April is off to a good start. Sold a painting yesterday to a repeat patron and Constance Humphries, a wonderful painter on 1000 Markets, posted this interview on her blog. I’ve added my bigger abstracts as limited edition prints on my shop at Etsy, since they are really too large to ship without huge expense. Larry Gagosian, where are you, dude.
Azaleas, oil on canvas 21″x37″ 2007.
It’s difficult to write an artist’s statement and at best, is only an approximation of what makes up the actual painting. Many painters have refused to describe their work, others merely offer a hint of what their motivation or muse may be. Yet this is required for grants, for galleries and museum exhibits. Even though one friend has maintained that Twyla Tharp for a Guggenheim application, wrote this one phrase and got the grant: ‘I dance’.
I’ve often wondered why a musician isn’t required to write an essay about his/her composition, while a painter or sculptor must somehow communicate in words, what he or she is already communicating in a visual medium. Why is music so readily accepted, while art must be defined in language. That is the irritating expectation of the visual artist.
One of the best books written from the point of view of the artist, is Katharine Kuh’s 1960 ‘The Artist’s Voice, Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists’. She includes a diversity; Calder, Albers, Hopper, Duchamp and others. Self taught artist Morris Graves offered a wonderful description of how and why he painted. To her question of ‘what do you want to get across to others?’ he answered:
‘I want to get across to me‘
‘…people occasionally say to the painter, ‘What you’ve said in the painting is my experience too. I agree, it confirms me.’ That’s the communication, but it’s not the first aim.
The act is a meditation in itself…. Painting is a way of knowledge.’
That is all a way of saying there’s no literal way to describe what goes into making art. Howard Hodgkin skitters around the same premise, relying on memory and emotion to sum up his working methodologies.
from a 2006 interview with Howard Hodgkin:
‘The overriding impulse to make the painting comes from memory and the emotion that memory can carry.
…He has always thought of himself as a representational painter. The term colourist, he says, has no meaning except in terms of very bad art. There is no colour for its own sake; he is not involved in making decoration. The paintings arise from precise occasions, precise emotions. He begins work in the same way as a certain sort of novelist can operate. You suddenly find that a hidden memory, an event that is lost, carries with it an emotion.’
Finally, John Haber aptly calls the verbosity of artspeak; martspeak. In a blog post from last April, Carol Diehl from ArtVents quotes his ’97 essay;
…am I imagining it, or do they blend together—the gallery press release and a parody of management jargon?…. It may have its roots in academia, where scholars hope to share their hesitant insights with students and peers. It may look back to art journals, where critics fumble for words to describe works of art rich in emotions and ideas. However, that is not where artspeak begins, and complaints about it hide its origins all too well.
Worse comes to worse, academics will trip up on their own humanity. Worse comes to worse, they will stumble on insights as unfamiliar and unpronounceable as art itself. Artspeak really starts sometime later, when critical clichés pass through the gallery system and into the marketing departments of major museums, eager for a larger public and bigger institutional gifts.
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Promoting art is business, big business, and money talks. I call its language martspeak.
So perhaps now that it’s been defined for us–the language of two industries, academia and the art market, who have joined together for their mutual economic benefit–when we see it, we’ll more easily recognize martspeak for what it is.
Haber continues:
Words never contain a work of art. Words can, though, encourage its reconstruction. They can create small openings in the walls that already exist, so that others may begin to look—and to see….
Art asks one to enter into a broken conversation, a half-overheard dialog between the work and the world. Newcomers to art distrust that demand. Most, often, too they would never know how to begin. A critic’s job is to break the ice.â€
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My newest painting isn’t yet finished, so nothing to say about it except- here’s a fragment.
So did anyone think this would ever happen? Alice Waters has been pushing for it for decades, as you can see from her 1995 letter to Clinton and Gore.
