Hawksperch
37 creative works found
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Portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe. Oil on Canvas / American Artist. Georgia O’Keeffe was raised in Wisconsin, educated in Chicago and Virginia, taught, painted, and lived on the east coast until her early sixties when she moved to Abiquiu, & Santa Fe, New Mexico. Close to one hundred when she died in 1986, living alone and painting in scenery that inspired her famous flowers in closeup with strong sexuality, voluptuous lilies and poppies, stark desert landscapes and animal skeletons. She worked in charcoal, water color, and finally oils, and worked large. I’m not sure her story is known well outside the states. She was photographed, courted, and married (1924) by famed 1920’s photographer Alfred Stieglitz who adored her, left his wife and family for her, and made her more famous than he was. She too, was madly in love with him. His black and white photographs of O’Keeffe filled Stieglitz’s famed “291” gallery in New York and caused a sensation with portraits focused on her beautiful bone structure and striking looks, and spectacular nudity. He took over 300 portraits of her from 1918 to 1937. Stieglitz may have been in love, but smart enough of a businessman to cause O’Keeffe’s work to skyrocket in price, averaging $100,000 a painting, monumental for a living artist and a woman in that time. What he did for her career lasted, interest waned some but revived and her work is priceless now. Every girl painter can use a Stieglitz, few get one. Stieglitz died in 1946 and she moved permanently to New Mexico three years later after cataloguing his work and papers. She was 59, began a new life in a landscape she claimed as her own. “God said I may have that mountain,” she’d written, “if I paint it enough.” So she did. / I painted this from one of Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe. / When you do portraits, you start to hear conversations from that time, get a sense of the thinking of the subject, smells and impressions wander through you or assault you inescapably. It’s a fascinating and somewhat dangerous occupation because when you put down the brush and turn away you wonder where the hell you’ve been and question your sanity. I’ve come to accept it as just what happens and there it is. One cannot help but see Stieglitz’s fascination with O’Keeffe’s profound physical symmetry. It bothered me. I thought it annoyed Georgia, too, that he was making more of it than in truth was there. Certainly a thoughtfully bright, introspective & solid woman. But he did not capture the O’Keeffe who stood in the desert in thunderstorms alone in the middle of the night to draw the electricity in the air into her being, which she was notorious for doing. Or the O’Keeffe who lived alone on her Ghost Ranch, and drove in her Model A Ford recklessly to plateaus and mountains of New Mexico to soak in the wilderness. DH Lawrence, Ansel Adams, the Lindberghs were visitors. / It’s not the last portrait I’ll do of her, but I wanted to see more in her than Stieglitz’s precision, no matter how beautiful that is to see. / I think he was incredibly kind and thoughtful about this woman’s life, and helped her reach a financial independence undreamt of for an artist of her time and sex. Stieglitz said of the first drawings of Georgia O’Keeffe that he saw: “Finally, a woman on paper!” He admired her, and he loved her. I can’t blame him for thinking her perfect. I’m just not so sure he saw the savage in Georgia. Other US photographers who did some earlier radical work in b/w, nature, and nudes you might want to visit: Ansel Adams. Brett, Edward, and Cole Weston. Edna St Vincent Millay wrote: “My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night; / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— / It gives a lovely light!” / Which, published in 1918 became an anthem to end constraints on overwatched Victorian girls. A wild, free life… edged with death. / The Hawks Perch
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In honor of Oscars night, a favorite actor / Portrait of Steve McQueen / Water color and ink on paper / From an old photo in a local magazine. McQueen used to do a lot of racing at the nearby Laguna Seca racetrack. Someone got a shot of him just pulling off the goggles, mud and grease on his face, in his leathers, and wearing that / You Want a Piece of This? / look / he did so well and made him so interesting to watch as an actor. The Hawks Perch
