An old friend from Sotland

Just got an image of this watercolor sent to me by the person who bought it in Scotland in 1990...

Hard to believe...

That I used to do watercolors like this...

"Northern Lights, Back Road, near Little Keithock Farmhouse, Angus, Scotland."
30x40 inches. Watercolor on Paper. In a private collection in Banff, Scotland.

Edzell, Scotland

Great deal on a 1989 vintage piece at auction!

Bid for it here!

Rousseau on Campello

Dr. Claudia Rousseau checks in at East City Art with an insightful review of my current solo show at Artists and Makers Studios II in Rockville:

The artist has always been fascinated by history, mythology, and the imagery of religion and legend.  These often overlap in his creative mind.  Having been stationed in Scotland for a number of years before returning to the United States in 1992, Campello became deeply immersed in the rich and mysterious history of the ancient Picts and Celts of Scotland and Ireland.  The spiritual connection that he developed to the place and its material and visual culture has become almost a second origin for him

Most people don't know that Dr. Rousseau was once considered one of the leading art critics in Latin America! We are lucky that subsequently, when returning to the US, she turned her formidable skills to the DC area - both in writing and in teaching!


Read the entire review here. 

Lida Moser photos acquired by the NPG

The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC just acquired four more photos by the amazing Lida Moser (may she rest in peace). Lida's work is already in the collection of the NPG as well as the National Portrait Galleries of Britain, Canada and Scotland! We miss her and love her and are honored to run her estate.

They've acquired these photos:

• Judy Collins, gelatin silver print, 1961
• Charles Mingus, gelatin silver print, 1965
• Nell Blaine, gelatin silver print, 1968
• Aaron Siskind, gelatin silver print, 1949

 Lida once told me the story of how she photographed Siskind... apparently they were all in Central Park in New York to photograph a zoo or carousel that was being built, and Lida got more interested in Siskind's gestures as he prepared to frame his photographs, and started shooting him, instead of the assignment!

Look at the photo and see the clear and empty surroundings around Siskind, the mud, the water, the stream??? Does anyone know where in Central Park that would have been in 1949?

By the way, that photo is in the permanent collection of many museums, including 3-4 "local" museums here in the DMV. 

One day I will tell the story of the Judy Collins shoot... or even better, the Charlie Mingus shoot.

Aaron Siskind by Lida Moser, circa 1949

Coming in from the North Sea

A while back I posted about some of the artwork that I did while I was living near Brechin, in the Angus region of Scotland from 1989-1992. You can see some of those works here.


It has been of extreme interest to me to see several of these pieces come up for auctions and estate sales here and there, as sometimes the buyers contact me for information about the work.


In this case, this work was acquired at an estate sale in Hannibal, Missouri of all places. I recall selling it via an art show in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1990!






"Coming in from the North Sea, Heading to Montrose, Scotland"
16x20 inches, Watercolor on Paper, circa 1990
By F. Lennox Campello

Snowcalypse 2017

Snowcalypse 2017: Bring it on... I've got food, booze, firewood, generators, water, snow blower, flashlights, batteries, coffee, 2nd Amendment instruments... running low on milk though... Feh!

Road Outside Little Keithock Farmhouse, Near Brechin, Angus, Scotland
Circa 1991. Watercolor and gesso on paper. 30x40 inches.
By F. Lennox Campello

On the first anniversary of a cancer victory

Today is the first anniversary of the first major battle with cancer... below and together, you'll find the record of that event - it makes for an interesting read, and some good lessons in there as well...

---

February  16, 2016, 4:00AM

I'll be out of commission today, going under the knife for a major, somewhat urgent and quite unexpected surgery procedure with a substantial recovery period. Surgery starts at 0730; as I type this the main worry in my mind is getting from my house to the hospital (arrival time 0530) with all the ice still all over my neighborhood's twisty and windy streets.

Not looking forward to the next 2-3 weeks. But like Clint Eastwood once famously said: "Hog's breath is better than no breath at all..."

There are lots of things that I am afraid of, but weirdly enough, death is not one of them. I think that the fact that if I were to croak today I'd still be leaving behind around ten thousand pieces of artwork which have been sold, traded, given away, left in hotel rooms, inserted into Goodwill stores and/or otherwise left to leave an artistic footprint, is rather a calming feeling.

This is a major, multi-hour, robot-not-a-human-in-charge operation, which I am told has an 80% success rate where the John Doe doesn't bite the bucket (and frankly, I picked the robot over the human, because of something called "tremors" when it comes to a surgical scalpel), soooooooooo.... If I do bite the bucket, I'd like a tombstone that looks like a Pictish Stone, sort of like this one that I did in Scotland in 1989:

Clach Biorach Pictish Standing Stone
Edderton, Ross, Scotland
circa 1989 by F. Lennox Campello
Pen and Ink wash on paper, 9.5 x 6.5 inches

---

February 16, 3:03PM 

Nothing is ever easy! Last night's ice rain made for an interesting drive to the hospital this morning.  Since I knew that the ice rainfall was coming, I put my van inside the garage and laid out plenty of salt. Around 4am I got up, sprinkled more salt and pulled the van out and warmed it up.

