MY PAINTINGS & DRAWINGS

This is a short film I produced for an arts and lecture evening at a contemporary art museum in Seattle. Artists were asked to "explain" their work, which is generally a bad idea. Art should approach the ineffable. At the very least it should arrive naked, stripped of wordy manifestos and "wall-text" jargon. If you're lucky, it will dance with you, tickle your brain, show a little passion. It won't settle too easily into a pigeonhole. It won't reveal itself all at once.

My work is inspired by classical painting as well as offbeat popular art, films noir, golden age cartooning, illuminated manuscripts, sideshow banners, German engravings, Mexican wrestling posters, and both foreign and domestic currency (which I will gladly accept for my art). But that doesn't "explain" it, really.

There is a professional language one uses to discuss art but often it's like explaining an orange by listing it's chemical ingredients. Something is lost. Not that my work is that complicated or impossible to discuss, but given the chance to defend it, I realized a dry, academic tact wouldn't serve me well (nor would it "explain" anything, really) so I respectfully skipped the traditional slides-and-lecture approach and presented this small film. Hope you like it.

For more of my artwork, please check out Bob Makes Art.

PART TWO:

I AM AN ARTIST!

Most artists don't know anything about the business side of art. I AM AN ARTIST: Professional Development Weekend for Artists is a workshop designed to fill that void, and provide essential resources, funding opportunities, peer-to peer evaluation, networking and hands-on feedback for artists.

So you make art? Now what? How do you showcase your work? How do you present your portfolio? How do you write a successful grant proposal? How do you most effectively write an artist's statement? Do galleries still require slides or has everything gone digital? How big are your jpegs? How does your resume look? Sure you know Cadmium red and your Cobalt blue, but what about fiscal sponsorship? Taxes? What about money?

Artists are comfortable making art--that's what we do--but less comfortable conducting the business of art which we've often learned by trial and error, willy nilly, haphazardly. "That's left brain stuff," we joke, burrowing into our work. The business of art is rarely touched upon in art school, which many artists don't attend anyway, and once you're "out in the world" you improvise and play catch as catch can, hoping for the best and trying to make art with your fingers crossed. Other professions have vast support networks and encourage (if not require) continuing education, but artists tend to fumble along alone.

I'm just halfway through this workshop but I've already stuffed my brain (both sides) with valuable information about grant writing and portfolio presentation and galleries and resumes and the labyrinth of taxes and 501c3s and fiscal sponsorship. Lots of good tips. All that, and sharing notes with fellow artists from various backgrounds and experiences. I highly recommend I Am an Artist.

The workshop is offered by Artist Trust, a non-profit organization dedicated to serving the needs of the arts community in Washington state. Artist Trust was founded in 1987 by a group of arts patrons and artists who were concerned about the lack of support for individual artists. Artist Trust is guided by the leadership of a Board of Trustees and a professional staff.

"Artist Trust provides artists the time and resources necessary to prosper. We deliver vital professional development information to thousands of artists each year, and have distributed over $3.4 million in direct support to more than 1,675 of Washington State’s most promising and respected artists of all disciplines."

Visit Artist Trust

WHY ART?

Who needs Art? We're in a recession, right? During tough economic times we've always slashed health care, education, environmental protection, and programs designed to help the hungry and the homeless--critical social services--so why worry about something as ephemeral as "the arts?" Surely, we can jettison a few poems and paintings in favor of more pressing concerns...right? After all, who really needs painting, music, and literature?

The novelist E. L. Doctorow gave this speech before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee in the fall of 1981. It remains a timely statement on the value of art to the human spirit.

For the Artist's Sake

I have always disliked the phrase "the arts." It connotes to me furs and black ties and cocktail receptions, the patronage by the wealthy of work that is tangential to their lives, or that fills them not with dread or awe or visionary joy but with self-satisfaction.

"The arts" have nothing to do with the loneliness of writers or painters working in their rooms year after year, or with actors putting together plays in lofts, or with dancers tearing up their bodies to make spatial descriptions of the hope of beauty or transcendent myth.

So as a working writer I distinguish myself from the arts community. I am confirmed in this when I look at the National Endowment for the Arts' board and program structure. In the past, a very small percentage of the arts budget has been given over to literature, to the grants made to young writers or dramatists or poets of promise. In all the time since its founding, the N.E.A. has found only four writers worthy to sit on its immense board. Instead, the heavy emphasis has been on museums, opera companies, symphony orchestras: just those entities that happen to cater to patrons of "the arts."

I suppose I would have to confess, if asked, that I feel about opera, for instance, that it is not a living art in this country, that we do not naturally write and produce operas from ourselves as a matter of course as, for example, Italy did in the nineteenth century, and that, therefore, as wonderful and exciting as opera production may be, it is essentially the work of conservation of European culture; opera companies are conservators of the past, like museums, and their support by the National Endowment reflects this strong bias or belief in the arts as something from the past rather than the present.

