Toward Pretensionism 4

Now, something has to be said about my appreciation for the Lichtenstein piece. I was able to enjoy it because despite the origins of my artistic impulses, in my pursuit of craft I have developed an understanding of and appreciation for more formal values in the arts.

Composition, color, technique -- these all have meaning for me. Before I studied art, they influenced my reactions to particular works, but that influence was on a subconscious level. Initially, my interest was in image and narrative content.

And these elements are still central to my appreciation of the visual arts. But now I'm able to enjoy art on another level. Which brings me back to one of my difficulties with fine art -- it the problem with me, or is it with the piece? Is it possible to reach the point where you can in good conscience reject a work on any other basis than, "It didn't do much for me?"

Here's the rub. In works in any media where content is important, I feel a lot more comfortable passing that kind of judgment. 'Was the content effectively conveyed?' is a question I can usually answer with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

But in an arena where formal values are paramount? I can have an opinion -- but I can't pass judgment. And this leaves me feeling uncomfortable.

So. On to the artworks that brought me to the gallery.

The two exhibits of Asian photography caught my interest, involved me -- but now that a few days have gone by, the only pieces that have stayed with me were a number of works dealing with landscapes as abstract images. I can still call them to mind, still recall the emotional state they evoked. In particular there was a series of photographs of the sun on the ocean that evoked a distinctly nocturnal atmosphere. They were beautiful dreams, and I won't forget them.

But the Richard Avedon show... that was something different. As I said, I was in an emotionally distraught state, and I found many of his works to be shattering. There was a wall of small, fairly conventional portraits that did little for me, and many familiar images, such as Nureyev's foot, seemed clever but trivial after the works that most affected me.

These were the large-scale portraits. In photograph after photograph, one was left with the sense of direct contact with the subject of the portraits. Every physical detail of the people portrayed was mercilessly, almost surgically, laid bare. I was reminded of scientific illustration where the absolute specificity of the subject was the only goal of the image. This was heightened by the consistent use of spotless white backgrounds. Every wrinkle, every blemish, every line generated by habitual facial expressions and every bit of physical damage endured by the subjects was there to be seen, inspected, measured. Everything that could be seen was seen in microscopic detail, in black-and-white, with a clarity impossible in live observation.

These were images of the human animal, wounded, wary, vicious, and unconquered.

The subjects returned the gaze of the viewer -- or the photographer -- with no more mercy than had been shown to them. These were images of successful people, people who had achieved, and they seemed haunted. I have no way of knowing how much of this came from the subjects, how much from Avedon, how much from me, but my emotional response was that these were people who had been shattered by trauma and yet refused to die, survivors of a prison camp or a battlefield. I read the names, the professions -- and it grew on me that the horrific environment that had stripped these people of joy and left them hardened against its unrelenting power was the world of privilege of which I am fearful and jealous. Or, more simply, the world.

Then in a smaller area off of the main exhibit, I found two portraits that nearly brought me to tears in a public space.

Not to go into it too deeply, but some of the most important influences on my writing came out of the social group known as the Algonquin Round Table. When I used the word 'shattering' to describe the emotional state this exhibit induced, I was referring specifically to the portraits of Dorothy Parker and Oscar Levant.

Humor has always been my first line of defense. And both Parker and Levant are best known for their humorous remarks, their one-liners, and in both cases their humor is known for its cutting qualities. These portraits showed their subjects without that armor. The results were heartbreaking, horrifying, appalling.

Dorothy Parker has always struck me as a failed talent. She produced some excellent light verse, a few first-class short stories, and a large body of entertaining critical writing. None of these have struck me as a true fruition of her potential abilities. Like many of my other favorite writers (I use the term 'favorite' as contrasted with 'most respected.'), her story is one of great gifts compromised by lack of discipline, self-indulgence and self-pity, bad habits, and most distressingly, lack of vision.

Ms. Parker's portrait broke my heart. Her self-imposed isolation had left its mark on her features. The set of her mouth, her eyes -- a lifetime of unrelieved bitterness and the kind of misanthropy generated by disappointment in oneself had branded her. It was an unfair portrait. To deny her the consolation of wit was genuinely cruel. This was not a portrait of Dorothy Parker; it was a portrait of her shadow, of a woman stripped of her saving graces.

This cruelty was nothing next to that shown to Oscar Levant. Unlike the other portraits in the exhibit, this one was blurred by motion. Blown up to twice life-size, mouth open, lunging forward with his remaining teeth on display, I was -- and this is my cruelty -- irresistibly reminded of an elephant in agony, bellowing in pain and rage. The image was monstrous, almost inhuman. It was a dying thing, the human animal in defeat, the other side of the first photographs in the exhibit. To associate that image with the gentleman whose witty comments I'd been reading my whole life was a reminder of the inevitability of death and decay, that there is nothing we can ever do to distance ourselves from the traumatic corruption of the body.

After this, I'd had enough Avedon. I was not in a state to re-inspect the works I'd seen once. It was time to move on.

Toward Pretensionism 3

Or How I Learned To Start Worrying When I Stopped Hating Roy Lichtenstein

On Tuesday I had an experience that will have long-term effects on the way I feel about the fine arts. My digital photography class had a field trip to a showing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I was in, shall we say, an emotionally vulnerable state. I was feeling weak and helpless, and the idea of entering into a temple of privilege was not something that held a lot of appeal for me at that moment. I wandered around the city for half an hour before meeting the rest of the group, and came very close to just going home.