The walk from the van back to the house was quite an event, as I hugged the walls to try to make it back in one piece, slipping and sliding all over the place.

The drive out of my neighborhood was almost surreal. To start, the start itself took two tries to get the van pointed in the right direction. I then crunched my way out via an interesting new path that avoided most hilly streets in my very hilly neighborhood.... I slid a few times, but made it out and eventually to the hospital.

---

February 19, 2016, 12:14PM

Going home today! This is my hospital allegory to Frida Kahlo's "What the water gave me."

---

February 26, 11:58AM


I've debated over and over about documenting my recent and brutal prostate biopsy (the brutality comes in the bloody evidence after the biopsy), the subsequent cancer diagnosis by a very aggressive form of cancer, the recent hospitalization for radical prostrate surgery, and the current harsh recovery. 

And I'm still not really sure why I started to do it here, because this is an art blog, not Lenny's diary or whine-blog, but here it goes.

Why? There are some excellent lessons learned in the process which maybe can help someone; who knows. If I had read this ahead of my own surgery, it would have made some things a lot easier. I also plan to print this and mail it to the hospital, as there is some good feedback in here for them.

It has been over a week since the surgery, which was done on Tuesday, February 16, and things are not all 100% good, but we're moving forwards (I hope).

As noted in an earlier post, I arrived at Suburban Hospital last Tuesday around 5:30AM for a scheduled robotic assisted prostate surgery. The road that led there was accented by multiple pokes, biopsies, meetings with doctors, nurses, and deciding between chemo or the knife.

I decided to get rid of the little fucker outright and quickly, rather than cook it to death. The end results are the same: your prostate is history, but with surgery at least it is out of your body, unable to spread, and they can also biopsy the surrounding areas so that they can verify that it hasn't spread. Surgery, especially the robot assisted surgery which eliminates surgeon's tremors, also has a decent chance that after recovery you'll be able to still get your crank up.


That's one giant-assed issue, know what I mean.

So, after arrival at the hospital, I was prepared for the surgery, which is done by a team of doctors and nurses and a robot. 

I'm imagining this guy from Star Wars, but I know that it must be something quite simpler looking; later on I discovered that I was pretty close! At least the top half.

To the left is what the DaVinci Robot looks like (note the artistic name).

My surgery was to be directed and done by a genial Mexican-born doctor who has loads of experience in this area.

The staff at Suburban is like Whole Foods, there are people from all over the planet, and the accents reveals Americans who were once Russians, Ethiopians, Filipinas, Jamaicans, Asians, Indians, Central Americans, Nigerians, and the Gulf States.

A smiling tech wearing a hijab puts the intravenous needle kit into my left arm, while a nurse reviews the pre-operative protocol for the 100th time at different stages.

At some point the anesthesiologist comes in and walks me through his part of the operation. Soon after, my doctor comes in and we converse in Spanish. He tells me that all will be OK.

As I am rolled to the operation room, all that is in my head is the fact that I will have to wear a catheter for 10 to 14 days. The thought makes me shudder, but the mind (and the gurney) rattles on. But at least I have been told by most people that I should be heading home the next day, if everything goes well.

At the operation room a smiling nurse puts a hair net on my hair and that's the last that I remember.

I wake up to a smiling and efficient Asian nurse who checks me out. I'm not feeling any pain or discomfort, but have a very sore throat. She explains that I had a tube going down my throat into my lungs. I am also very thirsty and start drinking lots of water.  I'm also beginning to cough, the familiar feeling of phlegm in my lungs ticking my throat.

Each cough feels like someone is stabbing my guts in five different places, the result of the multiple robotic probes and the macabre tube coming out of my stomach. I also know that it's there, but don't want to think about the catheter tube up my crank and reaching into my bladder.

My wife looks under the sheets and grimaces. "What?," I ask alarmed. She describes the multiple angry incisions in my belly, the stomach tube, etc. She also notes that I have been "manscaped down there."

Much later, when I've had a chance to get a mirror, I inspect the manscaping, which goes all the way from below my nipples to my testicles. Curiously, whoever did all the shaving stopped halfway through my balls, so the top of them are shaved, but the bottoms are still covered in pubic hair, somewhat making them look like balls with beards, or one of those Japanese haircuts where they shave your forehead all the way up to half of the top of your head.
Eventually I'm released from the recuperation ward and I'm taken to my room; and I'm pleased to see that I'm the only person there. When I was a teen and got whacked by a car running a red light in Brooklyn, I spent months in a giant ward at Kings County Hospital; not pretty.

My wife is there by my side with a bag of essentials, such as my iPad. I use it to snap this photo and Facebook the image. She notices that my eyes are watery, and I tell her that they feel very odd.

With the exception of my colleagues that were at Context Art Miami with me in December, my wife's immediate family, and my two daughters, no one knew that I had been diagnosed with cancer, much less that I was to undergo major surgery.

