The Feedback: What it Means for an Artist

It was a FABULOUS experience at this past weekend’s Eastside Culture Crawl. What a misnomer. It’s hardly a “crawl”. More like an explosion! So many energetic and diverse people interested in art attended. The buzz at my open studio was humming for three days. 

It's very gratifying for artists to hear appreciative comments about and reactions to works they’ve created. How can one remain blasé when hearing (and overhearing) from strangers things like “it’s absolutely amazing”; “never seen anything like it”; “it’s so beautiful it makes me cry”, “gorgeous”.  Of course, there are also the (happily, rare) comments like, "I wouldn't even put this in a garage sale." 

For me, such feedback works as a validation,  a reminder of how art really connects when it communicates. I work alone. My intention when painting, is to work on what and how I want to paint, regardless of how it will be received..  Afterward, it's thrilling to know a painting has hit the mark for someone viewing it. It's a great feeling to sell a painting. It's a very bad feeling to have one's art rejected for a show. You put yourself out there as an artist. You feel naked. BUT the challenge is always to pursue  one's own vision. Be careful of minding too much about the seduction of positive or the hurt of negative comments. Accept  criticism that is useful in your own terms.

Some of the visitors to this open show were painters, themselves. Their appreciation and comments (the ones they let me hear, anyway) were a tribute to their keenly interested eye and generous spirit. Their many technical questions were a pleasure to answer, knowing it fed our mutual curiosity about artistic process.

Many children came with their families, and I was delighted to see that a good number of them really looked for themselves. Some even led their parents over to works and pointed at things. I didn’t want to intrude on those sessions, but I wondered what they saw with their perceptively  “uneducated” eyes. So, after talking with the parents a bit about a painting that interested them, I asked one 7-year-old girl what she liked, and she had no problem walking over to a very different painting and pointing to it. “So tell me about it; what is it that you like in this one?,” I asked. She couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me (an adult she didn't know),  but whispered something in her mother’s ear.  “She says ‘because it’s beautiful,'"reported her mom. What more could I ask!

I’m pleased, of course, that I sold a good number of works. But there’s more to it for me, and for most of us, at such events. Thank you for looking, for interacting with the art,  for your many and diverse reactions and insights. Thank you for your keen interest and your appreciation

 @ janetstrayer.com

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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Who Am I? and Why Me?

I'm back in Vancouver, a not too shabby spot on the planet to land after a long time in Europe living, eating, loving, and painting ... and blogging about it. We drove from Morruzze to Paris to spend a few days exploring and saying a fond goodbye to Europe, staying in a charming little hotel in the Marais (home to Rabelais).
Today's Thought
Many a trip continues long after the movement in time and space have ceased.
-- John Steinbeck

My re-entry to North America was a very bumpy one, though. I had  had my passport, wallet, cards, etc. stolen in Paris, one of my favorite cities, leaving a cloud hanging over me. I'll spare you the frustrating and exhausting details. But I arrived in Vancouver feeling like a nasty pointed finger was coming down from a dark cloud in the sky and poking right at me.

What did I do wrong? Did I have too much fun in Europe? Did I not mix in sufficient guilt with my dollups of pleasure? Was there some capricious universal principle I'd offended that needed appeasement?  Did I need to curb my enthusiasm?
Another Thought

Travel penetrates your consciousness but not in a rational way.

--Milton Glaser

OK. I know bad things happen to good people. And I'm not even that good. But a whole string of bad things happening? Even after arriving home and the myriad of things you have to do just to re-connect the phone and get the house running, the string of mishaps continued. There were appliances that broke, a computer glitch, things found in the suitcase that had spilled, things not found in the suitcase that should have been there, and more things misplaced or lost in the confusion that was me.

Each day brought a new lament.  I couldn't shake the feeling that it was not only jet-lag I had to endure. but a cloud of misfortune hovering around me. If Ray Bradbury's right about much of the fun of travelling being in the esthetic of lostness, then I should be having a ball! Not so. Lost is how I feel... more now than when travelling. This lost-ness is too concrete and blunt, too externally manufactured (though of course my mindlessness contributed to it), too much of a confederacy of nuisances boiling over into problems to give me anything but a  headache!
Yet Another Possibility
I love to travel but hate to arrive.

--Albert Einstein

Who knows? So, I've been laying low for a while, getting my bearings, cautiously doing what I can each day to put things in order. Trying not to be overwhelmed by the list of things I "have to" do, from getting services reconnected to searching for an affordable studio space in the city.

I have a mid August deadline for a big group juried art exhibit  I'm part of. Hah! it's called Painting On the Edge!  That's where I am right now: on the edge. I've learned (and travelling is part of it)  that artful living involves living earnestly but lightly, intensely but without a heavy footprint. I need to find that way of living here at home....and soon.
Today's Final Thought

He who would travel happily must travel light.

--Antoine de Saint Exupéry

I'm still, trying to collect the bits of light together that make me recognize my own true life while I'm also in the process of reconstructing my official identity here. The sun, at least, is shining graciously. I hear neighbors across the lane having a BBQ. And today, I actually found my long-lost camera!

Tommorrow I venture forth to see some of the friends I've missed.  It's a garden-party. I will try to curb my enthusiasm, just in case.

Once my computer comes back from the repair shop, I'll plan to insert some homecoming artwork for this blog.

Write me, insert comments please. I need some anchor lines.

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The Moon and the Misbegotten: Lunar Eclipse and the Hockey-Riot

Two big events happened yesterday in different parts of the world that are home to me.
There was an extraordinary and beautiful lunar eclipse, a luna rossa, and I saw it through our bedroom window in Le Marche! What surprised me, aside from the lovely red-gold cast of the light bouncing off the moon, was the softness of the earth's shadow on it.

photo of June 15,2011 lunar eclipse by space.com

The second event happened inVancouver, BC, my long-term home.
The Vancouver Canucks, after a 3-3 tie with the Boston Bruins, lost the Stanley Cup. It was a bad loss, too: 4-0! I could feel the heartache drift across the North American continent and reach all the way across the Atlantic to here. So close... and yet so....defeated. I have to whisper that I'm not really a hockey fan, but even I was very glumly disappointed! My Canadian hometown team, the Canucks, had tempted the odds by coming so close to winning what even an adopted-Canadian, like me, knows is the fabled chalice of the Stanley Cup.

Though I shared in the disappointment, what I didn't feel was the anger that ensued and ensnared fans. A riot broke out in downtown Vancouver, a typically law-abiding and pretty sane place, and the pictures I see of it are awful: cars set afire and overturned, bottes thrown, looting, police in riot gear, tear gas. But hockey, man, that's evidently cutting close to the bone.


I live here in Italy right now, and in my present world there was this exceptional lunar eclipse -- the first I'd ever seen so clearly. I take great pleasure from that very particular experience. It was a leap to a larger dimension: a window on the movements of a universe.
Today's Painting

Starsoup for Supper, painting by Janet Strayer

But what a nasty thump of landing back to earth was the news of the post-game Vancouver riots. It's my  home and it's such an attractive and livable city, or so I continue to believe. I'm sure some deft or daft heaven-gazer will blame it on the moon!
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