“Table-top Next To Cabinet”, Oil on Linen, 15″ X 20″

These paintings focus on how space is organized and how that might be an extension of interior identity. I intended for them to be an exploration and analysis of places I inhabit to see if the composition of things within them might reveal something.  To do this I envisioned images that might be similar to police crime scene photographs. The “crime” in this instance involved me undergoing an emergency appendectomy, which was the first serious medical issue in my life.  Doctors say they never really know what causes an appendicitis.  Given no proximate cause for my illness, I took up my camera and tried to capture any evidence in my house that would cause my appendix to fail.  I wasn’t literally looking for the cause of my appendicitis in the organization of the furniture in my house, but I did have the idea for a painting project that might display a philosophy of feng shui gone horribly wrong.

“Foyer (For My Wake)”, Oil on Linen, 15″ X 20″

I felt the framing of the images was very important.  I wanted images that have a decidedly non-artistic composition. I didn’t want perfectly composed images according to aesthetic sensibilities or principles of design. I wanted the images to appear as if they were taken for a more utilitarian purpose, rather than for art’s sake, in the sense that they might be documenting evidence in my home that might be indicative of a larger manner of living. After capturing the shots (some of which I have not painted yet) I then further abstracted the images by converting them to sepia, sienna and ochre color scales in an attempt to give the images a quality of representing an older photograph.

“Bureau (San Antonio Maria Claret)”, Oil on Linen, 15″ X 20″

These weren’t intended to be photo-realist works and they’re not copies of photographs. Nor are they “hyper-realist” works in the conventional sense. During the process of creating these works, there was a stage that I left the photograph behind. At that point I worked only with the painting and made decisions based on what the paintings required independent of the photo or the actual setting being depicted. I think they’re most similar to William Bailey paintings, in the sense that they minimize the trail of labor that took place during the creation of the paintings.  But unlike Bailey’s paintings that evoke ideas of Platonic order and harmony, these interior paintings hint at tension and dis-ease.  Aside from the subject matter of the paintings, I hoped to create in these paintings what I call “allusive realism”.  This term for me means that the paintings be expressive of human emotion and thought, despite the concerted effort to represent forms in the paintings with a significant level of realistic detail.

“Collection (It’s Over)”, Oil on Linen, 15″ X 20″

Annie Lapin: “Bi-cyclic and Tri-cyclic Romantics”, 2009

New American Paintings announced last week that Annie Lapin was the winner of the inaugural New American Painting Reader’s Choice Poll.  I went to the gallery website that has a few of her works on-line, and found her work quite compelling.  The intersection of abstraction and realism is an exciting focus in painting currently.  I’m guessing a payday for her work is coming soon, with an exhibition at Honor Frasier in May of this year.

Annie Lapin: “See-Through Age Sentient Conglomerate”, 2010

Annie Lapin: “Private Outdoor Facial Coronation”, 2009

“Juan Ramón Moreno, S.J.”, Oil on Canvas, 2010

I’m painting portraits of the six El Salvadoran Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter who were murdered in November, 1989.  I’m enjoying working on the portraits, but the research involving their deaths is very disturbing.  While their murders were shocking news around the world at that time, the event barely registered a blip in news coverage in the United States.  Their deaths, along with thousands of other civilians in Central America, were the effects of U.S. foreign policy during the 1980′s and early 90′s.  During the same week the Jesuit murders were committed,  U.S. funded and trained military forces killed at least 28 other civilians in similar fashion.  Among them were the head of the water works union, the leader of the organization of university women, nine members of an Indian farming cooperative, and ten university students.  In the 1990′s the “School of the Americas” at Fort Benning in Georgia proudly proclaimed that they had “defeated Liberation Theology” in Latin America.

Training, funding and instructing military forces in Central America during the 1980′s was oriented towards supporting U.S. business interests.  The American consumer, American businesses and government sponsored terror are linked together in a market system.  However, massive amounts of state-run propaganda and business advertising are aimed at marginalizing the truth about government-business enterprises around the world, which benefit the American consumer.  While it is a very callous thing to say, the murder of the Jesuits, along with the deaths of thousands of other innocent people in Central America have ultimately benefited America.   This is the dark side of the American identity, and what I want to represent in these paintings. 

