Two Sadly Missed Shows

I've missed so many shows I wanted to see over the last few months. Being sick has a way of slowing you down and seriously messing with your ability to get up and at 'em. I really was looking forward to seeing the Edward Hopper Retrospective at the MFA. The man was a genius with light and mood, and there's something very intriguing about Depression Era paintings of such solemn subjects rendered in amazing color. The play of light and shadow and the sense of sadness are stunning. This was a show that encompassed a huge selection of his work, including his Cape Cod paintings and even sketches. I'm still sad I missed it and it ended in August. You'd think I'd have gotten over it by now, but I haven't. Such a big baby.

Likewise, I also am regretting not getting to the Peabody Essex Museum to catch the Joseph Cornell show that also ended in August. I simply adore a good shadow box and his are fabulous. Tiny Victorian women, little buildings, and birds, birds, birds. His assemblage work is thrilling and stirs the darker side of me. And the details within each box are not to be believed. The show also had disassembled his workshop and recreated it completely down to the last detail within this exhibit. I would have killed to see it, to see where he worked and how he worked (considering this was a man who spent a great deal of his career creating his amazing works at his kitchen table).

Seldom is there more than one show at a time that's huge on my radar screen and that I would be devastated to not have seen, and here were two that ran concurrently between May and August and both of which I missed. Damn, damn, damn.

Back to School

After much hemming and hawing, I finally caved and registered for the prerequisite foundation drawing class at the Museum School, and have already had my first class. It wasn't bad at all, though I think my next class might be a bit of a comedown when we learn some basic mechanics, such as how to hold a pencil properly and how to draw different lines. Hmm. Not sure that will teach me anything I don't already know, but the first class was interesting, including some rapidly drawn still lifes. I've found that I no longer work well at a quick pace (oh! the pressure to complete a sketch within a specific time frame!) and that as feared, my basic skills are somewhat lacking in quite a few areas.

The instructor was nice: laid-back, knowledgeable, and at times funny. I've also reached the conclusion that it's okay to be working below my potential for a while if that's how this course plays out because I'm building classroom confidence (it's been a long time since I've been in school), reinforcing the basics I first learned so many, many years ago, stretching sketching muscles that have long grown stiff, and I'm meeting some pretty nice (and art-minded) people to boot. Oh yeah, and I'm fulfilling one of those pesky prerequisites I need to take more advanced courses.

No matter what, it's all good.

Speak Softly

There's a certain prejudice among many artists which is not often discussed, but is occasionally addressed in books written by and for artists. It manifests as something of a snobbery in regards to one's chosen medium, as well as one's choice of subject matter. The hierarchy of the major mediums goes something like this: oils, watercolors, acrylics, pastels/charcoals. Artists and a great many non-artists alike tend to think of oils as the pinnacle of all mediums and if you can successfully master them, then you are a true artist. I guess one can assume that the more fussy or difficult your medium, the more hoodsies you deserve as an artist. I'm not entirely sure how choosing to work predominantly in oils over, say, acrylics, makes you a superior artist to one who would choose the latter medium, but it does happen. Likewise, if you're a portraitist, and especially a portraitist in oils, then you are in theory Lord and Master, and all other artists must bow low before you. While I haven't experienced much of this prejudice first hand, I have been witness to those who consider collage and assemblage artists to be lesser artists than traditional painters, and are quite frequently looked down upon with undisguised disdain.

Personally, I find it all pretty disgusting. An artist is an artist is an artist. Everyone has different skills, choices, techniques and preferences and as such cannot be compared with those of other artists. An artist's work must stand on its own merit and need not adhere to the biases of some close-minded, shallow and preconceived ideas put forth by artists-cum-art-snobs. An artist must be beholden to no one's standards save their own. As a group artists tend to be undervalued and often misunderstood and to pick apart and demean many within our group simply because we think we're better than them in some way is absurd.

After pouring your very soul into a work, nobody wants to hear from another artist that their work is shit and is merely masquerading as something called "art," while the critic's work is the true masterpiece by dint of its medium and subject.

