Art Lover

Another opening, another show! Was that Cole Porter? It took me a moment to think, “yes.” It’s from Kiss Me Kate, that wonderful musical spoof on Shakespeare’s even more wonderful The Taming of the Shrew. 

But my main point in this communiqué is that another of my paintings has been selected by the Federation of Canadian Artists, this time for the Autumn Salon show at their Granville Island gallery in Vancouver. It's good that a different jury of curators are the judges for different shows. This offers flexibility and range.

I’m especially pleased that my painting, Art Lover has been chosen because it's one that took on a lot of significance for me as I worked on it.

The painting is both a conceptual work about art’s role in the world and a visual-aesthetic play on art as fantasy confronting art as realism confronting actual art sitting in the actual world. It’s about transformations of the natural world via art as well as the place of art in the world, no matter who the art lover happens to be.

Today's Painting

Art Lover, painting by Janet Strayer (Sold)

You may recognize the fanciful influence of an artful Klimpt tree painted in mural fashion on a wall that’s otherwise rather shabby: a painting in a painting. The wall itself bears witness to its transformation from mundane to inspired. The door that is slightly ajar to your right may be a portal to something real (a hospice, a shelter, a church?) and beyond. It's dark, and the eccentric bag lady prefers the street, especially this spot.

The focal figure is an iconic bag lady who is eating out of a can. In my story, she especially chose this spot, sitting beside this wonderful tree. I think she comes here often, sitting outside with all her worldly goods, enjoying her magnificent tree, claiming her share of sun. Or, like the mass of us who never notice, perhaps she lets it all go by. If art is in the eye of the beholder, what is it that we see? But no matter, even if she is engrossed in her can of food, the art still reaches out to envelop her.

The opulence of Klimpt’s fin-de-siecle Viennese style tree, the columned building perhaps recollecting better days, the solid presence of the bag-lady whom we (erroneously) might not expect to appreciate delicacies of taste ... these are some of the elements that combine in the narrative suggested by this painting.

Your story may be entirely different from mine. Usually, I’m reluctant to offer mine because any art lover always enters a painting and makes it his or her own, seeing and reacting to things that may be new to me... and better than what I offer.

That’s why any artwork that “works” really does live independently of the artist/s who made it. That’s why it continues to affect us outside of the particular or personal contexts in which it was created. There has to be something that reaches out, doesn’t there?

Well, I hope this painting reaches out to some of you.

I started this post out with some lyrics from another time, so I’ll end with others that are much more contemporary.

Today's Thought

Bag lady you gone hurt your back

 Dragging all them bags like that
I guess nobody ever told you

All you must hold on to Is you, is you, is you

--Erykah Badu sings "Bag Lady"

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Saturna Weekend

Last weekend I was sitting on the porch at Saturna, feet up, and reading one of the many old New Yorkers that had collected in the post office during all the months we’d been away.  What bliss! (Hey, you can take the girl away from NY, but you can’t NY away from the girl!)

The sun was strong, and the breeze from the ocean was cool. The ocean itself was unruffled by the breeze, with only a large patterned swirl on its glossy surface showing any movement at all. Spots of darker color here and there where the clouds cast shadows. 

Feeling good despite all the work to do here: the massively overgrown garden, the roses that had made it without me, grown taller and more spindly than they’d ever been, strangled by the high grasses and weeds. The kiwi branches reaching their amazingly long and curling tentacles onto anything for attachment, grasping indiscriminately at wooden gate and roses, not bothering to have any preference.

I’d decided to let the garden go this year. Too late and the weeds are too strong for me to pull. I’ll wait until the colder weather comes and the rains. The hardy flowers will all be gone, but many of the weeds will be too. Then I’ll do what I can to rid the garden of them. That’s my strategy. I feel like Napoleon planning his march on Moscow. I know it’ll get the better of me.

You should see my garden. Rather, you should have seen my garden before it went stark-raving-lunatic wild. I’d planted every bit of it,even laying by hand the little brick path that weaves through it. Not all at once, but each year bringing something new. And it became a work of art. Like Monet’s at Giverney, but of course not at all like Monet’s. Like a garden a city girl would grow who knew nothing about gardening until she planted this one right out of her head. It’s really a lovely place. Or it will be, again.

When I lifted my eyes from the New Yorker to look up, I was stunned. There on the top branches of a tree sat three bald-headed eagles, looking out to sea. I ran to get the binoculars to make sure. Yes, indeed, three of them, silent and still, the air charged around them. 

