Monday, October 31, 2011

The Political Sight - Konrad Pustoła's 'Views of Power'


What do you see?

This, here, is an image of power.
Pure and simple, it is what a specific person with power sees. Out of the window. Every day.
Some of the Views of Power, a project by Konrad Pustoła, could be postcards. They are annoyingly nice. Others - most of them, actually -  seem violent in their chaotic setting.
And so, the game begins - can you match the picture to the person? Does it tell you something more about who the person is? Or is it vice versa - the person informs your view of what this view is?

After taking the pictures, Pustoła posted them on billboards in every possible corner of the city.
No, it's not about the contrasts. It's not about looking for contrast. Rather, it is about asking yourself, what is this power? What does this view have? Do I want something from it? What could I possibly want - and expect - from this? Each context is a confrontation of one view with another. It shows the complex web of relations that go beyond a simple decision-making process. For it is clear, here, that we are part of this world of power to a much greater extent than we might think. We co-define it. Which makes it less surprizing to discover the familiarity of some of these views.

One of the most exciting aspects of this project is perhaps the most obvious one - why this window? What is this person's power? It's like trying to discover what are the superpowers of some superhero - only here, there is no super. The power is quite real. It can be power over the soul, the body, the political body. But we can name it, one way or another. And through this simple choice, of deciding this is a person with power, Pustoła provokes us, saying, look, I've made my choices, those are the views I associate with power, here and now, where are yours?

The accent on our capacity to choose power comes across even in the formal approach: these pictures are not attempting to be particularly nice, or ugly. They aren't shot as panoramas, which could seem an obvious solution. But a wrong one. It would suggest that the picture sees it all - that there is, indeed, a panorama. The "standard" angle is a political choice. It tells us clearly, this is the view. The limits are part of this game. They provoke us, ask for alternatives, answers, consequences other than the ones we already have. The billboards set the record straight: if power is always symbolic, the symbol requires context more than scope. The choice, and hence the power, is sharp as a small and precise frame.

There is one more aspect of this simple and effective work.
It was made locally. I was told the plan is to have the scope broadened. I like it as it is. It was made in one Polish city - Krakow. It is the third largest Polish city. Not the capital. Not the center. Neither the periphery. It is one place in the world. And a few windows. Where's the power? In the view, of course.
The views, in order of appearance, belong (?) to: Wisława Szymborska (poet and Nobel Prize Laureate), Magdalena Sroka (v-ce President of Krakow), Jerzy Meysztowicz (businessman), Andrzej Wajda (film director), and, below two of the pictures on billboards, cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Still Life: Cup of Joe and French Press




Cup of Joe, 22" x 28" acrylic on canvas panel and French Press, 28" x 22" acrylic on canvas panel.

Eastern WA Landscapes

Chief Joseph Road WA and Chief Joseph Creek at Grand Ronde WA

Both - 22" x 28" acrylic on canvas panel

Paintings inspired by the the photography of Craig Robinson.

Friday, October 21, 2011

0NE LOVELY DRAWING, part 38

This woodcut by Lynd Ward scared the crap out of me when I was a boy:


Ward (1905-1985) became known in the 1930s for his "wordless novels" comprised entirely of woodcuts.  (His first, Gods' Man, a powerful story about the corrupting influence of money, debuted the week of the great stockmarket crash in 1929).

I discovered a battered collection of Ward's books on my father's bookshelf.  This illustration-- one of my favorites-- was from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

At age five, I was already expert at drawing scary monsters.  I'd figured out that the two most important ingredients for a monster were 1.) a scary face, and 2.) great big muscles.  Yet, Ward's monster had neither.  Ward succeeded in unnerving me without showing a face at all. 


That gave me plenty of food for thought.

Today you see artists straining to draw scarier faces and bigger muscles.  They'd do well to linger for a moment over the work of Lynd Ward.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Hamster Hamster Hamster Draaaaaaaaaag Racing

Star Trek Art Car - from Greece?

