Over the years I’ve been a painter, when I take time off from it, I turn to photography. I do have that painter’s eye from color and composition, and it is another way of seeing. These days I use my cell phone, although I still have my camera. Given my post-cataract surgery issue with not being able to see well enough to paint intricate detail anymore, I have the same problem with taking pictures. It’s hit or miss now, I have to guess at what I’m shooting and take a series of shots, then deal with editing them on my laptop later. I still get good images, but not like I could on my Nikon.

The longest break I took from painting happened in New York in the years after 9/11. I took up collage back then too, but the paintings I was doing were too much like what I saw that day and I needed to get away from those feelings. I’d also taken a job at a Soho gallery on West Broadway. I was good at that job and have worked as a gallerist ever since, but it’s hard to make art and sell art at the same time.

Hence the camera. There are at least 1,000 images in my archives, which I could probably boil down to a hundred really good ones from New York. I also have around the same amount of good quality shots the Cape, but I realized that if I was behind a camera all the time, I wasn’t living my life here. And besides, I wanted to paint.

So, as I chip away at the admin stuff and have no new birds for you, I thought I’d do a couple of posts from the New York City. archives. I’ll start with shots of and from the Houston Street pier, which was only a few blocks from my house. I was over there all the time, I found solace in the stillness way out in the water. It felt like God lived on the river. And maybe he does. Or did, way back then. I think He lives in the dunes of Provincetown too. Anyway, as Kevin likes to say, Onward.

With everything for the show framed and ready to go, I thought I’d show you something other than birds. In addition to grant submissions I’ve been working on, I had an opportunity to enter an open call at the Side Gallery, which specializes in photography in the UK, and while I was editing them to meet size restrictions I decided to desaturate them of color to see how they’d look in black and white. Here are five.

All of these were shot on Cape Cod. The scene at the top and the trains above were taken in Hyannis. The rest are in Provincetown. They seem better, if not fresher, at least to me, in grey tones. But then again, this snowy graveyard is actually the natural color and only appears to be black and white because of the weather that day.

The street scene below was an interesting undertaking because the lines in the road and the house on the right are the same shade of yellow in the original version and it’s quite dynamic. But I think it works this way too, especially since the sky is more dramatic. It’s a bit like the shift away from the vivid colors of my earlier paintings as I took up charcoal as a medium.

And since one can’t do a Provincetown spread without the beach or the dunes - I’ve already spared you the classic rowboat and lighthouse shots - I close with this one of my friends Ron and Michael on the day I took them exploring while they were visiting one summer. Mind those footprints in the sand, they are how you’re going to find your way home.

Fashionably late again. I’ve been deep into art-related admin tasks. I spent a few days revamping my website (www.maureenmccarron.com) and in the process discovered that my membership page at The NewBridge Project in Newcastle Upon Tyne (https://thenewbridgeproject.com/artist/maureen-mccarron/) is up and running so I’m officially international now and very happy with the results. Today I hope to tackle the essay I need for one of the grants I’m applying for. It would simplify things if these application requirements were more uniform but alas, even the image sizes and resume character counts are different each time. Having to cut my resume down from over 8,000 characters to 2,000 for this particular grant was a trip. Bye Bye New York history, Welcome abbreviated, initialized venue titles.

Speaking of numbers, last week was my second anniversary on Substack. My first post was about Flaco, the owl who escaped from a Manhattan zoo and lived feral for much longer than anyone expected him to. At the time, I only sent it out to 26 people. Today, that post has had 180 views so clearly some of my followers have gone back to read it. So Hello out there! I love that you’re here. You are very much appreciated! In the meantime, two new birds - Scout the parrot above and Atticus the frigate at the top - are framed and ready for my show this spring. I spoke to The Commons about expanding my allotted space and we’ve come up with a few options. Still, I’m teetering on the brink of having too much work, especially since the new ones are bigger than usual. Also, Atticus brings the series full circle since he was inspired by the first of the little charcoal studies, below. This makes my focusing on grant applications right now feel timely, even though I intend to stick with birds and charcoal. Yes, yes, busy busy, lots to do - let’s go! Onward.

Today’s my birthday, and I’ve been thinking about when I turned 60 and left New York. It was a really rough year which started when my seasonal temp job at the gift shop in the Plaza Hotel ended after they’d kept me on two months longer than expected. Then there were other short term situations that culminated in August at the big Kahuna of retail madness - the Barney’s Warehouse Sale. In the meantime, I’d been sucked into a vortex involving the DA’s Office and the Parole Board Commissioner because they wanted me to testify against someone who had assaulted me decades earlier and had come up for parole. THAT is a whole other story. In fact I’ve written an unpublished memoir about it, but once it was over my landlord suddenly offered to pay me to move out of my rent controlled apartment, and in six weeks I found a job and a place to live on Cape Cod, sold almost all of my belongings and then tossed the rest into a UHaul and never looked back. 

It was as if the Cosmos had kept me in New York to testify against my assailant, then let me go. And while I don’t feel trapped like I did back then, I do feel a bit stuck at the moment here in Provincetown, given my stalled plans to move to Newcastle - but there are plenty of things to keep me busy while I wait for the Cosmos to shift again. Such as a possible promotional project for the windows installation and more big birds like the cockatoo at the top and in the screenshot taken to give you a sense of scale. There’s also the same sized parrot below. Both are charcoal on the new paper I bought, which I am currently in love with. I’d thought about adding a touch of color to each of them similar to the pink beak of Zhivago from last week’s post, but I got over that impulse once I started the work. Next one, maybe. Although, in spite of editing the series down to accommodate the gallery walls for my upcoming show, I’m running out of space. I can probably squeeze another one in, and I just got a birthday check in the mail that will cover the framing. So it’s all good, I can wait - Onward.