Rounder Studio Stuff--Nancy Charak

Minimalism at Woman Made Bare Essentials

2011-09-13T10:49:00.001-05:00

Nice, very nice, my work and the work of these other fine artists juried into Woman Made Gallery's Bare Essentials Minimalism in the 21st Century, by Ingrid Fassbender.

Note that I have made bold not only my name in the list but my fellow exhibitors in the "Marks In Time" group. We exhibit together as a three-fer, email us at marksintime@gmail.com

Bare Essentials: Minimalism in the 21st Century

We thank Ingrid Fassbender for jurying entries for the "Bare Essentials: Minimalism in the 21st Century" exhibition on display from November 4 to to December 22, 2011. After reviewing 276 artworks, she selected the work of 26 artists.

We congratulate Grazyna Adamska-Jarecka, Salwa Aleryani, ATYL, Carrie M. Becker, Jan Blythe, Marian Carow, Nancy Charak, Patricia Schnall Gutierrez, Jeanne Heifetz, Martha Hopkins, Carrie Johnson, Katie Kehoe, Pauline Kochanski, Lindsey Landfried, Diane McGregor, Elizabeth Mead, Anna E. Mikiolay, Amanda Damico, Phuong Pham, Ulli Rooney, Mary Rork-Watson, Lisa Flowers Ross, Yvette Kaiser Smith, Sharon Swidler, Asha Tamirisa, and Erwina Ziomkowska.

Exhibition Dates: November 4 - December 22, 2011

Opening Reception: November 4, 2011 / 6-9pm

Greatest Artist Ever?

2011-09-06T11:44:00.000-05:00

I want to dive into this one. Who is the greatest visual artist ever and why? I invite artists and thinkers to offer up their opinions on this.
My nominee is Goya.
It is a much overused trope, especially in this modern era of the artists' statement, that art is about truth. Goya tells the truth about war, disaster and misery, to which he had a front seat.

"Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra, a series of eighty prints depicting the consequences of the nineteenth-century Spanish War for Independence are unbearable, but they are not meant to simply document atrocities. The real paradox of horrors transformed into painting or sculpture or print is that art does not let the savagery have the last word." —Stephen Vincent Kobasa is a writer and activist who contributes occasional essays on art and society to the New Haven Advocate.

Goya, 3rd of May, 1808.

Goya started his art career by making "cartoons" for tapestries that depicted idyllic happy dancing scenes. After the images were converted to fabric, the oil paintings were rolled up and set aside. All this to our benefit as those paintings now grace the Prado.

Goya became a court painter to the Hapsburgs that ruled Spain, managing to depict them despite their pendulous jaws and unhandsome looks with some flattery. He also made devotional paintings that grace cathedrals in Spain.

Events in Spain, however, gave him a front row seat on horror and treachery. The Hapsburgs were lured out of Spain to France by Napoleon Bonaparte, who then installed his brother Joseph on the throne. An uprising by common Spaniards ensued with horrible massacres by mercenaries loyal to France. A monstrous civil war ensued. Eventually, the Spanish patriots succeeded, the Hapsburgs and the church prelates came back to rule Spain with an even harsher hand, giving no gratitude to the populists for saving the country. The argument can be made, not really germane to this discussion of Goya, that stable government did not exist in Spain until after the death of Franco (1975).

To sum it up, Goya's career spanned the 19th century, he moved from the depiction of idyllic country scenes, flattering royal portraits, devotional paintings, the Caprichos, the Disasters of War, ending with the Black Paintings.

As survivors of the hapless 20th century, after Auschwitz, Dachau, Cambodia, Somalia, Goya tells us about our darkest, deepest human selves.

I Learned a Museum Lesson

2011-09-03T12:52:00.000-05:00

I took myself to the Art Institute of Chicago the other day. I have a usual path that I take, prints and drawings, then American paintings, then the modern wing. This means that I walk past China, Japan and quickstep through South Asian art in the railroad bridge to get to what I am in a hurry to see. However, finding myself in the place last week and having seen prints, drawings, American, modern several times this summer, I decided that I would go to China and Japan.
Part of the reason I would seemingly rush past is that the Art Institute puts the older more traditional art at the front of the gallery. Thus I almost missed this amazing bamboo basket. To call this a basket is potentially a serious mistake, it's a sculpture, it's an amazing piece of art.

Knot, 2007, by Homma Hideaki

Furthermore, it's a mistake on my part to assume that if it's old it's boring. This is one of my favoritest pieces in the China exhibit. It's a clay model of a pigsty and latrine from the Han dynasty era. It is about 12"x12"by 8", in the center is a sow suckling her piglets.

Han Dynasty

Lesson, slow down, look.

Helen Frankenthaler is My Lodestar

2011-08-25T11:30:00.000-05:00

Cri de Coeur 5951, Nancy Charak, 2010, watercolor, prismacolor pencil on unfinished fabricated birchwood panel, 18”x24”

Tales of Genii III, Helen Frankenthaler, 1998, fifty-three-color woodcut from 18 woodblocks (17 maple, 1 mahogany) and 2 stencils on gray TGL handmade paper,” 47x42” (119.4x106.7cm), Edition 36, Artist’s proofs 14.

I can honestly say that there’s a very real sense in which I have never not known about Helen Frankenthaler and her work. My mother was a great admirer of Helen’s art, returned from a vacation in New York gushing about what she had seen when I was still in grammar school. To my sorrow that catalogue has disappeared. A good friend from junior and senior high school had Frankenthaler’s work in her house, along with Picassos and Kandinskys.

I choose Helen Frankenthaler because she is the head of a pantheon of abstract expressionists; to name a few, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Linda Karshan, Sandra Blow, Vija Celmins and Katherina Grosse. Purity of thought and action on the canvas emanate from Frankenthaler’s work, even if that work is a 53 color woodcut.

The Frankenthaler woodcuts astonish because they continue her pattern of breaking rules and ignoring conventional modes of working art media. She is widely credited with being the first to work with unprimed canvases, allowing oil paint to halo and stain, and in so doing, to influence a number of artists, Jules Olitski and Sam Francis as foremost examples.

Helen Frankenthaler is my lodestar. I keep two quotes from her displayed in my studio, “A really good picture looks as if it’s happened all at once. It’s an immediate image. For my own work when a picture looks labored and you can read in it—well she did this, and then she did that, and then she did that—there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me.”[1]

In the description of the exhibit of the woodcuts at the National Gallery of Australia’s website, she is quoted, “There are no rules, that is one thing I say about every medium, every picture. . .that is how art is born, that is how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules, that is what invention is about. “[1]

[1] Ibid.

[1] http://nga.gov.au/Exhibition/Frankenthaler/Default.cfm?MnuID=4#_ftn1

Berlin Museums

2011-05-07T13:59:00.000-05:00

A stroll through the Neues Museum and the Pergamon in Berlin, April 2011. ">Berlin Museums

Monet Water Lilies

2011-05-07T11:48:00.000-05:00

April in Paris at the L'Orangerie, what could be better? Monet Water Lilies Orangerie

We're Not Going Back. . .

2011-04-03T13:01:00.000-05:00

Two of the greatest technological revolutions in the history of the world go largely unheralded, the flour mill powered by electricity and the washing machine also powered by electricity. No other inventions have done more to liberate women, with the possible exception of the birth control pill. And I might add, we’re not going back, no woman I know yearns to get back on her hands and knees and grind corn for five hours a day to feed just five other people, and no woman I know wants to stand over a washtub with a washboard ever again.

Nicola in Edible Geography talks about this liberation, after a lengthy description of the process of grinding the wet maize to make tortillas.

“Mexican women that I have talked to are very explicit about this trade-off. They know it doesn’t taste as good; they don’t care. Because if they want to have time, if they want to work, if they want to send their kids to school, then taste is less important than having that bit of extra money, and moving into the middle class. They have very self-consciously made this decision. In the last ten years, the number of women working in Mexico has gone up from about thirty-three percent to nearly fifty percent. One reason for that—it’s not the only reason, but it is a very important reason—is that we’ve had a revolution in the processing of maize for tortillas.”

Similarly Hans Rosling in a Ted.com video lecture discusses how the washing machine saves so much time and womanly labor that women can now read.

As I've said, we're not going back.

Art Has Power...

2011-04-03T11:39:00.000-05:00

Judy Taylor Maine Mural

From Visual Art Source, Weekly Newsletter, April 1, 2011, comments by Editor Bill Lasarow,

"We have to go back to the early 1930s for comparable acts taken with similar reasoning. The whitewashing of David Alfaro Siqueros' "America Tropical" in Los Angeles was prompted by his symbolic representation of a hovering American eagle poised to peck the life out of a crucified Mexican laborer. Diego Rivera clashed with his patrons John D. and Nelson Rockefeller over the content of "Man at the Crossroads," which included a portrait of Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. The mural was removed from their Rockefeller Center building in New York. After recent controversies over the painting out of a partially completed mural by Blu's in Los Angeles and the removal of a video by the late David Wojnorowicz from an exhibition in Washington, D.C., perhaps it was just a matter of time before elected politicians would begin to interpret their mandates in the spirit of a conquering medieval army. Destroy all signs and symbols of the previous regime, permit only images that proclaim the power and glory of the new ruler. As Mount Holyoke College (Maine) President Lynn Pasquarella wrote, "... The act of removing images commemorating Maine's history itself conjures thoughts of rewriting history prevalent in totalitarian regimes." The grand historical spirit of barbarism is on the loose in America."

I say to Judy Taylor, YOU ARE IN VERY GOOD COMPANY.

Compassion is a Verb

2011-04-03T11:17:00.000-05:00

My thoughtful brother sent me this as we have been engaged in an on-going conversation about the condition of the world.

“As I was reading the article the author James Baraz references two of my night stand authors Thich Nhat Hanh and Alan Watts. For those of you who need a little background Nhat Hanh writes an excellent book (amongst others) entitled Peace in Every Step where he reminds us to be "mindful" of our moments and our experiences and to create positive experiences for our selves and others. Watts (the true ex-hippie philosopher) came to my attention in the sixties in a now defunct publication entitled Earth. In an editorial that sticks in my mind to this day he elaborated on the theme that "everyman is an artist" that the ability to "throw paint" or play music was comparable to a lawyer presenting his case in court, or a social worker focusing a families therapy towards enlightenment. His book entitled the Wisdom of Insecurity tackles the issue (and I truly paraphrase) of what tools and philosophies do we go through life with when we know "no one gets out alive".”

My brother references James Baraz’s post in the Huffington Post, in which Baraz says:

“Accepting that anything can happen at any time helps us understand that life is out of our control. As much as we want to feel secure, events will unfold as they will. And in this physical plane, events do not happen in a vacuum. They affect everything around them. Buddhists call this interconnectedness. One metaphor describing how a small change in one location can have a major influence in another is the famous "butterfly effect" of chaos theory: A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can alter the path of a tornado in Texas. In a complex system a change in one condition can produce a result in another part of the system. As we're seeing now, what happens to those far away can ultimately affect those near and dear to us.”

and

“You may want to do something and don't know quite where to start. As one of my teachers says, "Action absorbs anxiety." If you let yourself feel the caring and connection that comes from your heart, you may find ways to put that compassion into action. Meditation master and social activist Thich Nhat Hanh teaches us that compassion is a verb. Whether it's sending support or prayers to the victims in Japan or working to raise consciousness to the nuclear issue here, what you do in response to this situation can lessen feelings of helplessness. What you do matters and affects us all.” (ITALICS MINE FOR EMPHASIS)

Marks In Time, an Exhibit Proposal

2011-01-15T14:00:00.000-06:00

Marian Carow

Artists Marian Carow, Sharon Swidler and Nancy Charak, create works of art that illuminate lines in subtle, minimal, yet complex ways. Carow, Swidler and Charak discovered that their artworks relate in ways that engender visual conversations. This exhibit proposal is that series of conversations.

This exhibit proposal arose from an awareness that our different approaches to art making nonetheless have fascinating overlaps. After a number of meetings and discussions with each other about both the art work and of our ways of thinking, we decided that we wanted to collaborate on a group exhibit.

Nancy Charak

Marian: My drawing process is distillation and expression, putting media to paper, intuitively tapping into a continually evolving vocabulary of lines, marks, smudges, scribbles which populate the silence of the paper plane.

Sharon: My images are navigations through an environment of meditative space. Space and lines create a diary of time, delineating both timeliness and timelessness.

Nancy: What is necessary for my art is that it flows from inside and allows the work to spring from my entire set of experiences and sensibilties as an artist. I then trust that my hand and eye make art that says to the viewer, "here look at this, make of it what you will."

Sharon Swidler

Life Drawing

2010-10-30T13:29:00.002-05:00

On an impulse last Sunday, I went to a life-drawing session at Alan Emerson Hick's studio in the Ravenswood area of Chicago, with Judith Roth. To be honest, I have not drawn from a life model, indeed a life anything for a very, very long time, essentially since graduate school. I did not even have anything resembling a sketchbook in my studio.

My way of working for the longest time, my process, has been to work directly with the painting, with the drawing. The painting or drawing and I engage in a kind of dialogue or what used to be called worked organically. From those conversations I have made a lot of art for years.