“Ignacio Ellacuria, S.J.”, Oil on Canvas, 2009

The El Salvadoran Jesuits taught at the University of Central America, and provided services for the poor, and for indigenous farmers and labor organizations during the country’s civil war in the 1980′s.  Democratic organizations that grew in number among the population during the 1970′s sought greater representation and a more liberal distribution of resources and opportunity in their own country.  The country’s oligarchy system of government, having been largely supported by the U.S. government since the country’s independence from Spain, maintained a vast inequality between the elite governing minority and the majority population.  Unfair land ownership led the country’s population to increasingly call for reforms through protests and other social remedies, which was met with violence and murder from the El Salvadoran government.  Funding, arms, and military training from the U.S. to El Salvador increased exponentially during the 80′s to fight back the social democratic movements, which led to a gruesome civil war in the country.  The Jesuits were specifically targeted for murder for their support of the social groups that called for a more democratic society.  

“Segundo Montes Mozo, S.J.”, Oil on Canvas, 2009

William Powhida, “A Guide to the Market Oligopoly System”, 2010

Reuters’ Felix Salmon has an interesting article on William Powhida’s “A Guide to the Market Oligopoly System”.  One of the most interesting points of the article regards the value of artworks:

“Most people who buy art will, to a first approximation, ‘lose’ all their money: like most other consumer products, it won’t or can’t be resold after being bought. Many of those people kid themselves that their work is ‘worth’ roughly what it would cost them to replace it; they’re only disillusioned when they actually try to sell the thing and find no willing buyers. And even the clear-eyed often think of their art as a lottery ticket: it might be worthless today, but maybe, in the future, if the artist becomes hugely successful, it could be worth a fortune.”

It’s surprising to me that the value of art purchased from artists in the “Submerged Artists (Yearning Masses)”, the “Emerging Artists (Commercial Galleries)” and even the “Primary Market (Blue Chip Galleries)” tiers effectively drop to zero once it is purchased, yet most people mistakenly believe that the art product they purchase retains some financial value even after purchase.  I was taught that art always appreciates in value, and I think most people may believe this too.  However it seems sensible that re-sale of the product becomes mostly impossible unless the artist progresses up the pyramid.  This blog post will surely be overly simplistic, so it’s highly open to discussion.

Let’s exclude buyers who purchase art solely for the purpose of decorating their home, those deriving aesthetic pleasure from viewing it, and those who never intend to re-sell the product in the market.  This subject more aptly concerns active participants investing in art as a commodity.  For the serious investor, works purchased from artists in the top two tiers offer only marginal returns (0.55%).  Thus, the only real hope for a return on their investment is to buy works from the bottom three tiers of the pyramid, which are re-sold once the artist ascends to the upper tiers of the pyramid.  Since the risk is so high concerning purchases from the first three tiers, the buyer is really buying an interest in the artist’s career.  The buyer has a vested interest in the artist’s well-being and future success, and thus buying more than one piece of artwork from an artist, and encouraging others to purchase an artist’s work is acting in an investor’s own self-interest.  You often hear investors say that collecting is almost like an addiction, and that they can’t just buy one piece of work.

Future returns on the re-sale of art for the most part go to the investor and not the artist.  The only opportunity for artists to make significant wages is if they sell their products within the higher tiers of the pyramid.  While the bottom tiers of the pyramid are buyer’s markets, the upper tiers favor sellers.  However, the number of buyers diminish in the upper tiers, but the risk and rewards diminish for buyers of high end art commodities.  It’s important to note that Powhida’s illustration is a guide to an oligopoly market system, meaning a system of sellers, and as such, this is a guide for artists to make their way in selling their work.

The value of an artwork is the most quixotic aspect to the commodification of art.  Similar to the valuation of property, the value of artwork is dependent on what a willing buyer-willing seller will agree to.  In the real estate market, there are three primary methodologies to appraising a property’s value: the cost approach, the market approach (comparable sales) and the income approach.  These approaches inform willing buyers and sellers.  The appraisal of artworks also have standardized methodologies for valuing artistic property, however those methodologies become less determinative of value the further up the pyramid an artist travels.  Wild speculation about a piece’s cultural value is what informs buyers and sellers of artworks at the top of the pyramid.  The physical condition, age, originality and other physical aspects of the work will still influence value to a certain degree, but  aspects such as the cost to make the artwork, or what kind of income the commodity might generate are not factored into the value of art being sold in the auction houses.

