A subscriber wrote, “Are there any authentic, intellectually respectable reasons for the apparent divide between the contrasting and often opposing worlds of 1) ‘serious’ contemporary painting and its practitioners, and 2) the sprawling world of proud retro painters, and their constellation of activities and venues that are ignored by prevailing learned scholars and critics the world over?”
He says he likes to do it in his car, or in bed, at dawn. He works at it by practicing writing very big and very small, by zooming in on still life subjects and sending flower doodles to his friends before they’re awake. For his efforts, he’s hailed as an early adopter, an agent of the new or inspirer of complaints about a medium incapable of authenticity, though the Brushes app has handily lived in the toolkit of designers and commercial artists since inception.
On Wednesday this week — it may have been the phase of the moon — there were so many questions in the inbox that I buckled under and lost it. Don’t get me wrong — I love being of service to others, and there was great stuff to talk about, like how to dispose of toxic thinners while painting on a boat, or how to get perspective into curved things. Some of this stuff I can answer. What I need around here is a Michelangelo who is willing to sit at a computer 24/7.
By 1880, the crimes of twenty-five year-old Australian outlaw Ned Kelly had escalated from bank robbing and distributing funds to the poor to gunfights and police killings. He and his gang of bushrangers — escaped convicts with the survival skills to hide in the outback — roamed rural Victoria, both terrorizing and inspiring settlers. At the climax of their rampage, Kelly’s myth went supernova when he made a suit of armour out of iron plough parts and wore it to what would be his last siege. Still, Ned was shot by police, captured and eventually hanged.
Dear Artist, Almost everyone who reads my letters will have had this experience: You’re at…
On a recent balmy evening in Melbourne, the St. Petersburg Ballet performed in a sprawling theatre affectionately known to locals as “The Shed.” We settled in for the journey to a far-off, midnight, moon-kissed lake and soon surrendered to twenty-three floating, glowing tutus in cool, white tulle. The painted set poured moonlight so convincingly — the stage shining as black as an icy pond — I could almost taste the snowflakes on my tongue. It was a winter dream.
Let there be music. It could be any music. High brow, low brow. Music gives a key to what art is, to what art can do. For my desert island I’ll include the Sibelius Violin Concerto (D major, Opus 64). I’ll choose Pinchas Zukerman to play it. I’ll have to say it’s not the notes. It’s the spirit of the thing. As Zukerman says, “It has this incredible stuff happening everywhere.” Up and down, back and forth, the wonderful arbitrary quality of it all. Music, almost fully abstract, need not engage in realistically copying bird songs, wind, the sounds of traffic or falling coconuts.
Leading up to 2013, Dad had been working on a passion project called, “The Audio Letters.” Inspired by the knowledge that easel work goes well with listening to things, he decided to have some fun and join the ear waves. The first attempts involved my big brother Dave, a musician, composer and record producer, who set up a fancy rig with a mic and headphones in Dad’s studio, near the easel, in an area informally known as the “contemplation zone.” This would allow Dad to take passes at recording without needing to put his brush down.
A friend who will remain nameless is a big collector. He knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. We were feet-up, scotching ourselves when I started foaming about the watercolours of John Singer Sargent. “Didn’t know he did them,” my friend announced. “He was a society painter, wasn’t he?” There was no point in continuing. Then I mentioned Anders Zorn. “Never heard of him,” he said. I tried to fill him in.
The phone rang early — it was an artist friend from the other side of Earth. A recent collaboration had left him feeling humiliated: “I compromised my vision, thinking I could get through it,” he said, “and in the end it didn’t pay off; I lost the job anyway.”
An early lesson at the bottom of my parents’ property came to mind, where I was learning to be a painter in a re-configured boat shed. A client, in search of a treasure, found the shed constraining and asked if she could commission something specific.