My undergraduate art-education background is rooted in one of the American successors of the Bauhaus; design, photography were hailed as the modern forms, life-drawing and crafts were sneeringly derided as "beaux-arts" and "basket-weaving," respectively, by my professors.

Then in graduate school, having been admitted, a professor in my major group insisted that I did not have sufficient life-drawing classes, so I was shunted off to what was essentially a remedial class with the freshmen. Graduate school, even then, was expensive, those extra classes would have constituted a delay in graduation and extra dollars of tuition. Another professor poached me to his group and I never looked back at the need to do more life-drawing. I began the process of working directly as an abstract expressionist with my paintings and drawings.

I should add that it might be thought presumptuous to attend a life-drawing session with Judith, who is one of the best at looking at the human form and bringing it to life on canvas or paper.

I learned a valuable life-lesson in this life-drawing session. Amongst my conclusions, wow, it's really really hard, it takes time and patience to learn to reproduce relatively faithfully the illusion of the human form with your hand and eye. Really, really hard.

I learned that the observation of the model in front of me added a third kind of voice to the dialogue that existed between myself and the substrate. Looking at the model, at the drawing, at my hand, listening to my art-voice, the one that makes seemingly a thousand million decisions at once, slowed my head and hand almost to a crawl. I had to reconcile the visual space between the model and the drawing paper AND my need to make a meaningful image that made some sort of compositional sense, AND had some interest.

I Want to See More of This

2010-10-27T21:11:00.001-05:00

From Art Knowledge News

I want to see more of this at museums in my city. Much, much more. I want to see children enjoying art by making it in the museums. The top photo is from the MOCA in Los Angeles in front of a Frank Stella painting. The middle is one that I took in Paris at the Picasso Museum, and the bottom picture I took at the British Museum in the Assyrian gallery.

Sitting for a Portrait by Judith Roth

2010-10-27T20:27:00.000-05:00

Nancy Charak

Portrait as a mostly done Work In Progress

Portrait as finished and framed

Artist--Judith Roth

I served as Judith Roth's muse in a collaboration for the October ARC Gallery Members' Show, just past.

Work at Sapere Gallery, Chicago

2010-10-26T20:16:00.001-05:00

Cri de Coeur

From the Cri de Coeur series, 24"x18", watercolor on birchwood panel.

With the help of Scott Simons, this painting, one of six, delivered to Gary Marr, gallerist of Sapere Gallery, 1579 N. Milwaukee, Chicago, last week.

I've been working with watercolor lately, for about a year, more examples are at my website, rounderstudio.com.

I find an immediacy and a brilliance that excite me in these pieces. To get the intense color I have been mixing the pigments myself and just flooding the surface with it. The substrate is just a birchwood panel, totally unprepared, no gesso, no ground, nothing between the paint and the wood.

The panels are hand made by Joel Fromer of Art Services.

There will be more pieces, I just obtained 35 additional panels for my next year's anticipated production.

Juried into the Art Loop Open--Counting Down

2010-10-11T19:13:00.000-05:00

Counting down to Friday, October 15th at 5:00 pm. Today the Art Loop Open Facebook page sent out a video which literally displays all 191 of the pieces in the show in 1 minute 41 seconds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CCbRW4PdLo

So, don't blink, or you'll miss my piece, as so far, I've missed it. Makes my head spin to try to find it. Oh well.

Block 37, south west corner of State and Randolph, Chicago

Juried into Chicago Art Loop Open

2010-10-10T10:48:00.000-05:00

"Rainbow's End", Nancy Charak, artist

This is going to be an interesting set of experiences coming up in the next couple of weeks. My piece, "Rainbow's End," has been selected by the jurors of the Chicago Art Loop Open. The opening is Friday, October 15 at 5:00 pm. simultaneously at ten venues around the Chicago loop. My piece, "Rainbow's End," will be at Block 37.
The organizers have set up a system of voting via cellphone texting or an app downloaded to a smartphone. Visitors can vote for as many artists as they wish, but only once for each artist. The organizers clearly wish to avoid the likelihood that us artists would have encouraged all of our friends to vote over the internet, art-work sight unseen. The organizers want the public to come and see the art, to look at it all in person and make informed decisions and ultimately to show off good art.
Another part of what makes this interesting is that I personally know of a large number of very good artists who were not juried in; and yet, when I look at the list of acceptances, I'm delighted to be in such good company, Jason Messinger (at Palmer House), Renee McGinnis (at Merchandise Mart), Sandy Holubow (at Block 37), Jesse Howard (at Block 37), Pamela Johnson (at theWit Hotel), Beth Kamhi (at Hard Rock Hotel). My scan of the art pieces submitted via the artists list on the website signals the possibility that the jurors worked to select a wide range of art across the Chicago art-making spectrum. I'll know better about this as I work my way through all ten venues.

Caffeine IV at Murphy-Hill Gallery Chicago--part 2

2010-09-26T14:47:00.000-05:00

Fiber Piece by Trish Williams

Anne Farley Gaines

Ruyell Ho

Piece by Kim Laurel

Caffeine IV at Murphy-Hill Gallery Chicago

2010-09-26T13:42:00.002-05:00

I attended the opening of the Caffeine IV group exhibit at Murphy-Hill Gallery last night. A stellar line-up of who's who in Chicago art exhibited as many as three pieces of work each in this huge, spectacular space seemingly designed for museum work, in the old main Sears-Roebuck building in Garfield Park.

Deidre Fox

Marian Carow

Sharon Swidler

Judith Roth

Photographing Artwork in the Museum Good or Bad?

2010-09-21T20:05:00.000-05:00

Today’s New York Times has an article entitled “When It’s Illegal to Photograph Artwork,” by Jennifer Saranow Schultz. The topical conclusion is framed as the answer to this question asked of lawyers. The lawyerly answer, of course, totally parrots copyright law, 70 years. Ms. Schultz failed to ask museums why they forbid photography.

I think this is a topic worth pursuing and questioning. My operative philosophy as a working artist is that I look at the art of other artists, both my contemporaries and from history, with great intensity. I say directly in my personal artist’s statement without any hesitation that I stand on the shoulders of my artist predecessors.

The Art Institute of Chicago’s recent Matisse exhibit not only forbad photography, but sketching. When queried as to why, their answer was that they were concerned about dangers posed by messy sketching materials.

Given that museums are desperate for money, and given how blockbuster exhibits relentlessly push viewers into the gift shops, I think that the stronger reason for banning reproduction is obvious.

Ownership Isn't Everything

2010-09-16T19:34:00.000-05:00

This is an interesting quote from an article in The Art Newspaper by Maxwell Anderson, entitled “Ownership Isn’t Everything,” concerning the utility of moving art from venue to venue in and out of circulation, so that more of us can be exposed to more art, with less static reliance on standing collections.

“If we gather art for research and display, we don’t have to own it. We can commission it, or we can borrow and return it. Stewardship is the new normal—ownership matters less and less in the increasingly restless worlds of both bits and atoms, as ebooks and timeshares have proved. Museums have to devote the largest part of their budgets to caring for the permanent collection, but the public is increasingly demanding impermanent experiences, such as loan exhibitions, and tires of seeing the same works in the same context year after year. While as museum curators and directors we shake our heads at this dismaying phenomenon, and make pilgrimages to see familiar works in familiar places, that covetousness is becoming quaint. In an era of jet travel, careful packing and shipping, high-quality digital reproductions, and licensing versus buying, the enjoyment of static collections is less important to most people than the enjoyment of works not before seen, or not before seen in combination with other works.”

Repetition, Bad Habit or Not?

2010-09-05T10:23:00.007-05:00

From one of my favorite bloggers: Ancient Artist: Developing an Art Career After 50, in a post labeled Repetition How Do You Know It Isn't a Bad Habit? (Drawing, "I Found It Just Like Anything Else, I Stopped Looking," by Nancy Charak, 44"x30", oil wash, oil stick, prismacolor, graphite on 90# Stonehenge.)

Key quotes: How do you know if what you are doing is part of your creative process or a habit you need to break?

Do I feel passionate about this or is it just fun to play with pretty colors?

Am I mimicking or exploring? Mimicking is making duplicates of the same thing, "If you copy - you have two of same thing, who needs it?" Exploring is looking for depth.

Ancient Greek Sculptures NOT Monochromatic!

2010-08-30T19:56:00.007-05:00

Actually art-historians suspected this a long time ago from the paint flecks buried in the cracks of ancient sculptures, but orthodoxies die hard. Now the notion that Greek antiquities were polychromatic to the point of gaudiness is gaining acceptance.

The first picture is one that I took in 2004 at the British Museum of the Elgin Marbles taken from the Acropolis, from the running frieze. The second photo is a color rendering of possible coloration. You can bet that looking up at the Acropolis from the streets below in Athens must have been a delight to see some 2,500 years ago.

And once again a hat tip to Kottke.org, http://kottke.org/10/08/painted-greek-statues.

Imagine what Michelangelo's David or Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa would be had they been modeled on and inspired by full color antiquities. We'd all be living now in a very different post-Renaissance world.

Call for Papers on Artists' Statements?

2010-08-26T19:22:00.003-05:00

This is an interesting thing to me; I certainly mean no disrespect to the serious intentions of the editors of this academic journal, the Special Issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies. It is a call for papers about the Artists' Statements: Origins, Intentions, Exegesis by art historians at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. As a practicing artist I am constantly called upon to produce an artist’s statement. When I am asked to provide one, what I really want to say is as follows:

“It is not my responsibility to tell you, the viewer, what to think when looking at my artwork. It is not my problem. This is not, however, to imply that I’m saying ‘there’s nothing to see here, move along,’ like a Star Wars droid. What I make are maps, signposts, guidance of my journeys into unknown places, into terra incognita, because I never know where my art pieces will take me, let alone you.”

My problems with artists’ statements are many. First and foremost, they slow down and impede the visual process, the important part of actually looking at the artwork. All too often I see art viewers moving along reading title cards and statements with more care than they give to the actual visuals of the art works. Reading and language are so important in our culture that they take primacy of place and thus in an visual art setting, care needs to be taken to emphasize the art over the written verbiage. Another problem is that all too often the artist’s statement doesn’t match the work, or even more confusing the statements are extraordinarily similar but the work is totally different.

Visual art is meant to be looked at, for more than a glancing second. Viewers need to slow down, take their time and stop reading. Reading does not enhance visual art.

I certainly agree with the statement in the call for papers: “For centuries artists have made statements about their work in order to explain and promote it or to construct narratives about its origins and their intentions. The artist’s statement is now an integral – and taught - component of contemporary practice, and a seemingly incontrovertible primary source for art and cultural historians, literary critics, anthropologists and philosophers. However, artists have written about themselves and their work in many contexts and formats, both public and private, including correspondence, manifestoes and interviews. In some cases, such statements may overshadow, displace, or even constitute, the artwork itself.”

This is a result of the academization of art practice, with the massive numbers of MFAs justifying their work to academic committees, so that theses can be produced, copied and then put on shelves in the libraries and the graduate offices. I know, I’ve done it myself, written a totally useless thesis to go with the slides from the thesis exhibit.

Just for grins, this is my current statement that goes out to my public:

My function as an artist is not to tell the truth—it is to captivate viewers for as long as I can hold their attention. It is not necessary for the artwork to be any more than what it is. What is necessary is for the art to flow from inside and to allow the paintings and drawings to spring from my entire set of experiences and sensibilities as an artist.

My current favorite giants, to name just the women, are Agnes Martin and Joan Mitchell for the purity of their thought and action on the canvas as well as Linda Karshan, Sandra Blow, Vija Celmins, and Katherina Grosse. Whether what they do is lyrical, expository or just plain brash, to my way of thinking they are all pure abstract expressionists who make marks, lines, shapes, colors on paper, canvas, even buildings, and say to us, "here look at this, make of it what you will."

Just Because an Artist Says It Is Art. . .

2010-07-17T14:58:00.004-05:00

"This is not art. It's a statement and a metaphor and all that good stuff, but it isn't art. Just because Duchamp pointed out that we can call anything art, it doesn't follow that he thought we should." Artist: Garvin Nolte, title: Crossroads.

Comment found on Gizmodo re a piece of installation art.

Empty Art

2010-07-17T08:58:00.007-05:00

From Prospect Magazine, article entitled, “The dustbin of art history” by BEN LEWIS 24th May 2010 — Issue 171, a discussion on the overinflated value and systemic emptiness of contemporary art produced by Koons, Hirst and Murakami, that yet idolized by museums and collectors.

“I believe that this decline shares four aesthetic and ideological characteristics with the end-phases of previous grand styles: formulae for the creation of art; a narcissistic, self-reinforcing cult that elevates art and the artist over actual subjects and ideas; the return of sentiment; and the alibi of cynicism.”

In the previous paragraph, he says “Over the last decade, not only conceptualism—perhaps the dominant movement of the past three decades—but the entire modernist project has been going through a similar process. Of course, some important and inspired artists have made important and inspired work in recent years—from famous photographers like Andreas Gursky and painters like Luc Tuymans to lesser-known video artists like Lindsay Seers and Anri Sala. But there is something more fundamentally wrong with much of this century’s famous art than its absurd market value.”