And thus, after the Facebook posting makes the rounds, the Cuban side of my family is surprised that I kept them in the dark. My reasoning for that is clear, as I explain it to them.

My mother is in her 90s and doing OK in her apartment of 40+ years in Florida; she doesn't need to worry about me, cancer, operations, etc.

My plan was to tell her after the operation (I did); had I told one of my relatives before the operation, I was afraid of the effects of Radio Bemba ahead of the operation

Radio Bemba is a Cuban expression that literally means Lip Radio. It's news, gossip, rumors, conjectures, etc. spread by word of mouth. In the Navy an equal expression is RUMORINT (Rumor Intelligence).

As soon as the Facebook news spread, I get emails from DMV artists Tim Tate and Elissa Farrow-Savos: "Avoid the Percocet!," they warn. "It will really mess up your bowels!".

The tone of their alarms gets to me and I insist to the nurses that I want to stay off that particular painkiller, even though they tell me that I'm on a stool softener. I also continue to drink a lot of water.

Considering the trauma of the event, the pain is mostly manageable. As recommended, I even get up a couple of times and do some walking zombie 15 minute strolls through the ward. A couple of other patients are already out there, and a nice nurse ties my hospital gown properly so that I can stop showing the crack of my ass.

We walk around in zombie patterns around the ward, rolling out the IV tower for support, and holding the urine and stomach fluids bags in the other hand.

I'm not hungry, but I know that I must eat, so I consume some clear liquids: chicken broth, lemonade, green tea and (as directed by the nurse) some most excellent lemon ice. The food delivery people from the hospital kitchens, both the tiny East Asian woman and the clean-cut, elegant, young African-American youngster, are friendly and vivacious. In fact, nearly everyone that I came across while at Suburban, starting with the Central American and the Dominican ladies at the check-in station, to the always-friendly, talkative and smiley (and pretty) African-American cleaning lady who cleaned my room everyday, were an unexpected joy at the kind of workplace that usually yields jaded, glum workers.

So far, the only thing that it really bothersome, and pain inducing when it happens, is the constant coughing to try to get rid of phlegm in my lungs. It is mostly futile and my throat is really sore. Each cough hurts my gut with multiple deep lances of pain, and a nice nurse brings me a HUG ME pillow.

"Hug it against your stomach when you cough," she advises.

I cough a lot; it hurts a lot. Otherwise, everything else is manageable.

My eyes have been feeling odd since I woke up, as if they were full of eyelashes inside your eyelids. After dinner I zombie-up to the bathroom to brush my teeth and look at my eyes.

What I see scares the crap out of me. A jell like substance, looking like the vitreous, jelly like substance that fills the center of the eye accumulates at the edges of my eye lids. As I tilt my head, it quickly slides around the eye ball to whatever direction gravity pulls it, but never spills out of the eyeball.

I am convinced that my eye vitreous has detached during surgery and is now floating around my eyeball. I bring my alarm to my nice Nigerian male nurse, a smiling, kind man always willing to help. He looks at my eyes and is also somewhat alarmed, although he tries to hide it.

"I will get the Physician's Assistant to look at it," he tells me.

A couple of hours pass, and I'm now obsessed with my eyes; even the coughing fits take second place to my concern about them. I get out of bed again, run into my nurse and ask about the PA. He assures me that she's on the floor and will soon see me.

Around midnight she shows up. She sits next to me and asks me if I get grossed out easy. From her friendly and smiley approach, I am somewhat relieved.

She describes the operating procedures that took place, including the fact that my eyes were filled with a thick lubricant, and taped up during the operation; that's what's in my eyes. She cleans them with a warm wash cloth, and tell me to do that gently over the next few days.

It sounds from her talk that she was actually part of the operating team that morning. She describes how my body is put into a 45 degree angle, with my head lowered, and how my pelvic and intestinal area is inflated with balloons to allow the robot arms access to the prostate, the seminal vessels, and the lymph nodes.

The main driver, in this case, my Mexican Doctor, sits at a console and does the cutting, re-attachment of the urethra to the bladder, and the stitching. I mention to her that the doctor had mentioned that the robot does "beautiful stitches."

She clarifies that it is the doctor, using the robot arms, who actually does the stitching. "Baseball stitches actually," she mentions. She adds that prior to the robotic advance, a surgeon could only do six stitches; now he or she gets to go all the way around and baseball-stitch that connection.

I'm curious as to how the prostate itself and other internal body parts are removed from the body, and I ask her. Her eyes light up. Apparently, that's her job at the operation; she "runs" the robot hand that contains a expansible bag that accepts the prostate as it is clipped off by another robotic arm. The bag is then closed and extracted from inside the body.

I go into a coughing fit and she looks alarmed at my pain. She asks me where my Incentive Spirometer is; my puzzled look is her answer, and she rushes out of the room and comes back with one of the devices.

