Category: craftsmanship

Posted on

Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Craftsmen

Craftsmanship, passed down from artist to artist, keeps modern painting alive. That’s because painting is a craft, not an intellectual pursuit.

Rowboats on Dock, oil on board, by Robert McCloskey 
The other day I overheard an Old Salt telling a Young Salt that connecting links in marine chains are as strong as coil chain once the rivets are peened in. That kind of knowledge is passed from person to person in a trade. It can hardly be measured or tested.
My husband recently remarked that tradespeople get more respect in Maine than they did back in New York. I think he’s right. New York is heavy on colleges and universities. That’s a good thing, but it does result in some disregard for the highly-skilled people who hold our physical world together.
Any flat-pack project can be rendered infinitely more complicated with the addition of glue and clamps.
That’s ironic, since we live in a society where few people can do much of anything. A 2012 survey found that 44% of British adults were unable to assemble flat-pack furniture. Another quarter of them needed a whole day. Only 42% of Americans are confident they can change a flat tire, and 26% believe they can change the oil in their car. We need the trades.
There was a time when artists considered themselves craftsmen rather than intellectuals. That shifted with the Age of Enlightenmentand the Cult of Genius. We’re in the final stages of this thinking, where implied talent and intent trump discipline and skill.
One artist who thought of himself primarily as a craftsman was the brilliant and revered Maine illustrator, Robert McCloskey.  A show of his work runs at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts until June 18. I’d hoped to go down to see it with Bobbi Heath, but—I’m embarrassed to admit—I was home with my ailing dog. I had to be content with the photo she sent me of his Rowboats on Dock, above.
McCloskey has been in the news recently because his family recently donated Outer Scott Island, the setting for One Morning in Maine, to the Nature Conservancy.
From Robert McCloskey: A Private Life in Words and Pictures by Jane McCloskey.

 McCloskey thought of himself as an illustrator, not an artist. “He never sold anything [of his paintings], and never really tried,” his daughter Jane said. “It was all about the books.”

“His puppets and paintings,” she wrote, “which never won any awards, were worth as much to him as the books which won the praise of the world.” 
“Don’t talk about it; do it,” was McCloskey’s credo.
Dynamic symmetry is a system of rectangular design invented by Jay Hambidge.  It’s easier to visualizethan explain, since it is based on square roots. McCloskey was a fan of dynamic symmetry. 
I also learned this system and sometimes still use and teach it. I got it from an ‘Old Salt’ of an artist, the figure painter Steven Assael. It’s that kind of knowledge, passed along from artist to artist, which keeps modern painting alive. In this way, we have more in common with tradespeople than we do with intellectuals. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in that.
Posted on

Cast of thousands

Removing the mold from a terra cotta Santon.
This is the latest my crèche set has ever come out of hiding for Christmas, but at last the multitudes grace my mantelpiece. The festivities can commence. Last December, I wrote about the history of nativities, here.
I’m fascinated by crèche sets, and every year I entertain the idea of making a set of nativity figures myself. There are just a few techniques used to make them, and the biggest challenge is to choose one and learn it.
Italians, in particular Neapolitans, are the masters of terra cotta and carved nativity sets. This is from the Vatican in 2012. 
We are all familiar with Hummel figurines, which were introduced in 1935 as part of the porcelain line of W. Goebel Porzellanfabrik, which is in turn part of an even greater Bavarian tradition of painted porcelain. In fact, if you’re an American of German ancestry, you can hardly avoid the stuff, since it was collected avidly by expats living here.
This animated Italian molded polychrome horse would set you back $240 plus shipping and handling, if you could get it. It’s sold out.
Among the many Bavarian export porcelains were molded ceramic nativity sets. The Goebel nativity sets are highly collectible today, but I’ve never come across a set of molds.

If you think vintage Goebel nativity sets are cute, be prepared to dig deep in your pocket; they can easily set you back a grand or more.
If you own a plastic nativity set, it’s likely to have been made for the American market by Fontanini, which successfully caught and rode the 20th century American trend of voracious collecting. There are hundreds of different figurines available, every fanciful character with its own fanciful backstory.
That there was no reason for a centurion or a miller or a goose girl to be at the stable on the night of Christ’s birth has never stopped Fontanini from expanding its cast of thousands. At $20 a figure, it pays to spread the Good News.
Emanuele Fontanini founded the firm in 1908 as a craft workshop in Bagni di Lucca, making papier mache figurines. In the 1960s, his descendent, Mario, figured out how to translate the traditional figurines into injection-molded plastic, and an empire was born.  Alas, injection-molded plastic is beyond my capabilities.
The last time I made a creche figure was in the late Sixties, in Sunday School. I’m thinking of marketing that figurine in the red gown as Leah the Leper. My painting skills have improved since then, I think.
Naples is the place to go for papier mache, carved, or clothed terra-cotta polychrome nativity sets. This being a living, changing art form, it should come as no surprise that one can now buy them animated and lighted. No joy looking for the molds here, either; the best I could find were molds for chocolate nativity sets.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
Posted on

