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
-- 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.
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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