Month: January 2018

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Remember summer?

While the north appears motionless under its mantle of cold, its workers are busy preparing for another summer season.

Palm and sand, by Carol L. Douglas
The temperatures have been cycling around zero since before Christmas. A blizzard is winding up its rampage across the northern states and a Nor’easter is climbing up the coast. There are freeze warnings in Houston and in central Florida.
But enough of that. If you look carefully, you can see that winter’s back is already broken, no matter what the thermometer says. The days grow perceptibly longer.
Fish Beach, by Carol L. Douglas
Yesterday I visited the North End Shipyard. The former Isaac Evans is up on the railroad. Under her temporary cover, her new owners are stripping her down and rebuilding her. Captain Doug Lee of Heritage was in the shop, cheerfully smashing glass panes out of window frames, preparing to rebuild and paint them. And Shary was sitting at her desk sorting a big pile of reservations for next summer’s sailings. While the world appear motionless under its mantle of cold, its workers are busy preparing for another summer season.
In the grey summer garden I shall find you  
With day-break and the morning hills behind you.  
There will be rain-wet roses; stir of wings;  
And down the wood a thrush that wakes and sings.  
Not from the past you’ll come, but from that deep
Where beauty murmurs to the soul asleep… (Siegfried Sassoon)
Just reading the poetry fragment, above, makes me feel better. And that is one of the main points of art. It transports you from your current situation and reminds you that better days are ahead. 
Erie Canal, by Carol L. Douglas
Hanging in my studio-gallery is the above painting of my daughter biking along the Erie Canal. She was my model, but as she has grown up and away, the painting has assumed an elegiac sweetness to me. Almost all the paintings I own, either by myself or others, are of summer scenes. They bring me more joy than does ice and cold.
Even for those who can’t collect original paintings, there is art to warm our souls. Consider Claude Monet’s or Vincent Van Gogh’s hot, buzzing countrysides, or the long grassin an Edward Hopperpainting. Or Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s fresh strawberries, or Wayne Thiebaud’s San Francisco streets. All of them evoke not just a sense of place, but of season. None of them are farther away than a click of your mouse.
In a sense, I needed to write this as an antidote to yesterday’s post. After it was published, a reader directed me to this video.  It is cynical, but it accurately describes the high-end art market.
But here in the hinterlands, art continues to plug away at its primary job of sparking the human imagination. It can transport us away from our current reality of snow and cold to the warmer climes of memory. I urge you to indulge just a little.
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Happy New Year—your work is worth less than absolutely nothing

Can we please fire the curators and move on to another epoch, one that values art?

Ben Ledi, by David Young Cameron. Since I can’t illustrate nothingness with photos, I’m giving you four paintings by Glasgow School artists instead. 
Imagine, if you will, that you are offered a solo show at a smart museum in one of the world’s art centers, home to a renowned art school. It’s costing taxpayers £11,000, or $15,000 US. You’d be thrilled, because your reputation as an international artist would be secured.
That is precisely what happened to Dutch artist Marlie Mul, whose work ranges from two-dimensional image/word pieces to straight-up diatribes taped on the wall to sculpture. She isn’t an A-lister; she’s actually pretty obscure. How did she respond? She refused to produce any art at all, but suggested the show could go on, billed as This Exhibition Has Been Cancelled.
The non-exhibit drew 100,000 visitors to Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art. In other words, if you don’t even bother to make it, they will still come. Perhaps it’s been abnormally cold in Glasgow and people needed somewhere to warm up.
Near Dover, 1921, by William York Macgregor
This is the final devolution of conceptual art. We’ve already seen the end of craftsmanship and of ideas. Our incredulity at some of the total dreck in galleries was answered with, “You’re not sophisticated enough to understand. Furthermore, you don’t wear the right clothes, and your glasses are so last year.”
But at least there were objects—insufficient, ill-worked and badly thought-out as they were. This show tells us that even nothingness is to be preferred to the output of working modern artists, many of whom would have given their non-gangrenous left arm for such exposure.
Trying to put the best face on what was essentially a no-show, curator Will Cooper said, “By removing what would traditionally be considered an art object we are presenting the gallery as empty space, giving us a moment to question the value in turning over exhibition after exhibition after exhibition.” Ah, spun bullshit—the métier of the middle-manager.
A Hind’s Daughter, by Sir James Guthrie 1883, courtesy Scottish National Gallery
“This wouldn’t fly in my field,” my husband commented laconically. When a firm doesn’t deliver on a government contract here, not only do they not get paid, they can be held liable for damages. It doesn’t fly in the commercial art world, either. When a client forks over a few thousand dollars, they expect something in return.
Not all Glaswegians were as supportive as Mr. Cooper. “It is remarkable how authorities seem to have a talent for finding innovative ways to waste taxpayers’ money,” TaxPayers’ Alliance chief John O’Connell told the Scottish Daily Mail. “For households struggling with rising bills this will seem like a cruel joke. It is also deeply concerning that residents – who are picking up the bill – are not being told how much of their hard-earned cash is being wasted on this charade. Taxpayers expect their money to go to essential services, not to be squandered.”
The head of the Holy Loch, 1882, George Henry
All of this does a terrific disservice to real art. It’s difficult enough for the artist to justify his or her work to the world. It’s difficult to get people to slow down and read the texts of our work seriously. Do we really need to be attacked by the institutions who purport to support us?
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This fall I’ve written about Meredith Frampton and other overlooked British realists. Their careers were blighted by the same academics, who insisted that realism and craftsmanship were irrelevant in the 20th century.
With this non-show, gallerists and intellectuals and—yes, gallery-goers—have once again told us working artists exactly what they think of the work we’re struggling to produce.