Author Lewis likens paintings by Boucher, labeling them as 'soft porn' to Murakami's presentations.

Rococo’s “heavenly soft porn” replaced baroque’s classical values: The Toilet of Venus (1751) by François Boucher

Postmodernism, the grave of the modernist project: Second Mission Project ko2 (1999) by Takashi Murakami.

Marks in Time and Space

2010-06-27T19:59:00.006-05:00

Art by Nancy Charak, top, Sharon Swidler, middle and by Marian Carow, bottom. We have put together a three-artist show called Marks in Time and Space. We're looking for quality venues to exhibit these works. Contact us at marksintimetrio@gmail.com.

Increase Museum Attendance

2010-06-27T15:54:00.003-05:00

The problem of how to increase museum attendance and educate visitors is described by the new director, Thomas Campbell, of the Metropolitan Museum, in an article from the Financial Times. The issue being framed is that museums feel that they are in competition for patronage in an increasingly frenetic audio-visual world replete with many, many other choices that offer much more immediate gratification. Thus the Brooklyn Museum offered up exhibits on Harley Davidson motorcycles which brought in visitors to see the bikes but never made it back to see any of the other good things in the place. (Hat Tip: Arts Journal)

“That engagement with contemporary art is part of what he describes as a “fundamental shift” in the presentation of the Met’s displays, helping to make them more accessible. “We assume a great deal of knowledge in our audience; I’m conscious that we need to do more for our general visitors.”

““We assume people know who Rembrandt is, for example. We have wonderful, thoughtful labels next to each Rembrandt painting, but there’s no overview of who he was and, frankly, considering our international audience, I doubt whether many of them do know who [he] was, or the significance of a particular period room, in a broader context.”

““What I’m trying to do is to get the museum rethinking the visitor experience from the moment that people arrive at the museum: the signage they encounter, the bits of paper they pick up, all the way through to the way we deliver information in the galleries. And obviously that’s an enormous task. We’ve got a million square feet of gallery space and tens of thousands of objects on display, so nothing’s going to change overnight.””

I have a suggestion on how museums can get attendance, beyond signage and bits of paper, beyond the elitism of assuming that visitors know who Rembrandt was; offer up free family tickets on a once or twice a year basis to all citizens of the town, be it New York, Brooklyn or Chicago. I note that the Art Institute of Chicago sits on land donated by the Park District, a tax levying entity. Surely all those within the park district’s boundaries should be entitled to free attendance at the museum at least once a year. Mayhaps then we can have a polity that knows who Rembrandt is, and that values art, art education and museums.

Alice Neel: Kept it Real

2010-06-05T16:18:00.007-05:00

Alice Neel, at L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, California , Review by Marlena Donohue. in Visual Art Source. You have until 20 May - 26 June 2010, to see this show.

Quoting from the review: "One line of reasoning is that “the art is the art,” which is to say that it ought not matter that Alice Neel was one of few women painters tenaciously practicing when gifted artists like Elaine de Kooning and Lee Krasner were — by acquiescence or cultural pressure — conceding to roles as archivist or muse to male partners.

"As this argument goes, one stands in front of a work and it should not matter that Neel lost an infant daughter to illness, then had another taken by her husband to Cuba, then attempted suicide, then moved to Spanish Harlem to be closer to things a tad more 'real' than the silver ‘n black circle of Mary Boone.

"More than any realist of her generation, Neel honors Cezanne in the way she suggests anatomy from the architecture of paint rather than through perspective or logic. There is this tight fusion between the plastic and formal reality of an art work, and the equally undeniable accuracy and depth of the view the artist offers us of us, of our world, our place and predicament in it.

"We might indeed leave the messy life stuff out and still marvel at this artist. But that is not how or why art lingers. We continue to make and be seduced by art because its warp (form) and weft (content) can’t be taken one at a time and are more than the sum of their parts. There is in Neel that inseparable weave between the parts of experience defying language and their communication through utterly unrelated analogue actions like pencil lines, piled brac a brac, steel or, in Neel's case, oil on linen."

Alice Neel, Louise Bourgeois refused to be marginalized, bless them, because they honored the messy stuff in life and in their lives and put it up for us to marvel at.

Matisse: Black is a Color Too

2010-06-04T19:08:00.003-05:00

I finally took myself to the Art Institute of Chicago to see the “Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917” exhibit last night. My favorite piece in the show is Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg.

Quoting from Black Is Also a Color, by Barry Schwabsky, June 2, 2010, which will appear in the June 21, 2010 edition of The Nation.

“This seeming suppression of color was something new for a painter whose calling card since 1904 had been the fearless use of color. Again, though, it can hardly be called typical, but that Matisse did recurrently experiment with gray and black after 1913 is inarguable. French Window at Collioure and another painting of 1914, Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg, may be the most extreme examples here, but paintings like Head, White and Rose (1914–15); Goldfish and Palette (1914–15); Apples (1916); The Rose Marble Table (1916); Portrait of Auguste Pellerin (II) (1917); and Shafts of Sunlight, the Woods of Trivaux (1917)—not to mention The Piano Lesson, The Moroccans and Bathers by a River—are all ones that Matisse could not have made earlier because he would not have used black or gray so emphatically except to mark a contour.”

In addition to the dominant use of black, what is also evident on viewing the art in the real is that I learned that Matisse used sgraffito to create shades of gray, black and surface articulation. This was evident in many other works in the exhibit. Being able to see these is certainly a strong argument for looking at artworks in person rather than in books or on computer screens.

Schwabsky goes on to say: “. . .Matisse felt vindicated (after showing his work to the ageing Renoir). ’I'd won my point all the same,’ he told Masson. ‘The Impressionists had banished black from their palette; I put it back—and prominently—and a painter as in love with color and light as Renoir had the honesty to confirm it: Black is not only a color but also a light.’ This conquest of a color that's not a color and a light that's not a light is the inner story of Matisse's art in the war years. His sudden intense production in 1913 of monotypes in which fiercely elegant white lines pierce voluptuous black fields—the two elements perfectly matched so that the delicate line is as substantial as the massive field, the black as luminous as the white—must have convinced him that something similar had to be possible in painting.”

Creatively Thinking Outside the Box

2010-06-02T22:36:00.007-05:00

I have recently been having discussions with a musical friend who says of us visual artists that we are quirky. I had been vigorously denying the notion of quirky to her, saying instead that we artists are less afraid of having unconventional thoughts than non-creative people.

Here's a quote from a blog called Dose Nation: Creative People are Just High Functioning Schizophrenics. There's more at » more at: www.sciencedaily.com.

"Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box," says Dr Ullen about his new findings.

The post refers to dopamine D2 receptors and "High creative skills have been shown to be somewhat more common in people who have mental illness in the family. Creativity is also linked to a slightly higher risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Certain psychological traits, such as the ability to make unusual or bizarre associations are also shared by schizophrenics and healthy, highly creative people. And now the correlation between creativity and mental health has scientific backing."

Collage, "Urbs in Horto," Nancy Charak artist, 2010, 18"x24".

Tracy Emin Talks about Louise Bourgeois

2010-06-02T21:55:00.003-05:00

Louise Bourgeois, dead at 98, eulogized by Tracy Emin...

“The thing I really loved about Louise Bourgeois was that she wasn't afraid of her emotions; she wasn't afraid of being totally female and releasing those kind of emotions into the world through her art as a lot of men have done through history - whether it's Van Gogh, whether it's Edvard Munch with his jealousy, whether it is Picasso about love. Woman are actually much better at this kind of thing than men, and Bourgeois wasn't the Queen of this, she was the King.”

Agnes Martin Empty Yet Meaningfull

2010-05-31T16:59:00.004-05:00

Agnes Martin, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK, Financial Times, By Robin Blake, Published: May 31 2010.

"Can a work of art be both empty of meaning and a pleasure to look at? It is a particularly tough question about abstract painting, because iconography, through which meaning and intention are found, is missing or concealed. Yet we always do find ourselves seeking out significance, and we look to the artist to help us."

[Agnes Martin's] "This work had all of minimalism’s patent characteristics: radically spare in appearance, made from immediately evident materials and with none of the traditional painting techniques that tend to make a holy mystery of artistic creation. After five years or so, most other leading minimalists grew bored and drifted in new directions but Martin remained on this track for the rest of her long life – no theory, no hiding of technique, no reference to actuality. “I paint,” she said, “with my back to the world.”"

Art is a Conversation, Not a Patent Office

2010-05-30T01:01:00.004-05:00

Thank you to David Shields, author of a new book, "Reality Hunger: A New Manifesto." Headlined at the Huffington Post as "In Writing, Art and Music Everybody Steals." As I've always said about my own work, I stand on the shoulders of giants, and at the present moment, Helen Frankenthaler's work is very much in my art-head.

Quotes from the article: "Art is a conversation between and among artists, not a patent office."

"Reality can't be copyrighted."

"William Gibson: Who owns the words? We all do, though not all of us know it yet."

"And once we all did: artists have plundered one another since the beginning of time; copyright has existed only during the last 60 years."

"In digital culture, it's especially important for us to be able to sample, remix, mash-up materials available to us at the click of a button, but the law has a stranglehold on literature, perhaps because both literature and the law are verbal."

"The mimetic function has been replaced by manipulation of the original."

Shields lists numerous examples of artists using the work and ideas of predecessors. The image is my drawing, "Mountains and Sea," in definite homage to Helen Frankenthaler's own piece of the same name, 44"x30", 2009, pencil, prismacolor and oil stick on 90# Stonehenge paper.

European versus American Museums

2010-05-29T17:54:00.006-05:00

A minor comparison based solely on anecdote. I shot one picture at the Quai D'Orsay in Paris in August 2009 of Whistler's Mother forgetting to turn off the forbidden flash. Two guards walked past me from 20 feet away and merely smiled and said quietly, "no flash." I said thank you and turned it off. Similarly, I shot Picasso's Guernica at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid several weeks ago, deliberately breaking the no pictures inside the room rule, and certainly without the flash, and similarly the guard smiled, shook his finger and said in Spanish accented English (I guess I'll always look like an American on my travels), "please, not inside the room, you may shoot from the doorway."

All over the Prado I saw artists with easels doing copy work in oil in front of masterworks; not done very much here in the states, but this is an old established means of learning how great artists think, try to reproduce what they've done. It's harder than you think it might be at first try.

My questions are first why don't we see more artists doing this kind of copy work in American art museums? And what is the extreme bias that American art museums have against photographing "without flash"? I toured the Art Institute of Chicago's show of Benin Bronzes, where it was even forbidden to sketch, much less photograph. Why?

Wondrous Opening at ARC Last Night

2010-05-29T12:22:00.008-05:00

Charlotte Segal, Ann Fairley Gaines and Geoffrey Novelli held court last night at the ARC Gallery, 832 W. Superior, Chicago. The gallery was filled with friends and fans of the artists. The show is up until 6/19, so get yourself over there soon.

Being Creative

2010-05-28T06:52:00.001-05:00

Being creative means allowing yourself to be alone.

The No. 1 Habit of Highly Creative People

Charlotte Segal Artist Retrospective at ARC

2010-05-27T20:22:00.003-05:00

Charlotte Segal is having a retrospective exhibit at the ARC Gallery in Chicago, Illinois opening this Friday, May 28, 2010. She's a wonderfully lyrical artist.

20th Evanston + Vicinity Biennial 2010

2010-05-17T09:07:00.002-05:00

Jurors John Himmelfarb, Chicago artist, and Julie Rodrigues-Widholm, MCA Curator, selected this painting, "The Dreamer and The Dream," 2009, 30"x44", oil wash, pencil, prismacolor on 90# Stonehenge for inclusion in the Evanston Art Center's Biennial. Reception Sunday May 23 from 1 to 4, the show runs from then 'til June 27. The venue is free and it has parking in an absolutely awesome location, 2603 Sheridan Road, Evanston, Illinois.

Free Art Sucks What?

2010-03-13T15:14:00.009-06:00

I have argued in a previous post "Why Museums Need to be Free." Here's an interesting counter-argument by Mat Gleason in Coaguala Art Journal, Issue #98, with the title of "Free Art Sucks. Take My Money and Get out of My Way. Mr. Gleason describes attending a Culver City Art Walk., ". . .the art had actually been pretty good. . .oh sure, some trash here or there, some rentals by the trustafarians and some grad school masturbation, but, all in all the art was a good slice of L.A. Contemporary."

This could, without the L.A. Contemporary, describe art walks I've attended here in Chicago, ArtWalk Ravenswood (an event I have participated in for the past 6 years and will do so into the future), the old Around the Coyote, open Fridays at the Flat Iron Building in Wicker Park (where my gallerist, Gary Marr's Sapere space is) or in Pilsen, Chicago Arts District. It's all there, the grad school masturbation, regurgitations of anime, and on and on.

Then Mr. Gleason opines that the experience of attending the art walk as a free event cheapened it by making so accessible to the public, "Would you rather pay five or ten dollars and bump up against strollers and suburbanites or pay a hundred dollars to see an art show and have twenty people tops, silence, the option of curatorial commentary straight from the source and maybe a nice dinner out of the deal?"

