Drivel

Did some cleaning up in the studio. Needed... This space is small, tiny compared to the old Artwood. Not enough space to breathe.

I will try to have some new things in a week or so. This is winter aspens, Colorado.

Galleries 2

It is very important to make some distinction between galleries selling work, and gallery exhibition. In the United States, the two are fairly separate, which is unfortunate. Here, museums, universities, and arts organizations are largely the venues for exhibition shows, and galleries are stores for selling work. Exhibition shows have greater weight, because of the absence of the commercial primary goal.

Being seen is the beginning of any fine artist’s career. There is nothing worse than being invisible, especially if an artist deserves to be seen. This value is usually provided by sales history. Fine artists who manage to get shown, and appreciated, but do not sell work get to die just as broke as those who are never seen. They all compete for the same service and construction jobs, the same teaching positions, etc.

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 There are several layers of consideration when trying to make comparisons in the “arts”. One problem is “performance” getting lumped up into the same discussion as “solid” artwork.  Performance and solid are two very different things. It used to be that performers of all stripes were called that. Musicians, singers, actors, dancers, all went by those names. Now, anyone who makes anything of any type is called an “artist” and anything made, conjured up, written, interpreted, or otherwise generated by a person is called “art”.  In fact, that has completely overtaken the meaning of the word.

Conversely, those who went to “art” schools, got “art” degrees, bought supplies at “art” stores, showed work in “art” galleries were called “artists”. These people made “solid” art, one off, one of a kind, things that stood in space, and were regarded visually and tactilely, and had a relative permanence. You got a BFA or MFA with the qualifier of ‘Fine’ to indicate solid. Fine art has been all but left behind, and galleries have been more culprit than savior.

Performance “art” is intended to be repeated, and selling the copied sounds or performances is how those entities eke out a living (hopefully).  This is a way bigger group, and the assuming the mantle of “artist” has come to mean more as a performance descriptor than fine art one. Oh well…

However, it is not ok to make copies of fine art, and since the value of fine or ‘solid’ artwork is in it’s uniqueness, it needs a place to be seen and experienced first hand. This has been (up until now) largely the stage created by galleries. The web does not address this, or provide any assistance. The web only gives some poor clues as to how something looks, and the rest of the experience of solid art is lost. Seeing solid art in the “flesh” (so to speak) is the only true way to experience it because just seeing something in an image does not allow one to experience the other equally valuable aspects of a work, such as surface, or visual weight, or size, or it’s affect on the space it occupies, it’s emotional or architectural weight. None of that is possible in a web image. The hand of the “fine” artist is not present.

A couple of examples:

Cris Bruch is a sculptor I know who does drawings and installations, etc. that mean almost nothing in images on the web. You have to walk around them, be with them, experience their mass, and size, and presence. You have to relate to them physically. His drawings are large and linear and live in a space larger than the frame and glass that contains them.

When I open a show of my own work, it is not uncommon to see people up nose to paintings or looking at them from several angles, because the surface is important. They are paint, and up close that becomes very obvious. The further back you get the image becomes more center stage. Like Cris’s work, any solid artist’s work will occupy space larger than the image when viewed in person. This experience can only happen in the work’s presence, and the web cannot begin to supply this.

Often, when a painting (or any other ‘solid’ artwork) is shown, it is accompanied by additional information, which when supplied within the bubble of a work’s presence, has weight that does not happen on a screen. It can be a placard with some description or additional or helpful insight, or it can be an informed person willing to speak about the work or the maker.  These elements give weight to a viewers consideration as well, especially if the person who creates the placard or speaks of the artist has some intimacy with the artist, the kind that comes from knowing them.

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Having work in a gallery because it is popular and sells is a sad commentary on the evolution of the gallery and it’s relationship to fine art and to the public at large. Monkeys smoking cigars and bronze children flying kites may sell and pay bills, but this type of weak gate-keeping erodes the mortar that is the part of the foundation of a culture that powerful art can harden.

So, is the web the culprit? Is the Web killing galleries? Are galleries and the “art market” killing art?  Are we all backing off of our responsibilities to improve our culture by ignoring the discussion? Are we collectively at fault?

Galleries 1

I recently overheard a conversation about a prominent gallery owner that I know saying that the end of galleries is near. I have also suspected that may be true, but that there needs to be some discussion about it as a process. So this may be a two parter... or three.

The overheard conversation was mourning the changing of the art market, and the traditional gallery no longer serving whatever the market was asking for, if it was asking for anything anymore. A finger was pointed at the Web as a major player in this when I don’t think it is fair to say that. The gallery and those who feed it have been incompatible for a long time, participants in an unhealthy dance that left many an unhappy partner. Rather than learn from each other, both gallery and artist have changed in ways that reinforce that tension. The Web has just highlighted it, making the changes hard to ignore now.

