Pablo Picasso Month - Day 23

The urge to come across as knowing a lot only gets greater as more and more information is at our fingertips... never mind the fact that we are so ill-equipped to discern fact from fiction.

You mustn't always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.

~ Pablo Picasso

Why is it that "I don't know" is so hard to say? We really don't like it when the question has no answer... or when any answer is as good as any other answer. We don't like ambiguity or uncertainty...

I've recently learned that there is a great deal of freedom in being able to say " I have no fucking idea..."

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Why Pablo Picasso Month?

Pablo Picasso Month - Day 16

A little less scary than the quote from a few days ago, but I don't know which is worse - being artistically sterile, or being artistically pathetic.

To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.

~ Pablo Picasso

Both are hard to think about, and maybe equally bad if you exist primarily to make art. And some of us do exist primarily to make art. I'm not sure that I do, but when I'm in the studio it feels – briefly, fleetingly – like my purpose it to communicate with ideas made manifest in art.

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Why Pablo Picasso Month?

Pablo Picasso Month - Day 13

Scary. Very scary.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

~ Pablo Picasso

I can see it though. It's the story of the writer who has a best seller and then all their subsequent books are the same book with different details. It's the sequels and prequels to blockbuster movies...

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Why Pablo Picasso Month?

Thomas Kinkade

Well... not a fan, but you most certainly mastered your craft. Even so, I would never have named you The Painter of Light... but rest in peace, Thomas Kinkade. The world is lessened by your passing.

Thomas Kinkade dies at 54; artist was called the 'Painter of Light' - latimes.com

Still... the idea of selling reproductions as art disturbs me.

About a month ago I had the "reproductions vs. art" discussion with some friends. We were sitting in a local diner that had Kinkade-ish prints spectacularly framed and hung on the walls. Like a fool, I mentioned my disdain for the practice of treating prints of paintings as paintings... I then had to try to put hours and hours of thinking about this into a coherent statement during the 25 minutes our meal would take. I wasn't eating, so at least I didn't have to give up chewing time.

One of my companions said that he was in favor of "Kinkadeing" since it put art in the hands of people who couldn't ordinarily have art (of that quality). He thought it was perfectly fine for an artist to create originals and photograph/scan them to create printed reproductions AND call those reproductions art.

Leaving alone the fact that Kinkade prints weren't cheap enough for the people he was referring to to purchase, I tried to explain my view on the whole idea...

I believe that for most artists selling reproductions of their work do so purely for a financial reasons, not for some altruistic desire to put art in the hands of less-affluent patrons (an exception to that, I suppose, is the ego boost of having your "art" purchased by people and the warm glow that it creates deep down inside you).

For the most part, I have no issues with the practice of selling reproductions. It's hard to make a living doing art. But I believe that the artists who sell reproductions as if they are art are making a mistake. In fact, I think it's the biggest mistake we make - plus it's a bit like snake-oil... 

The primary reason it is hard to make a living making art is that we have a predominantly ill-informed/under-informed audience. They already don't see making art or being an artist as a realistic career. Unless they are among those who idolize artists (and this group is just as likely to be ill-informed), they tend to think we're all dreamers and misfits who have yet to "grow up and find a real job." They don't recognize the validity of an art career or the benefits of having art in their life. They don't know how to determine the amount of work that goes into creating art or the monetary value of that work.

So we have an audience, a client base, a market, that has no method for determining the value of the work we want to sell (for me, being unsure about the cost/value of something makes me less likely to purchase it). Selling reproductions as art compounds the problem by cultivating the point of view that art should be inexpensive. 

Someone said to me that I only felt this way since my work (they meant mosaics and sculptures) do not work as prints (no one is confused thinking a photograph of a sculpture is a sculpture or even art). While I will concede their point, my argument is not a sour-grapes point of view... I do make art that could be sold as reproductions - my encaustic abstract art would make fabulous giclee prints...

I guess I just think that the only visual artists that should be selling prints as art are the printmakers...

Encouraging an art-filled life

A friend asked me about art opportunities for her son (who spent his morning making masks)... and I said:

There are some venues around here that offer art opportunities. We can talk about them sometime. But I want to say that while it is grand to get kids together to make art, I think it's more important to make sure that the creative creature that lives inside of each of us has a chance. Parents are the best incubators for that creative creature.

I think that the critical thing is to encourage constant experimentation... making art is experimentation - pure, wonderful, exasperating, beautiful experimentation - it's giving in to the urge to "what if..." something, to take a bit of this and a bit of that and put them together to make a new thing. It doesn't have to be limited to traditional art activities - building a snow fort or baking a pie or making some contraption can be experimental - and if it is, you're feeding the creative creature.