That’s sophomoric

The Magazine Women Believe In was a spoof of style of 1950s publications. I painted it back in the day; I wouldn’t paint it today because my feminist thinking has matured. So has my painting style.
As a young person, my brain was fizzing over with half-cocked ideas. Some of my projects were musical—like writing a rock opera with my chum Michele, or writing and recording a cowpunk album with my husband. Some were literary. Most were visual. But some were just larks, like going on the Maid of the Mist in my bikini or going skiing in grease-stained Carhartt overalls—what today we might dignify with the label ‘performance art,’ if we could find funding for it.
I grew up in a time and a town which was too conservative for performance art, and my parents tended to cast a jaundiced eye on my antics. So I burrowed into the art form I knew best—drawing and painting—and gradually left the more conceptual stuff behind. I don’t think I’m any less creative at this advanced age, but my creativity is more yoked to what I do best.
Submission was painted during the first phase of the Iraq War and addresses the still-thorny issue of whether oppression or libertine impulses are more stifling for women. It’s one of the paintings that got my RIT show closed down.
Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity by economist David Galenson looks at the schism between the creativity of youth and that of maturity. Galenson says that some of us work by trial and error, and arrive at our major contributions incrementally, usually in old age. In contrast, there are conceptual innovators who make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas at an early age. Galenson puts Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Cézanne in the “old master” category, and Vermeer, van Gogh, and Picasso in the “young Turk” category.
Would I have painted The Beggar of St. Paul today, with its cynical depiction of Starving Africa as part of the money cycle? Probably not. I’m weary of hectoring people.
I think he has the division in thinking right, but not the outcome. We are all more daring thinkers when young, and more methodical workers when old. The difference is in when we’re discovered and what the society in which we live values. Today we live in a society which values audacity above craftsmanship, which tends to highlight the conceptual over the incremental.


Message me if you want information about next year’s Maine workshops. Information about this year’s programs is available here.
Posted on

The real reason I hate Hobby Lobby (and all those other craft stores)

Coral ranunculus at $9.99 a stem on Hobby Lobby’s website. At that rate, a nice floral arrangement would cost what a month’s worth of painting lessons would run you. 
The Census bureau reports that the nation’s international trade deficit in goods and services increased to $47.2 billion in April, as exports decreased and imports increased. (Imported goods and services, by the way, were the highest on record.) The May report will be out at the end of this week, but the news will be depressingly familiar; our trade deficit is about $450 billion a year and it only goes down when Americans are too scared to shop.
I realize that very little of this is from the stuff they sell at craft stores, but what always interests me about these places is how useless most of the stuff they sell is, and how none of it is made in the US.
But why pick on Hobby Lobby? I dutifully put all the stuff necessary to make this Pantone Radiant Orchid Wood Birdhouse in my online Michael’s cart, and it added up to $81.95. That’s about what a factory-reconditioned compound miter saw would cost, and with that you could make something useful.
“Hobby Lobby’s main shoppers are women of all ages. Because of the dependence on disposable income, the company’s stores do best when located in an area with demographics from lower middle class to upper middle class,” reported a shopping center trade rag.
Crafting used to be about saving money: women sewed, we canned, we remade old furniture. Now crafting is a $30 billion entertainment industry. The irony is that none of the stuff in these stores is cheap, and none of it has much to do with either art or craftsmanship.
We are drowning in all the stuff we buy, much of it which will never be used. Many of us then turn to professionals (like Nestle and Bloom, whose photo this is) to put it into some kind of order. That costs even more money.
Meanwhile, crafting’s target demographic carries significant credit-card debt. In 2012, people with incomes of $35,000 or less averaged $5,400 in credit card debt, those making $35,000 to $49,999 averaged $6,700 in credit card debt, those earning $50,000-$74,999 category had $8,900 of credit card debt, while those making more than $75,000 carried $9,200 in debt. And those numbers are down a third from their 2008 highs.
People borrow money they don’t have to buy stuff they don’t need. It clutters up their homes and will eventually be tossed into landfills. It adds to our trade deficit and our dependence on foreign oil. To me, that’s the real moral calculation one has to make before visiting a store like Hobby Lobby.

The heck with that. Come to Maine and learn to paint instead. I have two openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.

Posted on

Etsy’s just another craft fair that’s now allowing resale.

Charm bracelet by Jennifer Jones Jewelry.
Jennifer Jones makes handmade statement jewelry from vintage brooches, pins, buttons, and the occasional Tabasco sauce bottle. Since she’s my former painting student and friend, we frequently talk shop. Recently, she’s been telling me that Etsy, the e-commerce website focusing on handmade craft items, has started allowing the resale of manufactured goods.
Maybe the New York Times can wax philosophical about the difference between ‘handmade’ and ‘mass-produced’ but we artists understand the difference. It isn’t about the tools and supplies you use; it’s about personally guiding the work through every step of the process.
Enamel flower necklace by Jennifer Jones. There is no way to mass-produce an assemblage of this nature. 
If you’ve done time on the art-fair circuit, you know that allowing manufactured goods is the kiss of death for a venue’s high-end craftsmen. It adulterates the brand, and it brings in the wrong audience—an audience which can’t distinguish the craftsmanship of a $500 piece from a mass-produced $50 copy. Nevertheless, it seems like sooner or later almost every venue succumbs to the temptation.
Freakonomics had this to say about it:
Etsy’s latest move is entirely in line with the history of handmade goods, a history that is more complicated than the simple term “handmade” implies. The artisans have run head-on into the problem that led to the Industrial Revolution: Making things by hand is slow. Really slow.
That’s kind of missing the point. We don’t live in an age where the major issue is making more stuff in less time. In fact, we are flooded in cheap goods. Right now, we Americans can’t compete in the cheap-goods market. Whether our craft is writing software or creating brilliant jewelry from castoffs, we are not selling a product but a process, one that frequently yields arrestingly good results.
Bracelet cuff made of vintage enameled pansies and some other stuff, by Jennifer Jones.
I had a designer friend with a unique and locally-popular line of clothes. She tried to scale it up, and she got lost in the vagaries of offshore manufacturing. When she was done, she had a product that would have been at home at Target—in fact, she didn’t even have that, because she was a rank amateur at the business of international sourcing. She sacrificed what she did best chasing a mirage, and her product line died completely.
Meanwhile, Jennifer keeps making these one-off items, and her market is worldwide. 


Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!