The Month After I'm Compost

I'm not really feeling the "fluffy" today. Can't offer you any "go out there and love and paint and be happy with the result no matter what." Today I'm thinking of the reality of the profession, not the pleasure of the act.

I'm thinking of the grungy tagger scooped up in sudden success because some hawk-eyed dealer found a gritty, lean, raw talent they knew they could market well. Presto, some schmoe is no longer struggling, suddenly has cash and legions of fawning, flakey fans. The exposed nerves of his past can't stand the sudden shock of the cool air of fame on a cheese-grater raw psyche. And he melts down. A few months later he's dead. He kills the pain of lost autonomy and vacuous sycophancy by self immolating in a drugged flame-out. Like a crisping Saigon monk. But, oh, a perfect art marketing legend of found and lost genius. So brilliant. So tragic. So lucrative. But finally to the market so yesterday.

And "child artists," some just precocious nymphs with sly parents, some perhaps potentially brilliant - or might have been someday - whose development becomes fossilized, frozen in an amber of preternatural, endless childhood. Promoted in a bizarre spectacle of smarmy opportunists and studio parents marketing their work as "mature and masterful" at the age of eight or ten or twelve. Whatever depth of soul and spirit their precociousness may have matured into trapped forever in pubescent superficiality. Their true potential shrink-wrapped beneath their "look," their "style" and spit out as $25,000.00 copier machine prints (prices for original works available on request post approval).

Michaelangelo's adolescent knock off of "The Torment of St Anthony" was not a marvel because he painted it when he was twelve or so, "The Torment of St Anthony" is a marvel because of what he painted and sculpted later throughout his adult life. He was made truly brilliant by the grinding and polishing effect of torment, of politics and fear, guilt, remorse, passion, rich delight, hopeless love, months issolated and hidden from assasination in a single room basement chamber after a failed rebellion. "The most massive characters are seared with scars" said Gibran. The floods of his adulthood inundated the cleverness of his boyhood laying down deep, rich loam out of which grew expressions of universality and glory. His richness and density of spirit as a mature artist is what makes his boyishly clever knock-off so important, not the reverse.

When I was a young man I drank and drugged myself with everything there was to use. I was afraid I couldn't be the artist I needed myself to be, to live doing what I knew I loved. To risk being rejected by your deepest, truest love and passion is a terrifying thing to confront. For a long time I was more willing to live in oblivion and poison myself to death than risk the possibility I couldn't be the artist I wanted to be. I guess one day I grew the balls to realize that I'd rather find myself at the end of my life an honestly rejected suitor than to piss my life away in fear of even trying.

I'll never have children. I'll never spin the genetic thread that I can pretend will make some thing of me live past my death. After I'm gone nothing will be left of me but my paintings. I have no legacy but them. Like anyone with children I want them to be safe and go on after I'm dead. And, like children I fret and dread their future and I hope. But, like most artists - I can't know, can't know if both I and my work will be forgotten a month after I'm compost.

Somedays I think I am the luckiest man alive. Other days I'm drowning, afraid again. But, I'm an artist, for better or worse, I am an artist. Whatever gatekeeper I hid from drunk and wasted didn't turn me back. Maybe art, the lover I was afraid would reject me, will never embrace me with the same aching passion I have I have for her, but I haven't been sent away either.

All I can do is paint. All I have is being an artist.

HOT DAMN! A CHALLENGE!

There's virtually an absolute quid pro quo in making "good" paintings. If you paint from a place of confidence and easy trust in yourself your painting will speak with that voice. If you paint from a place of fear you will surely get what you fear most and want least. If you paint like you're afraid of looking foolish or like you don't know what you're doing you are actively affirming those thoughts throughout your painting sessions.

Your canvases might not yet speak with the directness and genius of a Braque, so compelling that even Picasso lifted from him; or the brio, clarity and depth of Sargent. But, neither will they be poorly dressed in pitiful marks that speak only of a painter's trepidation and fear of failure.

Conversely, if you paint with confidence and faith in your unique ability to say what only you can say your paintings will have, at the very least honesty and a strong voice. If you cannot yet paint - things, places, people, abstract ideas - in the way you wish - that's ok. You are not entitled to soar effortlessly the first time you spread your wings. Even an eagle is going to bust his tail-feathers the first few times it ventures to the edge of the nest. The choice you DO have control over is whether you find the learning process you must go through to be a delightful challenge or a curse. Treat your time practicing as if it were a scavenger hunt in the dark for jewels of new learning rather than a frustrating, self-defeating slog through a swamp of blind ignorance. Either way (and for as many years as you put brush to canvas!) you will often find yourself saying "I don't know what to do!" Then it's simply a matter of whether you say "Hot damn! A challenge!" or "What's wrong with me? I'm just no good." Either answer will display itself in your painting.

