Time out for an Andy Warhol moment, this was emailed to me by Maria over at Gardening with Turtles, but ShoeboxBlog.com appears to be the source - given the timeline, when were those 15 minutes up, last week?

One more piece by Patrick Pietropoli, now that he lives here, he's been painting New York. You can compare it to the one of Paris to see what being here has done to his work, check out the nod to his Classical Era ladies. I sold this a few weeks ago to a Swedish couple here on vacation.

Sometimes Patrick's work confuses a lot of people because, like Laurent Dauptain, he does cityscapes as well as figurative work too. This one is Paris, click on it, you really should see the details. Well, what you really need to see is the painting in person, all of the work I'm showing you of his has a remarkable surface quality that doesn't come through in jpegs.

Another of Patrick Pietropoli's faded fresco ladies. Gorgeous girl. Can not fathom why she hasn't sold yet. Patrick, who moved to Brooklyn last year, is the only one of our French artists that I've met. He is both smart (taught, I believe, political science, while honing his craft) and charming. Unlike some Frenchmen (my ex-husband?) I have known.

I love this painting, really, I love her. It's by another of the Frenchmen we represent, name Patrick Pietropoli. I've sold 3 of his paintings so far, and when this one goes, I'll be heartbroken. It's small, 15x15, and his goal is to make his paintings, or at least this series, look like aged and faded frescos. She's almost holographic, and my favorite painting there.

Two paintings of two trees, perhaps even the same ones from different angles, by Brian Keith Stephens. The top image has a canvas rectangle overlay under the paint, you can see the edge it on the left side. The one below's decoupaged effect is easier to see, it's a heavily textured band of fabric and paper that runs across the midsection in two distinct pieces.

So, no comments on Laurent Dauptain's paintings, I'm surprised, I like his work. No problem, we'll move on to Brian Keith Stephens, who lives in Connecticut and is another artist who I've sold a number of pieces of. It's hard to tell in this image above, but what is most striking about him is what he does to the canvas before he starts applying the paint. If you look closely at the horizon, you can see circles embedded into the paint. Sometimes he'll glue paper or canvas shapes down, or press them into the gesso with jars and such, or stencil or rubber stamp odd images in.

Two more self-portraits by Laurent Dauptain, the color is off in both of them, when hung sid by side, they read as a pair. There is a third one they were on the wall with for awhile that, at first glance, looked like it was part of the set. Similar steel grey palette, same size face and canvas, but it didn't have the shadows and highlights that these two do. Look at the foreheads and the tips of his nose. Identical light source, very nice.

Love this, Laurent Dauptain is best known for his self-portraits, he has done hundreds of them. This is one of my favorites, it's enormous and the colors are magnificent. Because of the size, whole sections, the eyes, the forehead, become these gorgeous abstracts. Wish I had a wall for it.

I thought it'd be interesting to show you some of the artists whose work I've sold at the gallery I'm now working at. This is by Laurent Daptain, and I sold a similar painting the first day on the job. This is the corner of Ninth Avenue at 21st Street. You'd totally recognize it if you are from that neighborhood. The one I sold was a block over on Tenth, and the man who bought it lives in a building in the painting. Great brushwork.

One last Eric Joyner robot, in honor of the weather NYC is having. No space ships yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to see one. Okay, I lie, I'd be all WTF in the middle of a throng of on-lookers pushing each other out of the way. So, tomorrow, back to the serious artwork, maybe. Ho hum.

Sorry, I just had to do it. That Andy, he's everywhere. Can't find any donuts in these two, I believe they may be be older than the others. The red robot below is the same one as a child in yesterday's post, only in grey. I especially like the cockeyed ear things. What, I wonder, does the big S on Warhol's belt buckle stand for? Something about Soup, or Super Stars, or Space Oddities, I'm sure.

I'm still not done with the robots and donuts, I'm gonna make you love them. They do have that kitchy Andrew Wyeth thing going on. There's Hopper element sometimes too; my favorite piece at the art fair was a lonely robot surrounded by conveyor belts going in all directions at a gloomy donut factory while he dusted the frosting with shiny sprinkles. Totally identified, wanted it for my dreary kitchen. Danger, Will Rogers.

Hope you're not sick of the robots and donuts yet, because I'm not done showing them to you yet. Maybe I think if you see enough of them, you'll learn to love them too. As a side note, I'd like to point out the blue robot offering a donut to the space monster is also in the bottom image having his back repaired while he repairs tinkers with the head of the tiny green robot who's frosting the donuts.