The National Endowment programs I value most are just those likely to be proscribed: first, the programs of individual grants to individual artists in whatever medium — the programs endowing directly the work of living artists; and, second, those programs that do not separate the arts from life, from our own life and times but emphasize the connection — the artists-in-education program, the poets who go into schools, for example, and help children to light the spark in themselves. I cannot imagine anything more responsible than the work persuading a schoolchild to express his or her anguished or joyful observations — and to be self-rewarded with a poem or a painting. Whole lives ride on moments like that.

Or the inter-arts programs, the folk arts, the expansion arts — all bureaucratic terms for encouraging experiment and risk-taking on the part of artists, and for bringing artists in contact with people everywhere in the country, connecting people with the impulses inside themselves. Programs that encourage participation rather than the passive receipt of official art of the past are the ones I think most important: all the programs that suggest to people that they have their own voices, that they can sing and write of their own past — people in their churches, students in their classes or prisoners in their cells. These programs — just the ones branded so vilely by the Heritage Foundation Report as instruments of social policy or public therapy and slated for extinction by our new budgeteers — are the ones I value. And not from any vague idealistic sentiment either: I know as an artist where art comes from. I know there is a ground-song from which every writer lifts his voice, that literature comes out of a common chorus and that our recognition of the genius of a writer — Mark Twain, for example — cannot exclude the people he speaks for.

Art will rise where it is least expected and usually not wanted. You can't generate it with gala entertainments and $200-a-plate dinners. You can, if you're an enlightened legislative body, see to it that you don't ipso facto create an official state art by concentrating your funding on arts establishments. Other people may talk of how many billions of dollars of business is produced from the arts, but to me that is beside the point.

But saying even this, I cannot avoid the feeling that it is senseless for me to testify here today. People everywhere have been put in the position of fighting piecemeal for this or that social program while the assault against all of them proceeds across a broad front. The truth is, if you're going to take away the lunches of schoolchildren, the pensions of miners who've contracted black lung, the storefront legal services of the poor who are otherwise stunned into insensibility by the magnitude of their troubles, you might as well get rid of poets, artists and musicians. If you're planning to scrap medical care for the indigent, scholarships for students, day-care centers for the children of working mothers, transportation for the elderly and handicapped — if you're going to eliminate people's public service training jobs and then reduce their unemployment benefits after you've put them on the unemployment rolls, taking away their food stamps in the bargain, then I say the loss of a few poems and arias cannot matter. If you're going to close down the mental therapy centers for the veterans of Vietnam, what does it matter if the theaters go dark or our libraries close their doors?

And so in my testimony for this small social program I am aware of the larger picture and, really, it stuns me. What I see in this picture is a kind of sovietizing of American life, guns before butter, the plating of this nation with armaments, the sacrifice of everything in our search for ultimate security. We shall become an immense armory. But inside the armory there will be nothing, not a people but an emptiness; we shall be an armory around nothingness, and our true strength and security and envy of the world — the passion and independent striving of a busy working and dreaming population committed to fair play and the struggle for some sort of real justice and community — will be no more. If this happens, maybe in the vast repository of bombs, deep in the subterranean chambers of our missile fields, someone in that cavernous silence will remember a poem and recite it. Maybe some young soldier will hum a tune, maybe another will be able to speak the language well enough to tell a story, maybe two people will get up and dance to the rhythm of the doomsday clock ticking us all to extinction.

--E. L. Doctorow

"For the Artist's Sake." E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations. Ed. Richard Trenner. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review P, 1983: 13-15.

WHO'S LAUGHING NOW?

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - The auction house thought the portrait was a 17th century Rembrandt knockoff, and valued it at just $3,100. But the British buyer who paid about 1,500 times more than that apparently knew what he was doing.

Experts have confirmed "Rembrandt Laughing" — bought for a bargain price of $4.5 million at an English auction house in October — is a self-portrait by the Dutch master himself, depicted with his head tilted back in easygoing laughter.

William Noortman from Noortman Master Paintings, specializing in Dutch and Flemish masters, said it's worth $30 million to $40 million, adding: "I'm very surprised it didn't make more at auction."

- Associated Press

For other Rembrandt self portraits, click HERE.

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG DIES AT 82

Robert Rauschenberg (American artist, 1925-2008) died Monday night at his Florida home. Irrepressible, playful, hard-drinking spirit, he blurred the lines between art, sculpture and photography, and used everything -- print, paint, and assembled found junk -- and made us see the art in it. He threw everything on board, and sidestepped the angst of Abstract Expressionism. Rauschenberg helped open up the possibilities. For the NYTimes obit, click HERE.


