Art Babel

Science in the Age of God

2008-07-27T07:52:00.000-07:00

The work of Joel Smock is, at first glance, self-contradicting.
It stands outside of time much like a pastiche of a Celtic illuminated manuscript. One gets the feeling that these books are somehow eternal.

In the tradition of western religious texts, the illuminated manuscript had a much greater meaning in society than a simple book does today. Few people were literate and few were wealthy enough to own books, which required great time and skill to copy out by hand. Books, to the common man, were mystical objects; somehow sustaining the thoughts and words of the soul long after the death of the body. They were the element by which God manifested the world. They were something apart from the corporeal, some immortalizing abstract force.

But after the printing press was invented in Guttenberg, books became amazingly easy to reproduce and were disseminated throughout the world. Their mystical appeal decreased as their availability increased.

The anachronism of Smock's handmade work is particularly pronounced today in the digital age, where copying a document or image requires nothing more than the click of a mouse and a few seconds of your time. Oddly, they somehow are able to transmogrify their contemporary content into the universal realm of ideals. Through this counter-intuitive contrast with our digital age, and because of their tactility, their physical presence demonstrates the platonic realm of ideas more readily than the abstract collection of zeros and one's floating in the invisible void that is the Internet - though, these too are composed solely of numerical sequences.

The feeling one gets as one weighs each leather-bound volume in hand is the haunting sensation of some Nostradamus-like monk peering back at you through time, completely aware of your contemplation. Cloaked in the darkness of the past, he prophesied the coming of the age of information and recorded his vision here. A vision of science in the age of God.

Because the creator took such time and care to create these endless volumes, one feels that within lies some message of great importance. Yet, perhaps the most striking fact is the utter impossibility of comprehending this message, which appears to be encrypted in painstakingly written numerical sequences. I am reminded of a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, entitled The Library of Babel, in which every possible combination of the alphabet is included in nearly infinite volumes in a nearly infinite library. Within each volume may lie nothing but a collection of jumbled letters, the story of your life (including your future demise), and absolutely every other possible novel, in every language using this alphabet and every encrypted possibility. Sadly, though all truth may be held somewhere within the walls of this library, the potential of finding such truth is practically nill within one's lifetime.

Yet, in our present age we believe no knowledge to be beyond our grasp, no truth beyond our search, no stone too heavy to lift. We believe our powers of science and technology so vast, that relative to the individual they are infinite. Numerology, mathematics, geometry... these are the gods of the age of science. And their truths may or may not be encrypted here.

If you have the time to search.

Art for a Cause

2008-05-26T10:09:00.000-07:00

Adam Miller has officially launched Art Cause NYC.

Art Cause NYC was founded as a collaboration between artists and supporters in the business and philanthropy world as a way to bring attention to the pressing need around the world of millions of people living in poverty, war and need. Our goal was to create a situation where every time a piece of art was purchased something would go to feed, clothe or treat those who not only cannot afford to buy art but often cannot feed themselves or their children.

With the creation of Art Cause NYC artists and art lovers have a sustainable way to use their work to do good in the world, to recapture the idealism and hope for which art has so often been a symbol.

Art Cause NYC was founded in New York as the dream of a group of artists. The founders of Art Cause NYC Adam Miller, Renata Telinova and Fedele Spadofora saw the potential to use their work to found a sustainable and ongoing charity. The unique idea behind the organization spread and grew, bringing in more artists and sponsors and has now grown to assist in hunger relief as well many other causes around the world.

A Letter to the Student of Painting

2008-05-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

Your day contains a great measure of freedom. Your responsibility as a painter is here within the walls of the studio and in the setting of the landscape. You have the opportunity to exercise genuine mastery at every step, and it is in this spirit of grand possibility that I hope you will reflect on the advice made plain here.

Do not grieve too long for the troubles of the outside world. There is important work to be done here. We can best express our care for all others by attending to our work well.

Allow yourself the peace of purpose and the knowledge that to make another attempt with the brush is a noble thing. If you accept the discipline of the truest principles of art, then yours is the reward of an unbroken line of tradition.

Therefore, you may earnestly free your mind of all heartaches, sadness, and transitory despairs. Creation is above these things.

Your vocation is as real and as true as any other. Those who denounce the artist as idle manifest a deep ignorance of the nature of art. Have faith that the civilized will somewhere, at some time, value your well-wrought works. It is a miracle that the world keeps its havens for art and yet it does. Know that to create art is to do a necessary piece of work. The most noble pleasures and measureless joys result from such endeavors. True art is undeniable and it is a gift for all humanity.

The threefold responsibility of the artist is: to creation, the individual talent, and to humanity. For creation – the whole of nature – we must cultivate prayerful awe. This is our source of work and our refuge as well. We should seek harmony with nature. For the individual talent – long hours and years of steady industry hope to find our abilities fulfilled, our minds, hearts, and hands put to valuable service. In this way, we maintain the sanctity of art. Lastly, we make to humanity a willing gift of all we do. Our control over the material world lasts only a lingering moment and it takes a generous soul to build the ambition of a lifetime and then to hand it over in trust to the future.

