fredericka Foster. The art will be hung and displayed throughout the Cathedral.
There has always been art in the Cathedral, much of it regularly on view. What’s so special about this exhibition is that the entire Cathedral—the bays, the nave, the choir; liturgical space, performance space, and the intellectual space—will be interacting with the art and the artists.
And because discourse, reflection, and open listening are key parts of our mission, we are taking this event to another level. Concurrent with the exhibition, we will present a wide range of programs involving scholars, social advocates, poets, musicians, and storytellers.
Water is considered by many to be our most critical resource. Currently, the media is focusing a good deal of attention on water, and we hear daily news about potential threats to the earth’s oceans and our own supplies of fresh drinking water.
At the Cathedral, many of the world’s best performers and speakers have entertained, inspired, and educated our community. They do so for many reasons, but one is that musicians, poets, artists, and thinkers of all kinds recognize what they have in common—a love of our amazing Earth and all its inhabitants. The Cathedral’s hope is that by presenting art in a space where quiet reflection comes naturally, new connections will be made.
The fuel of art is the desire to know the world, near and far, inside and out. From that early curiosity arises the need to protect and celebrate what protects and nurtures us. And few natural issues will impact us more than water.
Symposium Saturday, September 24 / 10:00 – 1:00
The Value of Water: Some Propositions
The artists in the Value of Water exhibition all have their own ideas about art, the sacred, and social change. They may claim for themselves a particular faith tradition, or they may identify as agnostic or atheist. In this they mirror the general population. Their particular wisdom, however, comes from the long practice of a vocation that requires radical receptivity, an attunement to what can be called self, soul, or the imagination. It is through this attunement that a synthesis is formed from what is known and what is unknown or only partially given in the moment. That process constitutes something of a mystery, holy or otherwise.
The Cathedral maintains that acts of the imagination—in liturgy and the arts, as well as the sciences—are a powerful and essential force for bringing about change. Imagination exists in each of us uniquely; it links, separates, and links again, the recognition of our common humanity allowing us to trust the insight of others. Civilization depends on the ability of enough of us holding in balance that which is known and that which is uncertain or not yet understood; suspending judgments that forestall understanding and limit investigation.
Artists are experienced at looking at complex systems with both an eye for how they work and a respect for their mystery. Sacred traditions teach “what works” in the realm of ethics, prayer and liturgy; and reverence for other lives and for the unknowable. Scientists grasp the facts on an intuitive level the rest of us can’t fathom, as politicians grasp the facts of public opinion. We think all these skills form the basis for a mutual understanding of one of the most crucial aspects of this crisis: the recognition that radical change in society is both necessary and exceedingly difficult, and that to scant either the necessity or the difficulty is tantamount to doing nothing.
Water is the essential element by which the planet and its people survive. What we know, not least of which is the human cost of the global water crisis, is complicated by contested facts and political and economic issues. The will to achieve a solution is compromised by self-interest and short-term thinking. There is much deliberate ignorance and neglect. It will take the concerted effort of scientists, thinkers, artists, journalists, activists, philosophers and theologians to tackle the hard work of imagination, to come up with new stories and new paradigms that can inspire the will to act in the service of transformation and change.
The Value of Water: A Basic Question
Considering the above propositions, and given that this exhibition is installed in the world’s largest Gothic-style cathedral, how do art, theology and liturgy cooperate or complement each other, if they do, in the work of imagination that brings about new understanding and the willingness to be transformed for advocacy and action?
9/11/11
5/12/11
We brought the Sweetcake Enso show to the Garrison Institute. The show looks great and can be read about here: http://sweetcakeenso.blogspot.com/
Max Gimblett
Moon Enso, sumi ink, thai garden smooth paper, 30×22″,2010/11, $3,500
Sweetcake Enso Artist Exhibit
Curated by Catherine Spaeth
Artists:
Ross Bleckner
Noah Fischer
Max Gimblett
Karen Schiff
Arlene Shechet
Suzy Sureck
This is the fifth Sweetcake Enso exhibit, curated by Catherine Spaeth and sponsored by the Empty hand Zen Center. It has been travelling to Zen centers here in New York and San Francisco and will continue on at the close of this exhibit in August. Artists were asked to treat the circle as a koan and to express their practice in any medium. To read more about the exhibit please visit the website, http://sweetcakeenso.blogspot.com. The website is an extension of these exhibits, with essays by significant teachers, writers and artists in Buddhist community.
Catherine Spaeth teaches the History of art at Purchase College. She also provides carefully curated and researched private tours in the galleries and museums of New York. Catherine is a student in the Japanese Soto tradition of Ji-on Susan Postal at the Empty Hand Zen Center in New Rochelle, New York. With the encouragement of her teacher and the support of her sangha she curates Sweetcake Enso exhibits, of which this exhibit at Garrison is the fifth, and edits the Sweetcake Enso website magazine. For more information please contact Catherine Spaeth at catherine.spaeth@gmail.com.
1/19/11
I participated in a one night event at the Village Zendo in NYC. Curated by Catherine Spaeth, this group show temporarily transformed a meditation room into a gallery diplaying art made by Buddhists.
The third Sweetcake Enso exhibit opens Saturday, January 15th at the Village Zendo, 588 Broadway, suite 1108. Viewing is from 11:00-7:00, followed by a panel discussion from 7:00-900 pm. You can read more about these exhibits on the Sweetcake Enso website. Artists in the exhibit are:
Miya Ando * Sanford Biggers * Ross Bleckner * Sam Clayton * Robyn Ellenbogen * Noah Fischer * Carolyn Fuchs * Max Gimblett * Rodney Alan Greenblat * Gregg Hill * Anne Humanfeld * Phyllis Joyner * Erin Koch * Liz LaBella * Peter Levitt * Timothy Reynolds * Karen Schiff * Fran Shalom * Bridget Spaeth * Emma Tapley * Leslie Wagner *
Maria Wallace * Margaret Wells * Michael Wenger
At 7:00 there will be a panel and lively discussion of how Buddhist practice inspires and informs contemporary art. Panelists include:
Max Gimblett, artist teacher and lecturer
Emma Tapley, artist
Rodney Greenblat, artist
Robyn Ellenbogen, artist and art editor of Zen Monster
Catherine Spaeth, art historian and curator
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10/20/10
The haiku project. My friend, David Rome, and I are collaborating on a drawing and haiku book. I make a small drawing and he responds with a haiku, and then I make a drawing from the haiku.
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10/18/10- My boss commissioned a painting. He lost his beloved doggie, Max, last year which broke his heart. He has a beautiful photo of them on the beach at the cape that he asked me to paint. Here it is, taken by cell phone.
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This drawing is a study for Night and Day, which was an oil painting included at the Perimeter Gallery group show in Cleveland, March 2010. Night and Day explores relativity through opposites such as night/day, male/female, summer/winter, up/down and so on. The painting is meant as a contemplation on interdependence. Without this, there cannot be that. We are in a state of relationship at all times.
Photo taken at the recent open studios in Hell’s Kitchen. I was in a group show as part of the International Woman’s Salon. There were 80 studios and galleries open for walking tours over the weekend in May 2010.
