Blues Singers III

Bessie Smith, Oil on board, 14" x 11"



Paul Butterfield, Oil on board, 14" x 11"



Juke Boy Bonner, Oil on board, 14" x 11"

HOWARD PYLE'S WEEKLY DRAWING SESSIONS

All images courtesy of the Delaware Art Museum

Howard Pyle, the father of modern illustration and one of America's most important painters, died just over a century ago.  To commemorate the anniversary of his death, the Delaware Art Museum mounted a splendid centennial exhibition reminding us of Pyle's contribution.  (You can find information on the show here and here.)

Eight years before he died, Pyle asked his art students to sketch their own concept of "The End."  The Delaware show includes a selection of those drawings:

In 1903, Howard Pyle and his students gathered for weekly drawing sessions, in which Pyle assigned a subject for everyone to sketch. On the evening of March 25, 1903... sixteen members of the class created sketches of "The End."

Sitting around that room was a charmed circle of young talent.  Pyle had received nearly 100 applications for every opening in his school that year.  Students such as N.C. Wyeth,  Frank Schoonover, Stanley Arthurs, William Aylward, and Harry Everett Townsend were at the beginning of what would turn out to be brilliant careers.  But on that day in 1903 they had no idea of what lay in store for them, or what  their own "End" might be.

Death would catch up with Pyle unexpectedly during a trip to Italy with his family.  Who would have guessed that this most American of artists was destined to be buried in a foreign land?

It is hardly surprising that the future nautical painter W.J. Aylward chose a sinking ship for his theme.
 

Fifteen years later, Aylward would find himself on a ship steaming toward World War I as an artist for the Armed Expeditionary Forces (along with his fellow student Townsend).  Passing through the enemy submarine zones with their constant alarms, Aylward had plenty of time to meditate on his choice of an end.

N.C. Wyeth's idea was to draw a man who succumbed to the cold:

Wyeth had a fertile imagination but even he could never have predicted that 42 years later, after a long and fruitful career, he would meet his own fate in a car stalled on the railroad tracks, with his helpless  grandchild trapped by his side.

Another student in that room, Frank Schoonover, outlasted all his comrades.  He met his end peacefully in the 1970s at the age of 95.  He lived long enough to see the empire of modern illustration that arose from such humble origins, and to lecture to the public about those early days at the Pyle school. 

Henry Jarvis Peck envisioned a prisoner's end:

Allen Tupper True, with his preference for western art, envisioned a cowboy hanging from a tree:

Samuel Palmer took a more whimsical approach, apparently viewing the End as the end of a circus performance:

Pyle's huge influence was due in part to the fact that his imagination and talent were perfectly suited for his moment in history.  Pyle worked in an era of change, when technology transformed the quality of mass reproduced pictures, and economics transformed the methods of delivering those pictures to the public.  His career began when a small handful of black and white journals such as Century and Scribners contained primitive wood engravings, and ended as dozens and dozens of color magazines were beginning to blossom with innovative illustrations and graphic design. 

Just as Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1440 led to the democratization of knowledge, these changes in the 19th century led to the democratization of art.

Pyle had the vision to hitch his great talent to the technological and economic changes of his day, but the Delaware museum show makes clear that the crucial ingredient for his success remained heart, rather than technology or economics.  In his excellent chapter in the Catalog accompanying the Delaware show, painter James Gurney quotes Pyle's students:

Thornton Oakley recalled "During three years with him he did not mention a word about materials, methods, mediums or techniques." Too much emphasis on technique, Pyle warned, would result in a kind of mannered overindulgence, where the means become more important than the message.

Instead, Gurney writes, for Pyle "the expression of an emotion or an idea was paramount."  Rather than instructing his students on the technical applications of the new photoengraving processes, he assigned them themes such as "Coming Home From the War" or "The End."  He told his students, "Project your mind into your subject until you actually live in it." He wanted them to be able to "smell the smoke" when painting a battle scene. "Throw your heart into the picture," he said, "and then jump in after it."

Then as now, improved delivery systems were not enough to change the world.  Pyle could never have been a major catalyst for the Cambrian explosion of modern illustration if his pictures had a less persuasive heart.

New Art Showing at SpaKrista

Flowers, Building, Sky - Oil on canvas, 24" x 30"


Capilano Canyon River (series, #3) - Oil on canvas, 24" x 30"


Manhattan Beach House - Oil on canvas, 18" x 24"

Spakrista, in Kirkland, WA, has refreshed my paintings display with an entirely new selection of landscapes, cityscapes, and others. Spakrista is located in the beautiful downtown Kirkland near the Lake Washington shoreline.