I took these photos to  show the views I saw without and with binoculars. Trouble is, because it’s not a video, you can’t see the eagles turning their heads, so you can’t see their white caps. The one at left is about to fly off the branch.

What a wonderful moment to be home again. What a magical place this is.

Today's Thought

It is not necessary for eagles to be crows.
-- Sitting Bull  

When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.

 --Winston Churchill

Price and Value at Art Competitions

Lately I've been trying to follow the advice of some art pundits who suggest that entering juried art competitions is a good way to get two birds to sing at the same time. That's my revision to the old "hit-with-one-stone" metaphor. I like birds.

The two metaphoric birds are, in this case, (1) getting one's artwork better known (if your work succeeds in being juried in); and (2) getting an idea of what other kinds of works make the cut, giving you some basis of comparison across different approaches to painting.

The outcome for me  of this competitive enterprise has been good so far.  I've entered works in several competitions during the year and have gotten my work accepted in each 'with congratulations given the many fine entries ...," etc. My latest news is an email notifying me that one of my paintings will be in the Federation of Canadian Artists Still-Life exhibition this September.

Marbles and Wood Box,, oil painting by Janet Strayer

Nice news, especially since this follows right on the heels of the Painting on the Edge exhibition. So, I must be doing something right. Right?

I suppose if you're already well known, you don't need to do this stuff. Though, looking through art-history, one sees just how many now 'famous' artists were cut from the established competitions as well as from sales. Even once successfully/financially established, Monet, for example, moaned about the public exhibition of his artwork.

Still, I have to pause and ask myself what I've learned from this process of entering competitive shows. The thought of dog-shows keeps perversely slipping across my brain, despite my best intentions. Is this really the way to go? Does it fulfill the two objectives I listed above?

I cannot form solid conclusions based on my still limited experience of this aspect of the art world. But I can say I am learning a few things personally.

• Either everyone else in the show is uniformly pricing their work too high, or I am pricing mine too low -- OK, there are some well-known people in these shows, so I expect they have to tag their prices to match their past gallery sales. Still, it's an eye-opener!

• There is absolutely no feedback regarding what makes a work "good", what about it caught the judges' eye, So, there is little to be learned outside of your own personal opinions about each work. Given you don't have access to the null-file (the declined works), you can't form any generalizations other than the wobbly and undefined "it's a matter of taste."  

•  I will do my best to let competition organizers know that it is in everyone's educational interest (artists and the public) that the qualities of at least some works chosen be described -- not relative to others (asking for trouble, indeed), but just in themselves. 

• Given the crowds attending the exhibitions I've been around for, I'd say that exposure to one's work is definitely enhanced. 

• Does this lead to increased sales? I can't yet say. Frankly, I don't really expect my "Little Adolf" painting to fit into most peoples' living room decor. For me, it's more about wanting people to see what I do with the material chosen, so that they may look further at my work, see what I'm capable of doing, and remember me when they might want an artwork.  

The jury is still out on that one. But I'm encouraged to continue this route for awhile.  Hope you'll join me.

Today's Thought 

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

-- Warren Buffett, American Investment Entrepreneur

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Painting On the Edge and Living on the Edge

The opening night was crowded for the art show, Painting on the Edge. Nice, but not a great way to view  the art displayed. It was a relatively small space for so many. In fact, that friends I'd hoped to see there and I never connected. They wrote saying "sorry I missed you", but I'd been there all the time they were. We must have just turned different corners at the same time, missing sight of each other. Beat that! Well, the show's on through Sept. 4th, if you're in town. Thanks so much to far-away friends who wrote with congrats about this. 

That weekend we drove to Seattle to see another great show: music this time. It was the Seattle Opera's production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. It was wonderfully good! Everyone in it was a fine actor and dramatic singer and so with-it. It all fit so well together: the set tableau-design, the dance, the impeccable orchestra that is part of this opera house. Wow! The programme termed it an "American Folk Opera". Of course, like Cavalleria Rusticana is an "Italian Folk Opera".

What's the difference between an opera-opera and a folk-opera? We're not talking "operetta" here with a lighter commitment to libretto and music: a divertissement.  We're talking full-scale dramatic and musical range, with vocal acoustics that demand operatic training to hold and sustain the highs and lows. The cast was up to it. And also up to the jazzy element that makes this so much an American opera.