As someone who began to study art with the intention of learning how to illustrate comic books, I've always had conflicted feelings about the world of fine art and just about all of those feelings have been negative. I've felt threatened, overwhelmed, judged, intimidated, mistrustful, and scornful of much fine art, or rather, of the social and academic structures surrounding the actual works.

These feelings are best understood in a context of class. I am a member of the working class, what Tom Wolfe would refer to as a stone prole. While many participants in the fine arts have similar backgrounds, the context of the fine arts is relentlessly upper class.

I've already used the term 'temple of privilege.' What I mean by this is... well, think about what a museum or a high-end gallery looks like, what it feels like to be in that space. Vast, airy, quiet, well-lit, impeccably painted and maintained, guarded -- these spaces are temples. One has a sense of reverence generated and enforced by architecture. And this context is specifically the product of wealth. I don't feel comfortable in these spaces. I feel excluded, unwanted, and inadequate. I also feel angry, envious, and resentful.Smaller galleries and public art spaces attempt to mimic this effect with less and less effectiveness as the budget in question shrinks.

When thinking in terms of the allocation of public funds, it's difficult to imagine an aware member of the working classes choosing to support these spaces over education, public transportation, and all of the other obvious inadequately supported elements of our lives. Frankly, it would do more good for the arts to have larger numbers of smaller institutions similar to the art labs of dole-era Britain, where people would be given the opportunity to create rather than observe. One of the great harms mass culture has inflicted on the human species is the transformation of creativity from activity to product, and art spaces such as the MOMA reinforce the distinction between artist and audience.

Art for the working class consists of reproductions. This predates our current notions of fine and academic art by hundreds of years. The nobility and clergy looked at paintings; the peasants looked at woodcuts. This is still the common experience. My introduction to the arts came through comic books, magazines, and illustrated fiction, and these are my primary models. The fact that so much of my work is digital stems from this -- digital art is inherently reproduced art.

Art for commercial purposes, art for reproduction -- these are, like it or not, regarded as more trivial than what we call the fine arts. And much of the time, these works are trivial. The serious work done in these forms is typically first recognized outside of the culture that generates them -- look at the French appreciation of American comics, or European appreciation of Japanese brocade prints. Inside their home culture, those who produce these works are not given the respect afforded to fine artists. And when they are? The sign that they have arrived is that they have a show in a major gallery or museum. Art intended for reproduction is thought of as second-rate. And my intention to work in the arena which is most natural to me has always left me feeling as though I am a second-rater, regardless of how well, how seriously I work.

When my involvement in art led me to study the works of what are referred to as the great artists, I did not have the opportunity to study their works. I studied reproductions of their works. The words of my teachers and my few experiences of museums and galleries made it plain to me that there is very little in common between the experiences of seeing a work reproduced in miniature and seeing it in person. So much of the information in a hand-crafted work of art is eliminated or changed in the process of reproduction that it's difficult to see more than a rough resemblance between the two modes. While it is possible to learn much from a reproduction, the true emotional impact of a work derives from its physical presence.

What this visit to the MOMA really taught me was how much of that experience is dependent on the physical attributes of an art space as well as the work itself. How the grammar of the space informs the dialog between the work and its audience.

As someone with both janitorial and building experience, it's impossible for me to enter a museum without an awareness of the effort and finances involved in its construction and maintenance. The two thoughts this provoked in me were first, that the physical skills involved in keeping the marble, the glass, the chrome and brushed aluminum shining and free of fingerprints, the installation of the drywall, the mudding and taping and painting of the walls and ceilings -- these skills are actually very similar and in some cases identical to the physical skills involved in the execution of a work of art.

The second thought was that the mood, the tone inherent in a museum is found in two other types of public space -- banks and churches. In all these cases, it is a sense of reverence that is inculcated in the individual, and part of this reverence is unavoidably directed toward the privilege that allows these spaces to be constructed.

The feeling that one is undergoing a spiritual experience is not-very-subtly heightened in the MOMA by the use of black marble in the entrance. It's a large room with a high ceiling, but the reflective black walls and floor combine with the dim lighting to make a space that I found both oppressive and visually confusing. I felt a sense of relief when I climbed the stairs and emerged into a space defined by comfortable light and unobtrusively warm colors. An open, pleasant space. This application of discomfort followed by ease is a classic element of an initiation process, and it worked on me.

The first work I noticed was a huge canvas, maybe seven or eight feet tall and nearly twice as wide. It was executed in bright, heavily saturated colors and made use of line and large dots used to mimic the Benday dots of reproduction. I liked it. I stared at it for a while. I looked at the impeccable precision with which the paint had been applied to the canvas -- this showed at least as much skill as had been applied to polishing the marble downstairs. More, in fact. The composition was pleasing. The emotional tone of it was practically non-existent and that was fine. The bland confidence of the piece pleased me.

And when I finally went to look at the plaque and see who had done it, I was muttering (mentally -- I was in a bad mood, not a psychotic one) "Don't be Roy Lichtenstein, don't be Roy Lichtenstein."

It was Roy Lichtenstein.

I've always had a nemesis relationship with Lichtenstein's work. His appropriation of compositions from comic books seemed to be shallow, contemptuous, and artsy in the worst sense of the word. I've even done a large scale print that satirized those paintings, and in researching his oeuvre in preparation for that piece, I found myself actually growing angry at his treatment of commercial and popular culture.

But when I was face to face with one of his works, my reaction was one I had feared for years. I liked it. I respected it. And I no longer felt comfortable with my scorn.

Of course this disturbed me. One of my most important emotional defenses against the oppression I felt from the world of the fine arts has been the feeling, vague at first, that a lot of that stuff was fraudulent.