He goes on, "Idiots are pulling art down to their level, demanding artists and galleries make the exhibition experience a potty-training exercise for the eyes without the psychological damage. The art has followed suit and is made for imbeciles by the addled, dull and fearful in the hopes of narcissistic hunger being satisfied and a few bucks made on the side. The great art is out there and it is time for people to get fucking angry and elite about it."

I argue something a bit different, yes, there's a lot of bad stuff out there, and we have a potential mass audience desperately in need of art training and art appreciation. The only way to do that is make the art accessible at free or nearly free museums and art events.

What Are You Doing Next Friday?

2010-03-07T16:39:00.004-06:00

Artist, Nancy Charak, watercolor on paper, on panel 10"x8", see this and others Friday, March 12, 2010, Open Studio at the Cornelia Arts Building, 1800 W. Cornelia, Chicago, Illinois from 6 pm to 10 pm. Be there, it's a happening place to look at art, talk to over 40 living artists such as myself and drink wine and enjoy those little cubes of cheese.

If you can't come, don't worry, you can still see my work at www.rounderstudio.com, follow my blog at www.rounderstudio.blogspot.com, visit Gary Marr's splendid gallery Sapere in the legendary Flat Iron Building at 1579 N. Milwaukee in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood and look at my art there, www.sapereart.com. Look for further events at our collective website for the Cornelia Arts Building as well.

Judith Roth and the Power of the Uh-Oh

2010-02-20T15:46:00.011-06:00

Artist, Judith Roth, "Seated Dancer on Green Chair", 2009, 48"x50", oil on canvas, currently on display at A.R.C. Gallery, Chicago until February 27, 2010, as part of a group exhibit, "Off Center" under the auspices of the Chicago Women's Caucus for Art.

Judith Roth is a classically trained artist, out of the Boston Museum School and Skowhegan. Perhaps uniquely nowadays, she works exclusively from live models, even in this age of the ubiquitous and multiple photo realities.

The real title of this piece could be "Uh-Oh and Proud of It." If you look closely BY CLICKING ON THE PICTURE you can see that this work of art is a diptych, made up of two canvases, there's a joint that you can see in the right side foot. Judith started the piece and ran out of room to finish. A lesser artist would have repainted and in so doing, adjusted the scale to fit the existing canvas. But what Judith did instead, in a flash of creative problem solving, was run to get a second canvas to extend the scale of the work. In so doing, she honored and preserved the immediacy of the marks and trusted her eye and hand. She trusted her years of painting and drawing.

Just for grins is a work on paper by Ida Appelbroog, demonstrating much the same happy accident.

Robert Motherwell Wisdom

2010-02-20T12:15:00.004-06:00

Image by Robert Motherwell, from the Lyric Suite, Ink on Japanese Paper.

From "On the 'Lyric Suite.'" 1969, essay excerpted in The Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Dore Ashton with Joan Banach, University of California Press, 2007.

"On an impulse one day in a Japanese shop in N.Y.C., where I was buying a toy for a friend's child, I bought 10 packets of 100 sheets each of a Japanese rice paper called "Dragons & Clouds". . .

"Some weeks later--early in April, 1965, it came to me in a flash: PAINT THE THOUSAND SHEETS WITHOUT INTERRUPTION, WITHOUT A PRIORI TRADITIONAL, OR MORAL PREJUDICES OR A POSTERIORI ONES, WITHOUT ICONOGRAPHY, AND ABOVE ALL WITHOUT REVISIONS OR ADDITIONS UPON CRITICAL REFLECTION AND JUDGEMENT. GIVE UP ONE'S BEING TO THE ENTERPRISE AND SEE WHAT LIES WITHIN WHATEVER IS IS. VENTURE. DON'T LOOK BACK. DO NOT TIRE. EVERYTHING IS OPEN. BRUSHES AND BLANK WHITE PAPER!"

Inchoate Jargon

2010-02-14T12:16:00.005-06:00

Painting--Nancy Charak, 2010, Primordial Soup 10, 16"x14", watercolor, pencil, prismacolor on birchwood panel. At Sapere Gallery, 1579 N. Milwaukee, Chicago, IL.

The annual College Art Association conclave (CAA) has been meeting in Chicago, so as a committed former member I went to a couple of the free panels. On Thursday, February 11, the panel was "Investigating the Need for Women's Art Galleries, Exhibitions, and Organizations: From our Center." Joyce Owens, Beate Minkovski, Amy Galpin and Joanna Gardner Huggett were on the panel. While the conversation and audience response went somewhat off target (as such are prone to do), there was general agreement that until such time as the high-end market (galleries and museums) is completely responsive to the work of so-called minority artists whose voices have been squelched, then so-called alternative spaces will be necessary.

My own added view is that the member institutions of the CAA graduate so damned many artists out of its BA and MFA programs that there is in essence an over-supply of very, very good, well trained people. The CAA should be teaching artists what the realities of the job markets are.

Then I went to another panel discussion yesterday, Saturday, February 13, titled "Feminist Painting, What Does it Mean to Paint Like a Woman and How Might that Differ from Painting as a Feminist?" That room was jam packed, standing room only. The panelists, Harmony Hammond, Carrie Moyer, Paula Wilson and Amy Sillman offered up what I can only summarize as "inchoate jargon." At one point the question was asked and answered whether or not this particular panel could have been titled something like being about lesbian or queer art. In addition to the mind numbing jargon there was constant reference to the battles of the 70s, 80s and 90s. My thought is that women have been making art much, much longer and I would have liked a longer historical perspective rather than one tied to the academic squabbles.

A quote was offered up from, I believe, Arthur Danto, that for a woman to engage in abstract expressionism, which is my oeuvre, is for her to engage in aesthetic cross dressing. I had to do everything in my control to keep from blowing my lunch. I'm not saying that I didn't understand what the panelists were talking about, because I did; what I couldn't deal with was the fixation on the academic squabbles, of the big fight against the male dominated establishment, which clearly still isn't won, as evidenced by the talk in the other panel discussion that I attended, of the continuing need for alternative spaces.

My last plaint is that each of the artists, perhaps logically, talked almost totally about their own work, with some slight references to those women who have gone before. I wanted to stand up and shout out the following names, Helen Frankenthaler, Linda Karshan, Sandra Blow, Katherina Grosse, Joan Mitchell, Pat Steir, and Agnes Martin.

Judith Roth and Joyce Owens Two of My Favorite Artists

2010-02-13T10:15:00.005-06:00

Joyce Owens and Judith Roth, two of my favoritest artists are being honored today by the Chicago Women's Caucus for the Arts for Excellence in the Arts at the Chicago Cultural Center at 4:00 pm today. I won't miss this. Judith and Joyce are artists, advocates and educators. They believe in and act on the power of community for artists, women and minorities. They care about art and artists of all stripes and colors. I am proud and pleased and honored to know them and to call them friends. The image on the left is by Joyce and on the right by Judith.

You Need a Scientist to Tell You This?

2010-01-23T13:53:00.004-06:00

So I'm reading an article from the esteemed Wall Street Journal titled "How Art Affects the Brain", (hat-tip to Painter's Post). Here's the amazing quote that one must put into the snarky category of "You Need a Scientist to Tell You This?" HAH. This is from a discussion about how scientific research is assisting the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore enhance or increase their potential audience.

In 2007, the museum experimented with a show of landscape paintings by Gustave Courbet which included classical music playing in the background. The lighting changed subtly every 60 seconds to create a variety of moods.

The result was that visitors spent four times as long in the exhibit than they did in other shows of the same size. Science could be used to come up with similarly creative—and cost-effective—ideas for making exhibitions more engaging for visitors.

Sorry, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell viewers of art that it's much more pleasant to listen to music, while sitting and listening, look at great works of art. Geesh. This is a plea to all art museums, galleries, sculpture gardens, please, please put out the chairs and turn on the music.

When You Don't Have Anything To Say, Show a Picture....

2010-01-17T11:50:00.003-06:00

It's a collage of pieces of trimmings of watercolors done on 140# Arches paper mounted to an 8"x8" clayboard. 2009.

The Visual Arts ARE NOT an Educational Luxury...

2009-11-27T13:52:00.005-06:00

From an article by educator and professor, Daniel Willingham in the Washington Post, quoting Jerry Kagan, on why children don't like school, Six practical reasons arts education is more than a luxury. I paste in the first two reasons:

First, he estimated that something like 95% of children are capable of doing the work necessary to obtain a high school diploma, yet the dropout rate hovers around 25%. Too many of these students quit because they decide (usually in about the fourth grade) that school is not the place for them. This decision is based largely on their perception of their performance in reading and mathematics. The arts, Kagan argues, offers such students another chance to feel successful, and to feel that they belong at school.

Second, Kagan argues that children today have very little sense of agency—that is, the sense that they undertake activities that have an impact on the world, however small. Kagan notes that as a child he had the autonomy to explore his town on his own, something that most parents today would not allow. When not exploring, his activities were necessarily of his own design, whereas children today would typically watch television or roam the internet, activities that are frequently passive and which encourage conformity. The arts, Kagan argues, offer that sense of agency, of creation.

Johns Hopkins University and the Dana Foundation hosted a conference titled “Neuroeducation: Learning, Arts and the Brain.” As the title implies, the goal was to bring together researchers considering, from an educational point of view, the impact of the arts on the brain. A book-length summary of the May conference just became available as a free pdf, available here.

As a shy, but extremely curious, very hard-of-hearing girl, art classes and self-guided tours in museums in Chicago gave me the confidence to meet the world. The image is my latest watercolor on birchwood panel, 16x14x1-3/4in., from the "Simkhes Toyre" series.

Who Does The Stuff Belong To-Part II...

2009-11-22T10:25:00.004-06:00

Per a recent article in the New York Times re the ongoing fulminations of the Egyptian Minister of Antiquities, Dr. Zahi Hawass, demanding that Nefertiti be returned to him, by John Tierney of November 16, 2009, referring to the position of the director of our own Art Institute of Chicago, James Cuno. . .

“As the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, Dr. Cuno has his own obvious motives for acquiring foreign antiquities, and he makes no apology for wanting to display Middle Eastern statues to Midwesterners.”

““It is in the nature of our species to connect and exchange,” Dr. Cuno writes. “And the result is a common culture in which we all have a stake. It is not, and can never be, the property of one modern nation or another.””

The Renaissance, wherein the west climbed out of the dark ages into the light, would not have happened without a serious examination of the Greek and Roman antiquities. It is time for the inheritors of past empires to stop feeling guilty for the wrongs committed in history. Sending Nefertiti to Egypt from the newly rebuilt Neues Museum in Berlin, (which is, by the way, in its own right, a remarkable story of rising out of historical ashes) is in no way a return to a rightful owner, nor does it in any way expiate old sins.

We must all enjoy and learn from our collective histories, not stake out specific territories of ethno-centric meaning. Down that path is cultural isolation, down that path is the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan, for instance.

Who Does The Stuff Belong To?

2009-10-31T19:15:00.011-05:00

Derek Fincham, honcho of the blog, Illicit Cultural Property quotes Michael Kimmelman in his recent New York Times article, Michael Kimmelman, When Ancient Artifacts Become Political Pawns, The New York Times, October 24, 2009, as follows:

"So argues Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times in describing the recent calls for repatriation of works of art. He takes as examples the recent repatriation claims made by Egypt against Germany and France. He makes two points that I'd like to draw out of the article."

"First, he claims that globalization has intensified "cultural differences" between nations. This allows nationalism to "exploit culture". He may be correct in some cases, but he fails to note that the frescoes returned by the Louvre had been purchased recently, with little history. Given what we know about the antiquities trade, this means they were likely illegally exported or looted."

"Second, he argues these claims are often based on emotion. That is certainly true in some cases, because after all works of art are often designed to convey emotion. One example of this would be Scotland's desire for the return of the Lewis Chessmen. But not all of these claims are without merit. Moreover, why is it that only claimant nations are "emotional". Are not museums and other groups "emotional" when they make arguments that works of art should stay where they are currently situated? Kimmelman makes the argument that justice has shifted. But I think that is a good thing. We are closer to better justice for all nations, not merely the wealthier market nations via International treaties like the 1970 UNESCO Convention, and important decisions like the Schultz and Barakat decisions in the United States and the United Kingdom."

However, all of this being said, I’m still a big fan of the encyclopedic catchall museum. I fail to understand how and why specific geographical occupation of a current territory entitles the current inhabitants to believe that they are the exact descendants of the ancient empires, because truth be told, we all are the exact inheritors.

The Damien Hirst Problem

2009-10-31T07:33:00.015-05:00

Fabled and much feted art bad boy Damien Hirst opened his newest paintings to the dismay of the critics.

