February 8, 2015
“Do something instead of killing time. Because time is killing you.” Paulo Coelho
“Do something instead of killing time.”
Finished Pieces
“Art is long, life is short.” – Hippocrates
February 1, 2015
One small painting and three drawings from this week.
“This house doesn’t burn down slowly” – Imagine Dragons
January 11, 2015
Spent some time FINISHING a couple of paintings. I feel like I have too many things left undone right now, so I’m going to try to rectify that. Here they are:
Painting is a faith…
October 19, 2014
“Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.” ~ Vincent van Gogh
“Puking clears the soul…”
September 21, 2014
Some artwork from quite a while ago that I am debating about painting over…
Just finished reading Leonard Cohen’s first novel, “The Favourite Game” and I really enjoyed it. Especially the passage below. And if you really want to know what puking has to do with school supplies, well, it’s not that long of a book.
“Puking clears the soul. Breavman remembered what he felt like. Fry’s Stationery, buying school supplies. Ten years old. The whole new school year coiled like a dragon to be conquered by sharp yellow Eagle pencils. Fresh erasers, rows of them, crying to be sacrificed for purity and stars for Neatness. The stacks of exercise books dazzlingly empty of mistakes, more perfect than Perfect. Unblunted compasses, lethal, containing millions of circles, too sharp and substantial for the cardboard box that contained them. Grown-up ink, black triumphs, eradicable mistakes. Leather bags for the dedicated trek from home to class, arms free for snowball or chestnut attacks. Paper clips surprisingly heavy in their small box, rulers with markings as complicated and important as a Spitfire’s dashboard, sticky red-bordered labels to fasten your name to anything. All tools benign, unused. Nothing yet an accomplice to failure.”
Art has absolutely no existence as veracity…
September 14, 2014
“Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth… As a drug it’s probably very useful for many people, very sedative, but as a religion it’s not even as good as god.”
-Marcel Duchamp
I have some issues yet to resolve with the background of this painting yet. I was playing around with a background that I created with book pages and black gesso. Even without the horrible glare that I couldn’t escape in this photo, it is clear that I will need to play a little more with it.
“Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifer.” ~ Pierre Bourdieu
September 7, 2014
The quote is from Pierre Bourdieu’s book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. I came across it in the book Believing is Seeing; Creating the Culture of Art which discussed the origin and development of the concept of art as we know it today. The author follows the above quote with: “Taste is not something “natural” but something cultural, something produced. Bourdieu looked at the way consumption of Art and culture legitimates “social differences.” Having taste and appreciating fine art is a means of distinguishing yourself: It’s a way of demonstrating that you have class.” ~ Mary Anne Staniszewski in Believing is Seeing; Creating the Culture of Art
Can’t we just assume that we all have ‘class’ (whatever THAT is) and just get on with it? I found parts of her book interesting, but I am still trying to figure out if the elitism that surrounds the appreciation of art is a help or a hindrance – what role would art play in our culture if it weren’t so embedded in the domain of the wealthy? And maybe that’s finally changing…
And while I wasn’t debating esoteric topics in art history with myself, I was doing this:
The artist never entirely knows…
September 1, 2014
“The artist never entirely knows — We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark” ~Agnes de Mille
“Being an artist means…”
August 24, 2014
“Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.” ~ Jose Ortega y Gasset
I think this is finished. I’m debating about fixing a few things that are bugging me yet. I’m kind of feeling done with it though and may just walk away and start something new.
susanne semchuk 