At first I felt as though that feeling was reflective of ignorance, of an inferior capacity to appreciate art. But when I read an article in Art World magazine about a company that repaired conceptual art, I felt confirmed in my belief.

There were two pieces in particular that left me feeling comfortable with dismissing them without seeing them. One was a pile of Sweet & Low packets that the artist had dumped from a carton onto the floor. A visitor to the gallery had kicked it. The Sweet & Low packets were gathered and meticulously rearranged to duplicate photographs that had been taken of the original installation. And there were doubts expressed about the validity of the piece post-repair. After all, they hadn't been able to duplicate its internal structure!

Hoo-boy.

The other piece was an eighty-pound wad of butter that a sculptor in the Netherlands had jammed into the corner of his studio, up at the ceiling. (Shall we discuss willful eccentricity? Not knowing the artist in question, we shall refrain.) A Spanish collector walks comes to visit, sees the butter wad, and says, "I must have it." Said wad is transferred to a room in Barcelona. Where -- believe it or not, art fans -- it melts.

In the course of reproducing this work, the company in question found that different countries produced butter that melted at different temperatures. In order to properly duplicate the original, they needed to use Dutch butter. And the room it was displayed in had to be refrigerated.

You can understand how the word fraud seemed applicable.

But the sight of the Lichtenstein drove home a thought that had been lurking in in the back of my mind throughout my involvement with the arts.

What if I'd seen the pile of Sweet & Low packets or the butter wad in their intended context? What if I'd liked them?

Was I going to have to abandon the concept of fraud in the fine arts?

(To Be Continued!)

Holy Smokes.

Huh.

It just struck me.

The combination of fiction and art that I'm currently executing is something more-or-less new.

It's not that illustrated fiction is new, or that art inspired by writing is new...

But the idea of creating art as a means to inspire fiction while making sure that the art is of a certain quality, well.

I can't think of anyone who's done this before. Christ, that can't be true. Someone else has done this.

Right?

So The Presentation Went Well, Aside From The Way I Dressed

The missus took this picture of me; I'm standing in a doorway in order to give a sense of scale. Since I never see myself in this kind of context it's a little unnerving to see just how big I really am. There are places in the world where people would look at me and go, "Hey, I bet we could get a canoe out of that son of a bitch."

And is it just me or does that outfit say 'Cop show?'

Well, I had my final presentation for the Art Marketing class Tuesday night and I think it went fairly well. Let me correct myself; it went damned well. The people on the panel were a working filmmaker, a graphic designer, and the chairman(person) of the art department at school.

Well, they said flat-out that my work is gallery quality. There was something that threw me a little bit, though. They also said that my art would have been a lot less interesting to them without the story behind it and the words associated with it. As I've mentioned many times before, these pieces were done as inspiration for the novel; in my packet the prints of my art also featured related paragraphs from my writing.

So it was suggested that should a gallery show come to pass it would behoove me to a) figure out some way of working the novel into the mix, say by posting plaques featuring the appropriate writing side-by-side with the prints, and b) make a video featuring either an interview with me or just me explaining the story behind the work. Today in class my instructor made a point of repeating this again. Okay, chief. Whatever you say.

The thing that gets me about that is that (that! that!) I learned how to make art because I wanted to do comics; now I'm contemplating a gallery show with fucking captions. You can't rise higher than your roots...

The other encouraging thing that came out is that I'm apparently very well-spoken. I was told in so many words that once your art is good enough to get you in the door it's your ability to present yourself that makes the real difference -- and made it plain that the way I come across in person is a real area of strength for me.

Go figure.

Afterward we went out for drinks and pizza. (I had a red ale that was a bit green and sour and a very dry and toasty porter that more than compensated.) It was quite nice; the class was small and we've gotten to be quite fond of one another. And one of the people in class works at a local bookstore. When I was being congratulated on the way I handled myself I mentioned that I'd been considering some kind of performance and that one of my writer's groups was talking about organizing a reading; he said that we should do it at his store. Details to come; I'll be talking to my writing buddies about this in half an hour or so.

Of course the grownup costume I wore was a whole other kettle of slimy disgusting fish that bite. I've never had a sports coat before; the last time I tried to wear a tie was in my twenties and I warped it when I tried to tie it. I haven't had a white long sleeved shirt since those days either. And my pants were polyester.

There were two issues that contributed to the disgraceful quality of my appointment. First, I've got a bit of an unusual build and it's difficult to find clothes that fit me well. I'm sort of menhir-shaped -- short legs, long torso, narrow shoulders, wide hips, long thick neck, long arms, and general behemothosity all make me long for the day when I can afford to have my clothes tailored.

I'm not criticizing my body here -- I'm very pleased to have the kind of physiognomy that lets me walk anywhere at night. I just don't have the kind of form that dresses well.

The other problem was that... well, when I got home from the thrift stores the missus started moaning, "Why did I let you shop for clothes all by yourself?" The answer is simple, my beloved -- you wanted to play video games.

Interestingly, by the end of the evening I'd started to feel comfortable in my new duds -- the poorly-fitting ugly formal wear made me feel threatening in a new way, one that seemed more in fitting with my current prospects. One of my school pals said, "You actually look kind of punk."

I can live with that. But maybe I need to get a shoulder holster to round out the new look. I'm just saying.

12: An Art Show Opening On Friday

The design on this postcard was done by Jayson Cheung, using art elements by everyone else involved in the show. Pretty nice, huh?