Painting requires the bravery of solitude. Painting requires disciplined labor. To be a painter is to search the world with a benevolent eye for every subtle beauty that the infinite world offers.

Here is the opportunity to give your honest effort and to add in any small way to the legacy of art. Cultivate patience in your heart and you will improve. Learn to see well and your hand will become sure.

No pain or doubt can invade the honest soul engaged in the communion of creation. We artists must love the world with our deepest selves and forgive it at every turn.

To paint even a little passage with a measure of quality is to achieve a life’s triumph.

Spend your days wisely with the best thoughts and works of those who have walked the road before you. Search their paths, their timeless inspirations, and the lineage of their genius. Learn your craft well and your talent will mature into its full possibility. Keep an obedient heart before nature. She is the master above all other masters. Nature is the concrete manifestation of all that remains true and sublime. Let us always be thankful for her abundance and hopeful that we might approach her in our art. Nature will renew every generation of painters, ready to illuminate the minds of those who practice the art with what is calm, rational, beautiful, sublime, and eternal.

Such is the purity of your vocation. Treat every moment before the easel as a quick and tender opportunity. Invest your most noble self. Give your most noble self. To be a painter is to enjoy a precious state of life.

- Charles Philip Brooks 2002

The Path Less Taken

2008-05-13T16:46:00.000-07:00

I've finally begun down the path of a life long dream - to co-found a school of art.

I recently discovered that Georgine Benvenuto, the gracious owner of Gallery 364 only a few blocks from my apartment, had a similar desire to build an arts community center here in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The area of southern Brooklyn has nothing of the sort, though it hosts more than half a million residents within a 4 mile radius of Bay Ridge. And so, upon hearing the repeated pleas of many artists and art students in the area for figure drawing classes and more, I decided to shoulder the responsibility and joy of the task.

I rang up several of my colleagues whose brilliance and dedication to teaching and art are exceptional and who live in the vicinity. We sent out word to find if there was truly enough interest in such classes in the area. We called meetings to brainstorm about the resources available and the feasibility of such a venture. We were answered with unquestionable excitement. It seemed that everyone had been waiting for this. And so, with the perseverance of was born the Gallery 364 Studio.

I think that building a community where people feel inspired to engage with one another is the foundation for solving problems and accomplishing goals. And the arts are so absolutely fundamental to enabling this engagement. We hope to quell the trickle of our best and our brightest, our creative and our entrepreneurial, who every year invest their ideas in Manhattan instead of their own community because, truthfully, there's not much here to keep them. We hope to inspire them to reinvest in their community and build a better future. We hope to halt the tide of the faceless disintegration of our neighborhood or what many call the "brain drain".

And so, we plan to soon begin our classes on the first floor of the beautiful and historic building which houses Gallery 364 within the month. Through the deep generosity of many of my friends, colleagues, and the community, we have been able to acquire much of what we need to begin. But there is only one element lacking. We do not have the dozen or so easels that we require to hold a single class. It is on this single investment that it seems the whole project hinges.

Though there are certainly many more immediate, pressing, and pivotal humanitarian issues to address: the cyclone in Myanmar, the tragic earthquake in China - and I would encourage anyone interested in charitable donations to give to the Red Cross to aid in their recovery. If you might have even one dollar that you would wish to donate to the funding for our school, we would be incredibly grateful. If so, we will accept donations made payable to the Paypal account:

Georgine@gallery364.com

Or, if you live in the New York area we would much appreciate the donation of easels themselves.

Thank you kindly for your consideration. I wish you the best in your endeavors as well.

Sincerely,
Richard T Scott

The Light of a Single Candle

2008-05-10T07:29:00.000-07:00

Please join us at Gallery 364 for

"OUR FIRST YEAR RETROSPECTIVE"

Thursday, May 15th, 2007
Press Time: 6:30PM-7PM
Opening Time: 7PM-10PM

Gallery 364

364 72nd Street (between 3rd & 4th ave)

Brooklyn, NY 11209

917-767-3848

An exhibition of our first year's "best in show" winners.

Refreshments and noshes will be served Compliments of Circles Restaurant and Bay Ridge Sushi

By Appointment after Opening Reception

"R" Train to Bay Ridge Ave 69th Street

Car Pooling and the use of mass transit is recommended

We hope to see you here!!!

---Georgine Benvenuto

On the Nature of Art

2008-05-01T17:49:00.000-07:00

"I've been thinking a lot lately about the nature of painting."

I said this one day recently to my friend and colleague Shawn Fields as we peered out of a fourth floor window in Chelsea. It was a luminous day, and the sun glinted off the Hudson river like a benevolent god winking. The wind paused profoundly in its journey from the west and I couldn't help but think that it had some beautiful and poetic significance.

He replied with a chuckle.
"That doesn't surprise me. What would surprise me would be if you had stopped."

I had the feeling that I took myself altogether too seriously. So, I laughed as well and enjoyed the sun.