Seattle Opera: Porgy and Bess

You know how awful some very good opera singers sound when they try to leave their own element and sing jazz or blues or pop? Well, these singers could do it. Even Sportin' Life, whose voice was the least 'operatic' among them, had the jazz and jive to make up for it....and, besides he hit  the operatic money-notes too. All the principals were outstandingly good. This is real opera. No acoustic-boosts in McCaw Opera Hall: it's the voices that penetrate right through the rafters!

We were sitting in front of Speight Jenkins, the long-time director of the Seattle Opera. It was fun during breaks in the performance to listen in on his sotto-voce comments about what a particular performer was like in real life, or how he happened to find just the right person for a role. Well, aside from the in-talk, I'd say Speight knows a thing or two about putting on a good show. The Seattle Opera manages the entire Ring Cycle every four years (though I can't bear to sit through it all)!  Still, we've seen such great performances there, done in such a fresh way. It's such an extraordinary opera venue that we travel to Seattle regularly to catch the productions we can.

I thought it might feel a bit dated to see Porgy and Bess now. I'd seen it at least three different times throughout my adult years, so thought it might have become a bit worn by now. I'd bet many of us could have sung-along with every song in the opera (so glad we didn't!!), .... that's how well-known its tunes are. Though the rhythm and music hit such familiar chords, the only impetus was to LISTEN to this "new-again" work.  I tell you, when real artistry and feeling go into a work.... and into performing a work... wow, it comes alive again, no matter how familiar you think it is.

That's how it is with art, I think. Not only does art make something special (as I've said before), but here's the added flavour: it does so in a way you can keep coming back to again and again, finding nuances you didn't find before, savouring and appreciating things you missed all those other times.

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Art That Moves: Movies Beyond Belief

Art has continued from prehistory to be a powerful way of knowing, feeling, touching, expressing, and effectively communicating something important, something special.  -- Janet Strayer (previous blog)

                                                                                                                                                                  

I’ve been hooked on movies ever since I can remember, and then some. Even as a kid, old black and white movies on TV especially captivated me. For some magical reason, I thought they were more “real” than those in full-color.

There isn’t even a particular movie genre I like best, that’s how indiscriminate I am. Give me westerns, chick-flics, action-movies,, sci-fi, documentaries, thrillers, romance, comedy, Hollywood, Bollywood, foreign, domestic, you name it. 

Maybe this marks a strain of promiscuity that needs restraining.  But I rather like having it.  So I’ll name it something more positive, like a “generous or wide-band receptivity”.  It’s not a bad quality. But it does leave one open to others thinking that you have little taste or discernment.  I’ll risk being branded a cinema slut, though, just to keep the pleasure of my open options!

Not much of a critic in my early days, I was a glutton at a visual-narrative feast.  I’m more of a gourmand now (and I see fewer films, alas).  Still, I like many more movies than a cultivated person probably should. But then, I guess, for good or ill, I have a high quotient for suspension of disbelief -- that radical imaginative facility Keats and others speak of. I did and do respond to material from any direction that engages my mind and feelings and encourages imaginative participation.

Today’s Thought: Imaginative Participation

 Actually, imaginative participation may be a rarer quality in art now than in years past. This isn’t the same as knee-jerk interactive participation in a video game, or the scripted and conditioned responses we may be unable to resist in “tear-jerkers”.

Imaginative participation is more elusive, taking some time to experience and enduring, usually somewhat transformed, in the viewer’s mind . I think it requires some empathic engagement, an intersubjective bridge built from the artwork into the viewers' own esthetic and empathic imaginings. (I've written a chapter draft on empathy in the arts; write if you want to read it.)

I still love going to the movies But, like eating junk food, I don’t always come away satisfied.  Recently, though, I saw two movies whose imagery was enthralling, sending me on a visual- imaginative-esthetic journey that pushed my critical boundaries out and away. They left me full of images rebounding in my mind, full also of enduring feelings and sensations, many of them hard to describe, and a sense of wonder.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams 

Werner Herzog did us all a great favor by filming inside the prehistoric, but only relatively recently discovered, Chauvet Cave in France. Seeing the film was almost better than being there because of the intimate camera work (not special effects). The hand-held cameras provided shifts of perspective and changing contextual viewpoints on the marvelous animal images drawn upon the cave walls.

