Art.....

[Morley]

The poor guy is in the US with a Green Card, but he remembers that he was accused of running a stop sign, fifteen years ago. Now he's praying he gets due process under the Trump administration before they ship him off to the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador.

[Markk]

Markk, I'm sure you'll agree that thrift store art can sometimes be heartbreaking. This is especially true when the object in question is a meticulously painted, somewhat unskilled, but hopelessly heartfelt picture of a rooster atop a red barn. It will invariably be signed on the back, "For Rebecca, With Love, from Grandma Tilly."

Reading the clues, you know that Grandma Tilly died, and Rebecca felt bad about it and cried and everything, but in the end she needed the space on her wall to put that Billie Eilish poster she had under her bed. Poor Grandma Tilley, you're off to the Goodwill, along with that signed gingham quilt that nobody quite liked, but felt like they had to keep around.

Sometimes, my sweet wife will buy these things out of sympathy and respect for the dear departed.

I get it, I love looking at the signatures, and admit I google them at times looking for that one in a million find. Recently I found a print by Alan Murray "Heart of a Child" at an antique booth, they wanted a 100 bucks and it has a value of 250 more, it was nicely framed and signed....I almost bought it but it was just to large to ship if I did find a buyer on ebay.

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/ ... -466457041

[huckelberry]

Growing tired of the board grumpiness I thought it might be nice to return to this subject of Art. Thanks Morley for the comments. I do not see your Picasso image as small or silly. Perhaps I remember his work as on the large side an material so that memory attaches itself when I see a small reproduction.

I have some doubts about Plato's scheme. I see particulars and material as in some ways having reality lacking in ideas. It might be argued that is a limitation of human ideas. Perhaps but art with its physical, emotional, and experiential focus helps us humans with our limited ideas. As you noted, it may also beguile and perhaps deceive. Perhaps it is best not to turn off one's reflective questioning mind.

Huck, you're right that the real painting of Picasso's "Girl Before a Mirror" is neither small nor silly. However, compared to the painting I saw in Ottawa, the wiki photo that I posted of "Girl Before a Mirror" seems unbelievably trite.

Unfortunately, I'm not always able to fully appreciate art that I haven't seen in person. In my experience, the difference between standing in front of a painting and looking at a photo of the same work can't be overstated. Ha! I guess I'm saying that there's no comparison between the fridge magnet of David and the giant statue of him that you find in Florence.

Like you, I appreciate a pretty eclectic array of artists. Also like you, I've found that there are artists that I just don't seem to be able to engage with. Their work never gets better, no matter how much I read or study about it--not even when I go see it in person. For instance, though I didn't want to pollute the thread by saying it earlier, I'm not crazy about Grandma Moses. Her naïve, idealized, folk art representations of rural, white America are mostly not my thing. Even if they were, there are other self-taught, naïve painters who do the job of pushing nostalgic Americana much better than she does.

I'm sure that you won't be surprised to learn that I'm also not a fan of the self-styled 'painter of light,' Thomas Kinkade. By the metrics that many use--how much money he made, his overall popularity, and the number of his pieces that are in hanging in homes, Kinkade was wondrously successful. Unfortunately, when I see his stuff, I have work hard to suppress my gag reflex. But that’s the great thing about art: There's something for everyone to either love or induce vomiting.

If I'm not mistaken, you and I are about the same age. I'm guessing that, in college, you were an Art History major. I do so envy you. You see, I came late to art, so I lost many years that I could have spent learning and appreciating.

I spent most of my life getting educated in, and working in, another field. When I became disillusioned with the work I was doing, I quit. After that, I decided that I'd go back to school and learn something that was completely out of my wheelhouse--so I spent an improbable decade studying painting and sculpture.

I wish I'd known to do it earlier. I rue that I lost so many years. If I had known, I could have started in my twenties. Painting is difficult. It’s also occasionally extremely satisfying. I’m lucky.

Hi Hi Morley, good to hear from you. Yes our ages are close. Our art involvement pattern is a bit of a reverse. I did take art history classes in college but ended up a studio major. I will blame spending a weekend with Picasso paintings and sculpture while I was a senior in high school. I got badly bitten. It took over ten years after college for me to complete the decision to stop. I realized my modest talent, enough to create some things was not going to be a career and not getting anywhere near what I hoped to find. I found a regular type job which was ok not my dream. I actually ended up fairly happy away from painting. Now retired I occasionally paint. I forgot so much I feel like I am half starting over. Oh well I enjoy drawing for myself .