"They were supposed to give you one of these when you came out of the operating room," she frowns as she teaches me how to use it. "It will re-start your lungs and help you get rid of the phlegm a lot easier."

I'm directed to exercise my lungs ten times an hour. As I do it, I wonder who fucked up the check list of what I'm supposed to do after a major operation. 

Within a couple of hours, my lungs are a lot better and a lot of gunk has been spit out. However, after ten hours of constant coughing, my throat has been abused and it is sore and the occasional cough from that issue still bugs me, but it's a million times better.


When my wife comes by the next morning, she's pretty upset that I had been Spirometer-less most of the day. Because she runs everyday, she actually runs from our home to the hospital (and back) everyday as part of her exercise routine; who knows how many miles this uberathlete logs on each round trip!

I'm expecting to be released later that day, but there's a problem.

It seems that something called a Jackson-Pratt (or JP drain); which is a soft, round plastic bulb that looks like a grenade and is attached to the end of my stomach tube, and "sucks" the fluid out of my body (from around the operated area), has been sucking too much fluid - there's a lot of fluid in that area.

Tests also indicate that there's elevated creatinine in that stomach tube liquid, higher than the creatinine levels in my blood. That essentially means that there's urine in the fluid. It doesn't take a medical degree to realize that the bladder (or something) is leaking piss inside my body.

I'm to be kept overnight and monitored; no one has mentioned the word "leak" yet - as in urine leaking from your bladder into your body. Later that night, the smiling female doctor from my doctor's practice assures me that things will be OK and that they just want to monitor the creatinine to see if it goes down.

Day two arrives, and the wasps make their first appearance... right after lunch.

DMV artist Tim Vermeulen has had a brutal couple of decades where his body has been wracked by pain due to side effects of some medical issues a couple of decades ago. He depicted this is pain in this chilling painting:

 The Seat of the Soul, Mixed media on panel by Tim Vermeulen

When I first saw it at Context Art Miami last December, it scared and chilled me to the bone. Little was I to know, that in a weird way, it would help me a tiny bit from Wednesday to Friday of last week. That's Tim at the bottom of the painting, hugging his stomach in quiet agony while the wasps go to town in his innards.

For me, it started as a little crampy sensation in my right pelvic area; suddenly one of my balls was in pain hell quickly and out of nowhere. It happened fast, so fast that it floored my senses, but soon the worst pain that I have ever felt was coursing through my pelvic region and my stomach. It was so unexpected, intense, fiery and full of living movement, that it surprised me and astounded me with the violence and level of the pain.

It felt like a million points of pain, each one a little needle poking into the meaty parts of your insides, drilling into your pelvic bone, and then moving quickly to a new spot to poke a hole inside your gut; it felt like a million wasps, and I remembered and recalled the Vermeulen painting.

The first time, after an agonizing 15 minutes, it was gone.

"Probably gas," said the nice nurse when I told her about it. "Call me if it comes back and I will give you some Percocet."

"Fuck that," I thought to myself, "I don't want to trade up to chunks of cement in my bowels."

The wasps came back three times or so that day. I cussed them out, begged them to leave, whined like an animal, and in my mind's eyes killed each little motherfucker one at a time inside my bowels. But there were so many! The clock became my friend, as I looked at the advance minute hand expecting the end of the agony. Within 12-15 minutes the wasps were usually gone and I was back to "normal."

That Wednesday night the JP Drain is out of control, filling up about once an hour. At one point it turns from the reddish, bloody discharge that it is supposed to be, to the same color as urine. I'm alarmed by that and mention it to the nurse. He tells me that it is not urine.

As Thursday arrives, the decision is made to keep me overnight once again, and my doctor comes in to visit. He explains that there's probably a leak, but that this is not uncommon. He also changes my stomach dressing and directs that the JP ball be changed to a gravity bag to hold the body fluids coming out of the stomach tube. He mentions that since the JP ball works with suction, it's filling out so quickly because of that.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

By now everyone is telling me not to worry that urine is leaking inside my body, because "urine is sterile."

"People even drink it," someone says grossing me out. 

At lunch, for the first time I sit down to eat. When I get up I notice that I am leaking fluid on the floor. It is coming from the stomach hole where the tube goes into my body. The nurse comes in, put me to bed and changes the dressing; as soon as she leaves the wasps make an appearance. 

I fight them with my own mental violence as I imagine pulling them off my insides one at the time, their stingers stretching my stomach walls as it refuses to release its penetration, and then the meat slapping back as the insect, angrily buzzing in my hand, is crushed between my fingers. But there are so many...

A couple of hours later, a nice PA comes in to check on me, and while he's checking me, the wasps make another appearance. He listens to my bowels as I'm whimpering in pain and talking to the little bastards. The nurse is called and she injects some pain killer into my IV; it is no of use, the pain is not affected by anything but time. Everyone has been telling me that the wasps are either gas or bladder spasms. I am told to be proactive, and that as soon as I feel the spasms begin to call for painkiller.

These wasps do not listen to painkillers.

There's a double nurse team on duty today. One nurse is young and pretty, the other is much older and wearing a formidable tool belt of medical supplies, sort of like a Medical Bat-belt for nurses. They are both efficient, friendly and concerned.

Bat Nurse is especially active. As I zombie around in my ward walks, I see her all over the place helping patients; she never seemed to rest.

Later the young nurse comes in with the PA to switch my stomach bag and there's some jury-rigging involved in switching the bags, and much tape is employed in the process. By now I've noticed that my stomach dressing is soaked because the hole in my belly, where the tube enters my body, is leaking again.

Bat Nurse switches my dressing efficiently; she's a nice lady on top of being a very dedicated nurse; she tells me that she's only been a nurse for six months.

Later that day, my doctor returns and quickly disassembles what the nurse and the PA had done and makes an efficient water-tight connection to the new bag. He also changes my belly dressing, as it is soaked again. He re-assures me that the leak will heal itself.

I sleep fitfully and then it's Friday; the wasps are not nocturnal.

On Friday I am to be discharged and sent home with the body bag. "Make an appointment for Monday to evaluate the situation and see if we can remove the stomach bag," my doctor advises.

I'm feeling fairly decent, and that day I walk around a lot. The wasps make an appearance after lunch, and then just a few minutes after they had left, as if they knew that I'm thinking of going home, while I'm standing in the room, they come back with the whole hive.

This time the pain is not only outside the pain scale, but the wasps have even conquered the clock! An hour passes and I'm still being attacked; these are extra-terrestial wasps from the planet Waspathron; this pain are a million Janices from 1959's The Wasp Woman; maybe I should not have insulted them earlier; for every one that I kill, a dozen more show up, their long stingers dripping with pain venom.

They are joined by hornets, not just any hornets but those giant Chinese motherfuckers called Vespa Mandarinia. "Is there a difference between hornets and wasps?," I ask them as I fight them.

My wife calls and detects the pain in my voice; she's alarmed. I try my best to sound OK, but she knows better and she heads to the hospital. This time she drives.

By now I'm nauseous with pain and lay down; it's no use, the pain won't leave me. I call the nurse and ask her to bring me the puke basin. She's alarmed at the level of my pain, but reacts to the nausea as well. She injects me with something and the nausea goes away, while I battle the wasps and the Mandarin hornets.

A new PA walks by and hears me talking to the wasps, begging them to leave me alone, and she comes in and listens to my belly. "The pain is because of bladder spasms," she notes, "It's very common when you have a catheter." This is the hundredth time that I've heard that diagnosis.

"I'll order some muscle relaxer to treat the spasms."

Wait, what?

This is the first time that anyone has mentioned something specific to treat the spasms; so far it has been painkillers to treat the pain. A fucking light goes on in my head and I warn the wasps that payback time is coming. I also wonder why nobody has suggested this treatment the entire three fucking days that the wasps have been attacking me.

She orders something called Oxybutynin which according to the Mayo Clinic: "Oxybutynin belongs to the group of medicines called antispasmodics. It helps decrease muscle spasms of the bladder." 

Memories of the Wasps Attacking at Suburban Hospital
2016 F. Lennox Campello
Ink and conte on paper 11x8 inches

I get it into my system and the wasps and hornets die. This is Raid to these fuckers; it's over... technology and modern medicine have won.

But, why on Friday? How come none of the other medical professionals realized that bladder spasms are very common when a catheter is first introduced? Why didn't anyone came to my aid to fight the wasps?

I'm discharged later that day and sent home with two tubes in my body. An awesome Filipina nurse trains my wife and I on the process of keeping track of the fluids coming out of my stomach and my penis, and also the process of switching the bags around as needed. She then walks us to the exit and hugs me, and wishes us good luck.

I read somewhere that over 97% of the men who go through this operation go home the next day and it's very rare when anyone has to go home with a stomach tube.

Welcome to rarity.

Next: This is what a Borg feels like at home.

---

March 4, 11:22AM

At the time that I checked into the hospital for my surgery, I was told that I would be discharged the next day, at least 97% of the men who undergo this type of surgery, get discharged within 24 hours of the operation. However, as fluids continued to come out of my body in prodigious quantities and the wasps continued to attack, I realized that I was part of the 3%.

I was released from the hospital on that Friday, three days after the surgery and two tubes sticking out of my body and uncomfortably sending chills of discomfort and pain every time that I moved. From there we headed out to the drugstore to pick up all of the different drugs that they had assigned for my return to home, including the anti-spasm medicine for my bladder that the medical system has so miserably failed to give me when the wasps first came at the hospital.

When we got to the drugstore, after the drive, made uncomfortable by two tubes sticking out of your body while you're sitting inside a car, I decided to take a small walk to the drugstore. As soon as I stepped inside, the tube from the catheter began to pull, making me really miserable.  

I looked around to make sure no one was looking at me, reached into my pants, adjusted my penis, and of course, as soon as I did that, an elderly lady wearing a yellow turban give me a long look as she came out from one of the aisles. 