Well, I've got another art show coming up. This one's being organized by my Art Marketing and Portfolio Management class. The class is loaded with good artists -- check out the website for a taste of what's on display. Here's some more information, from the official press release.

12 AT THE RAW SPACE GALLERY

Attention, art enthusiasts! An eclectic group of artists based at Berkeley City College is pleased to present 12, a gallery show featuring a wide variety of both traditional and digital media, including video.

Participating artists include Ricardo Ayala, Sean Craven, Jayson Cheung, Kristin Doner, Bowie Johnson, Madeline Ibrahim, Yuko Leong, Danny Neece, Jon Stich, Nicole Thayer, Tonya Truso, and John Wong.

12 will run from April 7 to April 28 in the Raw Space Gallery on the third floor of Berkeley City College, 2050 Center Street.

The reception will be Friday, April 10, 5:00 to 7:00 PM.

So if you're in the Bay Area, show up already! The artists will be attending, there's going to be food -- and while the art looks nice on the website, you haven't seen anything until you've seen the works live.

I'll see you there.

Meditations On Current Directions In The Key Of Flu And February

I've posted this one a couple of times -- but I just really finished it this morning and I realized that by showing you the entire image I've failed to give you a clear idea of what this piece is like.

See, it's big -- I'm working at about four feet long and thirty inches high and there's a lot of texture and details. Click on this sample and see what it looks like at life-size. I hope to be able to print it tonight on a full sheet of etching paper.

Well, I was talking with the missus yesterday morning and I came to a few conclusions. I need to drop my Contemporary Color class, as much as I'm enjoying it. My back has kept me out of school for a while now and having three classes is just beyond my capacity.

And it feels as though it's time to get back to work on the novel. I've gotten a bit of feedback from some of my readers and they're confirming my feeling, which is that the novel is solid but it needs a bit of detail work and line editing. So rather than wait for everyone to get done reading it I'm jumping back in. If someone has a large-scale criticism that mandates big changes and I wind up having wasted some effort, so be it. I'll take that chance.

While I'm revising the first volume, I'm going to be working on outlining the second. As I said before, I'm hesitant about starting out with an outline -- but I've already written a draft and I know how it ends and I've got a good grip on the story arc. The outline will just be a means of making sure that I'm keeping all my balls in the air at the same time and not forgetting about any of the subplots.

I want to be able to start stalking Christopher Moore's agent as soon as possible. If you haven't heard of him, Moore writes novels that fall into a gray area similar to my own work -- his novels are typically humorous works with a bit of horror and action thrown into the mix. He's always got a few fantastic elements in play and a humanely moralistic viewpoint. In addition, there's a distinct West Coast vibe to most of his stuff, even if it's set elsewhere.

These qualities are not entirely alien to my work. And I've noticed that his novels stay in print -- he's still got his first novel out there working for him. Which is the way I want to handle my writing. So the first agent I'm going to submit to is gonna be his. If that don't work I'll have to find out who represents Neil Gaiman or Jonathan Carroll, and so on as I creep down the ladder of ambition.

I have to admit that there's something kind of humiliating about working so hard to write something really original and to then turn around and say, "Well, how does this fit into the market?" And then realize that yeah, they've probably got a slot for you.

I'm also having some doubts about pursuing fine art -- it seems as if it might be a real black hole for money and energy, especially given the current economic climate. Also, my essentially hostile relationship with much of art theory and criticism is something that will automatically keep me from participating in the higher echelons of the fine art world.

But these are just doubts. I'm going to keep on track until I've gotten a chance find out how galleries respond when I try and place the Bonelands show. If there's any interest in my work I can see my attitude changing fast. And let's face it -- I'm sick and it's fucking February. This is no time for me to be doing any kind of serious evaluation -- my attitude is just too shitty to make it worthwhile.

Of course giving up on the gallery and museum scene isn't the same thing as giving up on art. That's not going to happen -- I've tried a few times and I can't make it stick. The question is finding the proper venue for my work...

I don't want to give up working large scale, I want to be able to make the images I want to make -- like it or not, this makes fine arts sound like the way to go. If you discount the expense and probability of failure.

I actually have more hope for my paleontological work. I've decided that when I complete a series I'll try and market it as a children's book. We'll see how far that gets me.

We shall see.

The good news is that we've found the last story for the current issue of Swill. It's one that has been submitted to us multiple times -- it's so well-written that I wanted to take it but up until this version it just wasn't a story. Now it's looking good.

So now I need to do my line edits on that one, finish the line edits on my Swill story, start work on the finished Psittacosaurus reconstruction -- the deadline for that baby is coming up fast, for reasons I'll explain later -- go print tonight, even though it'll mean walking in the rain with the flu for half an hour each way, and so on and so forth...

I hate February.

Progress Report

So here's my first assignment for my contemporary color class. First time I've used acrylics in about twenty years. Fun, yeah. But I'm awful at them...

The assignment was to go from white to black with the intermediate steps being tints or shades of particular colors of paint, forming something resembling a gray scale. I worked from left to right and the further right you go the better they are, which is something. I guess.

It's fascinating to see what a lousy job my scanner does on the colors, though. I wonder if the current models are any better?

Seems like it's been a while since I posted on my progress in my art and writing. Let's do a little catch-up, shall we?

The novel. Well, the wait to hear back from my readers has been driving me fuckin' nuts. (Short trip but scenic, as the man said.) I was walking around complaining about it -- "They just aren't gonna read it. I'm gonna wait and wait and they'll feel guiltier and guiltier and this sucks. I should just start revising."