The London Telegraph's critic, Mark Hudson, said in a headline "It couldn't get worse for Damien": Here, Hirst's daubs have been hung on walls newly lined in blue silk at a cost of £250,000, close to, if not actually alongside works by Titian, Rembrandt, Velasquez and Poussin. The result has been one of the most unanimously negative responses to any exhibition in living memory. Sarah Crompton, writing in this paper, was one of the kinder critics, finding the paintings merely "thin and one note". "Deadly dull, amateurish", wrote the Guardian's critic. "Not worth looking at", said the Independent. "Dreadful", pronounced The Times.

"Not to like the dipsy wild-card Tracey Emin, self-styled bad boys Jake and Dinos Chapman and the spectacularly vacuous Sam Taylor-Wood was simply to be out of touch. Never mind that most of their supposed innovations had been made by other artists, most of whom had stayed poor, decades before. Ordering his art to be made by other people over the telephone, which earned Hirst such admiration and notoriety in the 1990s, had been done by the Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in 1924. Indeed, the very name is telling: while the names of other modern art movements, from Cubism to Pop, tell you about their intentions, the term YBA says nothing more than that they were young and British."

"No, the groundbreaking aspects of the YBA phenomenon related almost exclusively to money and celebrity. When people look back to the initial "Freeze" exhibition, it's to the fact that the catalogue of a student show was sponsored by property developers Olympia & York. The actual content of the exhibition is rarely mentioned. The entire meaning of Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull is embodied in its price. The title, For the Love of God, is meaningless spin."

The Time's critic was even nastier: "And here's where Damien's work goes off the historical track, or more rather exemplifies the immoral roller coaster we've been riding, only to fall off in the current bursted bubble. The work of Hirst and the YBAs celebrate nothing bigger than the bloated egos of the money people, exalted no higher ideals than money and celebrity."

To my mind, here's the big ah-ooof, Hirst actually painted all these paintings himself and the gimmick of hiring others to execute is gone. Vanished. The critics can't get over it. The alleged novelty of hiring others gone. Silly critics, silly Damien. Art and artists have always been collaborative. Artists and their patrons have always hired services, vendors and expertise. It was only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the myth of the lone, starving artist wove its way into our narrative. Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Vermeer used assistants. Picasso's lithographs and etchings were pulled by master printmakers. I myself have hired fabricators to make panels for my big drawings and paintings. Damien Hirst was always right, and he's still right, in this regard, it is okay for an artist to present his ideas via whatever means he/she chooses. It doesn't matter whose hand makes the work. The thing that matters, that has always mattered, is the idea. Then decide if the shark in formadelhyde matters, if the diamond encrusted skull matters, if the paintings painted by the actual hand of Damien Hirst matter.

Why Don't More People Collect Art?

2009-10-17T12:58:00.005-05:00

Hat tip to Lisa Boumstein-Smalley, in Chicago Now...
Gallery Director Chicago Art Source Gallery

Here's her explanation of why more people don't collect art: It's our own damn fault that more people aren't collecting art. I choose to embrace the fact that it's not easy for some people to get over the intimidation hump, and that truly they want to have cool/beautiful/smart/evocative artwork on their walls without getting roped into a huge involvement of the artist community. I am confident that we can do better as a community because when a pedestrian turns into a first time collector, everybody wins. That's a beautiful thing.

Of course, the image is a "collectible," Rainbow's End, 2009, by Nancy Charak, 44"x30", oil, wash, pencil, on 90# white Stonehenge.

Henry Moore Elephant Skull Etchings

2009-10-11T10:05:00.003-05:00

Deb and I went to the Block Museum on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, yesterday; we looked at Henry Moore's etching series on an elephant skull. In the process I learned and relearned an important lesson on looking and seeing and drawing.

An inscription on the wall of the exhibit quoted this from Henry Moore: "You may think you are observing an object carefully when you stand in front of it, but you really look much more intensely if you draw it. . .because then you have to look very searchingly to understand its shape."

Bridget Riley on Drawing and Painting

2009-10-07T19:06:00.005-05:00

Bridget Riley has some wonderful things to say about drawing and painting in an article with the lovely title of "At the End of My Pencil," in the London Review of Books.

For me, drawing is an inquiry, a way of finding out – the first thing that I discover is that I do not know. This is alarming even to the point of momentary panic. Only experience reassures me that this encounter with my own ignorance – with the unknown – is my chosen and particular task, and provided I can make the required effort the rewards may reach the unimaginable. It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness. To break down this thickness, this deadening opacity, to elicit some particle of clarity or insight, is what I want to do.

This practice is rooted in my experience of drawing from the nude and from nature. But I found it could be moved across surprisingly easily to the elements of abstract painting, centring as it does on inquiry and what happens down there on the paper. I have always believed that those ‘ultimate’ statements of the great protagonists of abstract art were, in fact, declarations of new radical beginnings. Would those principles and geometric forms really yield the riches dreamed of? Or would they prove a block to creative will and passion? But, in art, prohibitions and denials are always a challenge and a powerful spur to inquiry.

Perhaps the time I had spent drawing allowed me to trust the eye at the end of my pencil.Movement in Squares (1961) began in this way. It came at the end of a time of great difficulty for me. I had very nearly lost the studio, and even when I managed to secure it, I had no real sense of what to do there. Although I had taken a few steps in the direction of abstract painting, I had not yet arrived at a point where I could establish a dialogue. One evening on my way to the studio, I thought of drawing a square. Everyone knows what a square looks like and how to make one in geometric terms. It is a monumental, highly conceptualised form: stable and symmetrical, equal angles, equal sides. I drew the first few squares. No discoveries there. Was there anything to be found in a square? But as I drew, things began to change. Quite suddenly something was happening down there on the paper that I had not anticipated. I continued, I went on drawing; I pushed ahead, both intuitively and consciously. The squares began to lose their original form. They were taking on a new pictorial identity. I drew the whole of Movement in Squares without a pause and then, to see more clearly what was there, I painted each alternate space black. When I stepped back, I was surprised and elated by what I saw. The painting Movement in Squares came directly out of this study. My experience of working with the square was to prove crucial. Having been lately becalmed, now a strong wind filled my sails.

We Were Switched from Lead to Zinc White Because....

2009-10-07T18:38:00.005-05:00

Everyone knows that lead white is poisonous and thus had to have been banned. So all the manufacturers of both common house paint and artists' paints switched to zinc whites. Now, there's no evidence that lead whites poisoned artists, but became dangerous in the modern era when used as house paint. Now a study from the Smithsonian Museum's Conservation Institute quoted by George O'Hanlon for Rublev Natural Pigments has bad news for artists using zinc whites. It becomes brittle and cracks easily after a mere 28 years.

The article concludes...

Paints made with zinc oxide and drying oils become extremely brittle in as little as three years. Paints containing zinc oxide exhibit severe delaminating problems after drying and especially zinc oxide paint on acrylic emulsion grounds. Even commercial lead white and titanium white oil paints containing zinc oxide become quite brittle after seven years of drying

and

Mecklenburg and Tumosa's paper forewarns us about the potential problems with oil paints containing zinc white commonly used by artists today. Artists may choose to ignore the report and continue using zinc in their paintings -- perhaps at their own peril. Whatever the choice, the paper helps artists gain a better understanding of the materials used in their work.

Cornelia Arts Open House Chicago 10/3-10/4

2009-09-27T11:34:00.003-05:00

CORNELIA ARTS OPEN HOUSE

Cornelia Arts Open House
part of the
Ravenswood Corridor Art Walk
Saturday, Oct. 3, 12- 6 pm
Sunday, Oct. 4, 12-6 pm
1800 West Cornelia, Chicago
Entrance on Ravenswood

In Conjunction with the Ravenswood Corridor Art & Industry Walk, the Cornelia Arts Building celebrates is annual Open House.

ARTISTS and ARTISANS in the Cornelia Arts Building Include:

JASON MESSINGER,
SCOTT SIMONS,
NANCY CHARAK,
DARRELL ROBERTS,
KEVIN SWALLOW,
JAVIER A LARA,
JOHANNAH SILVA,
TIFFANY STRONSKY,
JEFF BRYNER,
EMILY ROYNESDAL,
TRACY SYPERSKI,
GUILLERMO CARRILLO,
ALLEY MARANTO,
DOUG BIRKENHEUER,
BETH KAMHI,
BASIA KROL,
BAHAR PARTOW,
NORBERT MARSZALEK,
SUSANNE SIEGEL,
KATHERINE DRAKE CHIAL,
GREG MILNE,
HEATHER AND QUENTIN MC QUEEN,
FRASER TAYLOR ,
DOUG FROHMAN , ,
VANESSA HIRSCHOWITZ,
JODI RAE BROWNSTEIN,
JUDY ZEDDIES,
DREW KATES,
JAMES PARENTI,
TOR DETWILLER,
JOSH GARBER,
REED KIRST,
EDWARD LINES,
ERIC STEELE,
PAM ROBINSON,
ERIC WEINSTEIN,
BRENDA HESSELBERG,
JUDY LICHTENSTEIN,
FIRE ARTS,
FRIENDS OF THE ARTS,
GLORIA RUSSELL,
JUDY SCHUMACHER

Art When Museum and Curator Index it as Such

2009-09-26T16:22:00.002-05:00

THE LIMITS OF LICENCE AT SAM
Artist-cum-security-guard Amanda Mae has caused a stir in Seattle after she pushed the limits of a participatory Yoko Ono piece at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). Ono’s seminalPainting to Hammer a Nail is a small panel with a hammer hanging next to it, and a wall label that encourages visitors to "pound a nail into this painting" (the very artwork that, according to legend, brought Ono and John Lennon together). Hammer a Nail is featured in "Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78," June 25-Sept. 7, 2009, an exhibition that showcases works that "deconstruct painting in order to usher in a new way of thinking" -- though, apparently, this new way of thinking has some strict limits of its own.

From: http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2009/09/hammered.html. Let me see if I've got this right; Yoko Ono and the museum grant the museum visitor the privilege of nailing a piece of paper next to the work on the wall, but not to allow a different artist to remove the papers and place them on the floor neatly with the stated intent of archiving scraps. So, one performance artist cannot "undo" or alter the work of another performance piece, that's where the sacredness of the "object" is encountered.

At SAM, someone had the idea -- whether it was a museum official or a member of the public is disputed -- of using the license granted by Ono’s work to nail a piece of paper to the museum wall next to it. In short order, the piece was surrounded by a dense ring of announcements, receipts, business cards and other detritus that visitors had posted, all under the museum’s approving gaze. Informed about the paper-hanging, Ono stipulated that it was acceptable as long as the scraps were preserved as part of the work, and returned with it.

On Aug. 20, Mae -- who in addition to working at SAM, also makes performance-based photo art, and is about to start a graduate program in museum studies at the University of Washington, according to Stranger art critic Jen Graves -- decided to take things a step further. She set up in front of the work and began to remove all of the pieces of paper, categorizing them in neat piles for archiving. Mae dubbed her own performance Yoko Ono Excavation Survey, or Y.E.S. After a half hour, SAM curator Michael Darling arrived, and ordered Mae to halt. The next day, she was fired.

Blackbird. . .

2009-09-20T12:14:00.006-05:00

Blackbird

(A Riff on a Wallace Stevens’ Poem)

Because it was dark

all afternoon, because

it was snowing and

would continue to

snow, the Muse

decided she wanted

to be a blackbird,

wanted to sit in the

cedar-limbs, look

across the great

white vastness that

is her.

Here she is in a field

of white snow. She

has always been a

Taoist.

Look how beautiful

she is in her coat of

black feathers. She

could be a tarred

angel hanging from

a tree branch, could

be a rotting corpse

with a lolled tongue.

Cut her down! She

will fly up again,

become a magnolia

blossom stunned by

a snow storm.

She will smell of

death and burnt

feathers then, but

is she not beautiful?

She is like an icon

of the beloved black

Virgin Mary. Don’t

put a gold frame around

her. Set her free.

Poem by Jenene Ravesloot

Drawing by Nancy Charak, 2009, "Blackbird," 30"x44", pencil, prismacolor, oil wash on 90# white Stonehenge.

Slow Looking, Slow Down....Take Your Time

2009-08-04T19:41:00.005-05:00

Spend more than a minute looking at one painting; you don't have to get in all of your lifetime's art history requirement in in just one day at the Art Institute, the Met or the Louvre; you can slow down; it's a new movement akin to slow food, slow art.

Read this from the New York Times....

Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover.

We could dream about covering lots of ground thanks to expanding collections and faster means of transportation. At the same time, the canon of art that provided guideposts to tell people where to go and what to look at was gradually dismantled. A core of shared values yielded to an equality among visual materials. This was good and necessary, up to a point. Millions of images came to compete for our attention. Liberated by a proliferation, Western culture was also set adrift in an ocean of passing stimulation, with no anchors to secure it.

So tourists now wander through museums, seeking to fulfill their lifetime’s art history requirement in a day, wondering whether it may now be the quantity of material they pass by rather than the quality of concentration they bring to what few things they choose to focus upon that determines whether they have “done” the Louvre. It’s self-improvement on the fly.

Think About Judith Leyster....

2009-08-01T16:13:00.003-05:00

Think about Judith Leyster, a great woman artist 1609-1660. The link is from the New York Times review of an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art.