An artwork’s value is appraised differently depending on where an artist is within the pyramid.  Knowing how the different works are valued in the different tiers is not so well known.  For the “Yearning Masses”, artworks are primarily valued depending on the cost of materials, the time to create the works, the condition of the object, the size, and various other physical properties, but only to a certain point.  As Powhida’s illustration shows, there is far greater supply than demand for artworks in the “Yearning Masses”.  Additionally, the cost of production, specifically the amount of labor that went into the creation of the work, most often far exceeds sale prices of artworks.  With little or no hope of future return for most of these works, and considering an excess of supply, the market cannot bear the true costs of production of artworks.  Comparable sales of other artwork is a greater indicator of value for these works, however the set of data (comparable sales) informing the value is mostly opaque and highly unreliable.  Unlike real estate sales that are by law public knowledge and can be easily obtained, sales of artworks are not public knowledge, as commercial galleries actively work to maintain that the information on sales of artwork remains private.  in the long run I think this is more of a detriment than a benefit to sellers, buyers and artists.

Artists that want to scuttle up the next tier in the pyramid must begin to determine what context they want their artwork to exist in.  Artists who seek to create artworks that illustrate their individual life or the whims of their artistic story will rarely go beyond the Commercial Galleries (Primary Market First Tier).  An artwork’s content must begin to orient itself into a branch of art history for the artist to progress to the Second Tier of the Primary Market.  As Powhida’s diagram states, an artwork’s value “is determined by [its] symbolic content, rather than [its] physical characteristics”, but “this might not be true.”  There are many very talented artists exhibiting and selling in commercial galleries across the country.  However artworks that seek to place themselves within the stream of art history are the only ones with the possibility for an increase in value later on.

Wesley Freese, “Drag No. 4″, Oil on digital print, 8″ X 11″, 2009

As art history, particularly painting, is the signifier of a cultural history of ideas, what is New is what moves history forward.  But newness alone does not progress an artist’s work from Emerging status to Established status.  Artwork must be relatively new and intellectually compelling relative to artworks of the past.  The accomplishment of placing the artwork within the stream of art history is not orchestrated by the artist but by art critics, intellectuals, publishers, advertisers and historians.  These are the outfits that pull and push the market levers that begin the process of commodifying artworks.

An artist’s escalation to “Established Artist” status is also dependent on how well the work’s subject matter adheres to the increasingly focussed brand that is taking shape.  The context of the work becomes crystalized at this point.  While an artist can partly define and tweak the context of the work being created during this phase, there is a short window in which the work will have optimal value.  The works created after this tier will mostly digress from the perceived brand.  Most artists abhor repeating themselves and the necessity of perceived progression in their art literally compels them to separate themselves from the success they previously achieved.  Rarely does an artist strike gold twice.

Only artists who stick to works that fit into what are now well defined specifications of their brand, and who also develop a tightly organized means of production to churn out like-minded works will reach the Museum tier.  It may be highly profitable for the artist, but market forces are already at work as investors become increasingly wary of the value of individual works of art because of the increasing number of similar works which dilute the value of the works previously purchased.

The quality of the work becomes mostly irrelevant when dealing with “Art Stars”.  These artists are enshrined in the history of art and have been placed in a culture’s collective consciousness.  The re-sale of such works may still only bring negligible profit to previous buyers, but possession of such works pay indirect dividends more in terms of power in society.  Usually the artist has deceased by the time he or she reaches “Art Star” status, but increasingly artists are living out a good portion of their lives as “Art Stars”.  This is an effect of the art market.  The quality of their work has long since depleted but an artist’s brand name product has achieved a mostly stabilized common understanding of value among investors.

Willem de Kooning, “Untitled XII”, 1985

The common denominator in an artist’s travels on the pyramid highway is sales of artwork.  Sales codify both value of the work and an artist’s standing in culture.  Artists who don’t sell go nowhere.