"So, what's new?" He asked.
Happy to embark on any conversation about art, especially with Shawn, I began with an idea that I had been molding quietly for the past year or so. I didn't know if anyone had thought it before me, had written it down, or shared it with their colleagues in a moment such as this. But, I did know that Shawn could help me mull it over.

Once I said it out loud, we both knew that it seemed so simple that we couldn't believe we'd never heard it before.

It begins with the format. Painting is static, by its nature. It does not move. It does not change with time. Its meaning is locked into a single eternal statement, and your mind must take the mold of the lock to reveal its secrets. This is both its strength and its weakness. Because of this, a painting is inherently read iconographically through layers of symbolic meaning, like an onion. So, I ventured to say that a powerful painting should reinforce this kind of iconic reading. Almost before I finished saying this Shawn had the very same question as I:
What makes a painting iconic?

So we embarked on an analysis of a multitude of paintings which represented this iconic power. One of first we brought up was Andrew Wyeth, and Shawn explained that what he thought made Wyeth's work so striking was the way he composed large regions of clear values overlapping. There was always a dark, a middle, and a light - most often another intermediary value as well. He said, that if you shrink an Andrew Wyeth down in black and white, you'll see these patterns in every single painting.

We continued on to discuss other factors that made work iconic, and what even narrative paintings like "Susan and the Elders" by Rembrandt, or "The Death of Socrates" by David, had in common with obviously iconic paintings like Goya's "Saturn". What I found was that one idea kept returning: conceptualization. Conceptualizing color, conceptualizing form, conceptualizing light....
It seemed the common element that united the iconic impact of all these artworks was how the artist filtered the content of the work through his/her ideas about form, color, light, 2-d and 3-d design, texture, etc.... And as I pondered, it all became crystal clear. Of course, it seems so obvious now, but for some reason neither of us saw it before.

Because each artist was conceiving of these elements, a little bit of the idea was passed on in each of them. It was not the subject matter, but the way that these paintings were made that revealed the meaning, though the subject depicted could help. It was as if every single square inch of canvas was saturated with the artist's breath. His emotion, his perspective poured out of each shadow or highlight - the way he handled his brush, the decision to make a gray into blue and a hand into a silhouette, to make one detail sharper and another more obscure. There is a hierarchy and a meaning to how these elements are composed and relate to each other, which intuitively reveals meaning to the viewer. There is a mystery in this.

Film, by contrast, is a narrative form. The images change through time, in fact, it is virtually about change. This lead me to realize that verbal language is the very definition of the narrative and this is why it is so difficult, if not impossible to truly describe a painting in words. It is much farther than translating from one language to another, one just cannot communicate a purely visual idea in a verbal way. And one cannot communicate a verbal idea in a visual way. They are two banks over a canyon, but somehow the human mind can bridge the colossal abyss between - albeit across a dangerous and swaying rope bridge. We can see both sides, but we cannot transport anything more than a teaspoon of meaning between; hopefully not spilling its valuable contents in the unsteady journey.

The New New Thing

2008-05-01T10:13:00.000-07:00

I have been reading over alot of the blog lately and enjoying the lively exchange of ideas, so I thought I would throw my two cents into the discussion.

I want to discuss the idea that artists should reflect their time. Things do change and Time obviously moves on, new fashions come in vogue and fads appear and disappear . Great work can be done within a popular "of the moment" style, but it is important to remember how much great art (much more I think) has been done by artists with a strong identity outside of the taste of the moment.

This is apparent in the works many Great Artists who could not make a living when alive, but today their paintings sell for millions at auction. This is not because the Artists work changed with the times or even that tastes improved, but rather that the taste of the times moved to the artist.

The way that collectors perceive art also changes with time. Much art is sold today because the buyer hopes it will conform to a color scheme and offend no one. In the past art was bought because the collector admired the artists skill in depicting nature and in telling an interesting story. Today more people are returning to traditional looks in their homes, they are reverse renovating to reclaim original fire-places and tin ceilings that were removed to accommodate Modernism and buying realistic rather than abstract paintings. Is this a sign that this time has reached its cycle? Are people beginning to tire of horizontal and vertical lines, simple colors and flat-pack.... Time will only tell.

Dennis Anderson

World Provenance Magazine

The Collector

2008-05-01T09:48:00.000-07:00

Why do Collectors Collect?

There are many reasons associated with the collection of Art, but the main reasons apart from the love of the work is value. Collecting Art is seen by many, as a way of gaining a better return for their investments and some even see it as a retirement fund.

But what art will give the collector the returns that they desire? Unless you are in a position to collect art work from already established Artists whom may already be listed as the Artists of the future such as Chagall , Banksy, or Koons then choosing the right artist is like playing the lottery. There are however certain guide lines a Collector can follow and Artists should when possible follow these guidelines to make their work even more collectible.

First you most get yourself listed as an Artist, Title and date all your works, write Artists Statements to go with all of your work and have your stories read by as many people as possible. It is your Words along with your Works that will make that all important connection with the Public, Making that Connection will be the deciding factor in whether your works will be talked about in some ones collection in the future. I find that my artists who are most successful engage collectors minds as well as eyes.

