I was wrapping up my three racing day visit, up to my elbows and knees in routines I had wallowed in most every summer since 1975. 
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Nude on Blue Rug  1970

Our Pearlstein Nude

One weekend many years ago Danny and I visited friends in Pittsburgh and they took us to a local art gallery.

We had no intention of buying anything but one lithograph  – Nude on Blue Rug – caught our eye,  perhaps partly because we had a very similar rug in our bedroom!   The price wasn’t exorbitant for an artwork – $3,000 – but we were younger then with a smaller bank account,  yet we couldn’t resist the image and we bought it.

That day the artist – Philip Pearlstein –  was unknown to us,  but since then we’ve been following his rising career and he’s now a critically acclaimed painter known for his Modernist Realism nudes.

Born in 1924,  Pearlstein is a Pittsburgh native who studied as a child at the Carnegie Museum of Art,  and later at the Carnegie Institute of Technology’s art school.  Then in 1943 he was drafted by the US Army and stationed in Italy where he took in as much Renaissance art as possible.

After the war Pearlstein continued his art education at Carnegie on the GI Bill,  and after graduating left for New York with his fellow aspiring Pittsburgh artist Andy Warhol.

The two roomed together for awhile and during that time Pearlstein painted Warhol’s portrait,  now held by New York’s Whitney Museum.

Portrait of Andy Warhol  circa 1948

The prolific Pearlstein has won many awards,  held art professorships at Pratt Institute and Yale University,  and is represented in the collections of over 70 art museums.

Now living in New York,  at age 98 Philip Pearlstein is still painting!

Self Portrait  2000

– Dana Susan Lehrman 

Elliptical Intentions

Surely the priciest purchases we’ve made were our city coop and our house in the country,  and we’ve been enjoying both for years with no buyer’s remorse.

But those aside,  one big expenditure we made that I do regret is the large elliptical exercise machine that’s been taking up space in our apartment.

We’re not gym rats or exercise fanatics,  but we decided a handy and relatively painless way to stay in shape would be to get a treadmill or a recumbent bike.  We were advised the best exercise equipment was actually an elliptical,  and so we bought one,

That was a dozen or more years ago,  however I can probably count on one hand the times either of us has used it.  And so I’ve been urging my husband to sell it,  or just give the damn thing away,  but each time I bring up the subject he says,  “i promise I’ll start using it tomorrow.”

Of course as Shakespeare reminds us,  “Tomorrow,  and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day,  to the last syllable of recorded time.”

So meanwhile there it stands – our pricey elliptical – collecting dust and recording time.   But we just made a new year’s resolution  – if we don’t use it by January 1 out it goes!

(Come to think of it,  there were also those strappy Manolo Blahnik shoes I once bought in a weak moment,  but that’s another story.)

– Dana Susan Lehrman

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