Experts expect a ‘severe correction’, particularly in contemporary and American art, after years of spiraling prices and celebrity and luxury obsession
Art Market in ‘Mania’ Phase, from the Guardian. Including this report and all its links
For my other posts on Art & Capitalism, alternatives to the market/gallery system, click HERE and scroll down.
Revolution now!
Playing with colors. Each an approximate inversion of the other in hue and tone. #222, ink and water color. Continuing my exploration of what I can do with water color… a medium I’ve not more than dipped into… but finding I love … being in love with color, how could I not be? Like being a student! Would I have been able to do this in a water color class? Maybe Debi Riley’s! Check out her blog–beautiful work, and a natural teacher.
If it’s not play… if it stops being play… get a job at something that pays.
View GALLERY HERE.
Two more, playing with colors: Dominant Blue green, with ro, yo and rv for accent.
#220 got a little muddy. Gotta keep ’em fresh!
6×3″ water color
View GALLERY HERE.
In a better world, there would be no need for artists to sign their work. Material support would not be tied to a competitive system, and confirmation would come from performing and making and doing, without the destructive, enervating conflict that comes from confusing satisfaction with one’s work with social approval and economic status. On that level, the distinction between craft and art would vanish—as the satisfaction that comes from work well done would fall equally to all who contribute to the benefit of the community. Art would not be a specialty of a few—but a gift nurtured and shared by everyone. Those more dedicated and gifted would serve to teach and empower others.
The capitalist systems of exclusion that corrupt the arts and those who are called to them—the gatekeeping function of galleries, critics, investors, and yes—schools of art, which combine to work from earliest childhood to destroy the seed of the imaginative impulse before it can germinate—which works to marginalize, impoverish or reduce to servitude all but the smallest number of those who survive the culling—having lost its economic and political purpose, would crumble and disappear.
Aroused from the drug of the Capitalist nightmare, every artist, poet, dancer, actor, musician… would be a revolutionary
In the 60’s I bought a pad of drawing paper, cream colored, clay coated. I believe it was Morilla Cameo, a paper that was used for silver point. I’ve never found anything before or since as wonderfully responsive to pencil… or to fine ink. You could use pencil as you would use a fine pen nib with ink… with all the shading and modulating power of pencil.
Here are two drawings, the first, from 1969 (crow quill), the second, from 1970 (pencil). I’ve searched in vain trying to find paper like this. If you know where I might find it, please let me know.
Post script: my suspicions were right-that this paper was intended for SilverPoint. Here’s a wonderful site with information on technique, materials and contemporary silverpoint artists.
x
Doesn’t look bad matted! OMG, I love the vibrancy of water colors! Sitting over my drawing table, they just sing! I think I will be spending more time with water colors — perfect antidote to winter blahs!
Working with dominant/subordinate field reversal, where I wanted yellow orange and red for the dominant field, and blue as the accent. An attempt with acrylic was a failure. MUCH easier the other way around, where the warm colors are the accents and blue is the dominant field. I got a nice sheet of Fabriano 140 lb cp yesterday. Cut it up for 5×7 and 8×10 pieces, leaving myself 5 6×3 pieces and a 22″ strip for testing color swatches and combinations.
Here are two… still a difficult combination (though pretty close to what I have in #412) Need to think carefully about the design. And I can’t use red the way I would in acrylic or oil…tends to pink with water color. I could use it dry, almost impasto, in tiny spots, I suppose. Here are two of the 3×6 trials. I’ve posed a problem for myself… think I need to dream on this!
Support the Experimental Farm Network!
The Experimental Farm Network (EFN) aims to fight global climate change and ensure food security far into the future by facilitating collaboration on plant breeding and other agricultural research.
Founded in 2013 by Nate Kleinman & Dusty Hinz, the EFN is presently composed of over 200 participants: farmers and gardeners, plant breeders and researchers, amateurs and professionals alike. The network is not-for-profit, based on open-source principles, and dedicated to social justice.
All are welcome and encouraged to join. Read more, and learn how you can donate! HERE
EFN exists because our agricultural system is broken. As a society, we no longer grow crops primarily for human consumption, but as commodities. We don’t farm in harmony with the environment, but in ways that harm it. We’ve stopped breeding plants for resilience, taste, and nutritional value: instead we genetically engineer and patent them to maximize corporate profits.
