| |
Wednesday, May 31st
Fairy Tales in a new Medium - Fairy Tale Posters...
 The concept is quite simple.
One language at a time.
One main fairy tale character.
The text of the fairy tale with illustrations.
That's it.
The Fairy Tale Poster lives side by side with the internet version
of the written fairy tale, which can be downloaded in a Word document and
form a tiny children's book.
Asbjorn Lonvig on 05.31.06 @ 03:59 AM EST [more..]
Monday, May 29th
The Never-Ending Mystery: Pricing Your Work
 How do you go about establishing fair prices for the works you create—meaning fair to you as well as to potential collectors? Easy. Get a dart board, tape a range of prices to it, toss six darts at the sucker, and see where they land. The middle figure wins.
You don’t like that? Then try this: go to a series of galleries, find works by established artists that are in some way similar to yours, then set prices that you’re comfortable with in comparison. If the established artist is in the range of, say, $15,000 per painting, this is likely not a realistic comparison. If they’re in the range of $700 to $4000 per painting, depending on size, that will likely be more suitable. Even then, if you're an emerging artist, it would not be practical for you to charge the same prices. The artist whose work you’re viewing has probably been at it a long time, paid heavily in her dues, and is now reaping her rewards. If you’re in the beginning stages of your career, it’s doubtful that you’re at her level yet.
Paul Dorrell on 05.29.06 @ 08:48 AM EST [more..]
Wednesday, May 24th
A New Foundation?
 In the weeks since my last post very little painting has happened and a great deal of running around took over the quiet routine I was starting to enjoy at the studio. Together, Rui, Fernando and I have been preparing things for a meeting with someone who might be interested in backing up the idea of the Arts Centre. If all goes well we’ll be creating a foundation [a Trust I believe is the more correct legal term in English] – a structure that would allow us to think Big as many of you suggested in your encouraging comments. Many thanks to all for pushing us this far in this direction!
Jose Freitas Cruz on 05.24.06 @ 08:32 AM EST [more..]
Friday, May 19th
Hunting for Wild Asparagus
 There’s a Roman quarry behind my house, used again through the eighteen hundreds, and abandoned just before the Second World War. In town drinking with the marble workers a few years ago, a guy named Gaucho tells me it’s full of wild asparagus.
“But be careful! he warns, “it’s also full of vipers”
And rock slides, cliffs, pricker bushes, steep slopes, and further up in the quarry, wild boars. Sem told me that wild boars actually eat vipers, and that in the springtime, you have to be careful walking under the olive trees, because these snakes are born live, and to protect herself from their bites, the mother has to drop them from a height as she gives birth. The olive grove keepers always seemed to have their necks covered by a thick scarf, no matter how hot it is, and wide straw hats on their heads. Sem had made the large travertine sculptures for Henry Moore.
Andrew Wielawski on 05.19.06 @ 08:30 AM EST [more..]
Wednesday, May 17th
ART AND OPPORTUNITITES
 Well my 70th birthday passed and I spent the day making a list of all the art projects I intend to do in the future. I won't post it here because it is way too long. Some are left over from earlier days and some are brand new.
I will say that one of the biggest projects I would like to do would be to go up in a helicopter and pour and scatter paint over at least 5.5 acres of the Baron Conservancy to make the world's largest painting. It could only be seen from the air and would be framed by 1000 acres of government land as pristine as time itself. How far afield would the helicopter wings blow the colored liquid? Could it even be done? Would it be necessary to walk the sands to fill in the blanks?
Hyacinthe Baron on 05.17.06 @ 09:51 AM EST [more..]
Monday, May 15th
Steven Burkart
 I’ve spoken of my friend Steven Burkart before. Steve was an older student in my color class in the mid 80’s. He stood out from the rest of the younger freshmen because he actually knew who the painters were that I spoke about in class. We became friends after the class was completed and I hired Steve to paint my house that summer. Steve showed up one day to work on the upper front of my house and mentioned that he’d found a great studio/loft near downtown Columbus that was just to cheap to be true. We drove over to see it and we rented it. Thus began one of the most enjoyable, prolific and satisfying periods of my life. Steve and I shared the space, about 1200 sq. feet with 15’ high ceilings, overlooking downtown Columbus for 8 years. Shortly after that Steve rented the house behind mine across the alley and we also became neighbors. He eventually rented some of the rooms out to other students so there were always a handful of kids over at my house for barbecues, in my driveway working on their cars or mine, and always we talked about art. As students graduated they moved away and eventually Steven began to hear the call to New York. He lives there now with his fiance, Dana, in another studio loft in an old warehouse (Steven has a knack for finding great space for less than most of us have to pay) and he works for the Museum of Modern Art as an art handler. Recently I had the pleasure of writing a piece about his work for a big show in Naples Florida called “ABSTRACTION:Recent works on Paper and Canvas by Steven Burkart” which ran from Dec 05 to January 06. Here is what I wrote.
