God, Do I Hate This Guy!

I recently watched an older episode of Iconoclasts on the Sundance Channel that annoyed the hell out of me. The wonderful Tom Ford explored the studio and working life of the incredibly irritating Jeff Koons. My god, that man drives me to distraction. His talent is virtually non-existent yet his ego is beyond enormous and frankly, his eyes (and his personality) give the uber-creeps. True, Koons has billed himself as "the most written about artist in the world" but I'd bet any money on this being true only because he's such an arrogant, pompous ass that people just have to write about him to vent their hatred of him in a non-violent way.

Dating back to his earliest well-known works in which he boffed that hideously ugly and classless then-wife of his in large-format photos, paintings and sculptures to his current installation pieces that apparently are all executed by his minions under his dictates, virtually every single piece in his career has been (according to Jeff himself) an homage of sorts to another artist: this repetitive image of a playboy model is "an homage" to Warhol's Elvis silkscreens, this silver streak is "an homage" to Warhol's pillows, this thought bubble is "an homage" to Lichtenstein, these basketballs are "an homage" to Duchamp. And what, gentle reader, do you take away from all this? I know what I get from it: Koons seldom has any ideas that are truly original to him and since he's now too important and busy to even create any of his own works anymore, it no longer matters. Actually, it probably never did. I just don't get, have never gotten, what all the positive buzz is about this guy. The negative stuff I more than understand. Having been sued numerous times for copyright infringements of other peoples' works, how anyone can consider this guy an artist, let alone a 'genius' as many clearly insane people believe, is beyond me.

I knew I shouldn't have watched that episode. I knew it was going to get me all riled up about what a joke Koons is. But hell, at least Tom Ford was a joy to watch.

Blue Self Portrait

I've been toying with various color concepts of late and this is one example. The idea was to draw myself in the traditional complementary colors of blue and orange, and that's all I was thinking when I did this piece. David, however, upon seeing this work on the easel just had to ask if I was drawing myself as a character from James Cameron's Avatar, a movie I have never seen nor have any desire to ever see. Yuck. Way to ruin an exercise in creative freedom.

Blue Self Portrait, pastel, graphite and charcoal on paper, 2010

The Gardens at Giverny

"If I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colors and tones, less an old-fashioned flower garden than a color garden, so to speak, one that achieves an effect not entirely nature's, because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colors will bloom at the same time, harmonized in an infinite stretch of blue or pink."

-Marcel Proust, "Splendors," Le Figaro, June 15, 1907

Top and middle photo courtesy of giverny.org

Bottom photo courtesy of gay nomad on flickr.