She was quite a sight actually, only in Potomac do you get to see a 70-something older lady wearing a yellow turban, large loop earrings, full make up on, Daisy Duke shorts, a black leather jacket, giant Jackie Onassis sunglasses, and black Converse sneakers. 

Daisy Dukes in February! I actually smiled at her thinking "More power to you! But I best get the heck out of here before I get arrested." I could feel her eyes on me as I zombied out of Rite Aid.

As soon as I got home I took a hot shower. This was quite an exercise in controlled motion under the shower, as not only are there two tubes sticking out of one's body, but also they're very sensitive to any tugging and pulling. It also involves switching the large urine bag for the smaller one, and tying them around your leg. But the hot shower felt good, it was the first time since Tuesday that I had taken a shower. I wonder if Borgs shower.

There's a certain fascinating horror that comes with seeing the human body in extremis. There is a perverse sense of visual pain in seeing things that are wrong with one's body reflected in a full-size mirror for the first time in front of you: The angry scars left by the robot entry points into the body, the tube sticking out of your penis with a large bag at the end of it, and the tube sticking out of your stomach with a smaller bag at its own end. Each movement could be a disaster, each step a coordinated dance to avoid or minimize the movement of the tubes. Sleeping with tubes in your body is an art form in itself, but exhaustion always wins in the end.

For the next several days, I perfected the routine of switching the bandages around the stomach tube entry point into the belly, emptying and measuring bag after bag of fluids coming out of your body, and performing the delicate dance shower in order to to avoid hurting yourself.

At some point during the week, a nice nurse from Suburban Hospital called. She wants feedback on the stay, and as I relate the events detailed in my earlier blog post, she is horrified by the fact that no one gave me a Spirometer, that no one gave me medicine for the bladder spasms, and that no one helped me to combat the wasps.

And today, more than two weeks and three visits to the doctor later, I prepared for another visit to the doctor to evaluate pulling the tubes out and returning me to the human race, like Picard did from his time amongst the Borg as Locutus..

As the doctor pulls the stomach tube out, my wife's eyes widen as he does. Later on she tells me that she could not believe how long that tube was; it must have been coiled inside me.

The process didn't hurt as much as it was rather noticeable to my alarm senses, but quick. My doctor tells me that I need to return on Monday to see about pulling off the catheter.

Will that hurt? You bet, but still I look forward to that day; Borg no more!

Pictish Nation finds a home after 14 years!

"Pictish Nation" c. 2003 F. Lennox Campello Charcoal on Paper 15x41 inches
In a private collection in New York City

Over a decade ago, I had a solo show at the original Fraser Gallery in Georgetown in which I focused all my work on my interest on the original people of Scotland before the Celts arrived from Spain (via Ireland). The show was titled Pictish Nation and was widely reviewed by multiple local newspapers (ahhh... the halcyon days of DMV mainstream media reviews, see some of them here, and here, and here...).


"This legion, which curbs the savage Scot and studies the designs marked with iron on the face of the dying Pict," are the written words of the Roman poet Claudian that give the only insight as to the name given by Rome to the untamed Britannic tribes living North of Hadrian's Walls and one of history's nearly forgotten Dark Ages people: The Picts.

Perhaps the greatest mystery of Scottish or even European history is the people who once inhabited the lands north of Roman England, as far north as the Shetlands. Who were these fiercely independent people? Where did the come from? Which language did they speak? What did they call themselves? We first hear of them in the third century from a Roman writer in Spain, who describes their fierceness and battle skills of both men and women. The writer Eumenius, writes about them 200 years after Rome has been in Britain, and the name associated with the Pict is forever coined. To this day, we do not know if this is truly as in "pictus" (the Latin for "painted") or a Latin form of a native name. Because of the isolation of northern Scotland, history yields little, and the Roman Empire's expeditions into the north ended in little gains.

"We, the most distant dwellers upon the earth, the last of the free, have been shielded...by our remoteness and by the obscurity which has shrouded our name...Beyond us lies no nation, nothing but waves and rocks"...The above words by the Pictish chief Calgacus are recorded by the Roman enemy in the words of Tacitus and are a perfect example of the obscurity and legendary status held by the Picts almost 2,000 years ago.

In "Pictish Nation," I married my interest in history (I am one of the world's earliest and leading Pictologists) with art. The show consisted of two dozen charcoal drawings that interpreted and delivered my vision of how Pictish men and women, and their tattooed bodies, may have appeared.

Borrowing from the designs in the unique Pictish standing stones that dot the Scottish countryside, I re-created, for the first time in nearly 1200 years (The Picts ceased to exist as an independent people in 845 AD, when Kenneth MacAlpin, Scottish by father and Pictish by Mother, usurped the throne of the Picts and Scots and proceeded to erase all traces of Pictish culture from Scotland), the unique Pictish designs of animals, objects and imaginary beasts.

Most of the show sold, and it completely sold out over the years, except for the key central piece (Pictish Nation depicted above). I kept this work for my own, and in 2004 I had Old Town Editions in Alexandria do a small Gyclee edition of 10 reproductions of the work - all of which also sold.