Well, last week two of the three readers let me know that they were well into the manuscript and so far they like it. It does, in fact, read like a novel. The word 'excellent' has been used to modify the word 'writing.' So I'm starting to relax a little.

Rob-the-Swill-Editor and my old writing pal Allison Landa, two of the founding members of the Monday night writing group, have decided to start a new group and I'll be sitting in at least for the start -- depending on class schedules and music and so on I may drop out later but I'll be in at least for the start of it. It'll be on Thursday nights for now.

The new group might be enough to break my will and make me start premature revision on the novel...

I'm back in school as well. My intention was to sign up for digital photography and art marketing courses; unfortunately, I screwed up and had them both scheduled for the same day, which my back would not support.

So I'm taking art marketing, contemporary color, and digital printmaking, all with the same teacher -- Matthew Silverberg. I cut a deal with him on digital printmaking. I'm taking it as a pass/fail class and I'm going to be really flakey about my attendance, both for time reasons and in order to spare my back.

Art marketing is really exciting. It's going to be interesting to see how I can deal with the, uh, eclectic nature of my ouvre. I'll probably have to figure out two or three different identities to market -- the neo-surrealist, the paleo-artist, and the botanical illustrator. And of course I'll probably be spinning out in other directions as well, but I'll just have to take things two or three at a time.

We've got all but about ten pages of the next Swill filled up and it's looking like another strong issue.

And then there's this, which is gonna have me doing more paleo art.

Man. Between that, my marketing class, and the upcoming art show I need to write two or three different biographies. Time to start thinking up some good lies.

Oh, and there'll be something a little lighter than the midwinter pissing and moaning I've been doing tomorrow -- while searching for and failing to find brushes and a gray scale I ran across a stack of sketches. Get ready for another trip to the Valley of Forgotten Projects. This time it's kid friendly, believe it or not.

The Horror! The Horror!

Well, after spending the early morning with the missus I decided to turn my attentions to preparing for the next print day. First I made a folder for the files I was going to bring in, then I started to drag and drop. And I was only able to find a couple of the Bonelands pieces that hadn't been colored and printed. I went through all the files; I had only the three above prints unfinished.

So I went mad. I worked until they were all done. Not an impossible task given how far along they already were but still. And now I'm almost done. All I have to do is print the last batch of these and the show's ready. Then I print the big canvas piece and I'm set.

Mostly.

Anyway, I'm kind of amazed that this is happening within a few days of the novel's finish. I'm starting to feel as though I've got my shit together for the first time in my life.

Let's see if it goes anywhere...

More plot tomorrow.

Return Of The Son Of Monster But-Is-It-Art

The next assignment for my Digital Printmaking class is to do a print of a number in the style of a known artist. I chose Chuck Close and based it on a piece I'd seen in one of my few trips to a museum. I spent all day on it yesterday and it kinda sucks -- but this was not an assignment that was gonna inspire me so it's good to have it done so I can do my own stuff. Funny, though -- there's a bit of synchronicity between my doing this and the examples Glendon used in his post.

If you've found interest in my But Is It Art posts you really should go take a look at this post on Glendon Mellow's The Flying Trilobite. I am not fooling.

A Good Night For A Goddamned Change

Well, I really had to force myself to take care of business last night. I've been sleeping even more poorly than usual the last few nights and yesterday was brutal by my standards -- I had class, a Digital Arts Club meeting, and then a reception for the release of the new Milvia Street magazine. It's depressing to think that even with the freedom to stand and sit at will, something that isn't even a full day for an office worker leaves me thinking that I need to refill my prescriptions. When itchy twitchy Vicodin starts seeming preferable to pain it's just not good.

But everything else was swell. There was an emergency call for large scale art for a nice gallery show out where the rich folks live -- I may or may not get in but I was all over that. And there was some swell stuff at the reading, good poetry and prose and people. My social skills did not fail me. I wasn't a jerk or a feeb or a creep.

And the Milvia Street reception gave me a very gratifying series of ego boosts. People I respect admiring my work? A genuinely good writer thanking me for how much I taught him? Getting an invitation to join an elite writer's group that has a totally different approach from my beloved Monday night mob? Getting hugs and attention from attractive women? (Not that the other hugs and attention weren't swell but there are hugs and there are hugs.) Getting gruff praise from the gray emminence behind the multimedia arts program? Seeing my work projected ten feet tall? Finding a number of readers for the novel?

My back feels like shit and my sciatica is giving me that lovely barbed-wire tickle and I am exhausted. But tell you what -- I'm feeling good right now and I'm gonna ride this mood as far as it'll go.

But Is It Art? Part Two: Ego, Identity, And The Big Question

Here's a thought for the future -- the next time I'm looking around for a project, why not do linoleum cuts, scan them in and enlarge them to show the paper texture and the way the ink goes down in high-contrast detail? Treat the image to bring out the physical qualities of linoleum cuts. Get into some good paper. And work small, blow up large to enhance the contrast. Possibly mount the linoleum cut in some relationship to the print -- perhaps on an expanded border.

(As an aside, I decided to see what happens with this approach so I'm scanning this in at high resolution to try experimenting. Right now the scanner's running and the motor grinds away and every so often I hear a series of taps. They are great -- the rhythm has a jazzy quality, a lot of weird syncopation but it all hits the rhythm. It sounds so organic -- there must be some component of randomness to whatever's making the noise. I should record it, put it on a loop.)

(This post was inspired by my initial on-line encounter with Glendon Mellow and by a conversation in my Digital Drawing class.)