Dk Anderson

World Provenance Magazine

Defining Culture

2008-04-27T07:23:00.000-07:00

As an interesting follow up to the article on Habacuc's piece in which he ties a dog up in a gallery and starves him to death. I thought I would further solidify our case for the humane treatment of animals (unfortunately it seems necessary, though I would think that it's self-evident).

What this video exhibits is more than just a circus act. Though the elephant is probably trained, it's amazing nonetheless. But what this tells me is that the elephant is able to think symbolically. It is not attempting to paint what it sees, but is conceiving of what an elephant is from memory and reproducing a pictographic depiction.

In the study of Anthropology, culture is what divides man from animals and it is defined in several different ways. Though there is no absolutely agreed upon definition, these three traits are common in nearly all of them:

1. Symbolic Thought - the ability to understand and communicate meaning through abstract ideas.
2. Learned Transmission - the passing down of learned behavior from one individual to another.
3. Tool Making - The ability to see a raw material and alter it to suite your needs.

The Elephant is exhibiting at least two of these traits - learned behavior and symbolic thought. Other animals, especially primates, have been known to exhibit all three of these criteria.

There was a study done on tool-making crows of New Caledonia, in which a piece of food was placed in a clear tube. The only object available was a straight piece of wire. The crow bent the wire and used it to fish out the food. Similar behavior has been seen in chimpanzees who fashion tools out of sticks to fish termites of of mounds and other chimps who make spears to hunt Bushbabies. Another study was presented to a chimp where a nut was placed in a narrow glass tube next to a bowl of water. The chimp drank some water and spit it into the tube so that the nut floated to the top so that he could reach it. What's remarkable about this is that not only did he know that he could use water as a tool, he also knew that the nut would float!

Among primates, Gorillas, and most notably Chimps, have a been trained to communicate through sign language. They have been seen to not only learn from each other, but have the ability to understand and apply words to different contexts.

And this brings us to the specific issue: canine intelligence. A border collie named Rico in Germany has exhibited a vocabulary of at least 200 words. If that's not remarkable enough, he has also demonstrated the ability to learn new words from only being exposed to a new object once. Further, if you train a dog not to urinate inside your house, it goes without saying that the dog will understand not to urinate in your neighbor's house as well. This is evidence that the dog has abstracted the idea and applied it to similar contexts.

Now, to solidify my point. Elephants and crows have demonstrated several of the traits necessary for culture. Primates and dogs have demonstrated all three on the list above. Thus, the argument that I've heard, which claims that animals do not think or feel is unequivocally false. These animals have demonstrated culture. Thus, the difference between torturing a human being and a dog is non-existent and the law should be enforced equally. What's more, think about the fact that the very dog that Habacuc starved, likely understood much of what the viewers were saying and likely understood that it was intentional. This is the greatest outrage of all.

If you haven't already, please sign the petition to stop Habacuc.

http://www.petitiononline.com/ea6gk/petition-sign.html

The voice of elitism

2008-04-26T10:23:00.000-07:00

Are you better than the average man on the streets? If you think you are, how does this effect your art? I have always thought elitism in art or anything else is a compensation - for what the person is compensating, I leave to your imagination.

In 1957 Mike Wallace interviewed Frank Loyd Wright. Here is a quote that I found very telling.

Wallace: …a pretty fair share of our audience tonight either can’t, or does not want to, understand modern art like the paintings of Picasso or modern music, let’s say by Stravinsky; possibly they don’t even know, don’t even want to or cannot understand you. What do you think of these people who either don’t understand or don’t care?

Wright: I don’t think they matter as far as I’m concerned. I don’t think they’re for me, so why should I be for them?

The complete interview is available here: perpenduum.com

Observing Steven Assael at work

2008-04-23T20:41:00.000-07:00

These are notes I took watching Steven Assael paint. Here is a list of the colors I noticed on the palette. There were more, but these are the ones that were used frequently.

List of colors:

Burnt Siena

Alizarin Crimson

Violet?

Ultramarine blue

Prussian Blue

Cadmium green light

Viridian

Burnt umber

Ivory black

Transparent oxide red

Holbein brown pink

Transparent yellow ochre

Yellow ochre

Cadmium red light

Cadmium orange

Cadmium Yellow

Naples Yellow light

Brilliant Yellow light

Titanium White

Steve makes these colors work by blending on the canvas. He would often take a beaten large fan brush and slap in a highlight down the length of an arm in pure white, which would seem too light until he uses mixtures of more or less cad red, ochre and siena and blends these without white loosely over the same arm. Next he might take a green and work out from the cool halftones in the same way. By this time he had subdued the intensity of the white and by painting all these colors over each other and mixing them together created a beautiful subtle color scheme with lots of broken color and texture. At this point he might restate his lights. This process is very loose with no respect paid to edges of form as these can be established later. Last he would model his darks. This was done with mostly sable brushes. He chose his dark color not for the way it looked but for how it would blend with the other colors already there. For instance alizarin crimson would create a luminous reddish haze when he used it. This would be great for the space between fingers or the transparent flesh in an ear but terrible for a cool blue area around the eye socket. In the cool areas he would often use a purple or a mixed dull greenish color with a bit of umber and a green or blue . When painting these darks he blends out from the darkest point I never saw him block in a chunky dark it was always a soft delicate subtle process where the finish starts to emerge.