Robots and donuts, I'm telling you, they're very cool. Funny to say over and over to skeptical customers at an art fair too. This was the first Eric Joyner piece I ever sold, and while I was writing up the paperwork, the client decided to get another one of a robot on a Harley doing an Evel Knievel jump over a mountain of donuts. A clever pairing, mighty tasty.

Okay, I'm back, and this is so not the Renaissance. It is pretty fabulous though. Last March, I mentioned in my blogs that I was working an art fair in Chelsea associated with the Armory Show, and this is the painter I was selling. His name is Eric Joyner and the work is all about robots and donuts. The man can paint, and it's hard not to fall in love with his style. Funny how I work around the corner from that art fair venue now.

Patricia at Abyssal Plain emailed me this image yesterday, I doctored it up, but it feels appropriate. I'm fascinated by the way the angel on the left just sort of stops, the background painting behind it continues, so it must have been intentional. Perhaps it was once three dimensional and a part broke off. We could explore the Renaissance for ages. Shall we?

This was the image I'd planned to use yesterday, another of my favorite self-portraits by Basquiat. I was going to launch into a clever story, but I'm too upset about the helicopter/plane crash that happened only a few blocks from the gallery during the day. I don't know how much coverage it got outside of the city, but I invite you to Maureen Donegal, my other blog, if you haven't been following me there already, for the time being.

One more Haring shot, this time with Basquiat. And keeping with our running theme, today I met a woman in the gallery who was trying to find the "place where they verify Warhols" because when she was a child, Andy apparently did a street artist portrait of her at the World's Fair and it had been hanging in her parents' house ever since over the piano until she recently saw a Warhol show in DC and recognized the signature. She had a photo of it, and it was nothing like any of his early work, this would have 1963 think, but she has a home movie of him doing the drawing and it has been proven that he was in fact at the Fair that same day, so who knows. I told she'd better go get some insurance.

If you were around during the NY club scene in the early 80's, especially downtown, this was a familiar pairing. I don't know who took theses, but I think Veronica Webb's in the background in the bottom photo, so it's probably at Studio 54, where Andy's morphing into Carol Channing.

Phew, I'm back. And here, with a big Ta Da, is a Polaroid portrait of Keith Haring by Andy Warhol. When I was at the Foundation I spent an afternoon helping with the monumental task of sorting through hundreds if not thousands of shoe boxes full of Polaroids Andy took, primarily at Studio 54. The day I was on the project we were separating men from women. We were in a room the size of my apartment and once the box had been divided up by the sex and repacked accordingly, the women went on one side of the room and the men on the other. Those boxes would later be separated by race and age, with a sub-category for drag queens, who apparently were are all black or Latino.

Was so on a roll but my internet and landline are out and I've hightailed it over to my local Apple Store, one advantage to living in Soho) to read my emails and check in with you. Had a great post in mind for tonight, but more will be revealed, hopefully by tomorrow night!

Two of the four images from the Andy Mouse Suite by Keith Haring that Warhol singed as well. Biggest sale I have ever had was one of these, I don't even want to tell you what it sold for. It was a ridiculous amount of money, especially by today's standards. Interesting, the top mouse has a big $ sign on his chest; Warhol was also painting the $ at this time too.

Credit where credit is due. Here's a famous photo that ran at the time of Jean-Michel Basquiat's death from a drug overdose. Oddest of the odd couples, they collaborated on projects, Warhol also collaborated with Keith Haring on the Andy Mouse suite. Andy died first, during surgery in February of 1987, Jean-Michel went 18 months later in August of 1988, and then Keith succumbed to AIDS another 18 months after him, a week short of the third year anniversary of Andy's unexpected demise.

One can't blog about Warhol and not mention Marilyn, the piece that I sat with at the Foundation was one of the big multiples of this face on canvas, 12 or 20 repeats in different colors and it was spectacular. It's a miracle I got any work done. Especially since Bridget Berlin's two pugs, Fame and Whoopy, discovered that I loved them and would come visit me at whatever office I was sitting in. Bridget was certainly my favorite person there, she'd been fat and naked in the early Factory movies, but when I met her she was Nancy Reagan thin in a black mink and pearls. She got the pugs red leather collars studded with rhinestones, and they came to show the collars off to me, shaking their heads and so proud.