Here is one of the first Star Trek art cars I have ever seen out of Greece and I commend him for doing it. It's the first art car period that I have ever seen out of Greece and having lived there my self, I can't imagine anyone driving around in them, yet. It will take sometime before its more accepted, but someone had to be the first. To you my bold friend I say, Yiassoo.

Friday, October 14, 2011

PRELIMINARY SKETCHES BY BERNIE FUCHS

I love the wildness in these preliminary sketches by illustrator Bernie Fuchs:




They were done quickly, and with some violence:




They look completely unfettered.  Not a traffic light in sight.

  
 Yet, these are not random spasmodic brush strokes.  If you look closely, you can see the fruits of years of discipline and technical skill.

Fuchs spent his first years out of art school working in a small studio in Detroit learning to paint tight, highly realistic car illustrations.  Eventually he left that world behind, but decades later-- working with the palette of Bonnard and using free, spontaneous brush strokes-- Fuchs still retained all that hard earned wisdom about how to convey the weight and volume of a car. 


Fuchs' apprenticeship taught him lessons about form that Bonnard was never forced to learn.  Look beneath the apparent freedom of his brushwork to the subtle treatment of those purple hubcaps (with no wheels), or his reduction of the shapes of light and shadow, or his highlight on the corner of the fender, and you'll see that Fuchs was in full control the whole time.

There are a dozen subtle choices in that "freely" painted sunset.
Similarly, Fuchs spent two years in art school learning to draw the human form.  Years later, when roughing out a human form at lightning speed, Fuchs didn't need to pause and think about the way fingers bunch together, or the way an elbow works.


Look at the way his apparently free line captures the character of those wooden chairs.  This is a line that has definite opinions about its subject matter.


Some like to think they can save time by skipping over the long hours of basic exercises and turning straight to abstraction, or to copying photo reference, or scanning material into Photoshop.

But those dues we pay, they build up equity for us.  And they pay off not just when it comes time to paint that 100th car, or that 500th elbow, but also when it comes time to paint the nameless and formless abstractions as well.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Sausalito Art Car Gets New Life by Heather Wilcoxon

Sausalito Garden Art Car Gets New Life by Heather Wilcoxon

Heather Wilcoxon is better known as an artist from Sausalito Cailfornia who now lives on a decorated house boat called the "Delta Queen". I was honored to meet Heather last Saturday who came to my garage sale while visiting here sister who happens to live down the street from my house. We started talking about art cars and told me about her Gremlin art car that no longer works but has taken a whole new life as permanent garden art car in Sausalito CA. Its completely covered in toys and dolls and plants that have almost engulfed this amazing art car. For those of us with aging art cars on their last leg, this could be the next evolutionary step in the life of these wonderful works of art. More about Heather here
Sausalito Garden Art Car Gets New Life by Heather Wilcoxon

Sausalito Garden Art Car Gets New Life by Heather Wilcoxon

Sausalito Garden Art Car Gets New Life by Heather Wilcoxon

Sausalito Garden Art Car Gets New Life by Heather Wilcoxon

Sausalito Garden Art Car Gets New Life by Heather Wilcoxon

Sausalito Garden Art Car Gets New Life by Heather Wilcoxon

Photos via

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

The Fin Car by Bill Lockner

The Fin Car - Art Car Central
the fin car

Bill Lockner’s car is a 1979 Volvo that has been enhanced and rebuilt using scrap yard metal, and car parts that were bound for the landfill.“It started out stock,” Lockner explains, “and as time went by, things got added to it.” These things include truck fenders, the back end of a Rambler, and a fin.“[The Fin Car] was an idea to use up and change a car that to me represented soccer moms in the ‘70s,” Lockner says. “Every soccer mom had a ‘79 Volvo.”Lockner’s car features a removable fin, naturally, and is fully operational. He has driven his car to art car festivals throughout Washington, and regularly services his car to keep it running for everyday use.“What I like about it is that it makes me laugh,” Lockner says. “Wherever I go, when I drive it, it makes me laugh.”Lockner has owned five or six art cars over the years, and currently has another that’s a work in progress. His newest car project is a 1975 Gremlin that Lockner hopes to turn into a kinetic sculpture.

via

Art Showing - Phinneywood

Many of my music paintings will be on display at A-1 Piano in the Phinneywood area of Seattle for Art Walk starting this Friday evening, Oct. 14th. Art reception 6-9 pm.
The paintings will be on display until early November.

