The kids are all right
Dear Artist, A collector of emerging and mid-career art recently told me about the friendships…
Browsing: artists
Imposter syndrome
Growing up, my Dad used to casually throw out an idiom that went, “There’s no such thing as undiscovered genius.” Over time, as my brothers and I embarked on slow-burning careers in the arts, we internalized his words as a call to work as hard as possible. We fleshed out this ethic with another favourite family strap-line: “Keep busy while waiting for something to happen.”
Tales the palettes tell
Dear Artist, I’ve always been suspect of historical painter’s palettes. One reason is that a…
Desultory painting
Dear Artist, My friend Jack Hambleton and I were in the town of Sao Bras…
Art in small places
Last Sunday, in a shock of re-entry, two visitors came to the studio — the first in six weeks. They arrived at the door wearing masks, and we introduced ourselves for the first time with what felt like both a momentous and unsatisfying wave, from six-feet apart. I resisted the urge to embrace them properly. I did my best to show them what their presence meant to me. My visitors seemed weary of the protocol and sat down amongst the paintings I’d been working on at my new, yogi-like pace. We discussed the immediate future of the art world before talking about painting. Our visit was tinged with a calm and realism about the unknowns that face our special ecosystem. After an hour, we thanked each other and they got into their cars and drove away.
Post-traumatic growth
Dear Artist, Beneath a cloud of awareness that people are suffering because of COVID-19, artists…
Building the creative muscle
Ever since I was a kid I’ve been interested in the nature of creative thinking. Where does it come from? Can it be learned? Can it be taught? I’ve been curious about my own periods of creative intuition and creative ineptitude. I’ve also been interested in the difference between “wild child” creativity and mature creative self-management.
Most of our creativity takes place in the right back corner of our brains. In addition, many folks are able to toss the creative ball both fore and aft and port and starboard.
The end of factory art
In art critic Jerry Saltz’s recent dirge for the art world, he welcomes the return of art made at the kitchen table. “For now, there aren’t big studios, dozens of artist assistants working on one artist’s work, whole staffs keeping track of it all,” writes Jerry. Instead, he says, art is retreating to domestic spaces — in the fray with cooking and children and laundry and gardening, and being made by hand by one person at a time. “This is how our species made most things over the last 50,000 years. Creativity was with us in the caves; it’s in every bone in our bodies.”
House music
Last week, on the same day the Governor of California issued a statewide “stay at home” order, our neighbourhood small-batch ice creamery launched an online payment system and let locals know they could pick up pints, curbside. This small business, which is run by artists, had already begun posting daily flavours on social media. It was a natural evolution made real by a changing-world urgency. Like ice cream, art should be small-batch, experiential and on hand in a crisis.
Creative quarantine
This morning I received a message from a collector friend: “Some people are lucky, like artists (with materials), readers, knitters, gardeners. It’s worrying about the galleries and everyone else. But I’m excited to see the creative output from this period. It would turn some of the devastation from this time into wondrous innovation. We’ll see.” Sequestered in my creation station, I’d just opened my eyes and was thinking of everyone on the planet doing some version of the same. I was quietly redesigning the world.