I live in a rural area so good original art is a rare treat for me. I remember each museum I have had the chance to see in my life. I have gotten used to seeing most art in reproduction. You are right of course seeing the real thing is a more complete experience. Size and physicality is a significant part of the experience of seeing paintings.

looking upthread I agree to finding the painter of light unpleasant. Now Rockwell has real skill that the painter of light does not have. It is odd or just a result of personal differences that Rockwell limits his expression to lighthearted Americana cartoons. He really enjoys painting them however and I am not above joining his enjoyment occasionally by viewing his things.

[Morley]

Hi Hi Morley, good to hear from you. Yes our ages are close. Our art involvement pattern is a bit of a reverse. I did take art history classes in college but ended up a studio major. I will blame spending a weekend with Picasso paintings and sculpture while I was a senior in high school. I got badly bitten. It took over ten years after college for me to complete the decision to stop. I realized my modest talent, enough to create some things was not going to be a career and not getting anywhere near what I hoped to find. I found a regular type job which was ok not my dream. I actually ended up fairly happy away from painting. Now retired I occasionally paint. I forgot so much I feel like I am half starting over. Oh well I enjoy drawing for myself .

I live in a rural area so good original art is a rare treat for me. I remember each museum I have had the chance to see in my life. I have gotten used to seeing most art in reproduction. You are right of course seeing the real thing is a more complete experience. Size and physicality is a significant part of the experience of seeing paintings.

looking upthread I agree to finding the painter of light unpleasant. Now Rockwell has real skill that the painter of light does not have. It is odd or just a result of personal differences that Rockwell limits his expression to lighthearted Americana cartoons. He really enjoys painting them however and I am not above joining his enjoyment occasionally by viewing his things.

You were trained as a studio artist? My estimation of you keeps rising.

True story kind of about Kinkade:

A few years back, we were in pretty high end thrift store looking for a good used pair of cowboy boots. I saw some production dishes painted with pastel fairies and mushroom houses. I showed them to my wife, and while trying to keep a straight face, I started teasing her about how much I knew she would love them, and about how I should buy them for her. She played along, rolling her eyes and whispering back that they were way too extravagant. Unbeknownst* to us, the store manager was hovering nearby. She said, "You should purchase them quickly. I found out that the artist, Thomas Kinkade, has just passed away. These will only go up value." I ended up buying the cowboy boots, though we passed on the dishes--but on the drive home, we both wondered aloud if, as the years passed, our Mona Lisa fridge magnets would do the same. Maybe we had a small fortune that we hadn't even considered.



*Is there a more beautifully awkward word than "unbeknownst"? It almost makes me believe in God.

[Morley]

I've written before about one of my friends who knows art stuff much better than I do. In our conversations, he's pretty transparent about his love for conceptual and performance art. Me? Meh. Not so much. For example, an artwork that consists of floating the corpse of a tiger shark in a giant tank of formalin doesn't ring my bell the same way that it does his.


Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991).


This friend and I have argued for hours about Joseph Beuys. (Well mostly, it's me who argues. He just smiles and explains.) For those of you who aren't familiar, Beuys is the guy who, as performance piece, locked himself in the same room with a coyote for three days. He also had a piece where he watched butter melt in his studio for a couple of years. My friend loves Beuys and thinks that he changed the way we think about art and the teaching of it. I tend to go with the theory that Beuys was a shallow pretender as well as a massive dick.


Joesph Beuys, I Like America and America Likes Me (1974).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fettecke


You get the idea: I'm usually not a fan of most types of conceptual or performance art. Nevertheless, because over the years I've changed my mind about so much in life--and changed so many of my opinions about certain types of art, I try always to keep an open mind.


I made you read all of that to get to this:

Though I wasn't sure that we had much of a chance of enjoying it, my wife and I flew to San Francisco a few months ago to see Ragnar Kjartansson’s installation of The Visitors (2012) at SFMOMA.

