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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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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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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