The opening reception for my NYC Night show at the Woodstock Artists Association Museum was fabulous. The comments and questions about the pictures—the profound outpouring of enthusiasm for the work—confirmed for me that I’d accomplished what I’d set out to do with the series, and it also reminded me that I’m surrounded by an artistic community beyond compare. It was a great night.

The history of WAAM, both as an active and competitive artists’ association and a museum with a noted permanent collection, is ever-present in the current membership. This legacy of excellence includes participation and artistic contributions from renowned painters such as Philip Guston to living artists like Milton Glaser. What sets WAAM apart, and makes it a model for art non-profits, I believe, is the organization’s ability to mentor newer artists while also pushing seasoned professionals to consistently make new work on deadline. WAAM does this with juried shows, talks by artists, lectures by noted scholars on the permanent collection, well-maintained archives, a youth education program and with outreach to the community and local businesses.

WAAM is a non-profit business run by a board of directors comprised mainly of artists and by a salaried team of accomplished artists and academics. This team—Josephine, Carl, Emily, Beth, Ben, Patricia and Mark—are essential to the organization, and their jobs depend on fundraising, grants and donations. Volunteers work in the gallery, serve on committees and often create and carry out events.

If you’re an artist living in Upstate New York at least part-time, I encourage you to consider joining WAAM, and if you’re a collector, the yearly Labor Day auction is a must. I hope you’ll stop by the gallery this holiday season, see the shows and check out my NYC Night downstairs.

My show opens today at the Woodstock Artists Association Museum in the downstairs gallery. The prints are luminous, so if you’re in the Hudson Valley between now and Jan. 2, check out the show. I’ll be in the gallery from 4-6pm for today’s reception.

Artist’s Statement

New York City at night—a landscape illuminated and shadowed. Gritty, artful, lonely, revelrous. In this series, I photographed areas of New York that are transformed at night, by artificial light, into public space. These are not outlying regions transitioning from abandoned to useful due to the economic boom that has taken hold of the city.  The photographs in this series document planned preservation, a city creating a stage-set, a cinematic form of geography, on its own terms.

The emptiness in the photographs, the absence of people here, was intentional. While I was never fully alone shooting the pictures, it’s obvious that these locations aren’t densely populated at night. The city’s edginess remains, and these photographs represent for me New York’s fantastical seduction. The thing that brought so many of us to this place. The lure of a glittering stage that has already been set, waiting for you to enter it—make it yours.

Writing, and finishing, short assignments is a suggestion that teachers like BIRD BY BIRD author Anne Lamott offer to help writers stay encouraged and productive. Natalie Goldberg’s WRITING DOWN THE BONES has helped me get the pen moving with ten-minute timed writings, which often end up reading like short stories. After years of taking the advice of these writers, I started writing 100 Word Stories. Each one is a short assignment—a short story in exactly 100 Words. I begin as if doing a ten minute free-write, just getting the idea down first, no worries about where it’s going or grammar, spelling or punctuation. I started 100 Word Story Anthology to collect pieces written by writers and also artists working in other disciplines. I’m thrilled to introduce these writers to readers. Check out the site. Try one. Let me know how it goes.

http://100wordstoryanthology.com

Wisps of purple clouds

scattered on a moonlight lake

–as the traffic slows.

On Thursday I found Banksy’s Garden Truck parked sideways in a blocked-off entrance to Central Park at West 77th Street. There were about twenty people taking pictures with phones, and when several left, several more people taking pictures with phones replaced them. Two park employees arrived (one had called in reinforcements) on two golf carts, looking perplexed, and maybe even more so when I said enthusiastically, “It’s Banksy.”

Here’s one of Banksy’s NYC photos from this week:

http://www.banksyny.com