Some frequent mixtures:

In the lights often Brilliant yellow light or naples were mixed with cad red, Alizarin or Yellow ochre for warmer colors and the same brilliant yellow could be mixed with a purple or green to cool the light areas. For richer color areas mixtures of naples or brilliant yellow with ochre, cad red or either of the sienas were used.
In the shadows he often would mix burnt siena and cad green, or burnt siena and alizarin for hot areas. Finally for the dark shadow accents he might use pthalo blue mixed with burnt siena and alizarin.

Upcoming Competitions

2008-04-22T09:50:00.000-07:00

I am posting a list of upcoming competitions relevant for realist painters. The deadlines are all coming up in the next few weeks.

American Artist Magazine, Self Portrait Competition
http://www.myamericanartist.com/2008/04/enter-the-self.html

American Artist, Artist of the Month
http://www.myamericanartist.com/2006/08/artist_of_the_m.html

International Artist Magazine, Your Favorite Subject
https://www.international-artist.com/competition/index.aspx?location=us

Artist Magazine, Annual Art Competition
http://www.artistsnetwork.com/annualcompetition

Slow Art, Strange Figurations
http://www.slowart.com/prospectus/figure.htm

Lana Santorelli Gallery, Summer Nude Show
http://www.lanasantorelligallery.com/submissions.html

Oil Painters of America, Western Regional Exhibition
http://www.oilpaintersofamerica.com/

Artist of the Day Blog
http://artistoftheday.blogspot.com/

Of Art and Murder

2008-04-20T09:31:00.000-07:00

In 2007, the 'artist' Guillermo Vargas Habacuc tied up a stray dog in a gallery. Over the course of several days, he and the viewers watched as the dog slowly starved to death before their eyes.

The Visual Arts Biennial of Central America has invited Guillermo Vargas Habacuc to produce an encore performance of this installation in 2008.

This act not only disregards ethics, morality, and international law, but it is a blatant affront to our intelligence. Freedom of expression does not apply here and I'll tell you why. "Conceptual art", by it's very nature, does not require a visual to communicate an idea. In fact, it is more clearly articulated in written or verbal form. Truly ask yourself, who looks at an installation and just gets it? Understanding the point requires either a detailed written statement or a Masters degree in contemporary art theory. "Conceptual art" is an elitist statement, with an elitist vocabulary to an elitist audience. But, I'll briefly explain it for those who aren't familiar.

It all began in 1917 with Marcel Duchamp. He found a urinal, placed it in a gallery, and entitling it Fountain, said that it was art. From Duchamp onward, the entire point of "ready-made" or "found art" is that the part of the artwork that is "art" is specifically not the object. Therefore the object, whether aesthetically appealing or not, is absolutely unnecessary. In fact, if one considers the object aesthetically it negates the entire point and the piece is therefore no longer art. Duchamp's and Habacuc's ideas would have been more effectively conveyed if they had limited it to a written form, much like Schrodinger's thought experiment with the cat in the radioactive box. If the idea is the art, and not the object.... why have the object?

Regardless of whether or not one thinks that placing an object like a urinal or shovel in a gallery constitutes as brilliant art, Habacuc treats this living creature as an object. If his point is intended ironically (irony - an overburdened and weak leg to stand on) to point out starvation, we do not require his 'great insight' to realize that starvation takes place. We do not require his insight to see suffering, pain, fascism, indifference, or death. These are all extremely obvious. So obvious in fact, that a drunken four year old could illuminate the concept for you if you're at all confused. Thus, adding to the suffering in the world only adds to the suffering in the world and does nothing to counteract it.

As social action, this piece is not merely impotent, but destructive. As a concept it is banal and obvious - the only thing left is beauty. And the beautiful thing was the life of the dog, which he destroyed. One might say that was his point, as the goal of Duchamp's "Fountain" was to destroy aesthetic beauty. But firstly, some philosophical idea on the nature of art is never important enough to sacrifice a life. Secondly, it negates the point of art, as art is about life. And thirdly, how many times must those who claim to be the 'avant garde' repeat the same tired stunt? Must we do this for another 90 years? Habucac's "installation" is at best, derivative, didactic, and a pathetic attempt at art. He would have to do much more for it to be anything more than the malicious act of a twisted and childish mind. In short, Habacuc has resorted to shock value due to the fact that he has nothing relevant to say.

But, I've got a brilliant idea - let's take it a step further!

Next time we'll take a homeless person, or better yet, a whole family of poverty stricken Central Americans and chain them up before a crowd of self-entitled, bourgeoisie elitists who will watch them starve while they drink their champagne and eat caviar. Or better still, let's just put the family into a pit with lions. It will be over quickly so that we don't exceed the viewers' 30 second attention spans and they can go home early and have their after-party in their mansions by the sea and croon about what a brilliant piece that was ..... oh I'm sorry, that's already been done before and it was called inhumane torture and public execution!

Señor Habacuc, do you understand the idea, or is it necessary for me to "perform" it to clarify?

This is wrong no matter how one defines "art".
Please follow these links to sign the petition:

http://www.petitiononline.com/ea6gk/petition-sign.html

or

http://www.petitiononline.com/13031953/petition.html.

Fragments of Humanity

2008-04-18T05:09:00.000-07:00

From the show "Fragments"
By Blake Ward

Last night I made my obligatory trek to Chelsea to see the latest and greatest installment of chrome bunnies and iconccized household items being carefully scrutinized by a remarkably unchanging group of aging hipsters. They stand they criticize and they dribble free wine into the collars of their white turtlenecks. The night wears on and the atmosphere thickens. The distinction between the art and the spectators blurs and I find more pleasure observing a well heeled man in a tailored suit seriously scrutinizing a headless mannequin than I possibly could looking at the headless mannequin for myself.

Finally we take the elevator to the fourteenth floor of the Chelsea arts tower and step out into a dream. we walk into a room with a sprawling panorama of New York City and the Hudson river that is dazzling. I have come with two other artists Alexandra Pacula, and Fabio D Aroma, all three of us stop and for once were totally speechless. In this space were numerous small sculptures, active and restless fragments of nudes. They seemed healthy, vigorous, and alive, though they had been shattered. The show "Fragments" by Canadian artist Blake Ward and founder of Motive Art is Raising funds for No More Landmines a UK based organization dedicated to clearing landmines leftover from wars and making it possible for people to return to their land without risk of death or injury.

This show should be a challenge to every artist who sees it. Social change has been fundamental to modern art. Feminist art, political art, the freedom to do your own thing. Blake is an artist who is taking things a step further. He looks at the world and makes work that comments on it and makes a difference. Like Tom Wolfe's books his sculptures are a call to an art less self absorbed more and worldly.

Click here for a BBC story about the artist.

Advice from an art dealer

2008-04-17T13:47:00.001-07:00

Dreamless Sleep, Robert Dale Williams

Collection of DK Anderson

I am an art dealer. When I walk around my home I come face to face with paintings I have purchased from my own artists over the years, some of which I now could probably not afford. Painting is my obsession. Ever since the first auction I attended in my youth where I tried unsuccessfully to buy a painting of a paratrooper jumping out of a plane. What as a dealer am I looking for in an artist? First I want to own the art. It must to be the art I would hang on my own wall and would want to buy if I came across it in a gallery. Every dealer has their preference mine is for art from the Nineteenth century and contemporary works that possess the same craft and humanity to be found in works by such artists as Bouguereau and Fredrick Leighton.

In order to succeed in the art world however an artist also needs to connect with his audience. They need to understand why they bought the painting so when their friends come over to visit they can confidently explain why their art is worth owning and they are not Philistines.

I make a point of having my artists tell their stories in my magazine World Provenance. If you are promoting your own work you must find a way to do this. Rehearse your story and have it ready at all times.

The work I like and deal in tends to have a strong presence, it does not sit back and fade into a room, it is forceful and everyone notices it. This makes it especially important for people to understand the artist. The more character your work has, the more explanation you should give the buyer. I find that artists often think they must paint soft or easy paintings to be successful, but this is not true. You just need to connect to your audience.

DK Anderson

World Provenance Magazine

Been Caught Stealin

2008-04-13T08:08:00.000-07:00

There is a bill currently before Congress, which would allow other people to take the copyright of your creative labors and use it for their own profit.

Yes, I tell you the truth, just as simply as that. They will take your art and give you nothing in return- no credit, no money, nothing.

Does that make you angry? I bet it does!

As if there wasn't enough exploitation of artists rampant already, they've decided to make it legal. Just like the infamous Patriot Act, of course they chose to name the bill something misleading: The Orphaned Artwork Bill. Doesn't it conjure up images of little doe eyed paintings lost and alone on the internet with no home? Well, isn't it so kind of the big corporate fat cats to put her to work doing something productive - lining his pockets for free. In fact, this is nothing short of art slavery! I do indeed think of my works as my children, and I'll be damned if I let someone send them to forced labor.

As of now, your copyright is legally protected internationally, automatically. You do not have to register. Here are the basic facts if this bill is passed. Everything produced within the last 35 years will be open game unless the artist pays a fee to "register" each and every piece produced, individually.

In time honored fashion, they're thinking only of the short term profits and not the long term effects of this legislation. The proposers of this bill don't seem to realize that if you force struggling artists to pay fee after fee to "register" their work, people will stop sharing their work and most will stop producing it. The artistic culture of this nation will shrivel up and whither like a rose in December. Not only will millions of artists loose their rights and ability to feed and clothe themselves worldwide, but every sector of the society will be effected. We depend upon the innovation and invention of creatives to fuel our economy.

