Paintings by Blair + Laurie Fox PESSEMIER: Artnotes: The Best Passengers

Stimigliano, RI Italia

Olive Harvest Blair Pessemier acrylic/canvas 30 x 49" 75 x 125cm 750.00 unstretched

On our walk this morning, I noticed a parked car with a backseat packed full to the ceiling with broccolini. I saw tons of olives on a tree. A tutti-frutti colored persimmon tree sits among the olives, like a muted yellow aspen among the deep turquoise pines (one of my strong American images). Red vines, with leaves shaped like kisses, cover the fences. Emerging from the foliage is a friend, A. He is eager to visit: his son and son’s partner just had a baby, and he showed us a photo taken two hours after the birth. Cringing, I expect to see an icky sort of wrinkly red being with a goofy hat and pleading hands, but no, this was a surprisingly beautiful alert baby boy. He looks like his mother, A tells us.

Laurie Fox Pessemier acrylic/canvas 10 x 18" 25 x 45cm 450.00

I’ve been noticing the details of things, on my walks, while I wait, as I pass the time.
The Bastia-Livorno ferry last weekend was a wellspring of things to study. A young man with beautiful long fair hair sat at the next table, with his family. He was rather adrogonous, like so many people today. He had an adam’s apple and biggish bony hands, leading me to think he was a man; when he stood up, sure enough he was wearing telltale saggy jeans. He was handsome, reminded me a bit of Blair, who at that age was much beefier, not fat, but not skinny in this “guess my sex” sort of way. The man went to the gift shop.

Corsica Ferry Playing Cards Laurie Fox Pessemier Acrylic/canvas 12 x 12" 30 x 30cm 350.00

He came back with a brilliant yellow box. Candy? Cigarettes? No, playing cards! Poor old playing cards, usurped by solitaire or poker online. We once had terrific playing cards – Viking Lines, with their ships; slightly off color casino sets (Stardust) ; silver edged cards pale blue backs, a hole drilled through the deck -- on a string. We made our own deck of cards once. I makes me think of making them again, or maybe menus of dream meals, or matchbooks; paper products one rarely sees now.

Mountain Goat Corsica Laurie Fox Pessemier Lithograph 4 x 6" 10 x 15cm 75.00 this is my first foray into kitchen lithography!

The best passengers on the ferry were the dogs. I saw more than a twenty, mostly well behaved except for a Béarnaise mountain puppy trying to pick a fight with anything on four legs. I strolled out onto the back of the boat, where Corsicans and Italians were reclined on yellow and blue striped transats (those folding sling chairs almost impossible to get out of). But mostly I noticed the dogs, of all shapes and sizes, from large spotty hounds to stiff little terriers, sleeping on ragged blankets in the rays of the setting sun.