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DETAIL: “The Studio & Spirits Dream” Oil on Canvas. / I spent the last decade uprooted and on the road. I landed in a barn for awhile on a millionaire’s horse ranch, eventually turning the tack room into a studio that was liveable, enabling me to move out of the ranch’s bunkhouse (12 X 12 foot room with sink) and take up barn residence. It was a wonderful place for 4 years with horse pasture – about 200 occupants – out the door. Goats, sheep, mule named Corizon and Rambo the Ram in stalls and paddock on the other side, the Santa Lucia range all misty , mooned, sunned, gusted, and Milky Wayed before me. And it was the first functional studio I’d had in years. I wrote. And I painted. / This dream, this studio I painted there, is crowded with things I loved and hadn’t seen in ages, stored on the other side of America. Over filled with people I’d loved who’d died. With animals alive and not, who still owned my heart. With a chair from my twenties that no longer existed and the dream of my own bed again where such dreams could populate my nights. The cats who survived the move from Brooklyn then to Virginia’s wilderness then across country are on my bed, and some who departed before we got there, here too. My wonderful chocolate Lab – Rodin – is on alert at the bed’s end. A woodstove I’d seen once that would restore life to this heatless barn (I eventually got a kerosene heater). Some of my many thousands of books I carry with me that prop up my life are here, and all the intimate angels swinging through the undone work, the ready easel, the heart’s workplace. The Hawks Perch
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A girl and her horse, nothing like it. The Hawks Perch
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Oil Painting, on canvas board / Sun and sand and romance for Brooklynites. And one man I actually had a long if tempestuous relationship with. We loved and warred with equal passion, and this was a magical day which I still remember fondly. God he was so good-looking. And he could cook! I thought he shot the moon. Or hung the moon. Whichever it is, that feeling that girls get when they’re head over tea-kettle. / I paint a lot of experiences that have a profound effect on me. Sometimes they hustle inside my brain for years before I get to it, but eventually it all pours out. This, I believe I painted right in the middle of all the fine emotional uproar going on. How time passes.
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Oil on Canvas Email: hawk@hawksperch.com / Website: The Hawks Perch, www.hawksperch.com
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Portrait of Mary Shelley - Caught Between the Moon and Candlelight (1797 - 1851)
by Barbara SparhawkUS$5.82–US$133.00
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, Writer, Poet, Shooting Star. Oil on canvas. / The author (at 18 years old) of FRANKENSTEIN. A woman of such profound personal courage, of stunning highs and lows, it boggles the imagination. Mary, I adore you. / A rebel who dodged convention, whose parents were famous free-thinker free love radicals, whose mother died giving birth to her, who was sent to Scotland at 15 for a good education, and who ran off to live with two of the most famous, revered, dangerous, and notorious wild-men poets (when poets ruled) Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. It had to be like setting up housekeeping with Mick Jagger & Lou Reed. / Ostracized for romping through English tradition, she and Percy Shelley eloped to France, then moved into a castle on Lake Geneva with Lord Byron, proceded to practice Latin & Greek, write, live, and outdo each other. The very good looking bad boys were notorious for debts, affairs, abandoned children, sexually extravagant lives, and a trail of broken hearts. But they wrote gorgeously. Percy Shelley & Lord Byron remain two of the finest poets of the English language. / In what she called “a waking dream” teenaged Mary Shelley started to write Frankenstein, and published it finally under her own name, producing one more shock that an English woman could conjure stirring horror. She and Shelley traveled, changed countries like you’d change socks & became increasingly famous. Mary was pregnant many times, but six children miscarried, or heartbreakingly lived, to die as toddlers. One boy survived adulthood. She was in and out of depressions, trying to keep Shelley happy and produce her own original work. In rough Italian seas near LaSpezia, the accomplished sailor and non-swimmer Percy Shelley drowned. He was 29. Mary was 25, and felt her life ended. The extremes of drama that populated all their days astonishes. Lord Byron and a friend made a pyre on the beach to burn Percy Shelley’s corpse when it washed ashore. One of the two cut out Shelley’s heart (not an uncommon impulse at the time) and after arguing over who should keep it, decided to send it in a box, unannounced, to