forgot to put these in the last post....

forgot to include this picture of what is left of our house.  And this is what it looked like prior to the blast...

If you want to see more go to my house site

On the evening of Feb 21st, our home exploded

How strange, the post just prior to this was written sometime during the day of the 21st of February. That night after Keith had spent most of the day shoveling the neighborhood and then our "flat" roof, at about 10:45 he took a shower. When he turned off the water, the hot water heater lit and our house exploded. The shower was about 6 feet through the wall from the hot water heater. He was covered with glass shrapnel and cut his feet badly trying to get out of the damaged house. I was on the other side of the wall in our master bedroom in bed listening to my ipod under the covers when the place blew. One of the cats was at the foot of the bed, she ran screaming to the back of the house and the other cat who was in the living room must have run downstairs.

Our neighbors were the first there and soon the medics, fire department and police. Long story short, we were not so badly hurt but went to the hospital so they could pick the glass out of Keith and check both of us out.

The Red Cross put us up in a hotel for one night, then we stayed with Barry and Diane for a night, then moved to Carol and Gary's house with the cats. Carol was going to go down to Florida so she had us housesit. It was generous beyond belief. The house was declared damaged beyond repair. Because we had no real fire, the contents were blown around but not soaked from firehoses. Many things were saved. 

We were in the part of the house shown as that black box area. That was the sauna in our bedroom suite. The picture shows no garage any more and contents of the garage and house blown all over the cars and driveway. The temperatures were extremely cold and forensic investigators declared that this is what caused the gas leak. Oddly, we smelled nothing. 

Here it is July 5th and we moved downtown to the Waldo at 8th and Elm for temporary housing. Our house was demolished except for the stone wall and slab from the living room. We have a new house planned but ground has not broken yet. 

We postponed all gallery and building activities for a while and are just now getting some work done on the building again hoping to open in late Sept. We will see if that can happen. 

I retired after the semester in May, having had one of the best advanced classes in my history. These students were remarkable and the best of all worlds, now that I am not teaching, they are my friends and colleagues. We had a toast at the house site earlier this summer and most of them showed up. It was a wonderful time. 

So, we will see how life moves on and when we are finally not homeless blokes. 

Snow days

I am so bad at writing on my blog. I keep thinking I will make time each week to do this but I never seem to remember.

This week I had no school except for Tuesday when I met my Web class but only had about 6 students make it in. So the university gave it up for the weather, closing and canceling classes every other day. It's been very cold, snowy and challenging.

Keith and I met with Emily Wiethorn and John David Richardson yesterday for lunch to catch up on their quest for graduate school decisions. I am so proud of them and how well they have done with their applications. Emily and John got accepted at Nebraska, Texas Womens, UConn and are going to have their final decision by Monday. My guess is Nebraska is going to win. Emily also got accepted at Kansas State; and John also got in to Georgia, was interviewed by Florida State and has an on campus interview scheduled for Nortre Dame. I think they impressed the committees at the grad programs with their photo work, their maturity and their work ethic. I look forward to seeing how they proceed and what will unfold for them as they move through graduate school. Any choice they make for where to go will be a good one. Each program offers such great faculty, strong student work, and opportunities for travel.

Our or Keith's progress on the building in Maysville is moving forward, even if slowly due to the cold, the weather and the complications of renovation. Next week he will get a dumptster so he will be able to get rid of a ton of debris from walls taken down and things removed. That will free up space to begin to reframe the rental space. We had a great bid on track lighting and the solution to the choice for LED lighting for the gallery from Danny Sidebottom at A&S Electric in Erlanger. Danny is Sara's brother. Sara is a very dear friend and the university attorney. I did not realize that her brother worked at A&S. Michael Keating got me to go over there with him to look at the lighting because he was so impressed with what they had in their showroom. I got a bid from someone else there before I began talking to Danny who convinced me that there was a better solution than the very pricey wall washer LED lights which cost about $500 per light head. He came up with $24 heads and LED balanced bulbs that would do the same based on the distance from the lit wall. We decided on the color of the light and the order will go in on Thursday.

John David has been helping us with the peeling paint on the tin ceiling over the gallery and studio space and once that is complete, it will be painted a beautiful deep charcoal grey with a matte surface.  Then we can have the lights installed, paint the rest of the walls and add the trim. Keith wants to work on the floor, but I think we can put that off for a while due to all the other jobs that are much more pressing. He is going to rip out the unneeded walls in his work space on 1 and then he can deal with getting the bathroom there back in working shape. He's going to have a nice sized work space for his power tools and sculpture.