And Taking the Opposing Viewpoint

Some artists I'm glad I never met:

Mary Cassatt. Repetitive in a very boring way. I don't care how edgy she was considered by her contemporaries in regards to her perspectives and color palettes. I find her to be repetitious and, frankly, irritating as hell.

Gustav Klimt. Ugly people and blobs of gold on virtually every canvas.

Edvard Munch. The man's early work was delicate and lovely, but then all his subjects started to resemble not very well executed space aliens. Yuck.

Paul Gauguin. An arrogant man in his time and a tedious painter with minimal skill.

Georgia O'Keeffe. Enough with the big labial flowers and the steer skulls. This woman makes me go temporarily insane whenever I see her work.

I could fill an ocean with a list of the artists I'd rather not think about.

Artists I Would Like to Have Met

There are so many artists that I would like to have met. These are some of them:

Vincent Van Gogh. I'm enthralled with the idea that he could complete an entire painting within an hour. To work at that speed and execute the work so beautifully is an incredible feat. This concept is especially mind-blowing in regards to portraits, which are notoriously difficult. How was this possible?

John Singer Sargent. I would be humbled in his presence. His portraits are amazing: the life he infused in his sitters' eyes, the luminous flesh tones he achieved, the breathtakingly subtle lighting. His work moves me like no other artist.

Jackson Pollock. His later works, specifically the splatter paintings, are incredible in their layers of color and texture. His are among the few paintings that I consistently defy museum rules over by running my fingers lightly over their surface when the docents turn their heads (I know this is very bad). I can't help it. They beg to be touched.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir. His pinks and his reds are startling and life just vibrates throughout his works. While many works have a calming effect on me, Renoir's make me positively giddy.

Claude Monet. How could I not like an artist who couldn't let go of a subject until he had painted it to death? Having the compulsion to paint the same scene repeatedly, sometimes literally hundreds of times under varying conditions, is a man of my own heart. A little OCD can make for a compelling body of work.

Beautiful works by mind-bogglingly talented artists, every one of them.

Cezanne and the Apples

I love the work of Paul Cezanne. His landscapes are so vivid, his colors so vibrant. It's frightening to know that in this man's lifetime, he was misunderstood and rejected from exhibitions and even art schools for being without merit and talent (this was in part due to his early works being much darker and more somber than those with which we are most familiar). The man was a visionary and way ahead of his time in terms of technique. He was already halfway through his life before he developed the style that he is now known for and during his lifetime he was always the outsider, never accepted, and garnered very little success while he was alive.

As someone who has an obsession with painting apples, how could I not love a man who also spent a great deal of his time composing still lifes of apples and oranges (more than 200), and who said he wanted to "conquer Paris with an apple."? There's a guy after my own heart. I could paint nothing but apples and be happy for the rest of my life (even if I bored the shit out of everyone else with my work). He enjoyed painting them for the same reasons that I do: they are the one of the most basic and complete geometric shapes of nature, the circle. Apples are small little objects of perfection. They are all the same as one another, and yet they are all different. There is a world of color to be found within them. They are at once vivid and soft, plain and dramatic. They have character and personality. They are little embodiments of our harvests, our abundance. Simply put, they're beautiful.

Like so many artists who went before him and those who came after, he never knew his own genius and I wish that he had known in his lifetime the talent he possessed and the joy that it still brings to others. It's such a shame that so many brilliant people die broken and in pain thinking they were worth nothing. Cezanne was an amazing artist and I adore both him and his work. Picasso said that Cezanne was his "one and only master, that Cezanne was like the father of us all." I think that says it all.