The most important thing for raising a child (or an adult) to live an art-filled life - to be blessed with the indescribable lightness of being that art generates - is to be willing to totally wreck havoc in the name of experimentation, to be willing to put the journey and the finding out ahead of things like order and propriety and everything else that shuts down the creative mind, that forces us to be those cogs in the machine.

I was very lucky as a child - my parents did not have much, but they let us play with almost everything they had. The contraptions we made were applauded and treasured - even when they had to be scraped off the sidewalk, or painted over, or dismantled so that dinner could be put on the table, or, or, or...

I was "sewing" before I started school, "building" before I was out of grade school... I learned how to use tools, how to make stuff from bits of this and that, how to fix things, how to "see" what might be, how to be fearless in my experimentation - to know "I can do that..." whatever "that" was.

And all because I was taught that the creative creature was important, that it was the most important part of me - the part that made me alive - the creative creature was me. Life was all about the making and thinking and looking and finding... All those doings done, all those thoughts thought, they stayed with me throughout my life. Even in the times when I was too afraid to make art, when life demanded too much of me to be able to spare the energy, I still was art-filled.

And one day I came back to it.

So, would I like to make my living making art? Hell yes. I'd love to... and I am really stubborn, so maybe it will happen.

But it's ever so much more important to just be making the art.

Not a simple issue

Refused and Confused - New York Times, Oct 05, 2011 - Linda Greenhouse

Off the cuff I think that people who use their religion/other positions to refuse service to others should give up the employment that asks them to serve the public.

But do I think that way because the services being discussed in the article are ones I believe should be available... or because it is sound policy to require any legally available service to be provided no matter what the personal beliefs of the providing individual? I'm trying to think of services that I might find distasteful or morally wrong and see how I feel about this from the other side...

I need a philosopher to toss this around with. In lieu of one showing up at my door here's what I'm thinking...

The crux of the matter - either:

• employees are forced to provide services they abhor to the public at large, or to specific groups of people,

          OR

• employees get to pick and choose what services they will provide and/or to whom...

Does it violate a person's civil rights to force them to perform a service, or make a service available, if they feel it is a morally wrong thing to do?

Does it violate an individual's civil rights to have a government/agency employee deny them a legal service because the employee feels, a.) it is morally wrong that anyone receive the service (e.g. birth control, abortion), or b.) that the person is morally wrong for asking for the service (e.g. marriage licenses for same-sex couples, police protection for abortion doctors/clinics)?

Honestly, even if it is questionable (in regard to civil rights) to ask an employee to provide a service they feel is morally wrong, I cannot think of a situation where an individual's rights would trump the rights of a person seeking a legally provided service. But that might be a slippery slope of another sort...

When this kind of news story appears I end up feeling that too many people brandish their beliefs at the rest of us without actually living according to them. If you believe that same-sex marriage is morally wrong, it's not living your beliefs to deny a marriage license to a same-sex couple. Living your beliefs - following your moral code - would be quitting your job if it required you to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

That's how it plays out inside my head anyway.

They say it's your birthday...

You know, sometimes the down-and-dirty part of life really gets to me... the stupid allergies and the limits they impose on me, the bad shoulder, the bad hip, the whole getting older thing.

And then there are the days when, even though I still feel all those things, I also feel luminous - all brand new and shiny and full of potential.

Family and friends and making art are things that help me feel luminous. Last night it was Wes and Jude and Tinee and the sunset and the moonrise and the change-bringing wind up on Garvin Heights. This morning it was waking up, thinking about my birth 54 years ago (I'm the oldest, my mother was scared - who wouldn't be - and it was a Friday, she really wanted to wait one more day...) and thinking about the births of my kids. Right now it's the early morning bicycle ride euphoria and the flock of geese that greeted me with honks and hisses and much ruckus as I passed by on my way to work that's got me buoyed and calm.

I'm thinking about beauty today.

The ACLU and You

I received the following by email this morning...

"Christmas card idea

What a clever idea!
Yes, Christmas cards. This is coming early so that you can get ready to include an important address to your list..

Want to have some fun this CHRISTMAS? Send the ACLU a CHRISTMAS CARD this year.

As they are working so very hard to get rid of the CHRISTMAS part of this holiday, we should all send them a nice, CHRISTIAN card to brighten up their dark, sad, little world..

Make sure it says "Merry Christmas" on it.

Here's the address, just don't be rude or crude. (It's not the Christian way, you know.)
ACLU
125 Broad Street
18th Floor
New York , NY 10004

Two tons of Christmas cards would freeze their operations because they wouldn't know if any were regular mail containing contributions. So spend 44 cents and tell the ACLU to leave Christmas alone. Also tell them that there is no such thing as a " Holiday Tree". . . It's always been called a CHRISTMAS TREE!