Mary. / At a time when women had limited rights, freedoms or possibilities, she turned her back on what she was told she must do, with gusto. What is, after all, an ideal life. She risked far more than her peers ever dared. She did not have an easy time of it. But she chose not embrace the comforts or society that would have driven her mad. It’s more than fair to say this woman really lived. Mary Wollestonecraft Godwin Shelley was dead at 53. ABOUT THE PAINTING: There are only 2 or 3 exisitng portraits of Mary Shelley, and one, painted by Richard Rothwell in 1840, was my reference. It is a peculiar painting of her, age 43. When tackling historical figures, one has to account for rigid art standards of the times. I tried to eliminate what might have been purely the painter’s imposition. Along with what I suspect was a purge of her wild history and monster story telling (making her nice, & vapid) he gave her features considered beautiful then: a long oval face, an extraordinarily high brow for heightened inteligence (same things the Greeks did with that full flesh at brow level) thin lips to prove a lack of avarice, matronly to suit her widowhood, and shoulders in such a drastic slope they deny a skeletal structure. (The Rothwell portrait is on Wikipedia under Mary Shelley’s name). All that seemed an exaggeration, his portrait does not look real to me. So I left in her high cheekbones, softened the oval and lowered the forehead a touch, gave her a fuller mouth, kept the deep eyes. I painted Mary Shelley as the 18 year old who wrote Frankenstein, with thoughts of ghoul and goblin fleeting across her eyes, sensing terrors to come, uncertainty in the present, having to rely primarily on herself, an active imagination, great mind and fabulous story teller. / I have her between the moon and candlelight because it seems to me that’s where she lived. / The Hawks Perch
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Oil on Canvas / It only rains two or three months out of the year, though flowers bloom year round the first real punch of color is when the intense sun hits saturated land and everything that’s waited pops out of the soil. The air’s still turbulent, dust storms in the prairies and meadows sweep into the mountains, and head for the ocean.
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From an original pen and ink drawing. / Hawk in Flight, one of many beautiful raptors, against a copper sky. For more of my work, click on The Hawks Perch
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Portrait of William F. Buckley, Jr. – 1925 – February 26, 2008 / Oil on Linen, life-sized. (b/w photograph of original painting). / William F. Buckley, Jr. died today at 82. I painted a portrait of William F. Buckley, Jr from sittings, many years ago. The man was a phenomenal wit and intellect, used the English language exquisitely, and was a thoroughly charming and a towering human being. / I was in my twenties and had the cheek to write him and ask if I might paint his portrait. I said we were both questing for the truth. / His famous & phenomenal secretary, Frances Bronson, wrote back and said WFB asked three questions needing answers: / 1. Might he read during sittings. / 2. May he bring his cocker spaniel. / 3. How much will it cost…IF he likes it. / We worked out the particulars and he came to my studio in Greenwich Village, New York for sittings. / He was very famous, doing radio, tv and publishing his magazine The National Review. Buckley was a beacon of conservative thought causing trouble, uproar, and having an enormous amount of fun. The author of over fifty books. He ran for mayor of New York once, and (expecting the outcome in advance) when asked what he’d do first if elected, said, he’d “demand a recount!” He debated everyone with equal intensity and mischief, and had a fabulous time with sailing around the world, writing essays and books filled with his astute observations of American politics. When he turned 50, he decided to learn the harpsichord and ended up giving public performances. At the same half century mark he started writing fiction novels, spy stories reflecting some early work of his own. / He was reviled and adored in equal measure, not a bad outcome for a life fully lived. Meeting him and painting his portrait has always been one of the highlights of my life. Totally gracious, charming, eloquent, brilliant man. I miss him already. / Regrettably, this is only photo I have of the finished portrait, and it’s black and white. The full version included him sitting in his chair, lap full of papers, a pencil in hand pressed against his cheek, his portable typewriter at his side, cluttered busy desk, and an office filled with books stacked on the floor and every surface. Addendum: There are so many tributes now appearing about Willam F. Buckley’s life and wit, and this is typical, and so good, a comment made by Ronald Reagan in 1985: “Once when Bill was asked what job he wanted in the Administration of his friend the President, he replied in his typically retiring and deferential way: “Ventriloquist.” More on my website, The Hawks Perch
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Oil Portrait of Rudyard Kipling, Writer. I’ve loved his exploring heart, his gift for imagery and lyrical writing, his storytelling that pulled you in to dust and sweat, wild animals, and his being so moved by foreign ports, land, & people, since my childhood. Oh Rudyard Kipling!! The places you’ve taken me!!. / Born in Bombay- live-wire mother and sculptor father who met in Rudyard Lake and so named their firstborn. Aunts married famous painters; cousin Stanley Balldwin was 3 times PM pre-WW I. Nobel Prize – Literature 1907, still youngest ever & first English language winner; rejected a knighthood. / This kind of invitation to fantastic adventure in his tribute to Bombay, and it’s “strong light and darkness”: Mother of Cities to me, For I was born in her gate, Between the palms and the sea, Where the world-end steamers wait. / was surpassed by his more famous and endlessly exquisite: / ‘On the road to Mandalay, Where the flyin’- fishes play, / An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!” / At 16, unqualified to pursue academia, shipped to Pakistan to assist the editor of the local rag, Civil & Military Gazette, which he called his most true love. Thank God, they asked him to contribute short stories. Rudyard Kipling was later called the first modern science fiction writer. He left at 24 for Hong Kong, Japan, San Francisco, sending stories home from dozens of states, crossed Canada, met Mark Twain in NY. 8 months later, Kipling moved to Liverpool, got famous in London. In 1891, at 25, he headed for South Africa, Australia, New Zealand; married Carrie Balestier, moved to Vermont. 5 years later moved to Torquay on Devon’s coast. The family regularly trekked to South Africa. Dozens of places in Canada, the UK, and USA are named for him. / His beautiful poem,” If-” written in 1895 remains superb advice for growing up: / “If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you…. Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it…” The only spoken words at Ayn Rand’s funeral; runs like a river for over a 100 years through songs, plays, movies (The Man Who Would Be King), and rock’n’roll. Like other Kipling stories, immortalized, complained about, his fanciful combination of delight and terror keeps his memory sharp. Rudyard Kipling was a vociferous taker-in of all the world he could set his eyes on, and then who wrote about beautifully for the rest of us, so we might see it too. / ABOUT THE PAINTING: Again reaching into the time and presence of the subject, and one that startled me! I couldn’t get him to hold still! His hands moved, his head turned, he sat, stood, he was all motion. It was amazing. Then he settled down a bit. I turned his profile from the reference photograph I used to a 3/4 face, and because he was a writer wanted to include his hand (if I could get it to hold still). I am not a biographer-portraitist to trust, I invent as I go along. But all he means to me is in this: The sun of India is burning behind him, and the roads, waterways and purple skies drift from his blue eyes and crowded brain. He’s thinking of a story in my painting. I copied the style of the Medieval and Renaissance painters who place a raised finger on their saints, pointing to heaven, which is where, as far as I can tell, Kipling surely spent most of his life. / www.hawksperch.com
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PRETTY & SMART – Detail from an oil self-portrait on board, by Albrecht Durer. / A German painter, engraver and mathematician. Famous for his print series: / Apocalypse / Passion of Christ / Knight, Death, & the Devil / Melencolia / Four Horsement of the Apocalypse / The Rhinoceros. Third child in a family of eighteen children, of Hungarian father, German mother. Traveler and student, goldsmith, Durer became the most successful publisher in Germany and abroad, owning 24 printing presses at one time, incredibly famous in his early twenties. Painter, watercolorist, etcher, woodblock print maker. / He published the “Nuremberg Chronicle” in1493 with over 1800 woodcut illustrations. He didn’t think painting could earn him enough money (still true five hundred years later), and turned to printing. / Scholar, intelectual, and successful businessman, his engravings and prints affected the giants who came after him: Raphael, Titian, and Rembrandt.
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From an original oil painting, “Douglas At Dawn” / In a pasture at dawn, Central Coast California, cowboy country. The Hawks Perch
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I imagined a fine visit from darling Vincent VanGogh to my carriage house in Brooklyn one clear spring morning. He was very cordial, we spoke for many hours about painting and color and how plants wave in the wind, fabulous wind. Blackbirds. Cypress trees. Incredible day filled with enlightenment. I don’t remember how it ended, we drank a lot of port, pernod, and ate herring. I went out to an Italian bakery at some point to introduce him to Stromboli bread, cheese and sausage baked in the loaf. He said he admired my work. And of course, I couldn’t stop talking about how much he’d changed my life and eye. Van Gogh was a friend to me from the first day I met him through his work, and his letters. He is my friend now. Of course he visits me.
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The remarkable Vietnamese pig, Bertrina. / I was roped into feeding her for three days while the family Hetzel went on vacation. I lived in Yosemite at the time, and the house was far superior digs (despite the resident pig) to the little goldminer’s shack I called home about twenty minutes drive away, into the foothills. / Bertrina was exceptional. Very bright, allowed inside from her palatial outdoor combos of rooms and housing and pens and plants, to frolick with the family and dogs. Bertrina would roll on her back, little stubby legs in the air, and wait for belly rubs. The dog had short legs too. / I had some trepedation about this, being alone with the house and its occupants as Bertrina and I weren’t exactly friends yet and she was blind as a bat. The feedings were adventuresome. I tried to block her running into the house, keep the dog from running out, find the cat in the tree, and water the plants. But the most exciting moments arrived when Bertrina mistook my bright orange clogs for mangos and tried to eat them. You don’t want to be wearing anything ever that a pig is keen on eating. / Okay, you’ve been warned. Who else would give you advice like this.
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From an original oil painting / “Moonrise Over Cachagua” / Alone in the woods, surrounded by trees, wind, spirits, sky…..and heavenly solitude. / On your own, adventuring. Moonrise Over Cachagua (pronounced kaSHAHwa). / A beautiful wilderness with a beautiful name, a mix of Spanish and American Indian. Wild condors, hawks, coyotes, mountain lions, snakes, mists, stars, Buddhist hot springs retreat, the inland Santa Lucia range of Central Coast California. / You go there to lose yourself in the rough terrain, and keep going back when you find yourself. We can find ourselves in the planets and stars, including this one. The Hawks Perch
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Oil on Canvas Board / Okay, lots of my love life coming up here. Frankly, I confess to enjoying this. / A painting of fantastic Swede NY city detective and me. Seems we were always tearing each other’s clothes off. I did this painting/sketch with about the same speed. / I’ll never forget his fabulous shoulders, but I’ll be damned if I can remember his name. / Cops, detectives, agents…all great lovers and lousy dates. They never show up on time, you can never get them on the phone, you have to feed them – they’ve never eaten a meal always hungry and don’t have the time for restaurants; they have a thousand women in every port, rarely stay for breakfast, sometimes show up with flowers, and they lie a lot. But there is some magic in watching a man get undressed, shirt, pants…and guns…that is just way cool. There’s an odd aloofness in these men that comes from doing dangerous work that can hurt, if it weren’t all so fascinating. A breed apart.
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It always seems to come to this. What goes wrong in the opulent possibility of love making everything so right. / If two people can really foster innovation in each other, help and not hinder one another, it’s rare and it’s beautiful. We all need more opening up (on a daily basis if possible) and less shutting down—we do enough of that all by ourselves. I used to tend bar, and saw a lot of this between couples. Even had that pose and thought once or twice myself.