Consider Poor I

About seven or eight years ago, my husband gave me as a gift a book that was equally both charming and heartbreak-ing at the same time. Called Consider Poor I, it was about the life and works of a woman named Nancy Luce, who lived in the nineteenth century. She lived on Martha's Vineyard and self-published books of her own poetry and stories, mostly about her precious chickens, all hand written and colored and beautifully primitive. In her day she was mocked and abused by those who knew her (and by strangers who thought they knew her), but her work stands today, nearly two hundred years since her birth, as a noble and incredibly heartfelt body of work. And it was because of this beautiful little book, that I decided to make my own chicken book, but with the benefit of modern art tools (and the ever trusty photoshop), rather than just pen and paper. As the years have passed, that one book has morphed into multiple volumes that also include my ducks, and still I continue to make them as my own birds live their lives and pass on.

I've included in my books many of the same elements that Nancy Luce did in hers: photographs of my birds (her tintypes taken at her home must have cost her a small fortune in her day), stories I have written about them, remembrances of special days, anecdotes, and the often-times compulsive habit of "collecting" hen names for future use and listing them throughout each of the books (this can get out of hand as the names begin to number well into the hundreds. Nancy's names were quite odd). And while she would in her writing detail the sorrowful deaths of her beloved birds, I am not so inclined to do go so far as to dwell quite so intently on the morbid, although I do acknowledge the passing of my little friends when it happens.

The books make for a charming little outlet that combines my love of birds with my love of art. It also makes for a nice break (as do my art journals) from the more serious work of painting. Like my journals, the chicken books are an endeavor that is almost childlike in its simplicity. What could be more fun than colored pens, fancy papers and glue sticks? It also touches a place in my heart as I work, a place that makes me think of Nancy Luce and all the other women like her who were so grossly misunderstood in their time, who had they been born far into the future would have been lauded for their originality, for their abilities, and for their enormous heart and soul, rather than be beaten and attacked for their uniqueness in an era when woman were to keep quiet and disappear into the background behind their men and children and never venture into uncharted territory.

Long after I had begun my own modern versions of Nancy Luce's chicken books, I took a trip over to the Vineyard and while there, decided to pay a visit to her grave in one of the local cemeteries. I expected a grave as neglected as her unhappy life and as such I thought I might have to return home unable to locate her final resting place. So you can only imagine how amazed I was to see, from clear across the cemetery a headstone that stood vibrantly out from every other one. Dozens and dozens of plastic and glass chickens artfully arranged and placed there lovingly by countless admirers of her work, fresh flowers, even letters and photographs of people's pet chickens gracing not only the earth around her headstone, but atop the headstone itself. It was a magical and loving shrine to a quiet, lonely woman who poured out her tattered soul in words and pictures.

I like to think she's up there somewhere, looking down and feeling the love that's being poured out to her now, so many, many years after she walked this earth with very little love. And each and every time I sit down to add a page or two to my latest volume, I say a little thank you to Nancy for having inspired me to follow her lead and forever immortalize my own beloved little pets and the person who loves them with all her heart.

Thank you Nancy Luce.

To School or Not to School?

I've been mulling over the idea of going back to school. I don't think I can swing the whole college experience again right now (perhaps in the next couple of years though), but freelance studying at a museum school would be more than doable (for the most part). The trouble is, those pesky prerequisites. If I decide to take studio classes at the local art museum, I'm required to begin with drawing and only when I have taken the mandatory drawing classes would I be allowed to move up through the disciplines and the various levels within each. It may be the case that when they see my portfolio they'll realize that taking basic classes would be a waste of my time and money (but certainly not their tuition dollars earned), but I doubt it very much. The course schedules are very clear about there being no exceptions made. So would it really be a waste of my time and money? I suppose it couldn't hurt to undergo a "back to basics" education and to spend time with a teacher I could very well learn something new from. After all, everything is a learning experience when you look at it the proper way (and the social interaction with artists I've never met would be great as well). I'm concerned though, that if this were to prove to be a big, expensive waste, then I'm stuck. I'll either have to suffer through the remainder of the first courses, working well below my ability and being perpetually bored or I'll simply have to eat it money-wise and not attend at all (there's a no refund policy as well). Neither is particularly appealing to me. I more than understand all these strict rules the museum has set forth because by making it so rigid in the prerequisite field and leaving no "emergency exits" as it were, it ensures that their student body is comprised of only those art students who are very serious about their art and are hardworking and thus the studios are not full of a bunch of flibberty-jibberts who just want to mess with some paints. But regardless, frankly I'm stumped as to what I should do. The only thing I'm absolutely clear about is that I really, really want to go back to school in some form or other, and preferably sooner rather than later. Guess I'll ruminate on this one a little longer before I make any hard and fast (and expensive) decisions.

