What Libby loves

Libby loves Murray and Alex and Minna and the rest of her family. Libby loves words and popular culture but not as much as Murray and Alex love popular culture. Libby loves to think about art and what it means. Libby loves to make things and make things up. Then she believes her own fictions.

Libby loves tools. The affair started at Sears in 1973, when Murray bought her a drill for her birthday so she could hang the shelves and curtains in their new home. Now that she has a computer and a new kitchen she loves them too.

Libby loves books and the newspaper and magazines. Libby brakes for historical markers. Murray doesn't (even though he's the published historian in the family). It's the biggest problem in their marriage.

What Roberta loves

Roberta loves Steve, Stella, Max and Oona and the rest of her family. Roberta loves gossip and ideas and information and politics. She'll talk about any of them with equal enthusiasm. Roberta loves art and writing, duh. She loves people and animals, especially birds.

Roberta loved being a bookworm at her local public library when she was a child. She loves stories--her own and everyone elses. The gothic horror of holy cards and stories of the saints have left their mark on Roberta's imagination. Out out damned spot. She's now Saint Roberta of the Bleeding Heart. Color her blue.

Drawing Shelley

Shelley loves her home town, Philadelphia. She also loves her gallery which has some magical qualities. Such as, even though the space is tiny, the shows in there never look crowded. The place is a crossroads, a virtual community center.

Shelley is smart as hell and thinks big thoughts. That intelligence attracts a steady stream of pilgrims.

What Shelley loves

Besides her family, who she loves most of all, Shelley loves people and figuring out what makes them tick. She loves being Jewish. Her last big show included klezmer music and a minyan of sculptures, praying together.

She happily shines the spotlight on the artists in her gallery, but she also loves her own front page coverage. She's crazy about gossip.

Shelley loves Disney World.

Shelley takes a picture

We wanted to tell you about our friend Shelley. Cameras are not her medium. Neither are they ours. That's why we put the picture up of Shelley with camera strap. She's the only one who knew the strap was in the picture.

Shelley is a sculptor and she's a gallery owner. She has a family and is also mother to many young Philadelphia artists. She's one of the reasons the Philadelphia art world is hopping these days. We don't know how she fits all these things into her life. But to us she always seems calm and energetic.

Drawing L&R 2

We do get out in the real world or at least Libby thinks Roberta does. That's Libby's pencil drawing of Roberta at the top. Roberta thinks that Libby is overwhelmed by her inbox. That's Roberta's ink drawing of Libby below.

Drawing Libby and Roberta

Even though we're in the world we're inside our own heads and we're inside our computers. The computer part wasn't true before artblog.

We "R" Us

We decided to paint pictures of ourselves, since we are in our world, too. In what amounts to the 16-year chat we've been having as collaborators, we know quite a bit about each other. That made it harder. Like the other paintings, these two are collaborations. We put ourselves in the studio. Roberta's picture is on the top and Libby's is on the bottom.

Ann and what she loves

This painting looked different a while back. But we painted over it because it didn't really get to the heart of what we think about Ann. Some things you might like to know about Ann are that she is part of a crew and rows competitively on the Schuylkill River . She's a painter and one of her paintings is one of Philadelphia's largest murals -- on the side of the William Way Center. She teaches drawing and design. She's actually our most glamorous friend. She loves people. She loves to think. She loves Ed, Nick, Diana and the rest of her family.

We give it another try

Independently of each other, we both thought thoughts of Knox and boats. We don't even know if he owns one, but he sometimes makes boat-like sculptures.

...but first

Here are our first drawings of Knox. If you want to see what he really looks like, visit our post here.

It is Knox who pointed out to us in a recent phone call that the two of us have fun and decide to call it art.

And furthermore...

In spite of the fact that we crammed so much into the previous Ava drawings we still didn't think we got it all about her. Ava is a teacher and Ava projects confidence and vulnerability all at once.

