goats and art

It's possible that goats and painting are two of my very favorite combinations, and it's rare that one gets to enjoy them within a few hundred feet of each other.  Today Horned Locust Remediation were landscaping down in the Railyard, and doing their best to nibble the bushes clean of fresh spring buds (I rather think that they were meant to have their heads closer to the ground).  The flock includes sheep as well as goats: a wonderful cast of characters.

And then to SITE Santa Fe to see the May Stevens exhibition - two rooms that manage to give a rich and comprehensive sense of her whole career through a selection of her very best works.  She was a very melancholy painter, in a non-obvious way: a lot of her paintings and screen prints are about death, or absence, or the unfulfilled - I hadn't known her race themed works from the early 60s, though; and I'd never seen this really moving canvas: Galisteo (Creek, New Mexico) (2001) before.  It's a sombre take on a local landscape which is richly meditative in its own right - but as with so much of her later paintings, it's the more moving when one knows that it's one of the places where she scattered the ashes of her late husband.  I only met May Stevens once, alas - and by that time she'd started to become what my mother would have called "a little vague" - so it was a real treat to be in the presence of such an extraordinary gathering of her best works.

And then to watch the Joan Braderman documentary The Heretics - about the Heresies feminist art collective in NYC in the 1970s, which made me feel very old - quite apart from it being a terrific history of women's art in NY at that time, it brought back the whole excitement - back in the UK - of collectively pasting up magazines, and of writing "position papers" in the middle of the night, quite often about stuff one didn't really know very much about.  The internet has changed everything: I have a lot of thoughts milling around about how - despite all its benefits - it's a terrific denter of confidence.