Bitchy Starving Artist and Son

Griffin and I popped into the MFA last week for a quickie visit en route to Dick Blick's for a replenishment of our supplies. Things to do while at the museum:

1. Check out the Impressionist Collection of Scott M. Black in the Rabb Gallery (which I really wanted to see, but had somehow managed to forget to see for some bizarre reason the last time I was there)

2. Visit my beloved Sargents (which I didn't do the last time I was there because, frankly, my family can only take so much of my endless cycles through the 19th c American wing)

3. Pay a quick visit to a Van Gogh that I hate but had just read about in detail in a new book and now wanted to see once again up close and personal, if only to follow up on the history I so recently learned about this painting and much like the proverbial bear, see what I could see, and

4. In the Torf Gallery, give a 15c Italian Renaissance exhibit a chance after having loudly poo-pooed it for looking utterly crass a couple of weeks prior as I had peeked my head into that gallery (I read arts and entertainment reviews on the radio for the Massachusetts Disabilities Commission and after reading a wonderful article about the glories of this exhibit, decided to give it a chance after all, even though the initial pieces just inside the gallery door reminded me of the artwork typical to cliched Italian restaurants, but still far short of the chianti bottles with the melty candles in them).

The Black collection was nice, though a bit heavy on the Pisarros (not one of my favorites). The Sargents, as always, had me swooning in my boots, the Italian Renaissance exhibit mostly sucked, just as I thought it would (so much for the glowing reviews), though I'm not sure if it was more to do with the fact that it simply wasn't an exciting collection of work (perhaps there's a reason why these pieces had been shunted into storage for more than 50 years at the museum?) or because reliefs of Jesus being crucified and Mary holding Him as a baby just aren't my cuppa. I don't know. And, of course, as it wouldn't be a trip to the museum without me forgetting something I had planned to do, I completely forgot to check out the Van Gogh.

Perhaps if we had hung around a bit longer than an hour, or perhaps if I had even a smidgen of self control, I might have remembered to do everything I went there to do. Perhaps not. I do have a question, though. While I was wandering through the Impressionist exhibit, Griffin (who hates virtually all Impressionist works, every last Sargent, as well as the Dutch Masters. God help anyone who gets him started on that subject) decided to check out the gallery next door which currently has on display an exhibit of contemporary installations. Moments later, he stormed back into the Rabb Gallery and loudly announced that it wasn't fair that while his work wasn't selected last month for a fine art competition, submissions he had worked long and hard on, there was an artist in the next room who had been chosen by the MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS Boston, no less, for an installation of old paint cans, coffee tins, bread crumb canisters and used kentucky fried chicken buckets, all turned upside down, punched through with holes and strung with lights that ran on electric toothbrush motors. Where was the justice, he wondered? And what exactly was it about this ugly pile of shit that made the grade? And what about his did not? He had, I confess, interrupted my own silent rant as I studied several of the Impressionist works and wondered how these particular pieces, by rather unknown artists, came to be worth many millions of dollars and hanging in a museum, when they truly weren't very good specimens of art? I was thinking (and I don't mean to sound arrogant here, I'm merely making an observation) that my own paintings are, as a general rule, better executed and more alive than these select pieces, so why is there no interest in my work and why am I not selling buttloads of work, for any price (I'd be happy with a couple hundred bucks for godssakes)? And how exactly does one become an investment as an artist? Who gets to decide what is good art and what is not? What's worth the money, what's worthy of a spot on a respected museum's walls and what gets ignored and passed over? Griffin and I both spent the rest of our visit at the MFA grousing endlessly and sometimes probably a bit too loudly for the museum's comfort about the unfairness of it all in the world of art and how as artists we are all either shit on and abused or completely ignored. I have to say, he's definitely my child (except for that whole Sargent-hating thing. I can't imagine what the hell he's thinking there). Actually, come to think of it, it was probably my tirade through the many galleries that obliterated from my mind the thought of visiting that Van Gogh I so wanted to see. Serves me right.