The White House garden plan is very good news for us organic fanatics. Check out the garden map, courtesy of the NYTimes. And for the upcoming UK trip before the G2 summit on April 2, Brit chef Jamie Oliver will be the presidential cook. ObamaFoodorama tells all about it.
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… a lot of new looking shovels.
I say diversionary, because I’m supposed to be out in the garden digging up violets in my newest plot. Almost finished with digging and planting. No back strain, thanks to yoga and lap swimming.
So back to cars. I’m on this tangent after reading that Donald Hall received an English Morris Minor as a wedding present  while he was at Oxford. (poet – ‘Unpacking the Boxes’) That took me back to my first driving lesson, behind the wheel of a child carseat in the early 50’s. Convinced that I was in control of the family’s Naples yellow Morris Minor , I’d sit happily in the back while my mom drove us around Princeton, doing her shopping errands. It must have something to do with why to this day, I love to drive long distances.
No glaring technicolor palette, these cars had subtle hues and were the precursors of the PTCruiser.  I realize now my dad’s hip quotient. His own preference ran to convertibles; he had an MG that he and my mom drove across the country to visit his relatives in (old) Hollywood with me as a toddler in the back. There are old photos of us stopping for brownie breaks in the desert – we all look like gypsies.
I don’t remember the Morris model we had, but it looked much like this.
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…more inspiring perhaps, are my new garden plots and the great piece about regional and local agriculture in this Sunday’s NYTimes.
You can watch Ralph Nader on Al Jazeera talking about AIG and the banking bailouts. I’m steamed about this and think we should all be marching in the streets – like angry citizens in Europe –  to protest their shenanigans. I never trusted Obama’s appointments of Geithner, Summers and the other crooks in his cabinet-these were the same guys who deregulated banking a decade ago. C’mon people, take a cue from those daring French.Â
Scroll down to the very last sentence to find the link for the powerpoint.
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From Nader.org:
Friday, March 13. 2009Â Â Â Six Avoidance Indicators
I bought a Mother Earth News magazine today just for the article by Lloyd Kahn on ‘Inspiring Handmade Homes’. Read his fascinating blog and explore these magical abodes. I’m impressed by his writing and his travels, and the fact that most of the northern California and Pacific Northwest builders began these structures back in the late 60’s, 70’s… with no money. I’d love to live in any one of these, but especially the ones with a sauna!
from Kahn’s blog, a sauna built by Colin Doane in Haida Gwai (Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia)
Kahn is the founder of Shelter Publications, an independent publishing company. He also worked with Stewart Brand on the Whole Earth catalog, which was a bible for all of us back to the land’ers.
At 72, he still surfs, skiis and skateboards.Â
You need a subscription to the New Yorker to read the full article, but Patricia Marx’s ‘Made in the USA‘ gave some great promotion to Etsy. She mentions several shops by name with products.Â
And…for those of you who couldn’t make the opening last night for the ‘Contemporary Voices’ exhibit at the Woodmere Art Museum in Chestnut Hill, it was packed solid! 100 artists curated by Sam Gilliam, with patrons from all over Philadelphia and NJ. A great turn-out, I’m hoping there will be a followup review. I had my piece, Azalea and Forsythia in the show.  I met Edward Loper, the venerable 93 year old Wilmington born painter who still teaches art classes.
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Doris Richards on the right, is an old friend of my mother’s. She came out from Princeton for the opening, I hadn’t seen her in almost 40 years! Once a costumer designer who worked on Madison Avenue, Doris is still a wicked ice-skater.
There’s so much bad news out there today, what’s a person to do? One place to find solace and inspiration is in Mary Oliver‘s poetry. Her newest book, ‘The Truro Bear‘  is, as one reviewer states of her work, ‘an excellent antidote for the excesses of civilization’. Does anyone love the natural world as much as Oliver? Her poems about bears, snakes, frogs and possums make me want to live outside and never come back in. And once you are outside, the feeling is similar to a Greg Brown lament from one of his songs about his childhood growing up in Iowa and being called into supper too early; ‘it’s not dark yet…it’s adult dark’.