Human life is present in the Cave without itself being depicted.  The human is present and suggested in the selective ways the animals are seen to move, and in how they affect us as we view them. It’s interesting to me that the humans we focus on in the film aren’t the film crew or scientists (stand-ins for our present-day selves). Instead, we focus on the mysterious originating artist/s -- our human ancestor/s who walked here, envisioning and inscribing images of animal life in which they , too, must have participated.

These images are alive forever in the way only art can be. The human artists are long extinct, their own presence depicted only in handprints, and in one rather amazing blend of human female iconography with an animal head. Yet they, too, continue to live through the art and through us.

This film hardly needed narrative, yet Herzog insisted on providing it, much of it  (beyond the facts provided) seeming superfluous to me.  For me, it’s enough to say:

Look, see, marvel in any way you like at this life that breathes in art  35,000 years after our ancestors breathed the air in this cave. How like them are we?  How like the making of art then is the making of art now? What became of them and what will become of us?

Tree of Life

This film really surprised me. I had not read anything about it when I went to see it. Good thing, given I don’t typically enjoy anything with such a strong religious bent to it. Yet the imagery in this film, its lyrical and moving soundtrack, and the complex, elegiacally restrained emotional pull of it was, despite my admitted reluctance to follow any evangelical line, profoundly beautiful and moving.

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Take it in Stride: Rejection and the Half-Filled Cup

My last posting was pretty bad personally in the luck department, But, as a rational optimist, I simultaneously knew that things could get worse  ...and would, at some point, get better.

They’re better.  I still have the costly and tedious (many months) wait for citizenship ID, still have forms to fill and nagging chores to do, including an unexplained bathroom leak and a Saturna garden wild beyond the “au natural” excuse, plus tax material to collate and file (late because of my travelling), yadayadayada

.  

But, on positive balance….

            I’ve been to a casually lovely garden party with friends;

            I’m settling back into the city;

            I’ve had lots of good news about my art.

My art news is exciting.  Here are the highlights:

·      I’m gearing up for the Painting on the Edge international exhibit at the Federation Gallery, Granville Island, Vancouver. It shows from Aug 16 through Sept. 4, 2011. More about this below.

·      I’ve just been notified as one of the “winners” of a juried international drawing competition. My work, Pardon My Eye, will be in the book, Strokes of Genius 4 : Exploring Line (publication date: October, 2012). This book is one in the acclaimed North Light Books series celebrating art.

·      Three of my original printworks (an intaglio, a traditional etching, and a photo- etching) were juried into an August show of contemporary printmaking at the Federation Gallery in Vancouver. Sorry I missed the show, but I was still in Europe.

·      I’ve received confirmation of a new solo show, Child Out of Time … Reborn,  at the Seymour Art Gallery in North Vancouver. It will open in April, 2012. More about this show later.  The Seymour is an attractive and welcoming gallery in a very nice setting.  This is especially good news given the recent closure of two more very big galleries in Vancouver.

·      I’m getting (fingers crossed) a great new studio space of my own at a “Vancouver Soho” location that showcases a lot of terrific art and artists.  I think my paintings will thrive in it .

                                      

Regarding  Painting on the Edge, I was surfing the web for the prospectus on it and came across another artist’s blog. It was interesting to me because she showed some lovely paintings but lamented that, despite repeated entries during the 9 years this international show of “cutting edge” art  has existed, her work has never been accepted.  Behaving like a sensible (as well as sensitive) artist, she tried to analyze why, listing reasons like “just another pretty picture”, “nowhere near adventurous enough”,  and  she urged herself to have more nerve.

I don’t know Charlene, the artist. I just chanced upon her work. But I really liked her attitude and her wistful recognition that yet another painting of hers would be assigned to her personal Salon des Refusés

At the same time, I read a column by Chris Tyrell, one of the art-and-enterprise pundits in Vancouver. Spinning off from recent art gallery closures here (and elsewhere), he thinks the workable contemporary model is for artists to manage their own sales directly to the buyer. This can happen one-on-one or via artist collectives that invite the public in.

I’ve always liked the direct-sales model because, by eliminating the middle broker,  it keeps the costs low for buyers. But the big problem for direct-sales is publicity to get the public into your studio or collective setting to see the work. That’s what the galleries presumably did. Another route Chris suggests is for artists to participate in art auctions for charity (i.e., the business of charity).  