Last year I decided to sell the drawing.

It has now found a home with a well-known collector in New York.

How do I start collecting art?

I am often asked, usually by friends outside the art cabal, and by people who become interested in collecting art, but have never collected artwork, what they should “collect.” 

"What should I buy Lenster?" "How do I start?"

Many years ago, I formed an opinion based on empirical observations, that there are really only two basic rules to start an art collection:

1. Collect what you like, and
2. Whenever possible, buy the original. 

That’s clear, right?

Buy and collect only what you like, what attracts your eyes, and what interests you personally, and is within your economic means. If you like the work of a particular artist, or a specific kind of prints (like Japanese woodcuts), or drawings (such as figurative drawings), then focus your collection in those areas.  This also comes with a caveat, as a lot of excessive attention is often placed on a "focused" collection. A diverse collection may make less sense to some than a focused one, but it only has to make sense to you! After all, it is your collection.

It has also been my experience, that the more affluent a “beginning collector” is, the higher the probability that he/she will get swindled into spending a lot of money for wall décor and fancy frames. Since most of us are not affluent, the high end of the commodified art market is not where I’m focusing this post.

For those affluent folks: if the "gallery" has large realistic paintings of cigars resting on wine glasses, or the artwork comes with an "option" for a rococo frame, run for your lives!

The DMV offers an immense variety, and multiple, loads of, tons, mucho, a lot, beaucoup, diverse sources to begin an art collection.

The key to most of that statement is the number of art schools, art leagues, art centers, and reputable commercial art galleries that exist in our area. Add to that the number of independent artists’ studios, and you have the perfect mix for starting an art collection.

Let start with the schools; nearly all art schools and universities put together student shows. Usually these are Master of Fine Arts (MFA) shows – the graduation show for MFA program students.  American, Catholic, George Mason, George Washington, Maryland, Montgomery Community College, Northern Virginia, and others are but a sampling of some excellent places to troll for student artwork.

Buying student artwork generally equals buying an artist early on his/her career.

Buying an artist early in his/her career is the “golden nugget” of most art collectors’ hopes.  That puppy crossed my road a few times in my life.

In 1989 I stood in front of an original oil painting by Scottish painter Jack Vettriano at the Royal Scottish Academy in Glasgow... I loved it! 


I think that it was Vettriano’s first ever show (it was a group show; actually a painting competition or was it the Royal Scottish Academy annual show?), and there were two of his early paintings (all done as I recall, at his first - and only - art class).

It was on sale for 300 British pounds, which at the time for me might as well have been 300 million pounds, since my US Navy Lieutenant’s salary barely covered expenses in Scotland, which is where I was stationed at the time.  That painting sold for 300 pounds. .. 300 pounds at the time was around $500 dollars.

Today, although he is despised by the art critics and the British arts establishment, he is adored by the public and by some very important collectors, and his works, if you are lucky enough to get on the waiting list for one, ranges in the hundreds of thousands of pounds.

And that early one that I passed on? Sold at Sotheby’s a few years ago for a lot more... a LOT more pounds. Beginning art collectors can find their own early Vettrianos at art competitions, MFA shows, outdoor art festivals, open studios, etc.

I will discuss open studios in our region later on.

Under the knife

I'll be out of commission today, going under the knife for a major, somewhat urgent and quite unexpected surgery procedure with a substantial recovery period. Surgery starts at 0730; as I type this the main worry in my mind is getting from my house to the hospital (arrival time 0530) with all the ice still all over my neighborhood's twisty and windy streets.

Not looking forward to the next 2-3 weeks. But like Clint Eastwood once famously said: "Hog's breath is better than no breath at all..."

There are lots of things that I am afraid of, but weirdly enough, death is not one of them. I think that the fact that if I were to croak today I'd still be leaving behind around ten thousand pieces of artwork which have been sold, traded, given away, left in hotel rooms, inserted into Goodwill stores and/or otherwise left to leave an artistic footprint, is rather a calming feeling.

This is a major, multi-hour, robot-not-a-human-in-charge operation, which I am told has an 80% success rate where the John Doe doesn't bite the bucket (and frankly, I picked the robot over the human, because of something called "tremors" when it comes to a surgical scalpel), soooooooooo.... If I do bite the bucket, I'd like a tombstone that looks like a Pictish Stone, sort of like this one that I did in Scotland in 1989:

Clach Biorach Pictish Standing Stone
Edderton, Ross, Scotland
circa 1989 by F. Lennox Campello
Pen and Ink wash on paper, 9.5 x 6.5 inches

What Dan Zak did

Over the years, decades really, I've been complaining about the way in which the Washington Post treats its own visual arts backyard. If you go back to the very beginnings of this blog, well over a decade ago, you'll find it hard to see a week's worth of postings where I'm not complaining or bitching about something that the WaPo did, or most often didn't do, about our visual arts scene, galleries and artists.