There’s a sublime poem about going out in the middle of the night to meet deer walking in her woods. If you’ve ever come across these gentle animals in the wild, her words will prime those memories. It’s called ‘Five AM in the Pinewoods‘.
Even though most of my paintings are derived from nature, we often need a poet’s voice to remind us of our own wondrous world.
‘Carrying the Snake to the Garden’ Â -Mary Oliver from ‘The Truro Bear’
In the cellar
was the smallest snake
I have ever seen.
It coiled itself
in a corner
and watched me
with eyes
like two little stars
set into coal,
and a tail
that quivered.
One step
of my foot
and it fled
like a running shoelace,
but a scoop of the wrist
and I had it
in my hand.
I was sorry
for the fear,
so I hurried
upstairs and out the kitchen door
to the warm grass
and the sunlight
and the garden.
It turned and turned
in my hand
but when I put it down
it didn’t move.
I thought
it was going to flow
up my leg
and into my pocket.
I thought, for a moment,
as it lifted its face,
it was going to sing.
And then it was gone.
You may not be thinking about investing in stocks, but have you thought about investing in art lately?
Ok, so I have a vested interest. All the same, there is evidence that not only is art still selling, but will appreciate well over the next 10-20 years. So while your 401k may run out before you’re ready to retire, those paintings that you buy now could be an alternative to those iffy $1.86 GM stocks, worth over $43 earlier last year.
Think about it.
Here’s an interesting article from a Toronto based blogger/writer, Gabrielle Moser:
Aside from wondering why Leibovitz needs the money, and especially at such high interest rates (something she’s refused to comment on so far), I’m most curious about why the photographer is gambling the rights to her images for the loan when she has been notoriously protective of many of her photos; especially the images of her personal life, such as the image of her family above, and the series of photos of Susan Sontag, whose circulation in the public sphere has been tightly controlled until this point. In the credits and copyright lines for Leibovitz’s 2006 book A Photographer’s Life, for instance, it’s clear that none of the images of the photographer’s friends, family or partner have been sold to collectors. So why choose to gamble the rights to these images–which, if lost, would allow them to be more widely disseminated and likely in ways Leibovitz and Sontag would not (have) approve(d) of–rather than choose to sell a few editions to collectors to try and make the money outright?
The story of the Art Capital Group’s financial success, indicated by its anticipation of making more than $120 million in art-related loans in 2009, is also interesting given ongoing concerns about how the recession will affect the contemporary art market. Schnabel, for instance, leveraged the rights to his work for a loan used to complete a real estate redevelopment, which means it is apparently easier to borrow money in exchange for (good, celebrated, high market value) art than it is in exchange for real estate. Maybe this, along with the record-breaking sales at the auctions of Yves Saint-Laurent’s collections earlier this week, can be taken as a good omen for the future of the contemporary art market.
My new garden plot has been covered since early last summer with heavy black pastic and a thick mulch of the year’s NYTimes sunday papers. With our warm weekend, I was able to get out to see how things were going out there. Holy cow, do I have an amazing amount of worms! Our best buddies were loving the arrangement and I realized that tilling the whole area (about 10’x35′) might not be a good idea. It would cut up all my red, squiggly pals. So the answer is hand digging.Â
Now for you lazy slackers, this is not that hard. The soil out there is incredibly soft. It’s not wet, it’s full of good loam and most of the deeply rooted grasses have already been broken down by the efficient compost worms. This yard backed up to a horse farm about 47 years ago when the house was first built. And Chester County has some of the best soil in the world.Â
So I’m pretty happy. I plan to go back out later this week to plant potatoes and peas. In the meantime, check out the Salatin Polyface farm videos about how they integrate their livestock and farm techniques.
Here’s Joel Salatin talking about the reasons he’s a farmer. ‘We’re in the business of redemption’.- JS.
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Vendana Shiva talking about women centered agriculture…