And pass this on to your email lists. We really want to communicate with the ACLU! They really DESERVE us!!

For those of you who aren't aware of them, the ACLU, (the American Civil Liberties Union) is the one suing the U.S. Government to take God, Christmas or anything Christian away from us. They represent the atheists and others in this war. Help put Christ back in Christmas!"

Actually, for those who are uninformed - the ACLU is concerned with protecting the rights of the Individual from the encroachment of the State.

Do I like and support every cause that the ACLU takes up? Absolutely not. Do I think that we need the ACLU? Absolutely.

Without an organization guarding our constitutional rights we would soon become more powerless than we already are.

Some of the battles they fight for us:

Illegal wiretapping and spying on U.S. citizens - what if the government decided you were a suspect? Would you want to be spied upon, have cameras and microphones all over your house (your bathroom, your bedroom)?
Torture - do you think it's alright to torture people? If you do I think you've lost your soul.

Illegal internments - do you approve of locking people up without any proof they should be? without a fair trial? Think about it. What if your neighbors told the government you were a terrorist? What if you had to prove you weren't, instead of the government proving you were? How do you prove a negative? They could simply say, "well we haven't found the evidence yet, but we're keeping you locked up until we do."
Preventing government from having a say in religious worship - and you who claim Christian should realize that they also fight for you, they keep the government out of your churches, and only stipulate that your church needs to stay out of government. Would you want the government telling your priests and pastors what they could talk about?

I also feel the need to point out that decorating evergreen trees and bringing greenery into the home at or around the winter solstice did not originate with Christians and Christmas. It's a tradition much more ancient than that. In fact, the early Christian church prohibited the decoration of trees and bringing evergreen bough into the home.

And, my dear emailer, I AM one of the "atheists and others" that the ACLU represents, and so are YOU.

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Thinking again about appropriation

I feel sort of guilty that I haven't been posting lately - I haven't been doing much writing at all other than for work or some of the websites I've been working on. This is a practice run at doing some writing that is more thoughtful than most of what I've been writing lately - the thoughtful part is at the end, the rest is setting the scene...

The latest website to be finished (if a website is EVER finished) is Beelandia.com, Abelisto's website. There's at least three more websites in the works, mostly waiting on people to decide if they like them or not... only one of them is a paying job though.

I hennaed my hair last week (or actually, Abelisto did) using body-art quality henna. I mixed it up using lemon juice instead of water, per the instructions that came with it. It was much, much easier to wash out than the other henna. It did stain my forehead and ears a bit, but that faded in a couple days. Next time I'll have to be more careful about cleaning it off my skin.

The henna turned my hair a bit carroty-orange at first. The instructions said not to panic, but instead to give it a few days and see how it darkened. Wow. Now it is a really rich auburn. The gray hairs, which usually are quite coppery with henna I've previously used, are very mellow and not at all what I expected after I first washed out this henna. All-in-all a vast improvement.

I'm thinking about doing henna tattoos. I've had them done on my hands before - at arts & crafts festivals. I like the way they look, and the graceful way they fade out (I love my permanent tattoo too - just so you know).

Here's the thing... I love the look of the traditional henna tattoos, but I don't want to do traditional ones on people. Or I should say, I don't want to do the traditional ones unless it is part of the person's heritage/culture.

I cannot help but think of it as an appropriation, the exoticization of a culture that has always made me a bit uneasy.  Okay, here's the issue, when I think about the idea of inspiration and the artist’s practice it seems to me that there can be sort of a reverse colonization that often happens – a backdraft of appropriation of styles and artforms, which often ends up getting rolled up into the outsider's identity – a disrespectful fascination with a culture that leads to exoticizing the “other,” trivializing and reducing individuals within those cultures to caricatures (google "Native American Princess art images" and you'll see what I mean... how many of those paintings, sculptures, drawings were done by white housewife artists? Harsh, I know, but I cannot help it).

We assume we are welcome within groups just because we like them, because we want to be like them, wear clothes like them, talk like them or eat their food...

How often is respect for the material or nonmaterial objects of a culture – often manifested as a lust to own them – mistaken by those lusting for the object as a respect for the creators of the objects? Our engineered identities are made up from so many influences, so many “I love that!” feelings, that for the most part, it seems to me that authenticity may be a chimera.