Is it art? This is a question that gets asked a lot. I've asked it myself. It leads inevitably to the big question -- what is art? Here's my opinion.

Art is what you can get away with.

Or to put it another way, art is a word whose strictest definition is totally negotiable.

But if you want to know whether something is fine art or commercial art or illustration there is a clear definition -- and that is determined by the nature of your participation in the marketplace. If your art is a commodity used to enhance printed works you're an illustrator. If your art is used in advertising you're a commercial artist. If your work is displayed in galleries and museums and if your clientele consists of museums and private collectors you're a fine artist.

Like it or not artists seek validation and they have to eat.

Because of this art is almost always associated with the marketplace. Art that isn't -- truly private art created for its own sake -- is almost never technically proficient. This runs against the romantic image of the self-propelled artist whose inborn genius dominates his life.

Tough shit. If art never enters the marketplace then we, the audience, never see it. The idea of art for art's sake is true in that many of us are compelled to create and many choose not to market their work -- but there are very few Henry Dargers around whose creations enter the public mind through discovery following death.

If a living artist wants to make his work known -- especially if he wants to be able to devote himself to his work rather than give it the dregs of his time and energy -- he has to be willing to go to the market. And like it or not, all markets for art are two-cylinder engines, one cylinder being trends, the other novelty.

But the market shapes the artist. As I take my first steps toward being a working artist I'm already finding that out. My creative process is already being shaped to a degree by the needs of the marketplace.

One thing that I find fascinating about the relationship between fine arts (which are frequently not particularly fine -- the word's intent no longer suits its meaning) and commercial art is that the world of fine arts perceives itself to be degraded by proximity to commercial art while commercial art looks to fine art for inspiration. As a result the world of fine arts has to look for areas of novelty and outrage to try and keep ahead of their imitators in the commercial art world. Since commercial artists are frequently art students and fine artists are frequently teachers this little Red Queen's race gives any fine arts trend no more than a few years before its influence hits the commercial arts. Sometimes less.

Okay, I'm an outsider to the fine arts, someone who tries to understand the fine arts while being in many ways ignorant of and alienated from them. But to me this seems to be one of the two reasons why the fine arts keep running off the rails.

The other reason stems from a stance that is one of the root appeals of fine art -- the feeling that someone is in on something good that a lot of people don't know about and don't appreciate. I'm not going to denigrate the pleasure but it isn't healthy for the actual work.

(A related aside. There is also a close link between fine arts and the academic world. The academic world seems actively hostile to one who would be a practitioner of the arts. This is because in the classroom there is a strong bias for work that needs to be explained and against work that is self-contained and self-explanatory unless it can be placed in a cultural context -- which needs to be explained. There is also a strong desire to make the critic or observer of the arts a more important figure than the artist. As a result the aspects of art which call to the creator and demand devotion are frequently regarded as essentially meaningless if not actually degraded. These attitudes are to a lesser degree a component of the fine arts world as well.)

As an outsider I see many of the excesses of fine art to be examples of outrage tolerated by an establishment whose authority is partially based on a perceived ability to see significance where lesser minds are unimpressed. Let me give you two examples.

When I was going to school at Santa Rosa Community College there was a show of drawings at the campus gallery. It was gorgeous, with works ranging from exquisitely observed pen-and-ink works to a huge abstract in color. Figures, landscapes, shapes and patterns -- it really gave you a feeling for the sheer possibilities of working with marks on paper.

But one of my teachers was very, very much a maven of the fine arts. He took me to see two drawings. They were by the same artist and each consisted of a few scratchy, shaky lines drawn perpendicular to one another so as to form a very loose grid.

"Just look at the composition," he said. "These are the best works in the show. By far."

Now to my mind they failed the 'chimp could do it' test. I've got a decent eye for composition (admittedly, much of it came from this teacher) and I could not see anything attractive or interesting about these pieces at all. Period.

What if he was right? This really really bugged me -- if these actually were the best works in the show and they were totally lost on me what did that say about me as an artist? As a person? I asked Maurice Lapp, a really good painter and teacher who was a bit of a mentor to me in those days, what he thought.

"The man is an ass," Maury explained.

Still, there is that lingering doubt.

Years go by and I find myself reading a magazine on the arts. There was a fascinating article about a company whose business was restoring art. Not paintings, drawings, or conventional sculpture, though.

The Sweet & Low example I gave above was not a sarcastic mocking of fine art. It was one of the pieces this company had to reconstruct after someone gave the pile of Sweet & Low a good kick. (This I could understand.) Working from photos they were able to reconstruct the appearance of the pile -- but as I recall there was some doubt about the integrity of the reconstruction due to the inability to duplicate the hidden layers of the work.

Another example involved a sculpture from the Netherlands who took an eighty-pound wad of butter and jammed it in an upper corner of his studio. A Spanish collector visited him and saw the butter wad.

"I must have it," he said.

But when it was transported to his place in Spain guess what. The butter melted and he called in the art restorers. After much effort they found that due to the way cattle were fed in the Netherlands their butter melted at a higher temperature than that of Spanish cattle. In the end, the collector was forced to refrigerate the room with the reconstructed butter sculpture.

Maybe if I saw that butter sculpture I'd understand. I doubt that I would if I saw the Sweet & Low. Sometimes that there Emperor really is naked.

Trying to introduce myself to a world that sees significance in such things is terrifying. What could they possibly see in my work?

Won't know til I try.

One thing that's been really damaging a previously-invulnerable sense of disdain for the fine arts is the reaction in both myself and others to my prints. I went in assuming that when you printed something larger it was bigger and that was it.