Walter King on 05.15.06 @ 10:46 AM EST [more..]
Friday, May 12th
Rodin in His Studio (after the starvation years)
 Throughout the course of my book tour, whether speaking in New York, Seattle or Oxford, Mississippi, one common refrain ran true: I constantly met artists who felt guilty about attempting to market, and sell, their work. Where on earth does the guilt come from? Invariably they tell me that it was formed in college, partly from their fellow-students, but mostly from certain professors.
If this wasn't so tragic I'd find it amusing: tenured art professors advising their students on why they shouldn't sell their work. Of course those professors--who are in the minority among profs as a whole--have secure positions, so it doesn't matter if they sell or not. But the vast majority of artists will never gain a university position; they lead lives of risk that those few misguided profs know nothing about. However dealers like me encounter those artists on a regular basis--especially after they've reached their 30s or 40s, are broke, emotionally exhausted, and feeling like a failure on all fronts--even if their work is great. That is indeed tragic.
Paul Dorrell on 05.12.06 @ 10:08 AM EST [more..]
Wednesday, May 10th
Alberto Burri
 Alberto Burri has become one of Italy’s favourite artists in the last few months. Thanks to a well-thought-out exhibition of worldwide interest in Rome this winter, the somewhat forgotten Italian maestro has been put back in the spotlight, ten years after his death, alongside international contemporary masters such as Robert Rauschenberg and Yves Klein.
Alice Cavender on 05.10.06 @ 03:33 PM EST [more..]
Monday, May 8th
Authenticity…the Art of the Matter
News items about the art market in the past months have carried stories of some themes that never seem to go away. Fraud, chicanery, forgery, misrepresentation and other shenanigans have all made their way to mainstream news. Seems like the heirs of famous artists such as Picasso and Renoir disagree with the provenance of some reproductions from the masters.
Costco, the giant warehouse retailer, recently and suddenly halted all its fine art sales. The chain store had received considerable favorable press by selling Picasso crayon drawings. The pieces were priced around $140,000. But when a Picasso heir claimed they were not authentic, Costco immediately got out of the art business. Perhaps that’s a good thing for the art business…and you can take that statement anyway you want to decipher it.
Barney Davey on 05.08.06 @ 07:46 AM EST [more..]
Friday, May 5th
The Art of Recollection
 In 1980 I began work on an important narrative cycle Imagination and memory of the family, which was exhibited for the first time at the La Gradiva Gallery, in Rome, the following year.
The real innovation of this work, compared to my previous paintings, consisted in its requiring the aid of my memory, which I had never demanded with such persistence, to recapture all that we had left in our old house; to understand what it was right to leave there, and what we should have brought with us. In this reconstruction it seemed essential, above all else, to capture the sense of dignity that neither discomfort, nor suffering, nor pain, could destroy.
Alberto Sughi on 05.05.06 @ 08:51 AM EST [more..]
Wednesday, May 3rd
Digital Prints on Canvas???
I would like to ask your opinion.
Once an art work has been digitized you can print it.
Usually you print on paper.
Or cloth.
Or plastic.
Or....
 On this huge printer I can print in nearly any size.
On several surfaces.
One of them is canvas.
 One day I printed the motif "1 Cathedral Square" on canvas.
It seamed unreal, it seamed unfair, I felt as if I violated some basic rules.
Unreal because a canvas usually takes hours and hours to paint.
Unfair because all the troubles you have during the painting process had disappeared.
But it was amazing.
The quality of the print was that of a serigraph.
The paint layer was thick giving you the color depth and not least the color fastness of the serigraph.
And I felt this smell of quality serigraph colors drying......
The smell in the room was like when you print silk screen prints.
Another thing is that canvas is much more durable than paper.
Asbjorn Lonvig on 05.03.06 @ 03:59 AM EST [more..]
Monday, May 1st
Blank Space
In my living room, on a wall above a rubber plant that's currently alive, is
a blank space.
It measures about 30" wide by 40" long and is as white as white can be. To
the left of the space are nine different clocks in three rows of three.
They tick-tock around the clock and permeate the silence of the sunken room.
Farther to the left of the tick-tocking clocks is a huge geometric
abstract (50" by 60"), acrylic on canvas. It's a circular, brown, indigo,
olive and mustard-colored concoction. The colors are less than appetizing,
but the painting spoke to me, I had to have it and there it hangs. When the
light hits the mustard patches just right, they glow. An ethereal thing.
Michael Corbin on 05.01.06 @ 10:14 AM EST [more..]
| |
|