Think of “Judith Leyster, 1609-1660” at theNational Gallery of Art as a 400-year-old answer to the art historian Linda Nochlin’s famous question “Why have there been no great women artists?”

On the Passing of Merce Cunningham

2009-07-28T21:40:00.007-05:00

Merce Cunningham, legendary choreographer and dancer, died at the ripe age of 90. His obituary in the New York Times has a quote from him about his dancer's life and passion, which is so different from what I do as a visual artist. I tell people I am a mark-maker, that I make things. I make some effort to ensure that my artworks can potentially survive me by using archival methods and materials. Cunningham's greatness lies in his understanding of the ephemerality of what he was doing.

Mr. Cunningham often spoke and wrote movingly about the nature of dance and would laugh about its maddening impermanence. “You have to love dancing to stick to it,” he once wrote. “It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”

Colors Exploding Like Dynamite

2009-07-26T12:33:00.006-05:00

Ellsworth Kelly
Spectrum I 1953
Courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art © Ellsworth Kelly
Oil on canvas
152.4 x 152.4cm

This is the way I feel about Ellsworth Kelly's paintings. I think many misunderstand his intentions and think that the work is about creating optics vibrating at the edges. I think not, I think he wants the colors to be big and bright and to explode into the viewer's consciousness.

Here's a quote from Tate Etc. from him....

"In the 1960s the Minimalists’ work was considered to be more or less what it is. The painting or sculpture represents itself. I feel that ten years earlier, starting in 1950, I was struggling with exactly the same problem. Colors for a Large Wallconstructed of 64 separate panels becomes a “painting object” that separates the form – the painting – and the ground, which becomes the wall. The edge of one panel next to another panel is not the same as one colour painted next to another colour on a single canvas. When I want to do a painting with one colour overlapping another, it has to be a real overlap, not a depicted overlap. I didn’t want to paint an overlap, meaning that it would be a deception or illusion."

"In Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Fauves – Matisse,Derain – were using bright colours in their full intensity, which continued with Kandinsky, Malevich, Kirchner, Léger and Mondrian. They employed all the colours of the spectrum. In the 1940s and 1950s the majority of the Abstract Expressionists in New York rebelled against this European use of colour and mostly used mixed colours. That is, the Abstract Expressionists did use bright colours sometimes, but they tended to paint wet-on-wet, which muddled their hues. As Matisse would say, a small patch of any one colour is far less intense than a large one of the same colour. I returned in 1954 to New York and showed paintings done in France at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956 with bright colours that wouldn’t really be used until the Pop artists in the 1960s. My idea of using colour at its full intensity, which began with Colors for a Large Wall, hasn’t changed in the 60 years that I’ve been painting."

Painting of the Day....

2009-07-25T18:19:00.003-05:00

Nancy Charak, 2009, "I Found It Just Like You Find Anything Else, I Stopped Looking," pencil, prismacolor, oil wash, oil stick on 90# white Stonhenge.

On Behalf of My Pencils

2009-07-11T13:41:00.006-05:00

I have lost count of how many pencils I have, how many I work with. Here's a picture of my "guys."

Here also is a link to a story about how pencils are made, and the mystery of their creation in that no one person can make one, it is a global endeavor.

From The Freeman, Ideas About Liberty. . .

I, Pencil

By Leonard E. Read • May 1996 • Volume: 46 • Issue: 5

My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!

Pay Me Now, Help the Economy Tomorrow

2009-07-03T15:32:00.002-05:00

Here's a good way to stimulate the economy; buy my art; buy art from LIVING ARTISTs BECAUSE....."When artists get cash, they spend it both quickly and carefully."

Felix Salmon writes in this month's issue of The Atlantic that a good way to jump start the economy would be to pay the artists, who are among the very poorest citizens. "We’re living in a newly frugal world. But the rediscovered values of thrift and moderation should apply to the government as much as they do to households. No more trillion-dollar misadventures abroad: we need to spend money at home, and we need to get the maximum bang for our buck. If the Obama administration is serious about stimulating the economy and creating as many new jobs as possible, one choice is clear: it should announce a massive increase in federal arts funding. Artists are among the very poorest citizens. When they get cash, they spend it both quickly and carefully.

"That’s not what most recipients of federal largesse do, but it happens to be exactly what economists look for in any stimulus package

Free to the Public = Sense of Ownership?

2009-07-03T12:44:00.005-05:00

Here's a link to an article in artdaily.org with the wonderful title of Free Admission Boosts Sense of Public Ownership of National Museums in the UK.

Key quotes from the article; to which I would add, when you take money out of the public till, have respect for the public beyond catering to the lowest common denominator, treat them with respect.....

Free admission is valued and seen as a key element of public ownership.
Free admission is much valued – and makes the concept of ‘public ownership’ real.
Free admission does not of itself mean people think museums and galleries are places for them to visit. Government and museums should make every effort to find out what ‘barriers to entry’ still exist in our museums and galleries. The research highlighted some clear social and educational barriers that need to be tackled.
Better storytelling can involve the public and make art more approachable. Even apparently remote and difficult works can be made accessible relatively quickly - but the effort needs to be made.
The public should be encouraged to ask questions and interrogate decisions made on their behalf. Being asked what they think helps people feel a greater connection to the art collections they own, and may be a crucial first step in attracting support for fundraising campaigns.
Engaging the public in debate about collecting need not undermine the expert curator’s role. Galleries don’t need to be frightened to ask people what they think, because if the effort is made to engage people, they are happy to leave decisions to experts.
Andrew Macdonald, Acting Director of The Art Fund said: "Free admission has established itself in people’s minds as the cornerstone of what it means to have art owned by the public. Galleries can still feel intimidating or elitist, but those barriers disappear when they engage us in the human stories behind the art in our national collections."

Women at the Museum? Why Not?

2009-06-27T13:12:00.007-05:00

From ArtInfo.com

"NEW YORK—A couple of weeks ago, New York magazine art criticJerry Saltz unleashed a torrent of discussion in the arts blogosphere when he posted a status update on his Facebook page: "Of the 383 works on the 4th & 5th flrs. of MoMA's perm. coll., only 19 are by women (4%)," he wrote. Saltz went on to elaborate that he feels "MoMA has declared itself a hostile witness" and to ask the museum to address the issue."

Why oh why do WE have to keep saying LOOK AT US, WE'RE HERE! WE'RE NOT EFFING INVISIBLE!

From ArtFagCity, here's a list of artists the MOMA has but not on display...

Here is a list of 57 women artists already owned by MoMA, none of whom are on exhibit on the 4th & 5th flrs. perm. collection (work before 1970): Alice Neel, Georgia O’Keefe, Florine Stettheimer, Joan Mitchell, Hannah Hoch, Anni Albers, Louise Nevelson, Claude Cahan, Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fine, Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Jo Baer, Elaine de Kooning, Romaine Brooks, Ree Morton, Howardena Pindell, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Alma Thomas, Emma Kunz, Eileen Gray, Clementine Hunter, Adrian Piper, Dorthea Rockburne, Lee Lozano, Vija Celmins, Maria Lassnig, Gego, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Maya Deren, Pat Steir, Hedda Stern, Barbara Hepworth, Gwen John, Jay DeFeo, Jane Freiliecher, Minnie Evans, Merit Oppenheim, Betty Parsons, Bridget Riley, Claire Zeisler, Kay Sage, Grandma Moses, Sister Gertrude, Hilla AfKlimnt, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Dorothea Tanning, Janet Sobel, Atsuko Tanaka, Francoise Gilot, Anne Truitt, Ruth Vollmer, Jane Wilson, Sylvia Sleigh, Paula Rego, Marguerite Zorach.

Why Getting To Be an Older Artist is Good

2009-06-05T23:23:00.006-05:00

Happy birthday to me. I'm making the progression tomorrow, June 6, from what I've been calling "60 and a half" to 61 years old. Here's a link from an article on a blog reviewing a book about the value of being an older artist. The blog is titled Ancient Artist....by Sue Smith.

But I recently started reading a book by Martin S. Lindauer, titled AGING, CREATIVITY, AND ART, A Positive Perspective on Late-Life Development.

According to Lindauer, there are seven characteristics that distinguish "old artists and late art from young artists and youthful efforts."

"Older artists have more knowledge and are less career oriented.
"They also have less energy - the only case where older artists were at a disadvantage to younger ones..."
"...which they compensated for with greater maturity, concentration, and self-acceptance."
"Older artists were also less critical than their younger counterparts."
"However, in two areas, creativity and experimentation, older artists were seen as equal to younger practitioners." (2003, pp.187-188)

Happy birthday to me and to all of us older working, productive artists.

Creative Stifle

2009-05-31T13:22:00.002-05:00

How to be an artist? Or more rather how not to be an artist? Yes, be afraid, be very afraid of being ridiculed, laughed at and questioned as to your sanity. Be afraid of being analyzed, asked questions like "have you stopped making the black paintings because you're not depressed anymore?" Or, can you make it to fit my couch in my colors, lilac and lavender?

We deliberately stifle our own creativity and those of others who dare.

From an article in HR Magazine of August 1999 reviewing a book enitled "Orbiting the Giant Hairball."

The first chapter dares to ask how society has managed to stifle genius and hamper creativity even among schoolchildren. When MacKenzie visited elementary schools to talk about his job, he asked the students how many of them were artists. Although almost all of the first-graders said yes, only one or two sixth-graders claimed to be artists. Adults too can unleash their creative genius if they are strong enough to risk ridicule and challenge the status quo.

No Whining re Modern Wing Today

2009-05-24T15:07:00.006-05:00

The Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago is spectacular, a must see. I'm quoting from Paul Klein's Art Letter post below:

"The opening of the Modern wing at the Art Institute is significant cause for joyous celebration. The building is beautiful, the space dramatic and the installation sensitive and informative. Not forced or artificial like I’ve seen too often, here are pairings and groupings where important pieces inform one another and rooms are dedicated to a single artist. Enlightening. I felt like a tourist dropped in an unknown, thoughtful, considered, glorious, confident, consummate museum. And then I looked out the window. I was at home."

I entered the Modern Wing via the bridge from Millennium Park over the street. The whole setting from the Gehry bandshell past the Anish Kapoor "Bean" past the Pritzker Foundation to the third floor entry to the Art Institute constitutes one of the most magnificent and yet friendly public spaces in the world. Like Paul Klein I was home. I saw many, many old friends on display, paintings that had been out of sight for years. The building is suffused with a magnificent light throughout that makes the paintings glow and pulsate. Unlike the huge, intimidating entry hall at the Tate Gallery London Turbine Room, the main entry hall is large without being oversized, and is light and airy. The work throughout is grouped and hung so that they are easily seen and awed at. Gerhard Richter has his own room, the Giacommetis dance in their space, the Joseph Cornell boxes are back.

I don't know if it's worth the admission fee, you know how I feel about that, but geesh, go there, it's been a long wait.

837 Words from Art Institute of Chicago re Entry Fee

2009-05-23T13:59:00.003-05:00

Here it is, 837 words on the Art Institute of Chicago's admission fee structure starting TODAY, May 23, 2009...not merely is this link from the Art Institute's own website, but I pulled it via an article in Modern Art Notes called "Museum Cannibalism: Pricing Out Visitors."

Just as young people, the middle-class and the less fortunate can least afford access to the great collections in Philadelphia and Chicago, their museums are making it harder for people to visit.

For the museums it comes down to simple math: Endowments are down, government grants are down and private donors and foundations apparently aren't inclined to give enough to prevent admissions hikes. Museums are facing a tough decision: Cut (even more) staff, or raise admissions costs. Philadelphia and Chicago are (in part) choosing to maintain staff and other infrastructure instead of maintaining public access at current price levels.

The problem with looking to admissions costs as the place to make up revenue is this: Admissions are not substantial contributors to most museums' bottom lines. At the Philly Museum, for example, admissions made up just 3.2 percent of program-related expenditures in FY 2006.

At Chicago it's a little bit different; few major museums are more reliant on admissions for revenue. Nine percent of AIC's FY 2006 museum-based expenses were covered by admissions fees, down from 11.2 percent the year before. Yesterday the museum admitted to the Chicago Tribune that the increase was 'needed' because the AIC had to cover operating costs, which have risen (in part) because the AIC is opening a new addition this year. AIC director James Cuno effectively argued that because the museum has more space and higher operating expenses because of the addition, visitors -- who didn't green-light the AIC's expansion -- have to pay for it:

Roles of Our Local Museums in Chicago?

2009-05-18T19:31:00.002-05:00

From an article in The Art Newspaper announcing the opening of the Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing.

(Chicago also has a Museum of Contemporary Art, but its director, Madeleine Grynsztejn, considers the institutions’ roles complementary rather than competitive. “The MCA creates art history and the Art Institute summarises it,” she said.)

Wow, the certainty of Grynsztejn's statement truly frightens me. I've been to the MCA a number of times and find that institution to be woefully wanting. The work on exhibit is frequently obscure, difficult to understand and intellectually inaccessible.

Who The Hell Does She Think She Is?