Diane Kruer had her opening of a 25 year retrospective of her work at NKU, but the gallery has been closed due to the weather. That is really a shame for her since the work is remarkable. I want her to come talk to the advanced students about her approach to her work especially on the photographs.

So, my last semester teaching has been good so far. My classes are fun, the students are working quite hard to reach their goals, and my sense of humor has re-emerged. Next month, I go to the SPE meeting in New Orleans and will get to see Melanie Spencer Warner from our class of 2000 or there about and lots of my photo friends, especially Kenda.

The university has formed a new School of the Arts with Ken Jones as the new director. They were a bit premature since there were no plans for how it would operate and the folks are scrambling now to figure this out. I think the School is a good idea, but a College would have been better. I believe that will come in time like it did for Education. I just am happy that I will be retired and will not have to live through the growing pains this will cause. I am extremely disappointed that the university in its shortsightedness did not do a search for my position this year to add continuity to the program. I have hopes that they will regain the position for photo and do a search next year. Matt certainly will need the help because it's a lot to do for him and with Chris as an instructor, he should not have to carry more than a teaching load. My retiring is freeing up a big pile of money for them.

I received Emeritus Status from the Board of Regents for my years of service. I am grateful for that.

it's been a while....

So, October was busy and crazy. We had the painting of the front of the building completed but the windows have not been replaced yet because of the cold temperatures. We did get the furnace installed on the first floor but not soon enough for an open house where we showed Chris' class' Rt 8 panoramas. For that day we lived with space heaters, garage lighting and unpainted walls. However the work was well received and two were sold.

Here's the front of the building now: In progress.

Now complete without the new doorway or window above:

Actually, the white above and below the big windows will be replaced with wooden ornaments to reference the ironwork. It means that the white glass that is always broken will be gone and the red and grey will continue the lines. The door will be replaced with an antique mahogany one that matches the building across the street. This 1950's aluminum one is not very nice. Our sign is planned for the long grey line just above the red columns. We have to get permission for that from the Historic Preservation Board. 

Today, Keith is there and hopefully the hvac folks are giving him some heat in his studio space and in the second floor. The heat pump is already sitting there outside on the Sutton Street side of the building with the AC unit for the first floor. Keith has been working extremely hard to make this place workable. He is very stressed but doing a fine job of patching the holes that let in cold air, rain and the elements. Without his hard work, sleepless nights, and standing the cold, this would not be possible. 

Life, luck and iron

So over the weekend, I got this great picture of our niece Danielle as she was about to go to her first homecoming in high school with a bunch of girl friends. This young woman is 14 and looks like a million dollars in her homecoming dress. Back in my day, you had to be asked by a boy to be able to go the homecoming and if you weren't asked, you just could not go. It was horrible when I think about it now. Girls were pretty repressed back then. It wasn't until the 1970s that we began to demand our rights and think differently. Society pretty much forced us into a model that would not work at all today and thank goodness for that. Danielle and her friends probably just had a fine time and enjoyed themselves with no thought about dates.

When the workers were cleaning off the ironwork on the front of our building to ready it to paint this week, they discovered that the detail in the iron was extraordinary but had been covered for probably 100+ years with layers and layers of paint. A few pieces are missing from these pictures but will be back on when the place gets its painting done. The interesting part is that the work was made by L. Schreiber and Sons from 521 & 523 Walnut Street in Cincinnati. That would be roughly at Walnut and 5th which is the corner of Fountain Square. The company was there from 1854 to 1887 when it moved to larger spaces on Eggleston Ave with access to the railway. Our bases have the early stamp of the company rather than the logo stamp found on later castings.

You can see in the images where there is paint still on the ornate parts that so much of the detail was covered up and we had no idea how really beautiful it was. I am so anxious to see it when they complete the paint removal and repaint it to show off its details. The background on the iron will be a very dark charcoal grey and the recessed area will be a color called stolen kiss, a beautiful rich dark red.

This building keeps getting better and better. The neighbor directly east of us removed the ironwork at some point in the years that followed its installation. The front on that building looks like the 1950s but the one just beyond has a similar ironwork front although not as much as ours since ours goes around a corner.