Imagining Ava in pencil and ink

We found out that Ava was a rich font of drawing material for us. So much so that we tried to squeeze everything in in each drawing. Here's what fueled us: Ava's car, Ava's sculptures, Ava's rock collection, Ava's house, Ava's badminton, Ava's trips to Maine, Ava's energy.

Drawing Ava

These are some drawings we did of Ava based on our miserable photographs.

Imagining Ava

This painting of Ava is our best shot of her. We attempted a photo shoot and came away disappointed. Between our shaky hands and shooting without flash in a dark room everything was blurry and dark and pixillated. This painting is the triumph of imagination over mechanics.

We think of Ava as glamorous.

What Ditta cares about

Frank, Julian, and Max and the rest of her family. Space, light, order, photography, sewing, words and poetry, making artist's books, Philadelphia, drawing, paper, people.

What Steve cares about

Roberta, Oona, Max, Stella, and the rest of his family. His work writing and researching in game theory, logic modeling, etc. Politics, Daily Kos, information, jokes, thinking deep thoughts, walking, food and wine, solitude.

What Murray cares about

Libby, Minna, Alex, Mary and the rest of his family, South Philly, Octavius V. Catto, writing, television, movies, news, the facts, Tastykakes, and most of all, people in general.

Drawing Ditta 2

For some reason we thought perhaps we ought to try for something more realistic. We know we have a reputation for disdain of academic realism. Nonetheless we thought we'd work from photographs and try to catch a likeness. We like the results but it wasn't enough.

Drawing Ditta

Inspired by our visit to Ditta (see previous post) we re-imagined her in pencil and ink. Roberta is the inkster and Libby wields the pencil. We couldn't figure out how to do these together -- and we didn't even want to; after all we each had our own Ditta.

This is Roberta's third drawing (above).


This is Libby's third drawing.

Ditta has great hair and in a way Roberta's and Libby's drawings are homages to her hair.

Imagining Ditta

So here we will tell you about Ditta, a poet and photographer. When we painted Ditta we put her in her old house where her bulletin board was a big presence. Ditta sometimes takes photographs of the bulletin board and to us it was such a significant part of her life that we put it in our painting (above).


After we made the painting Ditta moved into a huge converted industrial building in South Philly. When we visited her we brought her bread and salt and took photographs of her (above) and her cat (below).

Before We Painted Knox

Knox wasn't our first home visit nor was he our first painting. The first paintings we made were of Murray and Steve our inner inner circles, Murray being Libby's husband and Steve being Roberta's. We think of Murray and Steve as artists; they probably don't. They're both writers and they're both creative and brilliant and hard-working and successful and curious about the world and driven to make a mark. (top image, Steve)


These paintings also have traces of us in them. On purpose, we put ourselves in because the project we imagined included our footprint in each painting. (Roberta is the green hairy cucumber in the painting of Steve, just in case you were wondering.) We quickly gave that idea up for the paintings of our other friends but we can't imagine portraits of our boys without us in them. (this painting is Murray. Libby has never been on a skateboard or a surfboard in her life.)

Because this project is now about visiting artists we're trying to figure out the best venue to visit with Steve and Murray. We think we'll take them out to dinner.

Our Visit to Knox

As it turns out we had some second thoughts about what Knox cares about so we paid him a visit in his studio. Here's a photograph of Knox in his studio. We think he looks like Thoreau with a telephone. The studio is in the middle of Philadelphia, not on the side of Walden Pond.

What Knox Cares About

Sculpture, Zeebee, Lucy, Vermont, his pets, the ecosystem, politics, his responsibilities to his and Lucy's families.

Last Year

A year ago, we started making some paintings of our friends.

Here's a picture of our good friend Knox. We've known him for 15 years or so. He was once a big part of our lives, part of a salon that met almost monthly at the best of times, for a number of years.

Since artblog, we haven't had a chance to see him so much. So we made a painting of him in order to have him around. The painting was from our imaginations, our memories of him and what he cared about. Here it is.