2009-05-16T18:05:00.002-05:00

For every woman who was complimented by a professor who told her that her work was just like a man's, for every woman who was asked by well meaning men if she could balance family and art. Who the hell doesn't have problems balancing? And it's not about the illusory genes thing, it's about allowing serious artists to make their work and attempt to be recognized. It's as simple as that people.

A movie called Who Does She Think She Is?

Schools Kill Creativity

2009-05-16T17:56:00.002-05:00

From the website TED.com, not related to the airlines, British educator Ken Robinson talks about how schools kill creativity; it's worth 20 minutes of your life to click, watch and listen.

Why Museums NEED to be FREE!

2009-05-03T16:00:00.004-05:00

Because the Met and the Harlem Library nurtured the young Jacob Lawrence. From an article in Arts Journal.com.

"He [Jacob Lawrence] also accompanied various mentors on trips to downtown galleries and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, eventually going by himself on foot, 60 blocks south of his home territory. While still a teenager, he developed an appreciation of early Renaissance art, the murals of Jose Orozco and the paintings of Arthur Dove, John Marin and Kathe Kollwitz."

"I think of Lawrence whenever museums rise their admission fees. He remembered the MET being free. He wanted to go, and the Met let him in. (Robert Frost: Home is the place where, when you have to go there,They have to take you in.)"

Here is an Art Journal article that talks about the Art Institute of Chicago's disgusting and vile plan to raise their admissions prices. In the interest of full disclosure I am a member at the lowest possible yearly rate. The best compromise is to adopt a pay what you can policy AND encourage memberships but leave the door open.

Good Art Day Today

2009-03-29T16:19:00.002-05:00

Finished this one today! "No Two Lines the Same," 2009, 30"x44", graphite on 90# white Stonehenge. [Double click on image for more detail.]

Loss of Albedo

2009-03-29T10:51:00.003-05:00

My latest drawing, "Loss of Albedo," 2009, just finished, 30"x44", pencil, graphite, oil stick on 90# white Stonehenge. [Reminder, if you double-click on image you can see it in all its glory.]

Art on the South Side of Chicago!

2009-03-28T10:30:00.003-05:00

Last Thursday, March 26th, attended a panel discussion at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago which featured Joyce Owens, Lowell Thompson, Natalie Moore, Andre Guichard and Patrick Rivers, organized by Quiana Burwell, all discussing the notion of the "Invisible Artist: Creators from Chicago's Southside."

First, in the disclaimer department I'm a northsider (and a Cubs fan) born and bred.

The genesis for the panel was the notion that at the School of the Art Institute students are not pointed or directed to art, artists and art-life on the south side of Chicago. The short answer is that there very much is life, art, artists and art-life south of Roosevelt Road. The long answer as to why the art-school and general public at large have a different and possibly negative perception lies in a multitude of answers, many of which are racist and which I won't go into here.

I want rather to look at the question that Quiana posed which is why did the school not point its majority and minority students south of Roosevelt. My thought is that perhaps it would have been nice, but it is my general unscientific not backed up by any type of data but just anecdotes that the Art Institute and its school are not interested in Chicago art. The school is a machine for matriculating and graduating huge numbers of artists who then make whatever way they can in the world, as artists or not.

I also posit that art schools and major art institutions have serious significant relationships with power, be that money and politics. All I had to do was look out the window of the room that the panel was held in, the former ballroom of the former Chicago Athletic Club to see the Pritzker fountain to the left and immediately across the street to the main entrance of the Art Institute itself, where when you walk in, you are flanked by the bronze plaques of the donors and major endowers of the place, Swift, Armor, Medill, Patterson, some of whose fortunes were made on the backs of underpaid, under-privileged migrants the world over.

Which brings me to my next point, we were all, all of us, so privileged to be there, to be able to complain, while we still live in one of the most prosperous countries on earth, have full bellies, have the means to make art and to try to sell it, under the auspices of an art-school that has a director of multi-cultural affairs as a panel leader.

It occurs to me that my African-American artist brothers and sisters want the same things I want, the means to make art and the means to sell it, to gain some recognition for it. Bless us all.

Mountains and Sea

2009-03-22T18:29:00.004-05:00

Finished today, Mountains and Sea, 44"x30", pencil and oilstick on white Stonehenge. [Reminder, double click to see more detail.]

Mostly 9H

2009-03-21T15:30:00.006-05:00

Finished last week, "Mostly 9H," 44"x30", pencil on white Stonehenge paper. [Reminder, double-click to see details.]

James Mesple at Printworks

2009-03-21T12:13:00.004-05:00

Next Friday night, March 27th, get yourselves over to Printworks Gallery, 311 West Superior Street, Chicago between 7 and 9 pm to see James Mesple's works on paper. Mythic, lyrical, enchanting, other-worldly, precious and yet pungent are some of my thoughts on seeing his work. This one is entitled "Sol and Equus," mixed media on paper, 12"x20".

Too Much Academia in the Arts?

2009-03-21T11:58:00.003-05:00

Dana Gioia, a former poet laureate of the United States, has lamented in a May 1991 article in the Atlantic Monthly that as the number of poets, published poets and academic study of poetry has bloomed, the numbers of the public reading and appreciating poetry has plummeted. He attributes this largely to the academization of the study and production of poetry. This process has isolated this art-form to a subculture of the public at large.

I contend that much the same has happened to the visual arts. MFAs abound everywhere and are seen as a key to university jobs and even acceptance by gallerists as proof of artistic achievement. Note, however, that the quality of instructors is high, even in locations and institutions far from the art-centers, New York, Los Angeles and even my beloved Chicago. If you take an art class you will find a good teacher.

But the visual arts, like poetry, have been consigned to the status of a subculture, largely unimportant to the people at large, except when a piece or an artist astounds and offends and is seen as somehow having been paid for out of the public purse.

Further, the visual arts have been isolated in the subculture of the high-end hedge fundies who drove the prices so high as to render relative value absolutely meaningless.

Why should anyone care? Why do I care? I make art no matter what and I make art in spite of my MFA from a university degree factory. I spent years unlearning what I learned at that program so that I could find my own 'visual voice.' I care, we all should care, because we are part of the human condition, we comment on it, we are.

Art & Fear II

2009-03-15T12:02:00.005-05:00

Another quote from the book Art & Fear by Bayles and Orland that I refer to in my previous post. On page 79 they quote Howard Ikemoto as follows:

"When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college--that my job was to teach people how to draw."

"She stared back at me, incredulous, and said 'You mean they forget?"

"To the artist, art is a verb." (page 90). I think that's the crux of why the non-artists find us artists to be strange and often crazy; we haven't forgotten how to draw, how to make art and we are much less afraid of failing to make a good drawing. We know we are going to make bad art, we will make work that will not satisfy us, whether or not we show that work to the outside. The "outsiders" don't understand that and they insist on labeling art as a "talent." Talent doesn't go far without the work; it goes nowhere.

Art & Fear

2009-03-14T15:15:00.004-05:00

Art & Fear from an artist's perspective, not the viewer's. I am reading Art & Fear: Observations on the perils (and rewards) of artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland (1993, Image Continuum Press), which I picked up this morning at my local library.

We artists are plagued by doubts and fears. These fears fall into two general categories, fears about ourselves and about our reception by others (p. 23). Bayles and Orland enumerate a list as follows:

I'm not an artist--I'm a phony

I have nothing worth saying

I'm not sure what I'm doing

Other people are better than I am

I'm only a student [student/physicist/mother/whatever]

I've never had a real exhibit

No one understands my work

No one likes my work

I'm no good

(p. 13)

All of which are potentially true, but all of which are totally destructive of the art-making process. These authors bring out another interesting point, which is that if as is true in the academic art-world, that 95% of the MFA and BFA graduates are not making art in 10 years, that if this was the case in the medical profession there would be congressional investigations.

Fear of failure and fear of success are the only reasons.

Who Owns Museum Stuff?

2009-03-10T18:48:00.005-05:00

I grew up in the Art Institute of Chicago and the Field Museum of Natural History, which means that I enjoyed and learned about the world looking at the fruits of loot inside these magnificent catch-all encyclopedic repositories.

James Cuno in his book Who Owns Antiquity argues that encyclopedic museums, those catch-all of goodies from the world-over are good things. He has been excoriated for this. I stand with him; I agree that these museums are a good thing.

The British Museum is not going to give the Elgin Marbles to the government of Greece. If each and every nation-state insists that whatever is in the ground belongs to them and only them, then whatever current national interests exist will be the only things served. Thus in the face of increasing Sino-ization of Tibet, the Amharization of Ethiopia, the Russianization of the former Soviet border states, what contrary issues and ideas will survive. Eleven and twelve centuries ago an entire tribe of Tartars converted to Judaism, their artifacts lie in the Trans-Caucasus between the Caspian and the Black Seas. Russian archaeologists deny that those artifacts are Jewish. The Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan out of pure religious zealotry and spite with no regard or respect for their own antiquity or anyone else on the planet.

Der Spiegel ran a story today about the discomfort and downright political hostility experienced by Erika Steinbach, leader of a group that calls itself The Federation of Expellees in Germany that wants to document the sufferings of Germans expelled by the Polish government at the end of the Second World War. The Polish government argues fearfully that such Germans should not be permitted to see themselves as victims of the Nazis.

I argue that they are victims of the insistence that the modern nation state defines nationhood and nationality on narrow bases of tribalism, race, religion, and language. Cuno argues the same for archaeological artifacts.

Cuno posits that the argument over rightful ownership of antiquities is not whether they and the sites they come from should be preserved but how to preserve them and increase our knowledge of and increase public access to them.

We are all one tribe, we deserve to see all of our ancestors goodies and treasures; we do not want them besmirched in the name of narrow national interests.

Opportunity Knocks

2009-02-22T09:04:00.004-06:00

From an article by Arne Glimcher, "Brave New Art World," take note of cause for optimism: Glimcher is the founder of Pace-Wildenstein Gallery.

In response to the comparison between the recent over-heated art market and when the Japanese collectors were going ga-ga in the 80's, Glimcher says as follows,

"The difference between then and now is vast. The Japanese were collecting already famous artists. Whereas the new collectors of the last decade were making artists famous by their rapacious patronage. Is it within reason that an artist's prices could from $50,000 in the gallery to $1 million in the auction rooms within six months? They did with Marlene Dumas. And within a two-year span a Nurse painting by Richard Prince went from $120,000 to $10 million.'

"The only parallel to this frantic escalation of prices was the tulip-bulb scandal that destroyed the Dutch economy in the 17th century. Today's art market is global and therefore susceptible to adjustment on an international scale. Consequently there is an immediate crisis in the art market as in other markets and sometimes they interact. Brandeis University's decision to sell its extraordinary collection of 60's art and close the Rose Musuem due to the diminished value is just one incredible example.

"Bu in crisis there is also opportunity. Serious collectors who couldn't get near an object now have access."

That's the answer, there is opportunity. Let's get out there and urge all serious art lovers to buy local, buy from living artists so we can buy more art supplies to make more, and remember, I always give 50 percent off to the second sale!

Hat tip to Emily for sending the article.

Courage of My Convictions

2009-02-22T08:53:00.003-06:00

I attended a symposium sponsored by FOTA, here in Chicago, the topic being how to make a living or at least try to market one's artwork. The main things I took away was to have the courage of my artistic convictions and validation of my current program of promotion, with the concern that I'm not doing enough, but that I have the best tools in hand, this blog being one of them.

The painting of the week is Untitled, 8"x8", 2008, oil stick, pencil, prismacolor pencil on clayboard. These sell for $75.00.

Painting of the Week Deprofundis--Center

2009-02-15T09:59:00.003-06:00

This is the center piece of a triptych; artist--Nancy Charak, 2008, 24"x30", oil stick, prismacolor pencil, pencil on acrylic primed masonite. Enjoy.

Darrell Roberts at Thomas McCormick Gallery

2009-02-08T09:57:00.004-06:00

You have got to go to 835 West Washington, just west of Halsted in Chicago to Thomas McCormick Gallery to see Darrell Roberts' paintings. You can also see the exhibit on-line at the gallery's website, but oh gee, oh gosh, you really should see them in the real, they are compelling objects, with great color, texture and presence.

Go to the Cultural Center see Poetic Dialogue

2009-02-01T10:09:00.003-06:00

I strongly encourage all of you to run, don't walk, over to the Chicago Cultural Center to see the current iteration of the Poetic Dialogue, which is as always, curated by Beth Shadur. It is a stunning, intense exhibit, a continued collaboration between visual artists and poets. The show features the work of a number of visual artists whose work I adore and respect, Charlotte Segal who is linked in my sidebar, John Pitman Weber a stalwart of the Chicago Public Art Group, Mirjana Ugrinov my good friend and super-supporter also in my sidebar, and 28 other artists and their poetic collaborators. Take the time, there is much to see and think about, go more than once.

The Secret of a Good Painting

2009-02-01T09:56:00.007-06:00

Once again the magazine Tate etc. hits paydirt with in the section called Microtate, in which Esther Stocker comments on Robert Ryman's painting Ledger 1982. The painting may be hard to see depending on your monitor, it consists of the subtlest changes of color on aluminum.

