The argument that "it won't be appreciated anyway" may be true, but in the end this attitude does infinitely more harm to the artist than to his client.
All the local art directors kept calling up saying, I want Bernie! I want Bernie! But Bernie got tired of doing pictures of people holding drinks and just said, "shove it."Another illustrator who worked with Fuchs, Bob Heindel, made a similar observation:
I know Bernie has tried to choose his assignments, and I know he has done some work he is not so proud of....That's how you learn. But you learn to protect yourself, and mostly if you care about it you learn to protect your work. Bernie was always very protective of his ability. Not that he was vain-- quite the contrary. But he knew what he had. And he always wanted the opportunity to do his very best.
by Roland Barthes (my translation)
This is pretty.
Lots of artists can dazzle you with flashing eyes or a dramatic expression. But the artist who can find the miraculous potential in the humble curve of a cheek and can convey that miracle to you-- that is an artist worth watching.Miracles are so-called because they excite wonder.
In unphilosophical minds, rare or unexpected things excite wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.
I get a sense (...) that somehow I trade majorly in comical irrelevance and apparent digression. Narrators/voices that are never really getting to the point, or who are straying from the point very often and as far as possible. Also the totally irrelevant fact from the background pulled out as preposterous foreground. Makes me think (on a tangent) of that description of movie extras (or is it scenery painters?) - as 'background artists'. Manipulation of background. As if foreground were (is in fact) only ever an excuse for what you are *really* doing, elsewhere.
One suggestive bracket for the project and very close ot the idea of the interview which guided Żmijewski in the realisation of this cycle, is Truth Serum. Althamer is asked a series of question while under sodium pentothal. Żmijewski begins with the usual prosaic issues: Where do you live? How many children do you have? (...) And at the end, a question about art: 'What is the significance of the fact that you make sculpture, dolls, films?' 'It gives me joy,' replies Althamer. 'I like when people laugh.'
Lisbon and Berlin are, currently, comparable places of creation and experimentation: there, artists seem more free to explore the limits of their undertakings [plus libres d'aller jusqu'au bout de leur propos].
“A new born child has no teeth.”—“A goose has no teeth.”—“A rose has no teeth.”—This last at any rate—one would like to say—is obviously true! It is even surer than that a goose has none.—And yet it is none so clear. For where should a rose’s teeth have been? The goose has none in its jaw. And neither, of course, has it any in its wings; but no one means that when he says it has no teeth.—Why, suppose one were to say: the cow chews its food and then dungs the rose with it, so the rose has teeth in the mouth of a beast. This would not be absurd, because one has no notion in advance where to look for teeth in a rose. ((connexion with ‘pain in someone else’s body’.))
Really, there seems to be something you left aside. As if something could explain your silence, your persistent silence.
I am watching, but I am not sure if what I see is what you want me to see. How am I to interpret it? Shouldn't there be some clearer way of knowing where it's you, and where I'm just daydreaming?
After all, I can see you and I can tell, you are this person, from here to here, you have physical limits and those limits constitute you.
Why is it, then, that your look escapes me, that your words seem shallow, as if only touching on the surface of what you are saying? Is there a code? Some sort of password I need to get somewhere?
, the foundation of all scholarship in the field, as well as Fifty Great American Illustrators, A Century of American Illustration, monographs about artists such as Joseph Clement Coll, Harold von Schmidt, John Clymer, Mort Kunstler, etc., and Famous Artists School books on Figure Drawing and other subjects. Each book is respected for its integrity of scholarship, soundness of judgment and clarity of expression. 
(here)
(here)
(here)Placed outside of the White Cube Gallery Masons yard at 3.30 am on Sunday night in response to the Damien Hirst's "For The Love of God" diamond skull exhibition.The "For the Love of God" prank was created using 6522 Swarovski crystals
and took Laura, the artist, a month to create.
Gravel's works confront us with our own existences and our deaths, the brute thereness of truth, the skull beneath the $400 haircut, the cellulite under the pants suit. His is neo-existentialist, post-apocalyptic, post-post modern art, a silence that screams and cajoles.
(...)
I suggest to you that a Gravel presidency would lead to an entirely new America, doing to us what cubism did to post-impressionism: dragging us moaning in glorious epiphanic pain into a new world.
One such modernist group, the Futurists, wrote a wonderful manifesto:
We want to deliver [art] from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.I get a kick out of the Futurist manifesto, but on my little oasis in blogland we do not judge art on the basis of manifestoes, fashion trends or market statistics. Strip away the politics of the art establishment and judge these once again as pure drawing.
To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action. Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past....?
For the dying, for invalids and for prisoners it may be all right. It is, perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a moment when the future is denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the young, strong and living Futurists!
