Category: Art

Urban Street Sketching: learning, and long way to go

If it wasn’t a challenge, wouldn’t be much fun. Not very good at this yet… a lot to learn. Every day, out on the street. I think it’s because I’m a life long obsessive journalist that I’m drawn to this. I would describe what I see on the pages of my journal… this kind of sketch is like a journal entry without words.

52nd Street fruit stand, looking toward Pine. Pen & ink, watercolor wash.
52nd St fruit stand

Everything that’s Wrong with the “Art World”

Fuck the capitalist gallery to investor pipeline–those who own it, and those who seek to profit from it. What is both so irksome, and revealing–is how this pitch is aimed, not at those who love art, or the art… but ‘investors,’ those who, by turning art into a capitalist commodity, eviscerate it’s value as art, as set up a gatekeeping system, that functions, not as means to select the best, but to exclude all but the smallest fraction of art and artists, precisely to raise the monetary value of what the system lets in. What this has to do with aesthetic value is purely accidental.

Skip the guesswork. Here’s three things to look for in an emerging artist:

Saatchi Art

 

Gorilla Friend and Crow Feather

What’ll I draw? What’ll I draw? Sometime, you just go with what’s in front of you… anything works to get one started.  My youngest son, who’s not a kid anymore, had a menagerie ‘friends’ when he was a child, most of them, like this little Gorilla, stuffed, some– creatures of the imagination (Red Rhino and the Blue Gnu)… It was like a running repertory theater. Destined from the beginning to be an actor/director.
Gorilla & crow feather

 

Trash to Art to Trash

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What to do with it all? Climb up from my basement dungeon studio… stacking and organizing and picking out what to paint over, what to trash.

So much stuff.

Think I’m gonna start taking pieces to A-Space and leaving them in the take-it-free-or trash-it corner. A lot of early assemblages–a few have held up, but they were all experiments (big grown-up word for ‘play’); making them was fun and gave me courage to go on to do other things–but I have to do something with the clutter. The nicer pieces get coated with cement dust from the walls.

Really depressing.

This weekend. Take maybe a dozen or so pieces to A-Space. They’re all at least interesting, in a conceptual sort of way. Compositions of street debris: old can lids, stucco flakes, roofing tar, nails, cigarette butts… dirt. Glued, nailed, tied with string to trashed pieces of weathered plywood or composition board. Capitalism in decay.

What ever possessed me?

I’ve got the larger pieces and paintings stacked face to the wall. Keep them a little cleaner. Some nice pieces. Come see them. Make me an offer and they’re yours.

Mansplaining: Tribute to Charles Dana Gibson

 

To a few, “Gibson Girl” might ring a bell… but mostly, this artist has been lost to memory. (though if you search down in these images, you’ll see New Yorker Cover… 75 years in embryo)… I mean, the 4 women on the subway: the nun, the religious prude, etc… ) and a brilliant illustration of Mansplaining. Though the Gibson Girl was a commercial pin-up, she was a woman not to be messed with.images

And Gibson’s ink drawings are brilliant… crow quill pen and India ink. Think: Walt Kelly (Pogo), Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes)…
My mother, who was a wonderful artist with pen and ink, had a book of Gibson drawings. I wish I knew what happened to it.

Gibson, as an artist, may have vanished from memory… but he was brilliant. I love his work. Check them out. There is nothing like the “Gibson Girl” in pop marketing now… she was fucking not to be messed with!

And his penmanship… excuse me, penship… was exquisite!