Bill Commerford

NEC Ran Blake Portrait of a Black Bag

At the evening's end Ran and Dominique Eade encored Winter in Madrid. appreciating
"less is more" these watercolor notes struck during the piece seem quite complete.

The watercolor shorthand notes
of Ran watching the evening celebration tucked up in the stage right corner
and surrounded by his colleagues and friends like Alice and George Russell.

were painted into later the very same evening, then streched vertically
to bring the digitally manipulated print of my watercolor into these proportions.
I will regularily reproportion the finished prints like this one to enhance images.
The original watercolor now functions like the negative of final prints.
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Live Watercolor Notes, slightly enhanced in color and
created during the November 11th, 2004 performances by
the New England Conservatory Contemporary Ensemble
Soloists. This sketch is of Jessica Rosinski
performing a 1992 piece Rapid Fire by Jennifer Higdon.

..........an early canon laser print debossed into
Atlantic's 300lb rag paper. Went up to Marblehead
with artist friend Davis Carrol. He gently advises me
to take the telephone wires out of my watercolors.
I love them! I follow them, they take me into my
landscape spaces. Give me a "Bill's window sill"
to look out over and into.......
This print is an older prototype. I've more control
over images and now favor, among others, a lighter
Fabriano paper for the support.

.....................ART/PRINTS:..........................
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There is always a situation where more than one of
an image would be what was needed.
.....Somewhere in the ephemera of my marks there is
a pen and ink of a rather disheveled looking fellow,
looking over his shoulder through horn rimmed glasses,
a tilted halo held askew up over his head by a stick
stuck into the collar of his floor length tunic and
carrying his set of wrinkled wings...........

I drew this caricature of myself on every one of my
greeting cards that year. Wm. Mullins, a favorite
sports cartoonist, was joined by David Stone Martin
as my drawing heros. Mullins' flexible brush stroke
is still a favorite, and my list of favorites is longer.
That was fifty years ago, there are easier ways than
to take pen and ink to each card to share images today.

Bill Commerford himself

Here I am at the Wang Center for the Arts in Boston.
................As an usher I'd get a bit of painting done rather than watch
"The Phantom of the Opera" 60th performance. Here I'm fascinated by
slight variations in mirrored panes' planes either sides of mullions.
Not inconsistent with real life in 1999.

Sat in dear friend Tracy Brown's favorite chair and added more details to my
stage one Sunday afternoon watercolor shorthand notes. In our visit early
Thursday night I painted more quick notes into my Sunday stage two image.
Late last night I painted into it again to get to this stage three level. 5-13-05

Logo: Nogome Blogs

..................WWW. N then an Mand a couple of // before adding BILL
What a set of ZigZag rhythmns! OGOME/BLOGS follows and gives this
typographic designer "eye-deas" with the OGO and bulges of the B and
OGS's opportunities to suggest olympian logotype's circle rounds, rings
of them. I wove circle bits into a linked chain like the Olympic's logotype.

T.J.Lyons provided the Staring Eye type sort and back when
I was still wearing my older style round gold-rimmed glasses.
My TH'EYE: as my logotype and apostrophied and colon-
ized in-text typographic rendering first appeared in Harvard Sq.
on the Blue Parrot menu. Leslie Boyd managed the restaurant
and John Boyd was his usual indispensable self. A bit later on
I bushed-in my own eyebrow and double circled the eye as my
older style eye-glass's rim I was wearing back through the 80's.

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I enjoyed having a 'blind' embossing die made for my logo image.
There seemed a bit of wit adding a "blind emboss" of my own eye
to presentations for TH'ARTIST"S EYES:my creative enterprise.
This emboss is applied to rag paper supports for every &'ANDS:
carefully prepared and cataloged singular digital prints as they are
individually signed and dated. An artist (my) reminiscence is optional
addition to provenance or authentication offer with published prints.
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This variation enclosed in the double lined circles using another
of T.J.Lyons great dingbats was created for the digital imaging
partnership with my dear old friend, 'JB', Jack Bernstein.