It's not true. When you present something in the context of fine art it does change it -- and this is where I have to admit that fine art isn't just a marketplace. My prints have a power to them that my illustrations never had -- even when they are the same image. If they were displayed in a gallery setting that power would be further enhanced.

So I'm forced to consider the possibility that I know a lot less about this than I thought I did. That many artists whose work I've judged on the basis of reproductions may carry a weight I won't be able to recognize without seeing the actual pieces. Maybe Jackson Pollack paintings are stunning when seen live. Maybe Gauguin's colors just don't print well.

Look, I am a straight-up gutterboy. I am far more comfortable having a fight bounce off me in a ghetto liquor store than standing in front of a canvas in a gallery. But the human need to feel a sense of understanding has allowed me to be judgmental about things I really don't know about and I'm becoming very aware of this.

As a result I'm having to let go of a lot of firmly held judgments. This is one of the reasons I'm so intimidated by my Digital Drawing class. The teacher is strongly affiliated with the fine arts and right now my opinions on the subject are in flux...

All I can do is roll with it and try and grow a little.

If you look at the image above you'll notice smudges, stray lines, all kinds of minor but correctable flaws. I thought about fixing them in Photoshop but then it struck me that I hadn't fixed them in the original print. This isn't a rough print out of a run; this is the only print I did from this cut. I put the baren down, slowly peeled the thick soft fibrous paper free and turned it over and looked at it. I decided it was a complete failure and I put it away and never looked at it again.

The biggest obstacle I face as an artist is the difficulty I have in showing respect for myself or my work. Physically my pieces are creased, smudged, in some cases stepped on. This is part of a larger pattern. I try and work hard on my art and writing but I flat-out fail to do the kind of hardcore driven labor for myself that I have always given to employers and managers. Why should I have so much trouble thinking of myself as an artist when it's what I do?

Am I an artist? Is this art?

The only way I can answer this question is to take the work to the marketplace...

A Revelation In The Early Morning.

The digital drawing assignment mentioned below involved doing a set of color exercises. When I was done I liked most of them but three were just not strong enough for me to want to print them. Here they are. This one makes me think of either Shaggy from the Scooby Doo cartoons or artificial fruit flavoring.

So I was up in the middle of the night as usual and I was hit by an inspiration as I examined my most recent work for my digital drawing class. I liked it. I was thinking about printing it. I wanted to see these compositions at a large size -- and that's the benefit of Illustrator. I designed eight of these compositions on a letter-sized space and I can print them at any size I want.

But the idea of turning out a series of eight prints based on the work of a few days seemed a little odd to me. If I was going to try and market these as prints... Hmmm. My intuition told me that I just wasn't working hard enough to make these worthwhile art pieces.

The process of generating a print digitally, then printing it digitally seems too easy. What would make the print seem as though it were a real artifact, not something just rolling out of a machine as a standardized unit of production?

These, on the other hand, are unremittingly drab and were clearly done to get the monochrome composition out of the way fast. Next!

And then it dawned on me. Someone in class had printed onto mylar, then mounted the transparency on a piece of textured paper. I thought about Ruth Leaf's prints and how much attention she paid to the paper, to texture -- to the print not simply as image but also as object.

Perhaps this is one of the key differences between the artist and the illustrator. I am going to explore the idea that making the digital print is only one step in the production of an art piece. I want to find ways of using constructive techniques to create artworks using my images rather than simply printing them.

I'm going to start talking to the people in the print lab about printing on paper other than that provided in the lab. This will involve treating the paper with an emulsion that will accept the ink. For now I want to print on some nice Japanese print paper with plenty of foreign objects and irregularities, nose around and see what else is out there.

The assignment here was to depict an emotional state using color. Could anything be more obvious? More clumsy? More maudlin? The van-art gradients aren't helping.

But that's just the start of a possible avenue of exploration. I could decoupage my work onto plywood or chipboard. I could create multilayered shadow boxes. I want to learn about papermaking and bookbinding. I need to find out more, think more about what can be done, physically, with printed images.

Hmmmmmmmmmm.

Anomalocaris canadensis Part One: Sketch

And in this corner, the bastard of the Burgess, sixty centimeters of spineless savagery, Anomalocaris canadensis!

Here's the first entry in my next series of prints. The initial goal is to do one animal from each of the main geological periods with the finished prints showing the animals at roughly life-size. I'm starting with the Cambrian but then I'll be jumping to the Permian for a Lycaenops, a yard-long gorgonopsian.

While I do want to do a dinosaur or two, part of the reason for the project is to show off some animals that don't get the same kind of love the dinosaurs do. I might do a simiosaurian from the Triassic... Heck, maybe I should skip dinosaurs entirely. But I want to do a psitticosaurus and a small maniraptor and... Decisions, decisions.

That said, I know there have been a lot of reconstructions of Anomalocaris done over the years. But hey -- what else in the Cambrian is big enough to make a good art print? Huh? Huh?

So now it's time to take this pup into Illustrator and start rendering it. I just hope I'm able to do all the final color rendering in Illustrator but there's a good chance I'll need to do some finishing work in Photoshop as I did with the Pterygotus buffaloensis drawing...

Two More Views From The Bonelands

These were the two pieces I enlarged and colored this morning so as to have enough material to justify a trip to the print lab. This one is a bit of a challenge so far as balancing the richness of color needed with enough tonal variation to read properly. I had to print it twice -- it was too dark the first time.