Spakrista
10 Lake Shore Plaza,
Kirkland, WA 98033
(425) 298-4575
Hours: Tue, Wed, Thu, 10 am to 7 pm | Fri, Sat, 9 am to 6 pm

Spakrista Website
Map to Spakrista

2,500 Toy Atlas Rainbow Art Car Installation

2,500 Toy Atlas Rainbow Art Car Installation

Here is a fantastic rainbow art car installation for the kid at heart made with 2,500 old toy cars by UK artist David T. Waller. The piece won him the People’s Award at the Arts Depot Open last year and a place of honor here on Art Car Central. I personal love art cars with repetitive glued object which reminds of a car out of the UK called General Cabuncle Art Car, that was covered in toy cars car made to look like the General Lee from my favorite show the Dukes of Hazzard.

2,500 Toy Atlas Rainbow Art Car Installation

2,500 Toy Atlas Rainbow Art Car Installation

Photos by David T Waller,  All rights reserved. Article via

Bellevue Landscapes

All paintings are oil on canvas panel, 9" x 12" These are part of the Bellevue Landscape set on Flickr - Slideshow

Leave the Work Alone

Let's set the background.


Andre Lepecki:

What dramaturgy as practice proposes is the discovery that it is the work itself that has its own sovereign, performative desires, wishes, and commands. It is the work that owns its own authorial force.

This seemingly fairy-tale description of creation was once made clear for me by Alexander Kelly. Whenever working on a piece, there is always a point where the question that takes over the process is: What does the work want?

But here's another question: Why? Why is it the work's work?
After all, beyond a question of "ethics" (Lepecki uses the term), it is hard to justify why something being made by an artist should not obey the artist's ideas, needs and desires.

The most superficial answer is, because it works. A work needs coherence, as in, it needs to be a work to be a work, and the focus on the work's identity allows to be more effective and less prone to the artist's varying ideas, humor and temper. If the work wants it, there is little you can do but obey it. Consequently, you will think twice before introducing a foreign element. The piece needs to fit in the piece, not you.

Which brings us to another level. The work, here, becomes master. This means the artist is working for "someone else", and his burden is smaller. "Don't blame me - blame the work".

But also, this means the artist does not really "create". He "executes". Which is a comfortable movement towards the neo-platonian idealism we know best from Michelangelo. There is something, an idea, hidden in that matter (be it solid matter, movement or words), and the task is only to dig into it.

The above creates an important advantage for the worker: he can suspend his disbelief. For the duration of the work, he can be a believer, no matter how much doubt he has in regards to his own work. He is now free to move in whatever direction is necessary to deliver this being. And once delivered, he can complain. He can even complain while delivering it. But this, here, is the job, and one has to do whatever it takes to complete it.

All this is very nice, but most of the time, the work sucks. Most of the time, even those who claim to do the work's work make an impressive quantity of uninteresting, though certainly in a way uncompromising projects.
How do we deal with it?
Or, to put it more bluntly, who's to blame?
If in the beginning, "no one (except for the piece itself in its atemporal consistency) knows what it will be", than how are we to analyze its failure? Where are we to look for its sources?

Then there is the other scary option: the work doesn't suck. It works. Only it says something else than I do. The dream dreams another dream - which is not mine. How dare it! How dare it speak in my stead! How dare it take my moral will into the immoral pit hole, or the other way around, turning my cynical irony into a moralist's sword? How dare it ignore all the work I've put into being who I am? I do not want this thing which is not mine. I want it somewhere else, let it grow somewhere else, let the cancer move to another soul, I am cured, I tell you, I am at peace and no pro-ject can take that away from me. Consider me to be the PR manager for the daimonion, I might do what it pleases, but I am somewhere else, you will not find me here, the artist cries. I have worked hard to sell my soul, now please, do not let it keep on being mine.

Magazine Art - GW Review Fall 2011 Issue

Three of my paintings are being displayed in the GW Review for their fall 2011 issue.
GW Review is George Washington University's nationally recognized literary review publication.
GW Review website




Strangers, Oil on canvas, 24" 30"



Abbey, Oil on canvas panel, 22" 28"



Seattle AsiaTown - Temple, Oil on canvas, 36" 24"