When I first came to the DMV in the late 1980s (1987-1989) it was as a young Lieutenant in the Navy, and in those years I spent most of my summers sailing in the Arctic off the then Soviet mainland at the top of the world, I started reading the WaPo regularly. Back then, the WaPo had a daily section titled The Arts, which covered art galleries, museums, regional visual artists, etc., in addition to all the other genres of the arts.

I left the area for a few years, and lived in Scotland, and then in Sonoma, CA. I returned to the DC area in late 1993, and by then the precipitous decline in the WaPo's coverage of its city's visual art scene was just beginning.

I then began writing about the DMV visual arts scene for a lot of local, regional and national magazines, in the process becoming deeply immersed in the scene itself. In those latter years of the 1990s, the WaPo's Arts Editor was a nice, kind man named John Pancake. I developed a professional relationship with him, and every once in a while we'd meet for coffee and discuss the area's visual arts. It was he who once described deciding to open an art gallery as a "heroic undertaking."

In those years the paper still had multiple columns covering the visual arts, which included the usual Wednesday Galleries column, then authored by Ferdinand Protzman, as well as other ad hoc gallery and museum reviews by Paul Richards. It also included a weekly Wednesday column titled Arts Beat, then authored by Michael O'Sullivan, who as I recall held the title of Assistant Arts Editor. Arts Beat reflected the interests of its author, and essentially augmented the paper's coverage of the DC area visual arts scene.

By the end of the 90s, things began to unravel.

Almost against the will of the WaPo's leadership (as related to me back then by one of the editors of the WaPo Online), the newspaper went on a major expansion of its online presence and also an associated expansion of its printed paper coverage. This included the visual arts, and I was hired, along with Jessica Dawson and others, as freelancers to cover gallery shows for the paper's online site (I wonder where all those reviews are now - have they ever been archived and preserved by the WaPo?).

I can't remember exactly when Richards retired, but his retirement (to Scotland I think) caused all kinds of minor waves for the DC art scene. First, Protzman quit, some say because he was upset that he didn't get "promoted" to Richards' job. Instead, the WaPo began a hiring process and eventually brought Blake Gopnik from his Canadian newspaper to take over as the paper's chief art critic (my titling).

Protzman's departure also brought a need for a regular freelancer to do the Galleries column, and several of those of us who were doing online reviews about Galleries were interviewed. I declined the position once we got deep into it - at the time, as some of you may recall, I was also part of the Fraser Gallery, and didn't think that being a gallery co-owner and a regular Wednesday critic for the paper would pass the smell test with some; but the real victims would be the gallery's artists, as clearly they could never get at WaPo reviews.

Around 2000, Dawson (who had been writing art reviews for the Washington City Paper) was then hired as the freelancer to cover galleries and subsequently Gopnik was hired to cover all the visual arts. 

A few years later Pancake retired, and by the mid 2000s the Wednesday coverage shrunk significantly when Arts Beat was demoted to a twice-monthly column, refocused to cover all the arts, and then eventually terminated. Most of the damage to the visual arts coverage was started by then Style Section editor Eugene Robinson.

It was Robinson who began the process to let Blake Gopnik get away with only reviewing (with one or two very rare exceptions) museums, thus having the nation's only art critic too good to review his city's artists and art galleries. On July 6, 2006, Steve Reiss (the Style section's Asst. Editor) stated online: "As for Blake Gopnik, he is a prolific writer and I find it hard to argue that we should be giving up reviews of major museum shows so he can write more about galleries that have a much smaller audience."

When Robinson left, under the new editor Deborah Heard, the coverage got even worse, with Galleries being reduced to twice a month. That added up to around 25 columns a year to review the thousand or so gallery shows that the DC area gallery art scene had to offer in those days.

A few years ago, when Dawson quit the WaPo (2011) to go to work for the Hirshhorn and in the interim, the WaPo experimented with using a couple more freelancers, but both experiments ended badly from both sides. Eventually they hired Mark Jenkins, who is their current Galleries critic, and who (in my opinion) is the best from all the names mentioned here so far.

What is a constant over all these years and memories, is the miserly coverage of DMV artists and galleries by the world's second most influential newspaper.

And then this past weekend, WaPo writer Dan Zak showed us a brilliant glint of what this coverage could be, if the WaPo "got it."

Zak's The Polaroids of the Cowboy Poet is perhaps the best article that I have ever read on an artist.

Chris Earnshaw is an odd and brilliant and sloppy man who vibrates with great joy and grand melancholy. For decades he has ambled through bandstands, major motion pictures and demolition sites, searching for prestige and permanence, all while being ignored on the gray streets of a humdrum capital.

This work has Pulitzer written all over it, but more importantly, this article is exactly the sort of coverage of the DMV visual artists and galleries, that we've always clamored from the WaPo to do 2-3 times a year - as they do when some celebrity visits the city.

Dan Zak: Well Done! You've not only delivered a brilliant article, but also shown the WaPo and Washington, DC, and the DMV visual arts scene, how it is done.