Our FotoFocus exhibitions continue to throw us curves. Chloe did not send the movie and I had to remind her to get it to me. She uploaded it and it took overnight to download it. I attempted to put the movie for Nick's show onto the mac mini that I brought home over the weekend. However, I could not do that because the thing would not recognize my bluetooth keyboard, and mouse and I did not have the password to open it up in the first place. So that foiled me and then David discovered we did not have the correct size poles to hang the show. We figured out an alternative method to replace the missing poles. However, the folks at Look3 continue to frustrate me. We did print a beautiful Sartore elephant print this morning for the back wall of his gallery. The show will look great but never do I want to do something like this again when the logistics are so complicated by snotty folks who think they are doing us a favor to cooperate.

thoughts on FotoFocus, staining, and my knee.

So, we are a few weeks into the semester and I had knee surgery because I could not make it without. No way could I walk that far, stand that long, and be paying attention to anything but my throbbing knee. So, I bit the bullet and it's just over a week later. I can walk again, no cane, no crutches and no walker but I forget to take it easy on the thing and every one in a while push a bit too hard. Like now, I am icing it because I just spent about a half hour leaning over the vanity I tried to stain and finish in a one coat process and it was a failure - a complete failure. So today I am using Stripeeze to rid the piece of the mess I applied yesterday. I should have stopped immediately after the first brushes, but thought my technique was the issue not the material.

I have stained and varnished all the doors and windows in this house and tons more things. But this MinWax Polyshades is the worst product on the market for refinishing or finishing for the first time. I followed the instructions to a T and it looked worse than if a 5 year old had been mucking about.
So, after stripping for a while, I must rest my knee with ice.

School is going ok. Classes are fine. Maybe better than fine. FotoFocus can be over soon enough for me. The banners are up around campus and look terrific. We got snubbed by Enquirer and FotoFocus for the article in last week's Sunday edition. That was disappointing but we have blitzed them with pictures, tweets, Facebook postings and I don't think they can miss that. I think we are going to have the jumbotron sign along 471 announce us so more folks will see that than the newspaper anyway. The ongoing issue is the uneasy relationship with the guy who runs Greaves. He is a bit of a prick, young and knows every so much more than anyone else. He makes snide comments about our use of another projector rather than their $40,000 one that is set to the wrong aspect ratio for the images and doesn't change easily. Anyway, that is a long story of a man peeing on all the bushes vs some one who wants to get things done well. I guess he is afraid that if he helps us do an event that looks spectacular, he will somehow look bad rather than be praised for a job so well done. Beats me. So little power, so little landscape and such a big fight. Academia.

Anyway, the shows should be wonderful, the work load is probably manageable if no one lets their head get too big and then lots will enjoy. I want to say, wow, wasn't that great. I have another nagging idea that the big FotoFocus folks think National Geographic photographers shows are not highbrow enough for the ART crowd from NYC, LA or themselves. My favorite photographers in the world do not work for Nat Geo, nor are those the books I collect, but and this is a big BUT, to do a show that will draw others to the galleries that would not normally set foot inside, to do transdisciplinary work that could be incorporated into curricula all over campus, you are not going to do a show of one of my favorites, won't happen. We are trying to be inclusive, not exclusive. We can teach about sustainability, world politics, global warming, other lands, other species and of course photography all in one place. That is what we chose to do. I only wish the main folks at FotoFocus could understand the shows and give us the credit we deserve because some folks have worked their asses off for over a year to have this happen. And one has given her energy and her wealth to support these efforts. I hate for her to be snubbed.

One hour til I begin teaching my last year.

41 is a big number for a teacher. University teaching is probably easier than elementary and high school. Some days are so long and it feels like you have not made a difference in their abilities to see, understand and grow; then others, you see the lightbulb go on and then you know soon they will not need you for guidance, only for challenging and brainstorming. The best thing that can happen as a university art professor is that your students don't need you any more. The big word is NEED. They continue to want to show you what they are doing and get your feed back but they do not NEED you to figure out where to go next. They have begun the long process of developing their own vision, their own work ethic and their own voice.

I know I helped a bunch of students do this along the way based on the number who are still working in some manner. It may not be what they started out to do, but their own travel down the path led them to other ways to say what they need to say. This is gratifying to see.

So, here I sit in my office with an embarrassing slide show of my life ready to show the students today to give them an idea who I am and what I have been up to all these years. I am anxious to see what they will do and to see if any lightbulbs are going on any time soon. 

August 18 11:30 AM