Today’s Thought

I take rejection as someone blowing a bugle in my ear to wake me up and get going, rather than retreat.
-- Sylvester Stallone 

OK, that’s Rambo talking, not me.  Still, thinking about Charlene’s comments about works rejected for the Painting on the Edge exhibition made it clear, once again, that the Salon des Refusés has always had much good work relegated to it –- a point most artists know but keep forgetting when it involves their own works.

Knowing doesn’t keep you from still keenly feeling what you feel. But knowing is essential for dealing with your feelings in a constructive way.  It’s as important for me to remember Charlene’s attitude as it is to attend to the constant searching and striving that also seems to be part of my own artist’s way.

Personal Musings on the Artist’s Way ... or some things I'm learning along the way 

1. Courage has to be part of it, as do respect for, and interest in, technical skills and phenomenological exploration. For me, some psychological exploration is usually part of the process too.

2. Persistence is essential if making art is what you want to do. No loopholes: work, work, work. Do it for the challenge of it, for the joy of it, for the learning, for the practice, for the discovery, for the accomplishment of materializing the immanent that started you off in the first place. Do it (don't just think it). To paraphrase Roethke: it's only by going that we know where we have to go. 

3. Perfection is a myth, and can be destructive. Do it because it’s worth doing; make it because it’s worth making. Yes, good work is better than bad work (who’s doing the judging?), but some work is better than no work. At least it helps you gain your own basis for judgement.  Mistakes are not bad works; they offer insights into the process of making things good and even, upon occasion, mistakes provide portals into something new and gainful … which bring us back to the importance of persistence and courage.

4. The bottom line is not about what galleries or juried exhibitions want . It’s not even entirely about what you want (to get into a show, to make a sale, to have the work admired, etc.). It’s about what the art (the work at hand) wants. This isn’t a mystical notion. It’s a gut-level reality of working on and with an artwork. 

5. No one can really take over for you (even if you should want this). You have to learn what you have to learn, all along the way. That's not to say there aren't some good masters to learn from (even the dead ones), some good mentors if you're lucky, and lots of different techniques to make your own. But here's the discovery that I think all of us come to somewhere along the path.

Even as I write these insights based upon my own experience, I have to tell you that I'm not 'there' yet. These same points that I've come to understand aren't fully integrated into my functioning. I break down, I get sore and sad and disappointed and frustrated. I want things outside of myself and am as susceptible to market pressures and comparative judgements as are most people. But I really do believe in the points I'm making, have worked to come to them, and use them as guides whenever I'm off-track. So, I thought I'd share them.

Today's Discovery
Every artist is self-taught.

Is the work you’re doing really taking you somewhere? Are you getting right in there and staying with it, however confusing at the moment, figuring out whatever needs doing and having (or getting) the skills to do it? Is the work to which you’ve committed your full attention and energy (certainly for all the time you’re doing it)  authentically what wants/needs to become materialized? If not, stop: go and tinker, paint as recreation or decoration (which I also like doing), be happy.

It’s a full and large palette that lives in us and that the world presents: fuller and larger than any one artist or art appreciator can handle. Art has continued from prehistory to be a powerful way of knowing, feeling, touching, expressing, and effectively communicating something important, something special.

That something special can be small or large, simple or complex. But it always hits the mark and makes the viewer stop, perhaps gape, and react.  What that something IS, I cannot name in the expansive human-world relationship, be it beauty, truth, a horror faced head-on, some construction of meaningfulness, or whatever.  But it matters. And it demands of the artist whatever vision, techniques and process are most authentic and evocative of it.

So, do you want to see the painting I submitted and that was juried into the show?  It’s entitled Little Adolf, and here’s my “artist’s statement” that accompanies it:

A malevolent historical moment embodied in the concentrated tyrannical rage

of a tiny personage, Little Adolf is a grown temper-tantrumming toddler, the

airplanes stuck in his head  and the vortex he creates referencing the fury he

unleashed in WW II. How can one depict such a dis-integrated and distorted personality? 

Personally scarred by the horrors of WW II, and reminded of this

in every contemporary tyrant, I wanted to confront the interior behind the

mask of Hitler. This is the ironical image that emerged. Its format is deliberately

small in size 

Today’s Painting

            Sorry, I don’t mean to taunt. But the image isn’t available because the gallery has it. I thought I had a photo on this computer (not so). I will insert it once I’m all together again with the stuff around me.

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