Do you remember the writer's strike not too long ago? Do you remember how all of your favorite shows were gone? Do you remember how bad the movies were? Visualize this: 200 tv channels, all with only REALITY TV, badly done billboards, music like Britney Spears and The Backstreet Boys will rule every radio station, our new buildings will be simply boxes, our cars will all look like the Hummer, our businesses will stagnate, our inventors will be stifled, our chefs will suffer and all our restaurants will serve Big Mac's and diet Coke. Art is communication, and communication is the foundation of civilization.

Ok, maybe I'm being a bit apocalyptic here, but the last thing we can do right now is ignore this.

We need to shake our friends out of APATHY and TAKE ACTION!

Here are some resources that you need:

Please read this article from Animation World Magazine for the
complete picture of the critical situation we are in! Go to "Mind
Your Business" link. >>>
http://mag.awn.com/?ltype
Animation World Magazine: Mind your Business: You will Loose All the Rights to Your Own Art

SIGN the Petition >>>
http://www.petitiononline.com/dAvsOW/petition.html

ORPHAN WORKS RESOURCE PAGE FOR ARTISTS >>>
http://www.illustratorspartnership.org/01_topics/article.php?searchterm=00185

Listen to the audio interview on this bill >>>
http://www.sellyourtvconceptnow.com/orphan.html

Contact Elected Officials >>>
http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml

Another artist's "In the know" journal >>>
http://realitysquared.deviantart.com/journal/17811892/

Odd Nerdrum Painting Process

2008-04-11T16:39:00.000-07:00

Here are some photos of Odd Nerdrum's painting "Bleeding Heart" in progress. My friend Robert Dale Williams, who studied with Nerdrum, kindly sent them to me. I've invited him to participate on Art Babel, so hopefully soon, he'll be available if you have any questions.

A Road Less Traveled

2008-03-15T18:18:00.000-07:00

I received a call one evening as I was returning home from the studio. It was someone who had seen me copying a Hieronymus Bosch at the Met and taken one of my business cards. He wanted to commission me to copy this piece in the stunning Courbet exhibition.

We met at the exhibit, pondered this piece, Self Portrait with a Pipe for a few moments; the under-painting (my copy) of which is included here. I began following a train of thought which I had previously explored about the nature of copying, appropriation, and originality. You might recall my thoughts on context, and as Borges discussed in Pierre Menard, author of The Quixote, how one could find the repetition of the exact same phrase in the exact same novel to be richer than the original. Much like a joke which becomes funnier every time it is repeated. It has the added contexts of referring to the previous, as well as being re-created at a later time by a different person in a different place for different purposes.

The copy of the Courbet, has an interesting context for me personally, as he claimed (falsely or not) to be from the country and even adopted a provencal accent. I actually am from the country (Georgia) and early on had somehow negated my accent. Thus, I am copying the creation of a man who molded his persona to be more like my origins. In an odd way, this is sort of an ex-temporal mimetic coincidence. If the chronology of time were not perceived, i.e. we lived a fourth dimensional existence, what then becomes a copy, and what an original? Sorry, if I lost you there, back to my point.

Instead of investigating the line between appropriation and creation as before, I found myself lost on another path which divided from the original like the road less traveled in a Robert Frost poem. What if the copy were copied again? Does a copy of a copy have an even greater contextual richness? What of a copy of a copy of a copy? Short of taking it to the level of absurdity, let's consider simply the copy of the copy. It refers to the original context, as well as the secondary context.

Artist a paints a piece. Artist b copies it. Artist c copies b, but is fully aware of and influenced by a. There arises almost a Pythagorean relationship between these three contexts.
Artist a is a painter in the Baroque period. b is a realist painter at the end of the Romantic period, but c is a painter during the height of post-modernism and conceptual art.
a works in a manner accepted by the tradition of the time. The work of b is considered only an exercise to study technique. However, an "original figurative composition" by c might be considered passe, anachronistic, and futile, yet his copy could be construed as an ironic statement and an act pushing the envelope of direct appropriation. It can be conceived of in the theoretical vernacular of the time as having artistic merit on it's own. Doubly so because it emphasizes the redundant aspect of the self referencing which art has made throughout history. Does this negate the idea of Kitsch?

This begs a question; if everything derives from something else, yet is different in a each new context, why does it matter if it has been done before?

"Originality is nothing more than remembering everything you've heard, but forgetting where you heard it." -Mark Twain

More quotes on originality.

Sound and Silence

2007-12-19T16:30:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in the midnight hum of nerves and flesh, there is a rhythm. Each city, each street, each place has its own subtle beat. At certain moments, perhaps in a drunken but acute stupor, we have all at one time whispered to the sublime in the undercurrent of the night and felt the pulse of the immediate. And it was in such a moment that I met Alexandra Pacula, recent winner of the Saatchi Gallery Showdown.

My wife and I attended an eclectic and vibrant party in east Williamsburg, amidst the rush of the tango and the thrum of voices. My good friend Adam Miller had invited me to his studio for this party in almost the nether realms of the warehouse jungle. It was this night that we requested of his girlfriend, Alexandra, who had a studio in the same building, to allow us to visit her studio.