It's not exactly rational, I know. It's not like henna tattoos are part of my own culture. However, there is some historical evidence that some sort of tattooing was part of a great many ancient and not-so-ancient cultures - including most if not all of the European mishmash that I descend from. And I do think that the desire to embellish our bodies in some way is a part of every culture. 

So what it comes down to is that I'd love to do the henna tattoos with designs of my own making.

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Wayne's Sushi & Karaoke Bar

My Las Vegas vacation is just about over. We've been here about a week. We've done some fun things and spent some great family time.

Tonight's wonderful surprise was Wayne's Sushi and Karaoke Bar. I cannot tell you how great it was. Total Food Orgasm. Period.

What we ate:
Appetizers:
Jellyfish, Bean sprout salad, Edamame, spicy Cucumber salad.

Wayne's Special Sushi Rolls:
Lost Wages - California roll wrapped with smoked salmon, topped withSum Young Gai sauce, baked and topped with tobiko and bonito flakes and eel sauce.
Mikey Mikey - Soft shelled crab, shrimp tempura and spicy tuna roll topped with spicy crab.
What Brah, Beef? - Shrimp tempura and asparagus, topped with beef tenderloin and ginger pepper sauce.
Snap Crackle Pop - Shrimp tempura and asparagus topped with baked tilapia and ginger pepper sauce.
Itsy Bitsy Spider - Soft shelled crab, crab mix, gobo, cucumber, sprouts, and massago. Served with ponzu and Sum Young Gai sauce.
Dragon Ass - California roll topped with eel and massago and eel sauce.
Brian & Marsha, Marsha, Marsha - Shrimp tempura, spicy crab, cream cheese and cucumber topped withspice crab, tuna, avocado and eel sauce.
And my very most favorite:
Mango A Go Go Hand Roll - Spicy crab with mango, served in soy paper.

The food was absolutely amazing. Fresh. Made right in front of us.

It's a tiny, small place - very intimate - owned/operated by Wayne and Heidi. We were sitting at the sushi bar and the food was prepared less than two feet from us. They have a few tables too, but if you go, be sure to sit at the bar. Wayne and Heidi have fantastic stories - tales to amaze and entertain, brash and silly, teasing and enticing. It's better than any dinner theater I've ever been to. The constantly running banter between Wayne, Heidi and all of us was such great fun. They make you feel like a welcome guest in their home, a long-time friend, not a customer.

If you're ever in Vegas, you've got to go to Wayne's.

Wayne and Heidi, we'll see you in December! We want to hear you sing next time.

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Helen Levitt, Photographer, 1913-2009

Interesting piece.

I especially appreciate the observation that we tend to suppose a genius to creating art, a master status for an artist. There isn't, you know... neither genius or master. You just get out there and do it. If anything sets an artist apart from others it is a trained eye (ear) and an obsession. Like anything else, if it is important enough, you do it over and over and over - looking for ways to do it better. Some of us read every book and article on art like ours. Some of us make and make and make, honing our skills, practicing our praxis. Some of us study the HIStory of the art we do. Some of us strike up conversations with every other artist we encounter, picking their brains for ideas and inspiration. Some of us experiment and push boundaries - our own boundaries, our audience's boundaries, and the boundaries of the media we work in.

Some of us actually do get better. Some of us become masterful in skill and expert of eye. Not Masters, but masterly.

It's not as special as you might think.

Anyone can do it, with enough passion, enough work. Some do it better than others (and therefore are able to sell/show work - although much of what sells isn't particularly better than that which never graces a gallery wall or floor, just better marketed).

More thoughts later...for now you should watch this video.

Identity Again

A couple weeks ago we went to the Dakota Gathering here in Winona. It brought up the idea of identity and how we construct it again.

I am not trying to be critical, but how can american indians (as I was told they prefer to be called by a few of them) celebrate their heritage by selling plastic beaded trinkets? Perhaps it is a reverse of the way that europeans purchased their lands with shoddy bling centuries ago. If so, it is fitting. However I wish they got as much for the stuff as the whites did back then.

Returning to the idea of native theory and inspiration and the artist’s practice it seems to me that there is sort of a reverse colonization that often happens – a backdraft of appropriation of styles, artforms, and identity by the outsider – a disrespectful fascination with a culture that leads to exoticizing the “other,” trivializing and reducing individuals within those cultures to caricatures. We assume we are welcome within groups just because we like them, just because we want to be like them, wear clothes like them, talk like them or eat their food... How often is respect for the material or nonmaterial objects of a culture – manifested as a desire to have them – mistaken for a respect for the objects’ creators? Our engineered identities are made up from so many influences, so many “I love that!” feelings, that for the most part, it seems to me that authenticity may be a chimera.

How can we possibly know if what we are, what we do, is authentic?

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