-from "Robert Rauschenberg: Man at Work"

LE MYSTERE PICASSO

The third volume of John Richardson's A Life of Picasso has just been published. I just read a review in the New York Review of Books, and now I wish I had the books -- and a time machine! Here is an excerpt from the review by Andrew Butterfield.

The book starts with Picasso's trip to Italy in the spring of 1917 in the company of Jean Cocteau, Sergei Diaghilev, and Léonide Massine, three of his four collaborators on the ballet Parade that they were then planning. Erik Satie, the composer of Parade, stayed home in Paris, but Igor Stravinsky joined the group in Rome and swiftly became close friends with Picasso. Stravinsky and Picasso studied the Sistine Chapel and the museums of Rome, and with Massine and Cocteau explored the ruins of Pompei and Herculaneum. In Rome they went to the puppet theater, and in Naples they attended performances of commedia dell'arte, experiences that not only helped shape Parade but later directly inspired the ballet Pulcinella which Stravinsky, Massine, and Picasso created in 1920.

For the entire review
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20892



A clip from the documentary "Le Mystère Picasso", produced and directed by H. G. Clouzot. France 1956.

KOMAR AND MELAMID

You may remember Russian graphic artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid from the time they combined survey results to ascertain popular preferences in art, and came up with the most pleasing,"perfect" painting. Of course, these Ruskies are having a laugh, right? (Komar and Melamid founded sots art, a strange combination of conceptual art and Soviet pop art, with some Dada thrown in for good measure) America's Most Wanted Art is shown above -- a landscape, with natural beauty and wildlife, and a beloved historic figure, George Washington. K and M made their point -- not only about the weakness of collectivist art, art by committee, but also a little slap at popular art itself.

Well, the Ruskies have done it again. This time they've collated their surveys and come up with the perfect popular song. According to the duo, "most participants desire music of moderate duration (approximately 5 minutes), moderate pitch range, moderate tempo, and moderate to loud volume, and display a profound dislike of the alternatives."

What do you think? See if your tastes are mainstream normal -- click the button to hear The Most Wanted Song.


Alternative tastes? Follow a different drummer? According to K and M, fewer than two hundred people worldwide will enjoy The Most Unwanted Song:

ART TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE

Some say it's a great idea, creating a shorthand checklist for art lovers with time and money to kill, and others say it's a fool's errand. Either way, Jonathan Jones of the Guardian has a daunting assignment: naming the fifty great works of art one must see before dying. "The works of art that matter most," is how he puts it. So far, he's kicked off the project by presenting his top twenty works of art (listed below). Undoubtedly great works, even a casual art student could think of significant omissions and probably come up with another list entirely. Reducing the total artistic expression of mankind to any list may seem ludicrous (especially a short list), but as a parlor game it's kind of fun, like playing art history Trivial Pursuit. What would you add? What are your all-time favorite works of art? What works are most important?


To his credit, Jones is asking for your help, so send your suggestions to the Guardian. I understand the reaction has been intense. For my part, I miss certain favorites and balk at the slim representation of modern art. Something is happening out there -- in the studios and galleries, in the museums, something of value in the past fifty years of art -- but I get the feeling you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2006/11/the_works_of_art_that_matter_m.html


Jonathan Jones' List

Jan van Eyck, The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, c.1435, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Caravaggio, The Burial of St. Lucy (1608), Museo di Palazzo Bellomo, Syracuse, Sicily
Rembrandt, Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (1654), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
San Rock Art, South African National Museum, Cape Town
Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire from Les Lauves (1904 - 6), Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow
Mark Rothko, The Rothko Chapel (paintings 1965-66; chapel opened 1971), Houston, Texas
Michelangelo, Moses (installed 1545), Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome
Leonardo da Vinci, The Adoration of the Magi, (c. 1481), Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Vermeer, View of Delft (c.1660-61), Mauritshuis, The Hague
Matthias Grünewald, The Isenheim Altarpiece (c.1509-15), Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, France
Hans Holbein, The Dead Christ, (1521-2), Kunstmuseum, Basel
Velázquez, Las Meninas (1656), Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
Unknown, Funerary Mask of Tutankhamun (1333-1323BC), Egyptian Museum, Cairo
Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31, 1950, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Masaccio, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise (c.1427), Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence.
Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937), Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid
Titian, Danaë (c. 1544-6), Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples
Raphael, The School of Athens (1510-11), Stanza della Signatura, Vatican Palace, Rome
Unknown, Parthenon Sculptures ("Elgin Marbles"), c. 444 BC, British Museum, London
Henri Matisse, The Dance (1910), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia