the senate building, athens, watercolor, ca. 1974
3:10 pm: as the snowstorm ramps up in intensity, i sit here in our house with an ice pack on my right shoulder. i tried to get going today in my studio by stretching some 20 x 16” canvases for a new series of ano kato paintings, but i realized right away that i was doing further damage to the tendonitis in my right shoulder, so i stopped & called it a day. i think i made it worse yesterday afternoon. on our way back from our stupa walk, we saw a guy in a pickup truck trying to get out of a snowy ditch. it was a slight uphill; just enough to create one of those spinning wheel situations, and the more he tried, the deeper in he got himself.
we offered to help.because of my shoulder, i couldn’t push, so i offered to sit behind the wheel. it was a stick shift, and as soon as i realized that, i should have declined. we weren’t making much progress, so i suggested putting it in reverse for a bit, then rocking forward. that ended up working, but it was hard on my shoulder, and i’m dealing with that pain right now.
so i have no new paintings to post. instead, i looked though my files & found this ca. 1974 watercolor of the senate building, a superb example of neo-classical architecture in downtown athens, greece. i was liivng & exhibiting there at the time, and would often venture out with my watercolors to make plein air studies of athens and piraeus. repairs were being done to this building at the time, giving me the opportunity to paint these two workmen. construction workers were core to my subject matter at the time. if you’ve read my stories page, you will have learned that my interest in observing and painting construction workers dates all the way back to nursery school. my teacher at the time, in brooklyn, commented in her evaluation of me, that i was fascinated by them even then.