A-1 Piano
7020 Greenwood Avenue North,
Seattle, WA
(206) 782-4592

Info: ArtUpGreenwood-Phinney
A-1 Piano Rentals Sales & Moving
Map

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

THE OLD QUESTION FINALLY ANSWERED: "WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ILLUSTRATION AND FINE ART?"

This is the second-- and I promise, the last-- excerpt from my recent talk at the Norman Rockwell Museum.  I submit the following thesis for dispute and contradiction.  Next week I will go back to showing really cool pictures. 
Over the years, many people have wrestled-- pointlessly I think-- with the difference between art and illustration.  The internet is riddled with silly theories on the subject:
The distinction lies in the fact that art is the idea (brought to life) while an illustration is a depiction (or explanation) of an idea.

Fine Art is simply art for art's sake. Even if you are doing a commission for a client, it would still be fine art.  But illustration is illustrating a story or idea.

In modern illustration the intent is most often the selling of a product.  When something noble is put to ignoble ends, there is a deterioration of value.
Even talented artists and illustrators have been tormented by the distinction. Illustrator Robert Weaver noisily agonized about the boundary line:
Until the illustrator enjoys complete independence from outside pressure and direction, complete responsibility for his own work, and complete freedom to to do whatever he deems fit-- all necessaries in the making of art-- then illustration cannot be art but only a branch of advertising.
With all due respect to Weaver's romantic illusion, it's difficult to think of a fine artist with "complete independence from outside pressure and direction" whose work was not worse off for it.  

Despite all this hand wringing about the difference between art and illustration, I think the question is a fake one, concerned more about social status than about the nature of art.

The real difference, it seems to me, has nothing to do with the talent of the artist, or the quality of the work, or its morality, or its intelligence.  It is far too easy to identify examples of illustration that are superior to "fine" art in each of these categories, just as it is easy to identify examples of fine art that are superior to illustration.  It hardly takes any effort to puncture categorical distinctions between the two types of work.

In my view, there is no inherent difference between art and illustration except the way in which  payment to the artist is processed.

Here's what I mean:  For the first 30,000 years of art, artists were able to earn a decent living working for kings, priests, pharaohs and popes.  Art was commissioned for temple walls and public spaces.  It adorned palaces and royal tombs and the homes of aristocrats.  Then kings began to disappear from the earth.  Popes stopped commissioning new art.  They were replaced by a new commercial class, fueled by the birth of capitalism and the invention of the corporation.  This class became the new patrons of arts.

It's important to emphasize that although art's sponsors and subject matter changed, the quality of the work did not. The same talented artists who once painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or the walls of the Great Temple at Karnak simply migrated to the new bosses in order to feed their families.

Artists adapting to the new business realities found two paths.  The first was to produce what we now call "fine" or "gallery" art for the private moneyed class and corporate art collections.  The second path opened as a result of the newly invented printing press: rather than selling a picture to a wealthy patron,  artists could now make multiple copies of a picture and sell them for smaller amounts to larger numbers of (less-wealthy) purchasers.  If this option had existed during the golden age of Greece or the early Italian Renaissance, you can bet some of the greatest artists would have taken full advantage of it.  In fact, when this business model first began to emerge with the invention of etching, some of the greatest artists, such as Durer and Rembrandt, quickly embraced it:

Rembrandt turned to etchings as a way of selling multiple copies of a single image to Dutch merchants.

