What Year Is This Anyway?

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I was talking with Ekaterina, the lifeguard at the pool yesterday. Don't know how we got on the topic but she said as far as she was concerned "the past is the past- I'm done with it." Now she's maybe 20 or 21. Me I don't have this problem.

The past, the present, what's up around the bend- it's all mixed up in my head like I'm swimming through a bowl of thick soup. The above painting is a case in point. 

I grew up on the shore of Lake Ontario just outside Rochester, NY. Especially in the winter it was magical. My childhood friend Bob Wetmore used to keep his little Sunfish sailboat in a creek that flowed north and emptied out into Lake Ontario. For some reason that memory of this protected little creek always stuck in my mind- perhaps I was touched by its seeming safety compared to the wide open and often wildly rough Lake Ontario.

Got a notion in my head to do a painting about winter a few years ago and started scribbling thumbnails in my sketchbook. What emerged as if from nowhere was an amalgam of Bob's little creek and some pines that grew outside my bedroom window (actually located miles away). So this painting, North Star, is simultaneously about the 1950's childhood of this artist and an imagined image that came to me in 2004. 

Sure I'm confused, but I kind of like it.



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