"I think it is the deeper secret of a good painting that it doesn't give you something, it takes something away from you. It leaves you with less than you had before, sometimes even with nothing. At least that is what happens with me. My old room-mate told me once that I am the dumbest person on earth for not knowing which things belong to me. This hurt. I hated hearing my human importance being measure by remembering (or not remembering) which teacup was mine.

"Paintings such as Robert Ryman's Ledger don't tell you what to see or what to think. Whatever instruction you might be given for its better understanding, it only shows you it is useless. I like to hang out in a painting such as this, not remembering this and that, things I always thought I should know. My head slowly empties and I cannot find much in there anymore. I am always happy not to find things. It gives me a calm sense of freedom. It is so great not to get it, to know a little bit less. I think this is called liberation."

Agnes Martin Writing on Failure

2009-01-25T10:06:00.005-06:00

Untitled, 2009, 8"x8", oil stick, pencil, prismacolor pencil and watercolor on clayboard; Nancy Charak, artist.

"When we wake up in the morning we are inspired to do some certain thing and we do do it. The difficulty lies in the fact that it may turn out well or it may not turn out well. If it turns out well we have a tendency to think we have successfully followed our inspiration and if does not turn out well we have a tendency to think that we have lost our inspiration. But that is not true. There is successful work and work that fails, but all of it is inspired. I will speak later about successful work of art but here I want to speak of failures Failures that should be discarded and completely cuttoff.

I have come especially to talk to those among you, who recognize these failures. I want particularly to talk to those who recognize all of their failures and feel inadequate and defeated, to those who feel insufficient--short of what is expected or needed. I would like somehow to explain that those feelings are the natural state of mind of the artist, that a sense of disappoint and defeat is the essential state of mind for creative work." (pp. 4-5)

From The Drawing Center's Drawing Papers 51, Agnes Martin, Beginning No. 5, undated writings, in conjunction with exhibit March 19-May 21, 2005 (3X Abstractions: New Methods of Drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin.

On Rothko and Mondrian

2009-01-09T21:40:00.003-06:00

In an article in a wonderful museum on-line magazine Tate etc., entitled Landscapes of the Mind, Brice Marden talks about both the physicality and the spirituality of experiencing the works of Mark Rothko in person.

To quote Marden: "That you're in a space--an indefinable space, but it is having an effect on you physically. You feel engulfed, totally surrounded by it. Last year I read that Rothko once said that the ideal distance from which to view his paintings is eighteen inches. So I do as he suggested whenever I am in front of one. And it makes a huge difference. You become much more conscious of every nuance, which probably at some other time I had thought were just little accidents in his printing process. I realized how carefully they were painted."

I can say that I had the same experience when finally getting close to the Rothkos at the Tate a couple of years ago. At that point they had nine of the famous Seagram murals. Standing in front of them made me feel surrounded, like Marden, and transported as well to a spiritual place. It was almost the sensation of an embrace. Now, of course, the big Rothko show at the Tate Modern is winding down by February 1st.

Which brings me to my point, which is that art needs to be experienced in the real, in real space and in real time. It is not enough to do as we all do out of academic necessity to look at them in textbooks, as huge projections in art-history lectures or on-line in our computers.

Paintings, as well as other works of art, are physical, they have size, substance, touch and presence. They demand to be seen for real, in the real, and we as artists have frequently ignored this at our peril.

Generations of art students have looked at the works of Piet Mondrian through prostheses and then went off to make paintings that they thought emulated this master. However, when in the real you see the Mondrian paintings, all kinds of things show up, they are small, almost intimate, in scale, they have thicknesses of paint and the lines are not quite straight, in a word, the works are organic.

What else needs to be emphasized is that we need to not only look at the art in person, in the real, we need to look at them in time, both in frequency and in duration. We do not spend enough time looking, we glance and walk on. Partly this is an architectural problem, museums don't have enough benches or chairs in the galleries. Why not take the leisure to sit and look. We need to slow down and look and contemplate, not just glance and run. We need to look at a painting or other work of art more than once.

Got English?

2009-01-08T19:30:00.005-06:00

My good friend Mary, an escapee from the winters of her youth and a well educated kind of a gal with a passion for the good usage of our native tongue has started a blog called Got English. She abhors misuse of that whole apostrophe S thing and the confusion between plurals, possessives and its versus it's. Suffice it to say that the apostrophe S thing is not a signal that there's an S coming at the end of the word.

And above is one of the paintings of mine that Mary has in her home in the Valley of the Sun, it's 22"x30" oil and oil wash on 140# Arches watercolor paper.

Take a Leap, Lay Down ****

2009-01-05T18:09:00.004-06:00

Dragons' Teeth, 2008, 24"x30", pencil, prismacolor on acrylic primed masonite panel. The title is from the Greek myth about how the teeth of the dragons when planted would grow into fully armed warriors. I came to this title after I made the drawing, not before.

But the topic of the moment is my own creative process. I had dinner with a friend who is an industrial engineer. She designs, or more particularly, redesigns decision making processes in companies. She is able to walk into a place, talk to people, look at their manufacturing systems and their decision making flow and assist them in redesigning for greater efficiency and even happiness.

I demonstrated my process to her at the dinner table at one of those cute restaurants that put the brown paper on top of the table with the shot glass crayons. I explained that I have to have all of my drawing materials close to the table, colored pencils arranged in cans by color families, reds, greens, blues, etc., to the point of sorting the hard and soft standard graphite as well. Then I make a mark, which sparks a visual idea. Sometimes, I'll define a recipe of action on the surface, such as red in a cross hatch motion until the point isn't sharp. Or perhaps a visual decision by stepping back and seeing that the drawing seems to need a temperature change. A thousand decisions almost all quick and non-reflective.

In Dragons' Teeth the limiting factor was a decision to work only in a range of greys, warm greys and cool greys, pulling definition out of the blackness of the substrate.

In a post to the Huffington Post, Kimberly Brooks described The Creative Process in Eight Stages. They are vision, hope, excitement, suspicion, clarity, obsession and resolution. The best quote is from Jerry Belson who wrote for the Dick Van Dyke Show and the Odd Couple, who would advise his fellow writers who complained about writer's block to "just lay down shit." At some point, have vision and hope, and then just lay it down. Or even better don't worry about the hope thing, just put something down.

The biggest barrier to being an artist is having the courage to jump into the unknown and lay down shit to see what happens,

I Took Some Lines to the Circus.

2008-12-28T10:54:00.004-06:00

Title: I Took Some Lines to the Circus, 2008, 24"x30", pencil, prismacolor pencil on acrylic primed masonite panel. I have decided that going forward all of my new work will have real titles, not merely, Untitled with Some Number. That got way, way too confusing, no doubt exacerbated by there not being a good system to begin with. Now I will confuse my viewers in a different way, with literary and linguistic questions. Enjoy.

New Paradigms

2008-12-28T10:32:00.004-06:00

I recently attended a panel discussion featuring Joyce Owens, Dawoud Bey, and Tony Fitzpatrick, along with Juan Angel Chavez and Paul Klein at the Chicago Cultural Center on the topic of Turning Your Art Into a Career. First of all I thought the title was wonderfully crafted, implying that a career is a life vocation, if not necessarily a remunerative one. Dawoud Bey with all his eloquence offered up the following which he posted on his blog which is called What's Going On?, Advice to Emerging Artists.

Amongst his best advice and I quote here: "• Don’t be afraid to create new paradigms for how you can exist and function as an artist. A lot of the old paradigms were never meant to serve artists well in the first place. I don’t know any other field in which you can bear the full expense of production, then give someone 50% to sell the object or product, then pay the IRS the requisite 33% tax rate, and say you are doing "good business." This is the “normal” paradigm of the commercial art world, and at a certain level it does work, particularly at the mid to upper levels. It doesn't mean its the only way, and in the early stages your work will not be priced high enough to cover your costs of production, let alone pay your rent every month, under this structure at any rate."

So I encourage you to go over to Dawoud's blog.

I am endeavoring to create and execute a new means of exhibiting my artwork. I found two venues last year, at the university art galleries of the University of Montana in Missoula and at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond. I am putting together a small, select group of artists who make drawings for a concerted run at additional spaces across the country. That's this year's project.

Response to 40 Years Old and Still Waiting

2008-11-30T09:05:00.008-06:00

Pentimento II, 22"x30", oil and pencil on 140# Arches watercolor paper. Nancy Charak--artist.

My studio mate Norbert Marszalek, a wonderful artist, and a thoughtful blogger with strong opinions, has a post "40 Years Old and Still Waiting to Emerge" in which he questions the definition of what is an emerging artist. I'm 60 years old and just emerging. Norbert references Malcolm Gladwell's article in the New Yorker contrasting the lives and achievements of precocious artists versus late bloomers.

I think that there has been way, way too much emphasis in our culture on youthful precocity. I consider myself to be a late-bloomer, even though I knew I wanted to be an artist from when I was seven or eight, went to art schools to study art, design, painting and drawing, getting a BA and an MFA. But after obtaining that MFA at the crest of the baby-boom and futile attempts to find a teaching position at art departments in universities and colleges nation-wide, I wandered off the art-path to search for a career. Never found a career but found a good day job, one with real benefits, health insurance etc.

But five years ago, I got the itch and issued a challenge to myself; I wanted to know if I was still capable of making art. I bought 100 sheets of 18x24" watercolor paper, some colored pencils, an oil painting starter set. I decided that I would know after those 100 pieces of paper were painted if I was an artist, capable of continuing. I only got to 70 but I knew that I was "back."

The main difference between myself as the younger artist and now is that I'm not waiting for the big ideas, not worrying about "being" an artist. I make art. I have a discipline now that I never had when I was younger because I spent and wasted a whole lot of time worrying about the big idea. I have discovered that for me the making of art is a process, not a big idea. I have discovered that the big ideas come only after the making of the art. For me art is a making not a thinking.

Which isn't to say that I don't think. I have a mental process in which I am making a thousand million decisions about what to do and where to put my hand with the pencil or brush. But it is a process that is as unself-conscious as I can do. I have learned to then sit and look and think. I know have a whole mental vocabulary of analytical tools in my head that I never had 30 years ago.

None of this answers Norbert's question, which goes to recognition. Like Norbert, I resent and question the attention that is given to super-stars just out of their MFA programs at the age of 25 or 30. They haven't lived much of an artistic inner life of making and thinking. And there is the frustration of finding our audience, our customers, our own recognition.

The greatest artists become truly great in their old age, Rembrandt, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Agnes Martin, Alice Neel.

I have learned to be somewhat patient. It's not easy.

Evolution, We are Evolved

2008-11-29T09:42:00.003-06:00

From an article in Science Daily headlined: "Evolution Of The Visual System Is Key To Abstract Art."

Abstract artists are still painting what we can see, we have inherited a basic visual system through genetics that provides very selective information about the world. We cannot see electromagnetic radiation or follow the leg movements of galloping horses. But just as soon as we enhanced and created prosthetics to view the micro, we have ways of visualizing the electromagnetic, we can "stop motion" the movements of horses. Because we use and expand these prosthetics, we can see more and more and imagine more and more in our art work.

“Artists were experimenting with abstract shapes long before scientists began analysing our nature of perception. Through observation or trial-and-error, artists have been identifying these aesthetic primitives - critical shapes and arrangements - and have indirectly defined the nature of our visual processes. In purely abstract painting, as with much music, form is all we have. Popular works have shown that essentially we like looking at what we are good at seeing.”

Rational Tax Policy

2008-11-29T09:19:00.003-06:00

An article in THE ART NEWSPAPER, "Artists should have same tax deductions as collectors when donating works of art," pleads the case as follows:

Art museums large and small depend on donations from art collectors to build and sustain their collections. By creating a tax incentive for these donations—donors receive a tax deduction for the fair market value of works of art they donate—the US Congress has supported the development of non-profit art institutions and expanded the public audience for art. But artists donating their own works receive a deduction only for the cost of materials used to create the work, for example canvas and paint.

I would be more disposed to donate to a museum or to the frequent calls and pleas I receive from innumerable good causes if I could at least deduct the presumed sale value of my work beyond the cost of the materials. My 24"x30" masonite panels cost about $2.50 each, the acrylic paint might cost out to $1.00 per panel (remember the dilution factor), I might use 1/8th to 1/16th of 10 or 12 pencils that cost me $1.25 each, so totting that up is about $5.50 tops, and there's no factoring in time or years of experience or schooling. I try to sell these for at least $200, having sold about 4 total. A decent quality frame is $55.00, that's without a matte or backing of any type.

So, remember to buy art from a living artist such as myself or any of the wonderful artists listed in my sidebar in the LINKs section so we can buy more paint and supplies. And write your congress people in support of the "Artist Museum Partnership Act."

Economic Challenge New WPA?

2008-11-23T12:05:00.003-06:00

My good friend, Joyce Owens, posits the question in her blog about the possibility of setting up a new WPA (Works Project Administration) reminiscent of the New Deal to assist artists in particular and the public in general. Like Joyce, I invite your comments. Joyce sees it as a good, a public good. I worry that, as in the 30's, art will be pulled to a "social realism" definition, pulled to subject matters potentially defined by lowest or lower common denominator tastes.