Painting With Peppers

I seeded peppers today. This is the year, I've already said that I will grow a proper pepper. Forty nine cells of four different pepper strains. Forty nine? One, two, three, four, fi...but there's 50 cells in that tray! Right. Well, there was just one onion seedling still hanging on in that tray and I just couldn't do it in after showing such tenacity. Forty nine.

Tomatoes will be seeded in a week or so. Late is the order of the season. Nothing will be put in too early. Lettuce? Yes. Soon. Monday?




I went to see the Catherine Murphy showing downtown today, before work. I headed down Crosby Street, where twenty years prior I worked for a gallerist in a part-time, not at all paid position. Such a different place back then, and I was reminded viscerally of those times as I stepped into Peter Freeman's new(!) gallery on Grand Street. It was the scent of old SoHo galleries, their rotting plaster and floors. I do not recall odors within any of Chelsea's galleries, but if there were it'd be polished concrete and a refinished built-in. Floors don't give under your weight in Chelsea, they push back.

Maybe it's the throwback to my formative years, or maybe it's simply the work. Murphy has a way with the thingness of things, and a full appreciation for the abstract in the representation, a mastery of 20th century composition, a compassion for banal coloration, and knows how to load the unloaded.

And no fear of green, either.