Trudy Benson, “Inside Out”, 2010

Trudy Benson, “Radiation Spill”, 2010

Keltie Ferris, “Rain Dogs Unplugged”, 2010

Keltie Ferris, “Red, Yellow & Blueprint”, 2010

Stephane Calais, “Les canons anciens”, 2009

Stephane Calais, “La stratégie du jour”, 2009

Lesley Vance, “Untitled (37), 2010

Lesley Vance, “Untitled (39)”, 2010

Kristine Moran, “Shady Lady”, 2010

Kristine Moran, “Sidestep”, 2010

Another Bouncing Ball blogged on the story of Seattle artist Molly Norris who drew a cartoon depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad and posted it on Facebook for all to see.  This was an act of fidelity with the creators of South Park after Comedy Central cancelled an episode that featured Muhammad as a teddy bear.  According to the New York Times, Ms. Norris has received death threats for depicting the prophet of Islam in a debasing manner.  Within Regina’s blog post is reference to Eric Lurio’s bombastic Huffington Post article on the correctness of insulting Muslims in the name of art, and Ms. Norris’s “cowardly” apology for her cartoon. 

Ms. Norris apparently objects to the Muslim admonition not to depict images of Muhammad.  The prohibition is a well established tenet of Islam, not the unreasonable demands of terrorists or “extremists” as many would like to construe.  Being a “free” person living in a culturally permissive society, I question exactly how the Muslim faith constricts her artistic practice?    

Why does an artist need to ridicule the Muslim faith?  Is an artist’s “artistic freedom” really on the line when the Muslim faith advises not to depict images of Muhammad?  Ms. Norris not only “depicts” Muhammad, but also goes out of her way to trivialize and demean a religious icon.   The underlying message is what?  That the Muslim religion is bunk?  That all religion is bunk?  ABB blogs that Norris “gently” needles the Muslim faith.  I’m not so sure gentleness makes such antagonism acceptable.    

Artists claim a right, perhaps even an obligation in their work to push up against perceived cultural limitations.  But is this dictum absolute?  I don’t think so.  I object to this perceived right of an artist to rattle the cages in the name of art, especially by an artist in this instance who is not Muslim.  Ms. Norris’s artistic rights are not constrained by the Muslim prohibition.  She suffers nothing from the prohibition, except perhaps an inability to watch a South Park episode featuring Muhammad as a teddy bear.   In response she chose to antagonistically say “yes I can” do what another says should not be done.  What victory did she win through her act?   

Mocking another people’s a priori reason for existence is not exercising artistic freedom, it’s antagonism without merit, much like a child who disobeys its parents admonition “no” when the child discovers it can.   The central question is: why does Norris feel compelled to depict Muhammad?  Is she a Muslim scholar?  Does she somehow work in the field of the Muslim religion?  No, she has no real relationship to the Muslim faith or its people, as far as I can tell.  She hand-picked a small morsel from the entirety of the faith with the only intent to display her piquant act in the face of some who ask for respect… and others who demand it through violent deterrence.  It goes without saying that threatening another’s life for graphically mocking another people’s religious icon is excessive in the extreme, and I don’t condone any kind of punishment for such artistic acts.  But occasionly when you’re looking for trouble, it finds you. 

In seeking to mock a form of authority in Norris’s work, she now benefits from another hostile authority, the American government, for her own protection.   I agree with Ms. Norris’s decision to apologize after threats of retaliation from Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlakih.  That was the correct thing to do, but apparently she’s rethought her apology and once again wants to stir up the hornet’s nest with the aid of the Cartoonist Network and clamors about artistic freedom.

For the cartoonists, the notion of artistic freedom trumps the prohibition of depicting an image of Muhammad.  My rule trumps your rule, over and over again.   Amid this foolish yet deadly serious situation, the one thing I have not heard uttered is the idea of civility.  The puffed up claims of artistic freedom in this instance are only meant to justify an antagonism of another who has done no harm to the artist.  Death threats are issued over something so trivial as a cartoon.  One transgression begets another, as cartoonists and Muslim extremists mirror each other in a stupid, violent dance.  Tell me again who the victor is?

“For her exhibition entitled “Phantom Spaces,” San Francisco-based painter Patti Oleon depicts period rooms and lobby spaces that are illuminated by both natural and artificial light.  Oleon’s process has been to make photographs of the rooms, taking advantage of the camera’s ability to distort and flatten space.  Evident too are the particular qualities of light captured by now obsolete Kodachrome film.  The glow from interior lamps emanates a warmth that is contrasted with cool natural light, flowing from the windows.  She indulges in these juxtapositions of opposing luminosities, translating them into a bracing visual encounter.”