For this one I used one of my favorite recent tricks -- use a banal but functional color combination, then use a hue and brightness adjustment level to manipulate the colors until they strike me.

Tomorrow? Cubes until you could plotz.

But Is It Art? Part One: Hey! Where's my culture?

The missus and I used to share models, me drawing and her sculpting. She had some friends who were dancers. Dancers make good models.

It's time for me to start coming to terms with art. Just as I haven't seen something until I've drawn it, I haven't thought about something until I've written on it -- so here goes. This is not an expository essay, though. It's an exploration. Expect me to wander.

Right off the bat let me say that this is an area where I have a lot of doubt and a lot of questions. I tend to express myself with a certain clarity that frequently comes off as a tone of authority -- nothing could be further from the truth. This is a subject that has me utterly at sea and I'm writing on it in order to get a grip on my thoughts.

The initial inspiration for blogging on the nature of art came from Glendon Mellow over at The Flying Trilobite. (See blogroll -- I really need to figure out how to put links inside of posts.) He and I had an exchange in a comment thread on Laelaps (ditto) where I made some snarky remarks on the fine arts and ever since then I've been trying to figure out what I really think about the subject. (I don't have any real background here so the best case scenario is that I'll reinvent the wheel. Oh well.)

Then yesterday I found myself making some statements in my Digital Drawing class that were reflective of some of this thought. They seemed to take the teacher by surprise -- they certainly startled me. (That's not unusual. Sometimes stuff just comes out of my mouth...)

The subject of appropriation in the arts came up and I suggested that one of the reasons it had become so common -- almost the dominant paradigm -- is that currently we are living in a state of cultural flux that's so intense as to render us almost accultural and that appropriation is on some level an attempt to experience a sense of heritage and cultural unity. (I doubt I expressed myself that clearly in class.)

By 'us' I mean those of us living in a post-industrial society dominated by mass communication. We do not share a common ancestry, we do not share a common religion or history or way of life.

Instead we are presented with a smorgasbord of culture and right now everything is being put through the blender. Right now I can go online and see work that's been done in the past few years that draws on cave paintings or Renaissance art or surrealism or, or, or...

Ever see the movie Moscow On The Hudson? It's not bad. And there's one scene in it that's going to stay with me for the rest of my life. The lead character (played by Robin Williams but don't let that scare you off -- he plays the character, not Robin Williams) is a Russian immigrant and in this scene he's in a grocery store. He walks into the aisle where they keep the coffee...

... and he sees one brand. And another. And another. There's decaf. There's flavored coffee. There's instant and drip and jars and cans and as he stares he mumbles, "Coffee, coffee, coffee," his voice rising until he's screaming, "Coffee! Coffee! Coffee!" as he collapses to the floor and is dragged away. Poor bastard is traumatized by the wealth of options.

That's where I see the artist at this place and time, in this accultural culture we live in. And while appropriation is one response another is to seek novelty, uniqueness, originality.

But there are limits to originality in the arts -- and it's entirely possible to pursue originality at the expense of everything else that makes art worthwhile. To entirely abandon tradition is frequently to abandon the ability to communicate effectively -- because most effective means of communication have already been discovered. There aren't that many new chord progressions or techniques of perspective or emotional states or narrative structures waiting to be discovered.

But to say that there is nothing new in the arts is a dead-end way of looking at things. While nothing is new, nothing is ever the same. Two people drawing the same object using the same techniques are going to produce two different drawings. Two people writing about the same event are going to produce two different writings.

So for me the question is, what are your cultural affiliations? What kind of heritage do you claim -- or more to the point, which heritage has claimed you? My taste is no more under my control than my sexuality is but in both cases I can choose how to express myself to a degree.

I wish I could remember who wrote it but I once ran across a statement to the effect that an artist spends his or her life trying to recreate the first images of beauty that came to them. I'd expand that past beauty but it's certainly true of me.

My first contact with beauty in this particular sense had three sources: the natural world, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit for both the story and the illustrations, and the original King Kong. These things took me away from a rather brutal urban life and they gave me a sense of the numinous, that there was something outside my daily existance that was full of wonder.

And for most of my childhood I sought that wonder to the exclusion of all else. I tried to escape my life by spending time in worlds created by others or by creating worlds myself -- and that is the root of my creative impulse.

As I grew older I came to realize that all the magic and wonder of those imaginary worlds was real -- that a dream is a real dream and a fantasy is a real fantasy and that as such they are concrete additions to reality. More than that, the world I lived in was a much less limited place then I'd taken it to be and that the sense of meaning and significance I found in fantasy was a reflection of the significance of the here and now. Everything I found in art was present in life -- but not in a way that made art superfluous. Rather, art was something that could help me live life well by allowing me to view the world more clearly and more expansively.

And part of this grounding effect was to make me feel as though I did have a culture. I am a product of the last half of the twentieth century, I am a product of America, and I feel thoroughly alienated by the bulk of our culture. I hate cars, I hate sports, I hate phones, I hate fashion, etc, etc, etc. But through the arts I have come to feel as though I do have a people. That I am part of something as old as mankind or older, that I have brothers and sisters scattered throughout history. That what I'm doing now, regardless of its worth or quality, contributes to the larger pattern.

I wonder whether or not any art created during these times will live the way the art of the past has lived. There is so much art being made now and it seems so ephemeral and so closely tied in to a world and a way of life that are more temporary than anything humanity has known before.

And still part of me works with the vain hope that what I do will be remembered, that somewhere down the line some kid will see or read something of mine and have that sense of community, that feeling of not being alone.

I want to be part of my culture.