To take back our food system, we’ll need to marshall an army of volunteers to counter the power of the multinational corporations. We’ll need to develop more agricultural cooperatives and strong regional economies like those that thrived before industrialization. And we’ll need to develop carbon-sequestering perennial staple crops (including grains and oilseeds) and more sustainable growing systems & practices in harmony with the natural world.
[…] it is usually through artistic expression that the highest values acquire permanent significance and the force which moves mankind. Art has a limitless power of converting the human soul—a power which the Greeks called pyschagogia. For art alone possesses the two essentials of educational influence—universal significance and immediate appeal. By uniting these two methods of influencing the mind, it surpasses both philosophical thought and actual life. Life has immediate appeal, but the events of life lack universal significance: they have too many accidental accompaniments to create a truly deep and lasting impression on the soul. Philosophy and abstract thought do attain to universal significance: they deal with the essence of things; yet they affect none but the man who can use his own experience to inspire them with the vividness and intensity of personal life. Thus, poetry has the advantage over both the universal teachings of abstract reason…
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24×18″ Flakes of stucco from the Ox, acrylic on back of a Draino Sign.
Moving pieces around until they seem to slide into place. Three years ago.The best scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind: making that mashed potato mountain on the living room floor. You know there’s something there but have no idea what it is, and no single piece will ever bring it forth, whole and shining with afterbirth. You have to keep doing it. Over and over. Nursing the symptom.
Something had been troubling me–for a few weeks now. I wrote a piece in that mood, posted it… than deleted it (copied and pasted it below). Too raw. To close. I felt flayed. Looking at #417, I began to get it (See what I wrote on that post) –an insight…. a better understanding of what I’m doing when I’m making art.
What follows, is what I posted and deleted.
I may take this down by morning. I’m weaning myself from FaceBook, so this might be the kinda shit I’d post late late at night exhausted mind weary before giving up on the day and surrendering to inebriate dreams.
Though WordPress will post it on FB. Don’t matter. I ain’t there.
I make no pretense, claiming that my obsession with making art is healthy–least of all for me. Like the walking dead say… it is what it is.
I feel a need to link up with others so afflicted. Hard to find. Lotta peeps make art. The more the better! I’m not looking to throw sandbags around some privileged status! But not all who do… are like 19th C. obsessed. Have.. as good as traded their souls for it.
Oh yeah. I did. I gave it up–whatever that was, that soul thing. I said–you can have it. Let me make art. That’s all I want. Sometimes I hear this weird echo laughter… like.. but I’m doing it.
I have no idea what it means to anyone but myself. Whether it’s good or bad–or what good or bad could possibly mean in our time.. when we have no “posterity” to fall back on… living, as we do, at the edge of human self-extinction.
I’d like to think that what I do might lend itself to imagining a better world. But poets are probly better equipped for that–having words at their disposal. Ideas.
I just…like… see stuff. In my dreams. Play with things. Real things. Pieces of trash… arrange them. Or colors, lines. Maybe they look like stuff you see in your world… mostly, probly not.
Useless. I mean… the LAST thing I want, is to be USEFUL in this bloody horrid corporate fascist world! but it does leave me… feeling useless.
I’d like to live in a world where… there was a place for what I do.. for what I have become. I’d like to be able to make that better world visible. But you can’t “intend” that. It has to come from one’s engagement with the world. If you are. It will emerge in your art. Anything you “intend” will only show what already ‘is.’ To body forth what will … what might be… one can only let go.. .and let it happen.
I did… I made this deal with the devil, like I said. You want to be healthy, happy–or make art? If that’s the choice–which will it be? No hesitation. I want to make art. I always have.
Ok, said the devil. Have at it!
Like my mother said. One should always listen to one’s mother.
“Don’t be an artist. Artists are the most selfish people on earth. But if you are… an artist. There’s no hope for you. There’s nothing else you can do.”
Yeah.. .she really did say that to me.
That’s my curse.
and the worst of it… I don’t want to be cured.
I want to reach out to others so cursed… who know themselves damned, as I have been. We could have a lot to talk about.
Jacob Russell's Magic Names 