I previously posted some personal reflections on Patti’s work here.  Over the summer I posed some questions to Patti about her work and received some thoughtful responses from her.  Below is an excerpt of some of the correspondence.

I’ve read the artist statement from your website.  Is the experience you describe in your statement an actual experience, or an allegorical description of something else?

It is both allegorical and real.  These series of rooms exist in different museums; the Metropolitan in New York, for example is one such place and is where much of my work has been derived from.  The sensation of displacement in time and location is what I experience and what I would like the viewer to experience as well.

The newest paintings I’m working on are pared down to a more critical essence – the light and sense of isolation – expansion of the imagery.  I want the paintings to be read as an almost iconic sense of space and light, almost as if, even though it is still “real” imagery, it has been converted into something intangible.  I want to get to the essence of what a Rothko experience is like for me, a floating, soaring, almost religious experience.  I want this abstraction to have transformed from the “real”.

The paintings exhibit a high sense of order, but at the same time your artist statement talks about experiencing a sense of disorientation, which at first would seem paradoxical.  But I don’t think you mean to describe a sense of being drunk or dizzy, but rather of experiencing a shift of perception.  In anthropological terms, when civilizations would settle, they first would build temples devoted to God that would be highly ordered wherein the citizens could go to escape the harshness of the elements in nature.  In that closed, human ordered environment people become calmed and their minds are quieted which is a kind of disorientation from their normal day to day reality.  My question is, what is that disorientation that you talk about in your statement?

By disorientation I mean that one is presented with a scene that at first glance, seems utterly real: a real place, real light, believable; one could walk into the room etc.  It is comfortable, soothing to know things are solid, that everyone experiences the same.  But there is a sense of something subtly disturbing, either the light seems to be not quite right (perhaps it is too much the same on each side – as the light is identical when the image is mirrored), etc. and this could not exist in reality.  So I’m hoping that one is initially fooled (and comforted) by the idea of what we all accept as a real, plausible environment that we can count on, but which is, in fact, a manipulated, deceptive environment.  I want the sense of unquiet, where all appears normal but something is slightly askew.  - that causes one to question the possibilities of what is perceived as reality.  To feel more, to think more, to experience more from the most mundane experiences.  The more realistically it is painted (presented), the more this disorientation could take place.

Do you see flaws in your meticulously crafted paintings?  Do you look back and say, I would re-work this section of a painting?

Naturally I see flaws in my paintings.  Because I work from the photographs which are already finished pieces of art that I have made, my particular creation and vision – I want the paintings to be exactly like the photographs – slick, almost machine made as if no hand was involved in the making.  But they are far more painterly in person and then melt away into abstracted paint as light on closer inspection.  I have to hone in again and again on adjusting the light to make the image come alive for me and to have the sense of transformation that enchanted me with the image in the beginning.  The painting has to work as a painting in and of itself, and it is sometimes very difficult to attain that; the process is very painstaking.  I will rework any section of a painting that I believe is not working to the level I need it to get the totality of the illusion I am after.  Once it is varnished, then it it’s done, for better or for worse.

How do you transfer the imagery in your photographs to the canvas (i.e. a grid system, a projector, or some other device or process)?

I take the photograph myself.  I use Kodachrome film, which is an archaic, very warm daylight film in artificial and daylight situations that distorts the actual environment.  I then import the slides into Photoshop and manipulate the images (I change the transparency, color, focus, layer, mirror, etc).  I then I have the image blown up at a Kinko’s in black and white to the scale of the panel, and then transfer the image with graphite paper.  I paint from this conglomerate amalgam of an image.

I generally prepare a hardboard panel with between three to five layers of acrylic gesso, sanding each layer in-between with very fine sandpaper to get an absolutely smooth surface. I don’t want any brushstrokes to be visible.  Then I sketch out the image with graphite pencils.  After this, I do a quick full oil color rendering as an underpainting.  I let this dry, and sand it.  I then do another, but more in depth painting of the entire panel from the photograph I had created.  I then let this dry and sand again, and then do this process again a third time.  So there are actually three complete paintings of the image.  After letting it sit for some time, I then really hone all the subtleties and nuances of the light and detail that make the image live for me, to have it embody the mystery of the original image I was working from.  The painting has to work on its own, obviously separate from the photograph it was conceived from.

