Friday, February 27, 2015

back on the horse again

I must start today by saying that it is cold cold cold, and though the paintings don't seem too stiff they are the only thing that is not...the great lakes are all frozen over except Michigan and who knows maybe this morning it has joined the rest...


ink  rives bfk 11x15


ink rives bfk 11x15


ink  rives bfk 11x15

Thursday, February 26, 2015

good morning my friend

At last you soul just gets tired of the cold, the piles of snow outside, the sub zero temperatures, and it says lets talk about the spring.  And it imbues that season with the purposive hope of blue skies and warming temperatures, the undulating rhythms and complex feeds...


ink watercolor  rives bfk 11x15


ink watercolor  rives bfk 11x15


ink watercolor  rives bfk 11x15

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

eschew the fineries


ink rives bfk 11x15


ink  rives bfk 11x15


ink colored pencil  rives bfk 11x15

Friday, February 20, 2015

eye-tiredness

Do you sometimes get tired...and your tiredness seems to be leaking from a particular spot...like your eyes?  That is a new feeling for me  this eye-tiredness...


ink watercolor  rives bfk 11x15


ink watercolor  rives bfk 11x15


ink watercolor  rives bfk 11x15

...as unbelievable as it may seem, though I painted these only yesterday,  I cannot recall exactly what I used when painting these.  It really makes me mad, I mean you'd think ah come on fella you don know how you done these?  But you see, what I mean is like did I use rubbing alcohol...?  old paint remnants dried in various jars where I add a bit of water and let them sit for awhile...?  did I just barely paint it then rush back to fill it just before it dries?...at the time you paint them the only important thing is to loose oneself in the process.

Is this the sky?

this is a nice one...I like it a lot though once again I must admit that I am a poor photographer...cause this painting is actually quite a bit bluer than it looks here...you know sometimes I wonder if the colors I see are actually the colors that exist...


dye  rives bfk 22x30

Wednesday, February 18, 2015

let's talk about rats ...for a moment

I know most of you know that James Audubon drew rats along with all the other animals and flowers he did...In fact as he studied rats, he moved naturally to New York City.  He even wrote the mayor and got special permission to shoot rats on Sunday mornings down by the Battery.


The funny thing about them rats is that the more you kill them...shooting them but mostly poisoning them -the higher their pregnancy rates climb.  Their pregnancy rate is always about what it is with humans...In fact they say now that coincidentally there are five times as many children in Iraq than in the entire United States.


Later on Audubon's eyesight failed and he moved up to 157th street, which is now settled by people from the Dominican Republic...which is coincidently also the home of Audubon himself.


these are all ink watercolor  rives bfk 11x15

Saturday, February 14, 2015

olde valentines

these are just some old ones...done on crane paper for the most part 4x6...after I had sent them out there were always a few left over












happy Valentine's Day

Now here is an interesting fact...when the people of Oshima in Japan wish to make a new Kimono the first step they take is to procure the finest silk made in the world. They soak it and roll it up and tie it together...then the walk over to the edge of the mud that lies there...and throw it in...and leave it for several months...then move it closer to the tree with the red berries and leave it again...

Now these are said to be the finest kimonos in the world and cost between six to ten thousand dollars when finished....


collage  rives bfk 11x15  

Friday, February 13, 2015

valentine

these are just a few of some old valentines we made...there are dozens of others...but I'll have to check and see if I can find them...these are all about 4x6...not fancy or anything....but have a happy valentine's day





Thursday, February 12, 2015

more mud

mud cannot scream
it flows through the rivers and streams 
it can lie still and suck on your boots
it gurgles and blurps and dries on your child's feet


collage ink pencil   rives bfk 11x15


ink  rives bfk 11x15

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Robert Walser Mark Rothko and me

There is no such thing as abstract...there are only things which we do not fully comprehend...and so, well we call them abstract.  When I was in DC with my boys we went to the Phillips Collection, which is totally groovy.  While there I walked into the Rothko room, the dreamiest sexiest room in America.  One large Rothko on each of four walls.  I went up to the guard and asked him if they could bring a bed into the center of the room so I could take a nap.

I don't know for certain what Rothko wanted to achieve but I know the sort of absence and chant I felt at that moment.  I wish you all could have been there with me, each of us snuggled up in cozy chairs in that room, each with our backs to the other, each of us asleep and dreaming...each of us would have a copy of Robert Walser's The Walk (middleton trns.) which we were reading as we fell asleep and now lies snuggled close to us...


watercolor ink  rives bfk 11x15


collage pencil watercolor ink  rives bfk 11x15

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

what can mud mean?

I misquoted some lyrics to myself and accidentally made new ones up that could possibly be a song:
mud isn't dirty
mud isn't clean
mud isn't jumping
mud doesn't dream

...or maybe not huh? But it does remind me of this painting which was made of using a carton topper (you know the stuffed paper put in some packages) and I painted the bottom sheet with watercolor and the topper with ink and watercolor and stuck them together with some forever glue from Japan.

I don't think it is much but it is pretty to look at...honest.  Maybe you would need to come see it for  yourself...


collage watercolor ink  rives bfk 15x22

Saturday, February 7, 2015

hello. Again. You have grown.

Yes, this one has grown, actually four times as big as age was then.  And I like this one, violet, grey, and green.  It seems almost as if I'm seeing someone, no maybe two people sitting on the other side of a fire.  

Though that is too simple -and desecrates the beauty of the curved lines. This is wholly one thing, a one thing we all see so often but never quite recognize. We see it as we sit by a fire, or when we garden outside, or when we nap and then wake just as it's getting dark. We see it in the covers on a bed, on the rug on the floor, in the pages of a magazine briefly glimpsed...and most often in our strange and weak visual memory,  deep within the depths of those far memories, they get fuzzier as we stare, and then become tinged with something, what for a better name we call sadness, ennui, not ever quite graspable, a thing slipping past recognition...


watercolor  rives bfk 22x30

Friday, February 6, 2015

Agata

I don't and won't talk about this again anymore.  But she was a good friend I think.  And in some ways a very close friend and I miss her and feel sad and conflicted as they say.  I don't like anyone to leave and go away.


Agata.  watercolor  rives bfk 11x15


watercolor  rives bfk 11x15


watercolor collage  rives bfk 11x15

Thursday, February 5, 2015

well hello who are you?

...and where did you come from my friend?  You seem familiar yet strange, out of step, slightly not in step, -though now that I look I see you are indeed one of ours. Come in and sit down.  You look slightly disheveled yet neat the way a street looks in the aftermath of high winds and rain.


watercolor collage  rives bfk 11x15


watercolor collage  rives bfk 11x15 

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

this one is a bit nutty

primarily cause it doesn't look like this as far as I can tell...I'm not a good photographer by any means...I believe this one is all red and black...at least in my eyes...well whddya know?


gouache pen dye   22x30 rives bfk

I got a whole new light and took a better picture and here it is...

Monday, February 2, 2015

same kinda thing man

For some reason I find these sort of beat jazzy from that time period but honest it ain't the kind of mood I'm in at all for today is a time of sadness for me.  Maybe these look sad and I just can't see it...


collage tokens gouache  rives bfk 11x15


Ink watercolor collage  rives 11x15



ink watercolor colored pencil graphite collage smoke  rives bfk 11x15

funky music

It may be the funky music my youngest is playing downstairs or maybe just the thump from yesterday's Bowie concert or could be just the everything that is going down...


ink watercolor collage charcoal  rive bfk 11x15


ink watercolor collage   rives bfk 11x15