Dennis Hollingsworth

Open House

I'm beginning to invite people I know here in Tossa to see the work before I ship it off to Z?rich.

"?Que significa?"

Always, the first question. How do you say this in spanish?:

I hope the painting would be so insistent that the qualitites of materiality would precede a rational justification for the work and that those qualities would force a spontaneous and even capricious association of a talkitive mind.

Instead, I say: "Cada su quieres, especialmente si tu quieres."

I remember our Spanish teacher gently mocking our primitive efforts: "Don't speak like an Indian!" Then she bats her mouth in an Indain war whoop: "Woo wooo woo!", her eyes wide and the corners of her mouth in a smile.

Back to the paintings, it is a fact that here in Europe, an artist gets much more respect that one gets back in the states. From all stations of life, people have a high regard for the arts. Many people here in Catalonia in particular tell me that they too paint or often as not, are poets too. Many streets are named for poets and painters. Add that to the long list of reasons of why we moved here.

Also, we had a visit from a family who are collectors and who bought one of my paintings, one that was in my first show at Chac Mool in Los Angeles. Now they live in Paris, blessed with beautiful twins and each have facinating careers. They found me through the weblog, amazement of this information technology never ends. We had drinks after a studio visit nd we spoke about art and I discovered to my delight that they are very well informed artwise. More than that, they have a wide ranging curiousity and they collect that way, many names popular and obscure. Rare. Wonderful.

They told me that there are as many people who love my work as there are those who hate it and that they have regular consuming debates with friends about the subject. Story of my life: love me or hate me.

Things could be worse.

And here are images of the last painting, which I teased in a blogpost or two ago:

Where was I? I was wanting to upset the applecart of the past several paintings.... hence the large ribbon smear in the middle left. But as much as I wanted to change, I was toggling the same switches: Blue "sky", suggestions of earth, and in particular the strange green I re-membered from an earlier painting, this time larger.