The story of that technology is the history of illustration. There would be no modern illustration without two key developments:
  1.  The ability to create and distribute quality copies to large audiences; and
  2.  The ability to collect small, proportional payments for that art from large audiences.
Because of these developments, the most talented artists (who we could never afford to hire individually under the old business model for art) could now create beautiful pictures to entertain and delight the public.  They are paid with a tiny fraction of the price we pay for a magazine or book or video game or movie ticket.  By aggregating tiny payments from vast audiences, we paid handsome sums to great magazine illustrators such as Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish and J.C. Leyendecker, just as we pay handsome sums to the talented creators at Pixar today.   Similarly, commercial artists who design products for mass consumer markets get paid very well when a penny or two from each sale goes into the manufacturer's design or marketing budget. Michelangelo never had the option of getting paid that way.

For a snapshot of how this new opportunity opened up for artists, look at the pirate illustrations of Howard Pyle, the father of modern illustration.  As the technology for reproducing his pictures gradually improved over his career, the public became more enthusiastic and the demand increased dramatically:

The earliest Pyle pictures were printed in magazines after talented wood engravers carved Pyle's images into wooden printing blocks. The engraver even signed the recreated image (see highlighted portion). 

Crude color was added to enhance the early images.

Later, audiences grew as the invention of photo engraving captured the subtler and more sensitive aspects of Pyle's originals .

Improved printing technology finally reproduced the full colors and technique of the original, leading to the golden age of illustration and a proliferation of illustrated books and magazines.

As we scan Pyle's pictures, we see how the quality of reproductions, and the newly sophisticated vehicles for delivering them to the public,  transformed the economics of art and inspired new bursts of creativity.  A handful of black and white journals, such as Scribners and Century, evolved into dozens of splashy, well designed, full color magazines.  It was the Cambrian explosion of modern illustration.



In short, the twin pillars of modern illustration are 1.) quality reproduction, and 2.) the ability to collect marginal payments from large numbers of viewers.  These two developments created a robust opportunity for talented artists.  They are the core of the economic model for illustration, and the only categorical difference between modern illustration and fine art.  

Does the method of payment affect the character of the art?  Yes, but perhaps the better question is: does it affect art for the better or worse?  It is undeniable that because of its wider audience, illustration is often broader than fine art.  But as Shakespeare proved definitively, broad appeal to a popular audience is not incompatible with greatness.  Even more importantly, the broadness of the illustration audience combined with the relentless scrubbing of the commercial marketplace seems to have inoculated illustration from the narcissism, decadence and irrelevance which has now infected the "fine" art model.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

The Bel Red Paintings at Vovito


Watch a slideshow of the paintings here

Bellevue Reporter Article

The City of Bellevue Press Release

The Bel Red Paintings are now showing in Vovito Caffe & Gelato at the Bravern in downtown Bellevue.

Vovito Caffe & Gelato, located at the Shops at the Bravern, is proud to exhibit the Bel Red Paintings starting early October. The paintings will be attractively displayed at the Italian inspired cafe for Vovito patrons and the general public to enjoy. Vovito’s partnerships with local businesses, non-profits, and museums along with the desire to bring local art to the cafe for exhibit, continues to enrich the culture in Bellevue, WA.

Vovito Caffe & Gelato
700 110th Ave NE, Suite 195
Bellevue, WA 98004
425.502.7522
Vovito Website
Map

The Bel Red Paintings, An Expressionist’s View, is an art project funded by the
City of Bellevue, WA, Arts Program and 4Culture. The City of Bellevue Arts Program
serves Bellevue residents through direct funding to artists and organizations for
arts programs and events in Bellevue, a public art program, cultural policy
development and other activities.

The paintings depict cityscapes and landscapes in Bel-Red, a 900-acre area east of
downtown Bellevue, characterized by low-rise retail and light industrial businesses.
Included in City plans for its future development is an arts district focusing on
art-making, developing new works, and arts education.

Art Showing - MarketPlace at Factoria

Many of my paintings are on display at MarketPlace at Factoria in the mall across from Panera bread.

4055 Factoria Boulevard Southeast
Bellevue, WA 98006
(425) 641-8282

Marketplace at Factoria
Map