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Wild Thing. (Enlarge the image to see the subtle “Wild Thing” printed inside the picture on top!) / Growing with courage in fabulous color and form, being the most and best it can possibly be. / Life’s a struggle and worth every second of it. / Wild Thing looks great in blacks and grays, but there are a fabulous lot of colors in the RedBubble menu. / Thanks for stopping by.
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Oil on Cavas Email: hawk@hawksperch.com / Website: The Hawks Perch, www.hawksperch.com
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Ah, Larry. Gone but not forgotten you fabulous creature. / He was a wildcatter from Louisiana, and we met in Coney Island, the once-famous Brooklyn amusement park landmark. I was painting signs, rides and carousels. He was managing the park. It was 24/7 non-stop noise, rock’n’roll, disco, motocycles, the Wonderwheel, plastic rocketships, food, beer, Jack Daniels, drugs, beach, color, sun moon stars, and danger. Knife and gun fights every night. Bodies washing ashore. What a summer! We fell in love (I was nuts for him – and he liked me a lot) and lived in his tiny trailer right off the go-kart track. We were in the bottom bunk, his sawed-off shotgun was in the top bunk. I don’t think we ever slept. / He was so totally alien to anyone I’d known before, all instinct like something feral. Speed. Action. Cooked Cajun food. Covered with grease from the go karts but loved to dress up. Could fix any motor, build any building, handle any problem. The isolated lonliness of six months on the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico brought him to Coney Island every summer. He drew people to him like a magnet. Everything he did was excessive til he passed out or puked. / “New York,” he said, “has got the best boxed cake in the world!” Entemann’s chocolate layer—he used to eat it in the shower. It was a long time ago, but the experience (one of those I’m gonna take a chance and do this come hell and highwater) was profound. I wrote a novel about it, and call it NOISE. Still trying to publish it and what a movie it would make, the synopsis and one chapter are on my website, www.hawksperch.com. and I just uploaded them here under “Writing”. / Would love to know what you think.
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There are benefits to staying with any pursuit long enough, in that people actually start ASKING you for your artwork. The hustle may not halt all together, but the emergencies of producing for the next meals actually slow down. / I know, surprises me too, but it’s true. / Be of good cheer all you youngsters out there. / A local wine merchant, near the wharfs in Monterey, needed paintings to promote liquor buying. I did three paintings for him that were terrific fun. I hope the neighborhood responds in sales.
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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - Oil portrait - American Poet 1807 – 1882. / A man of great ferocious tempo and histories. Still one of the most popular of our poets: Hiawatha, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, etc. / Henry Longfellow lived almost fifty years of his life while Queen Victoria ruled Britain from 1837 – 1901. There may have been some concentrated American effort to stand apart by lauding our pioneers and savage North America, and it sure wasn’t thwarted by being politically correct. Imagine while high tea was being mimicked on Park Avenue, this famous yankee poet had the courage to come up with the swashbuckling but doomed fantasy (loosely based on history c.1400) that started on the shores of Gitche Gumee, progressed to Daughter of the Moon Nokomis and right up and into the shining Big Sea Water! It was an instant & roaring success. Enough feathers were ruffled to make parodies galore, but it’s 125 years later and I’m not the only one who still remembers Longfellow’s words and wants a feather in my braid. The story teller poets were marvelous conjurers, Longfellow one of the best. / I met Nokomis when I was about seven years old and longed to make that birch bark canoe, moonlight, and woody adventureland my own. And Longfellow’s incredible epic of courage, mysticism, language, wildlife, and natives on these shores remain about one of the greatest tributes to Indian nations ever composed by anybody.
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Oil on Linen / The best of the best of anyone I’ll ever be privileged to know. Totally fantastic human being. Brave, tough, bright, savvy, charming. Top notch NYC reporter with more irons in the fire than seemed possible. Voice like liquid gold, words like Dickens and Shakespeare, damn he was good. Good at everything. Now THIS was someone who had a life. Chris Borgen was a friend, my teacher, my hero. The whole city loved him.
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