Tag: Just Stop Oil

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Art or vandalism?

Ice Cream, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Street art

Street artist Banksy is believed to be behind a ‘mural’ painted in Finsbury Park in London. It is a spatter of green paint that implies the leaves on a nearby pollarded tree. Banksy is, of course, a favorite of the high-end art market. He’s the guy who once got $1.4 million for shredding a painting.

Meanwhile, Chris Kanizi, 65, who owns the Golden Chippy, also in London, has been told to paint over a mural that he paid to have painted on the side of his shop. It’s a fish, and it reads, “Fish and Chips: A Great British Meal.”

“Why are planning laws, not to mention property laws, continually bent in order to favour the pseudonymous artist [Banksy] when they continue to come down so heavily against anyone else who has a go?” asked columnist Ross Clark  “Banksy is not just tolerated: some of his works have been listed, so the owners of the buildings on which they have been sprayed couldn’t even remove them if they wanted to.”

The same conversations happen here in the Land of the Free as well–here in Arlington, VA, and here, in Conway, NH, to cite just two examples.

Is it art or vandalism or just plain advertising?

Grain elevators, Buffalo, NY, 18X24 in a handmade cherry frame. $2318 includes shipping in continental US.

America has a long relationship with roadside art, which even lent itself to a style of architecture called Googie. Drive down Route 1 through Saugus, MA and you’ll pass signs from the heyday of Googie. Some of the businesses are gone, but the signs remain. After 70 years, they’re protected landmarks.

So why do we stop people from building roadside commercial art today? Ross has a simple answer: advertising art is for oiks, not the well-bred fans of Banksy’s art.

Princess Street, Dawson City, Yukon Territory, 8X10, oil on archival canvasboard. Includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Art or vandalism, redux

Those of us who love art have been troubled by the recent trend of protesters damaging works of art. In Britain, where this is beginning to look like a national sport, prosecution has been hindered by the Criminal Damage Act 1971. If the perpetrator believes the owner would have consented if he or she understood the circumstances, then the damage is excused. This codifies the common-sense idea that if you see a baby in a hot car, you’d be right in smashing a window to rescue it.

If that was your Velázquez that was just destroyed, well, you just didn’t properly understand the threat of climate change, and now that you do, it’s fine.

Yesterday Lady Chief Justice Lady Carr delivered a judgment on protest law that should close that loophole. Perhaps it will help hurry this fad into obscurity before more Constables, Van Goghs and other priceless pieces of our patrimony are damaged.

Larky Morning at Rockport Harbor, 11X14, on linen, $869 unframed includes shipping in continental US.

Those dark nationalist feelings

Landscape painting has always been about pride of place. We love the Hudson River School in part because they’re so optimistic about America’s heritage and destiny, on which rested their themes of discovery, exploration, and settlement. The Canadian Group of Seven painted the energy of the Great White North, and helped establish the Canadian art ethos. JoaquĂ­n Sorolla was a proud Spaniard; Anders Zorn was a proud Swede.

The Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge has decided that British landscape painting has a dark, nationalist underbelly. A new label in its landscape collection reads:

The countryside was seen as a direct link to the past, and therefore a true reflection of the essence of a nation.

Paintings showing rolling English hills or lush French fields reinforced loyalty and pride towards a homeland.

The darker side of evoking this nationalist feeling is the implication that only those with a historical tie to the land have a right to belong.

Think of that next time you go outside to paint.

My 2024 workshops:

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Art-vs.-Life is a false dichotomy

High Plains, 8x10, oil on canvas, available unframed, $522

By now, most of us have read about two Just Stop Oil activists who threw tomato soup over Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London. They’re part of a growing trend of annoying young people gluing themselves to the frames of great art and gallery walls in protest against petroleum culture.

They ought to be gluing themselves to a gas pump where they’d be addressing their actual enemy; oil paintings are generally made with flax-seed oil. However, they’d doubtless be ignored or worse, as their sit-down protests in roads have mostly just infuriated British drivers. In a gallery, they’re sure to get attention.

Sedona, 8X10, oil on canvas, Carol Douglas, private collection

“What is worth more, art or life?” said one of the lasses, Phoebe Plummer, 21, from London. “Is it worth more than food? More than justice? Are you more concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?

Mankind has always recognized that there’s a physical world and a non-physical world and that the borders are fuzzy. Descartes wrote “cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am) to prove to himself that he really existed. Cartesian dualism rests on the idea that there are tangible things, and there are intangible things, and that we humans are a combination of the two. Generations of spotty teenagers, myself included, have pondered Descartes’ question. The idea that reality isn’t real is tailor-made for adolescents.

Apparently, Plummer missed all that. Otherwise, she’d know that art isn’t separate from life any more than food or justice are. It’s part of thinking, and that’s part of life as much as checking the gas meter.

Van Gogh was just 37 years old when he died, either by suicide or murder. The vast majority of his 900 paintings were finished in the last two years of life as he grappled with crippling mental illness. That period of suffering paradoxically gave us a legacy of paintings that’s unparalleled in human history. Through his work, Van Gogh lives on.

The Rocks Remain, 16X20, is one of two pictures going with me to Sedona Arts Center. I'll post a better photo later.

I’m a reader. That takes me to alternate worlds and different viewpoints and realities, all possible through the artistry of the writer. Are those worlds more or less real than my physical one? The answer, I suppose, depends on when you ask me.

Marcel Proust addressed this question in Remembrance of Things Past, that monumental opus that we all talk about but seldom read. “(A)s many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal, differing more widely from each other than those which roll round the infinite and which, whether their name be Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us their unique rays many centuries after the hearth from which they emanate is extinguished.” The knowledge thus gained, he said, is something different from the “practical ends which we falsely call life.”

Rim Light, 16X20, is one of two paintings going with me to Sedona. I'll post a better image later.

It's an unexamined life that makes us so prone to excess consumption, exacerbating the petroleum problem. By no measures are American adults healthy. More than 37 million of us take antidepressants, more than 40% of us are obese, and 77% of us worry about money. A little more reading, writing, drawing, painting and thinking and a little less shopping would make us all happier.

By the way, the wise old souls at the National Gallery had protected the painting, and only the frame sustained minor damage.

I’m writing this en route to Sedona, AZ, for the 18th annual Sedona Plein Air Festival. It’s the last event of my season, and I’m excited about all the rocks I get to paint this coming week!