Pause for a moment now. Think of the harshness and shreddy appearance of deKooning's marks - he did that intentionally. Consider the shattered and scattered fragments of recognizable things and places in Hoffmann's Provincetown series - he consciously sought to make those floating, seemingly disjointed and simple statements. Consider the deceptively sparse thinness of a Gorky, the rough, tiled color stacking of Cezanne or the quaint flatness of Grandma Moses. One could make arguments against any of them from the position of an opposing era or school of work or simply personal preference. But those arguments could only stand on stylistic differences of opinion. No argument against those artists' clarity of intent or authority of statement can stand. If you paint with confidence and delight in your own desires it will show in your marks and strokes.

After a painting is finished you can debate, cogitate, grouse or grumble with yourself (and the many, many, MANY others who will freely, eagerly and aggressively critique your work!) about whether or not a particular painting is good or strong or properly composed, but those are debates that can last for centuries. Your time at the easel is limited. Let it be time spent with challenges eagerly met. Wrestle your demons with delight. Your paintings will be better for it.

An email arrived this morning with the breathless heading "These are actually paintings not photographs - INCREDIBLE!" Attached I saw that some Eastern European photographer had digitized her photos of pretty places and run them through what is deceptively called a "painting program software" and then had them giclee-printed onto canvas.

It's popular these days among a certain class of photographers. Often they have priced themselves so far into the stratosphere that they can justify no further increase in price in a saturated market so they try to re-brand their product with the cachet of the word "painting." Painting is often perceived, albiet wrongly, by the gross market to be more important than a mere photograph. That is the intellectual equivalent of claiming nitrogen far superior to beryllium. There is no correlative value relationship.

With apologies to real artists of photography everywhere, these things some are calling paintings are no more paintings than a kleenex with holes in it is a piece of Belgian lace. There is a reason the work of an Adams or Leibovitz has real and tangible, intrensic value and worth as art. A photographer here in Fort Worth, Luther Smith, makes images that are simultaneously uniquely American and universal. Some capture the complexity of urban living and the monolythic mass of a city while isolating and surrounding it in a context of open spaces, fields and rivers. The juxtaposition implies an active struggle, a battle for primacy between the creeping hulk of urban mass versus the relentless grinding down and swallowing up by nature of all things structured. His works are rich, varied and complex, dense and vibrant with thought, wit and intricate subtext. They need no justification by semantic association with anything other than what they are - important works of art in photography by a highly gifted and articulate artist.

Like any true master, any brilliant artist in any media, artist-photographers at their best transcend their medium and create works of intricate intellectual density and importance. Photography, like all art forms, is moved from its petty mechanics, composition, scale and execution into the realm of brilliance and sometimes genius because of an artist's mastery and vision. As surely as a weak crayon scribble or a thoughtless daub of paint is meaningless when compared to an authentic work of art by a Picasso, de Kooning or daVinci, a simple photo is an easy nothing compared to its potential in the hands of a master.

And so comes the sly marketeering of mediocrity. A modestly attractive photograph of portrait or place or thing can be magically made "high art" - and higher priced - by running it through a digital program. Email the file to the giclee printer and it will efficiently spit a dot matrix of oil-based pigments onto a strip of genuine canvas. Less than 20.00 dollars worth of effort and materials and you've begun to stock up an inventory of actual stretched canvases. How lovely. The process is virtually identical to any common color copier. The primary differences being that the basic color copier on your computer or at the store creates a dot matrix of polymer based pigments sprayed onto a piece of paper and the giclee "painting" printer sprays a dot matrix of color onto a piece of canvas.

They can certainly be pretty, some can even be beautiful. But they are not paintings. To call them paintings cheapens both painting and serious photographic art. It degrades the integrity of the artist. It misleads and abuses the trust of the uninformed buyer. Give it a clever name, "Matrix Art" or something snazzy like that for the market to embrace. But calling a digitized, computer manipulated photo a painting is simply a means to mislead, manipulate and milk a trusting market.

Incredible, indeed.