I was immediately taken by the homage to Nighthawks above, entitled Nocturnal Escapade. In the blur of my own aesthetic intoxication, I was able to sense the pulse of the city as I had never before encountered. Stretching back into the inky darkness of Jack Kerouac's New York, the Subterranean bee-bop of a lost generation, and Hopper himself perched upon the bar stool, I glimpsed the string which connects the ghosts of past - through the fluid hours - to strum a steady note under the fluorescent lights. I realized then, that the hum I heard, in the cold New York night, was not that of the warm bar lights, but a supernatural communion with all those lonely souls who've passed before. The city that never sleeps, has truly not slept for years, and somehow this enables each year to live on, blurring into the next to leave an echo which one might detect in the obscure encryptions of Alexandra's calligraphic brushwork.

Alexandra's work is a sensuous effigy to the night life. But more than that, it seeks a truth which lies beneath the clutter of voices and dirty martini's. It seeks (and finds) that intangible eternity which yawns into the depths of human collective remembrance. She employs the color and brush much like a jazz master, drawing on the greatness of the past, infusing it with her own soulful yearning, and improvising amidst our social and physical realities to create a fluctuating reverberation between the abstract and the corporeal. This excitement speaks of both passion and melancholy, but the tension between the two is what makes it so compelling.

What was Lost

2007-12-15T11:37:00.001-08:00

My job at Jeff Koons' studio comes with many benefits. Not the least of which is it's location in Chelsea, and proximity to over 500 of the most successful galleries in the world.

And so, my lunch breaks are taken up with lengthy constitutionals accompanied by my good friend and colleague Adam Miller. Last Wednesday, the galleries of choice were Stricoff and DFN, two on my list of possible venues for my work because both show several artists who also graduated from the New York Academy of Art. It was at DFN on this fair day (well actually rather dreary), that we came across the haunting work of Dan Witz.

This is a man after my own heart. His soulful use of tenebrist light could stir the sentiment of even the most cynical gallery goers. They depict seemingly meaningless and forgotten moments in such a way as to point out what we might have missed along the way.

The school crossing might be the moment long ago in early September, when I drove home from rehearsal for the high-school play, exhausted and proud. The ice machine is the half remembered acquaintance once met on a midnight road trip from some anonymous place to another. Lit by the buzz of gas station lights, he is familiar to my dreaming. And this woman I perhaps recall from a single glance, checking a voice mail as I walked by a restaurant in pursuit of my own thoughts. These too are companions to history and are worthy of remembrance. These are the moments which, once forgotten are lost to eternity, yet coalesce to form our existence. These too are the fabric of our very lives.

The Lost Dreams of Titian

2007-12-01T07:13:00.000-08:00

In past posts I have been known to say some choice things about Jeff Koons. Though I don't entirely recant all of my statements, I must admit that I have developed a different outlook on him and what he does.

You see, I just got a job working in his studio, and my first week has altered my viewpoint drastically. The pay is good, the health insurance is great, and what he gives to emerging artists by employing nearly a hundred of them, is the ability to make a decent living while pursuing their foundering careers in the city that never sleeps (nor gives you an inch).

In my first week I have met a number of intelligent and highly skilled artists in his employ and have struck a friendship with a few. Chief among them is my quickly growing friendship with the painter Adam Miller. His piece "Ariadne", above, awakens in me the haunting remembrance of visions in the dreams of Titian - images to which he never gave expression. These are the lost moments of a master, recently unearthed from the mists of time, and all the better as we can see these marvelous pieces afresh with searching and youthful eyes - never before exposed to this poetic mastery. These are the moments when art is most vital to the human experience. These are the moments when all the senses reach an apex in perception and the work transcends simply the beautiful and surpasses the sublime. These are the moments which reach the human soul.

The Moment

2007-11-15T08:42:00.000-08:00

It is hard for me to write about my own works keeping distance and the objectivity at the same time. So I realize that what you will read can be completely different from it, what really you will be thinking about them.

I am a bit of a surrealist, a bit of a portrait painter and something even more unspecified in what I do. Very man, as the topic, has always interested, however I am trying to determine this only moment, in which it alone is the most apart from the entire uniqueness of human character still with oneself, is revealing the uncontrollable inner life for his personality living in the very moment most intensively. It can be the moment of creating, the moment of staying in some surroundings, whether finally savouring one's body. Hedonism and the humility, distance and the closeness, everything it is making the image of the man up. Surreal World is being craved very much here, he is heightening the word through the unlimited amount of solutions, often surprising.

This "moment" has been accompanying me for ages in my works. Beginning the adventure with the drawing from normal painting portraits of people, through desire for expressing something more, to the attempt to show the entire complexity of situation, in the end till the shift techniques not to say fields of art established me. I mean stained glass in which I have only recently started being found which having the limitation with unique technology is causing that the form is becoming even more literal and strong.

Here are a few words about my art. I'm counting on constructive criticism....

The rest of them you can see on my website: www.gador.eu

Maciej Gador