This is an installation in a huge room with nine concealed projectors showing nine simultaneous floor-to-ceiling videos of Kjartansson and his musician friends playing (what sounded to me to be) Appalachian-style music. Each musician is performing the same musical theme over and over again in an overlapping way that lasts for a full hour. Each vignette was filmed in a separate room in what looked to be a Nineteenth Century mansion in either upstate New York or New England.

When the piece began, the first screen opened with the middle-aged, bearded Icelander sitting in a bathtub with a guitar. Bubbles floated in the water above his groin. It seemed that my worst fears were soon going to be realized. This was going to be staged, derivative, and pretentious.





Indeed, the whole production was overly (and wondrously) staged, costumed, and coordinated. (The only bow to modernity was that each carefully dressed and coiffed charcter wore a set of those recording studio headphones that you see on TV.) And indeed, the show did go on forever and was absolutely pretentious. However, I was surprised to find that all of the things that I thought would contribute to my distain were the parts I loved the most. It was marvelously and carefully overdone in every way that it needed to be.

Throughout the hour, I moved from screen to screen, now sitting, now standing, aways with my mouth agape. I was drinking in the set design. I was listening to the violin, the cello, the percussion, the accordion, the piano, the cannon being shot--hearing and seeing them both individually and all together. I was blown away by how mesmerizing, unified, and sumptuous the whole thing was.

It was worth a visit to the city.


https://youtu.be/Igof7jUIaaE

https://disquiet.com/2024/11/26/mapping ... -visitors/

[Markk]

Grant Wood vs. Grandma Moses

The differences are interesting....Wood, in my perspective, seems to be about order, having an anal OCD flavor, while Moses is just care free and paints objects within her canvas in the micro, each object as an individual painting, while Grant does so in the macro, each item being important to the painting as a whole. I really enjoy both perspectives and this is in my opinion a perfect example of what painting is all about.



Wood's shadows seem to be almost organized with a ruler. The corn in the garden in size progression and shadow, is really cool. Perfect grass, and soil, no weeds. He seems to be painting from his mind on how it should look, verses what is actually reality. Grant seems to correct reality...his side walk is perfect, no cracks, and the concrete steps are perfect.



Moses seems to me to paint with a lot of joy, trying the best she can, without caring at all about perfection. I see a carefree style with here having lived a hard life understanding what the important things in life are, and being a painter is not one of them.

I see Wood struggling for perfection, mostly mechanical, while Moses is just the opposite, again carefree, and just enjoying herself, in retirement mode after a long "career" of hard work. I envision her painting on a green hill, sitting on a blanket overlooking her landscape, while Wood painting on a drafting table with rulers and squares.

[Everybody Wang Chung]

It looks like Dr. Shades has a new favorite artist.

A painting by South African artist Marlene Dumas has sold for $13.6 million at auction, setting a new record for a living female artist.

“Miss January” is Dumas’ “magnum opus” and stands 9.25 feet (2.82 meters) tall, according to a statement from auction house Christie’s on Wednesday.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/15/style/ma ... -scli-intl

[huckelberry]

It looks like Dr. Shades has a new favorite artist.

A painting by South African artist Marlene Dumas has sold for $13.6 million at auction, setting a new record for a living female artist.

“Miss January” is Dumas’ “magnum opus” and stands 9.25 feet (2.82 meters) tall, according to a statement from auction house Christie’s on Wednesday.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/15/style/ma ... -scli-intl

Her work is definitely worth checking out. Thanks EveryBody Wang Chung.

[huckelberry]

Hi Morley have me thinking about coyotes and conceptual art I'm slow to like conceptual art too many other things are more interesting. the coyotes Put Me In Mind of a time when I stopped unannounced by the home of a former ceramics prof. He was an outdoor enthusiast living a bit out of town. I was traveling through the area stopped to say hi. I found him not home but did meet two canines in a sturdy pen outside his house. I figured to say hi to them. Those coyote eyes flamed. Why am I in here and you out there?

They were young and I am sure later released.

I do not think the fire in those eyes fit into conceptual art.

[huckelberry]

Hey Mark that's a nice comparison you present there. I find that Grant Wood painting quite strange but that's his style. In the comparison i admit finding the Grandma Moses more likable even though I'm not really a great fan of hers.

I suppose I should remember that the Wood has more proper artistic formal value. The Moses as you say is more fun.