Fashion Forward

I went to see the Paris Collections 2007 last month at the MFA and while some of the clothing was ho-hum boring, and some of it was just plain dumb, the majority of it was amazing. As someone who has been sewing since childhood, I was more than interested to get a really close look at what a $200,000+, one-off piece of couture clothing looks like, and what it looks like beyond it's overall beauty. (I have never in my life looked up the skirts of that many dresses before!) Gotta tell ya, in a great many instances, I wasn't all that impressed. Beautiful to look at, yes, some stains from the models being jostled around in the changing areas (champagne spills? make-up splotches? who knows?), but shoddy stitching and straight pins sewn in by accident? Hmm. Makes you think.

True, there were some pieces that were absolutely exquisite and from which I simply was unable to tear myself away. John Galliano for Christian Dior: his ode to a punk/goth French Revolution and Marie Antoinette collection in reds, pinks, leathers and liberally hand painted was amazing. And the Rochas collection of pantsuits and dresses reminiscent of Edwardian England and utilizing the colors of London's chimney sweeps of the day: dove grays, blacks, browns, subdued gray-purples and gray-blues just blew me away. This was far and away my favorite of the entire exhibit. Bustled and corseted gowns, yet surprisingly still modern in their lines. Moody appliques of dozens of crows sitting on tiny lines criss-crossing the skirt of a dress.

I wish I were wealthy enough to be able to have one of these creations made for me and sitting in my very own closet. The show was definitely an eye opener and I not only learned just about everything I would want to know about the exclusive world of couture clothing, but also the fact that, with the exception of a few very, very complicated pieces that were clearly well beyond my expertise in sewing, even with a hefty price tag, a fancy name and a heady week at Paris runway shows that only people who are Somebody get to attend, the majority of these frighteningly expensive pieces were things that were I so inclined I could easily sew for myself. I suppose I really shouldn't have been surprised by this fact, but I was. Does this mean that like all the other fashion sheep, I bought into the myth and mystique of the designer mind? That's a scary thought.

And last but not least, just to be sure I'm legally in the clear and not in line to be gifted with a "hey, you stole my photo!" law suit, this photo of Galliano's magnificent dresses is courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Credit where credit is due. Thanks, guys.

Good Books

I really love reading a good book about an artist or multiple artists. One of my all time favorites that I think I may have mentioned here before is Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X by Deborah Davis, though that just may have been given a run for its "top of my list" money with The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles by Martin Gayford. I especially love a book that details the minutiae of an artist's life: the stretching of canvasses and the mixing of paint. What others might consider tedious reading, I revel in. Not so long ago I also read a wonderful book about Klimt, though oddly enough, I can't for the life of me remember the title nor the author (go figure). I have as well just read several books that can be considered to be on the fringes of fine art, and a couple of them are: The Quilts of Gee's Bend, edited by a whole buttload of different folks, and a remarkably intriguing book about fashion as both an art form and as serious political machination, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution by Caroline Weber. This was a riveting read and full of an immense amount of information about not only the political demise of Marie Antoinette but the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries' fashion trends and textile industries. For older books, Edie: An American Biography by Jean Stein is great for getting the insider's take on Andy Warhol (who I met in 1984). I read the book for the first of countless times when it was first released back in 1982. And for sheer staying power after all these years, you can't go wrong with Off the Wall by Calvin Trillin. I wish I had been old enough in the 60's to have capped on that period in art and culture while it was happening.