October 19, 2014
“Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.” ~ Vincent van Gogh
Painting is a faith…
Oils
“As my artist’s statement explains…”
October 13, 2014
“As my artist’s statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance” ~Calvin and Hobbes
Still working on this one…
“Art is a form of consciousness.” – Susan Sontag
October 5, 2014
After two very busy weeks and weekends, I finally had a chance to start something new. We’ll see how this turns out…
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.
“Of all lies, art is the least untrue.” – Gustave Flaubert
August 17, 2014
In the end it all comes down to this…
August 10, 2014
“In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot – and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.”
– Art & Fear, David Bayles & Ted Orland
Here’s the beginning of a larger painting that may take some time to complete…
susanne semchuk 