Obviously the WWW has had a tremendous impact, but it is not what is doing in the current gallery model… not alone anyway.

The American gallery model has not been particularly well suited to artists or art itself, being the primary gate-keeper, primary beneficiary, and often the only source of what revenue artists do see at the same time. And with most galleries, this is the goal. It is like Ebay. The primary thing that happens is the company is funded. Everything else is a distant second.

There is nothing wrong with this from a business standpoint. But from that standpoint artists are only suppliers, wholesalers, whose performance and ultimately value is based on sales. It is hard to rise above that when the system has no intention of letting it happen.

The music ‘industry’ is undergoing some similar re-tooling. It is a weak comparison, however, since that industry is a print industry… they sell prints of originals and that is a fat no-no in the fine art world. The FAW courted that idea back in the ‘70s but has since largely abandoned it, and the print in the FAW is still quite expensive compared to the .99c download. But they (music) are on the forefront of changing and adapting to new models.

So, I would agree that the current gallery model is starting to weaken, but we need to start talking about what replaces it.

Ireland Paintings

I was invited to do a show in the SPACE Gallery in Magnuson Park in Seattle, for the month of October. So far, it is a confirmed go.

I will use this opportunity to do a unified show of just the Ireland paintings. I have kept most of them back because I really wanted them to be shown together, and this is a great opportunity to do that. Plus, it is just upstairs from my studio in the Building 30 Studios. I am working with the board on redoing the lighting in the gallery, and will have that all taken care of by then so it should be all set.

I am working on a catalogue of the Irish Paintings as well, and hope to have that available by then.

Writing As Sketching

I find that writing about my painting subjects makes some profound changes to my memory and final paintings. In the field, or in the studio, or anywhere for that matter. Just thinking about those places or people I care about, and writing as honestly as I can about them is a large part of the painting conversation. Plus, it is a way of being involved with the process without being in the studio at all. It is with me everywhere.

I know my writing is not terribly instructional, because I generally do not instruct, and I don’t want to really do only that here. It is more the stream of consciousness that I use when just writing in general.

When doing writing for painting, it is not necessary to be good, just honest. Write down any thing that comes to mind. The goal is to get it down, and organize it later if it needs it.

I am not going to publish my studio notes here, but will throw in some public examples that make my point from time to time.

Today I will include a link to the Artist Trust note I had to write for them because it is a good window into my inner conversation with Ireland.

http://artisttrust.org/index.php/news/blogpost/marc_bohne_goes_to_ireland

There is a reference to the “Irish Diary” which is a collection of my daily stuff from the time before this in Ballycastle, and that was published on my site daily at the time.

Writing about your subject gives your brain a different way to regard it, and it affects your painting in deeper and more meaningful ways. 

Drawing Expanded One

Going to expand a bit on drawing, to add to the first post.

Talking about line, in a non-traditional sense, means really understanding it for what it is. For something with no real mass it has a lot of weight.

When I was talking about line formed by the meeting of values, it can be an actual line, or an inferred line. Where values or hues come together they both signal a change, and also move our eye. Where value or hue are blended in that meeting, the line is still there, just inferred now. The line always defines the shape, even if you cant see it.

If you paint a tree in a field, and it is surrounded by sky, you can see the tree as positive space, and the sky as negative. Where those two meet is the drawing.

When I do a painting, I generally do a dynamic drawing of the subject. That is, no artificial ways to insure likeness. My eye to panel. All corrections are done that way as well. It is allowed to be flawed.

The second stage of a painting (in my convoluted technique) is to do an underpainting with colored gesso. It is really the drawing with a little color. I recommend drawing with black and white gesso, as it is a great way to explore line without color complicating things. Using colored gessoes is sort of an advanced thing. I use water-based gesso, and it dries mad fast so it is easy to go over with corrections.  It sort of brings painting and drawing together.  I save all my old brushes for this.  This is all still drawing to me.

The other line that is more complicated is the inferred line. This is the one that you cannot see, but moves your eye around the picture plane just as well.  If your drawing is done well, it will have inferred line that helps the eye explore, and brings the conversation into a smooth understanding. It can lead to, or away, from things that would be easy for the eye to rest on (consonance and dissonance). This is totally the artist IN the work. (If a batter hits the ball, we follow the trajectory of the ball even if we cant see it.)

Below are some simple examples of what I am trying to say... the crow is a simple line, but there is an inferred line between the head and body, as well as a directive that you finish it in your head.

The second is a small painting with and without the color. In black and white, it is ALL drawing. Lots of examples of what I mean, if not what I said...

There! Have a nice day!