What types of paints do you use?  What is the varnish you use when the painting is finished?

I use Winsor Newton, Old Holland, Le Franc and Bourgeois, and Holbein oils; I use a spray (Kamar) acrylic varnish when the paintings are completely dry.

Patti’s paintings will be on exhibit from September 4 through October 10, 2009. She’ll also concurrently be in a group exhibition at Carl Berg Projects at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles.  An exciting start to the exhibition season in Santa Monica and Los Angeles.

View Master is an exhibit of three artists, LORI NIX, GRACE WESTON, and JONAH SAMSON.  The common denominator for these artists is in their masterful fabrication of intricate 3-dimensional sets, which are then photographed and later disassembled.  The resulting works examine highly imaginative worlds, which illustrate humor, decay, and sexuality.

LORI NIX builds tabletop dioramas in a spare bedroom of her Brooklyn apartment. In her newest body of work, The City, Lori’s sets have become incredibly detailed as she creates scenes from an imagined urban environment that have succumbed to the nature of decay. Taking months to assemble, these dioramas show evidence of human abandonment, and take on a life of their own as nature slowly reclaims them.  Church,  Laundromat, and Botanical Garden are the latest additions to the ongoing series. 

Lori Nix, "Laundromat", 2009

Lori Nix currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, but spent most of her life in the rural Midwest.  Taking cues from the disaster movies of the 1970s and her memories of growing up in disaster-prone rural Kansas, Lori has blurred the line between truth and illusion with ’in-house’ set ups and dioramas.  In her first series, Accidental Kansas, she recreated floods, fatalities, tornadoes, and insect infestations.  In the series Lost and Some Other Place, neighborhood sidewalks, city parks, and forays into the wilderness are reconstructed, playing out dark little dramas before the camera. 

Lori’s work has been exhibited nationally. Recent museum exhibitions include Picturing Eden, a traveling exhibition from the George Eastman House in New York, and Fresh: Contemporary Takes on Nature and Allegory at the International Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA. Lori’s honors include a 2004 Individual Artist Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a 2001 Light Work Artist-in-Residence in Syracuse New York. Work by Lori Nix is included in the collections of the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle WA; Microsoft Corporation; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; the Spencer Museum of Art, Kansas City; Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA, Progressive Insurance, Cleveland, Ohio and Fidelity Insurance, Chicago, Illinois.

 GRACE WESTON is a Portland photographer who creates narrative imagery with staged vignettes that combine humor, wit and psychological tension.  The constructed sets, built from fabricated and found props, are whimsical stages that address personal and universal dilemmas, joys and fears.  With the use of human and animal figures, her characters act out an internalized drama that often remind the viewer of a long forgotten nightmare or daydream.

Grace Weston, "Current Affairs", 2006

Grace Weston’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the northwest. She was recently included in the 2008 Photography Biennial: Nine to Watch, Northwest Photography Biennial, at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, WA, curated by Scott Wallin.  Additionally, Grace was a recipient of a 2006 Individual Artist Fellowship and a 2009 Artist Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission. She will use the later to travel to Madrid this summer for the upcoming Photo España’s Descubrimientos Madrid, a portfolio review and exhibition.  Grace is among the 70 photographers chosen from a field of 900 to participate in this June 2009 event.

 Photographs by Grace Weston are included in the collections of King County’s 4Culture Portable Works, Seattle, WA; the City of Seattle Portable Works, Seattle, WA; Portland Community College, Portland, OR; and University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, and Erb Memorial Union, Eugene, OR.

JONAH SAMSON’s dark sense of humor and fascination with the macabre influences his recent body of work Pleasantville. His hand-assembled and painted sets of murder scenes and sexual encounters are born out of our cultures attraction to sex and violence as entertainment, and walk the line between humor and tragedy.  Works in this exhibit focus on the voyeuristic sex scenes; titles include Peeping Tom, Happy Trails, and F*cking.

Jonah Samson, "Fucking", 2006

Jonah Samson celebrates his first commercial gallery exhibit as a contributing artist to View Master, and will enjoy his first solo exhibit this fall at Chernoff Fine Art in Vancouver, BC.  Jonah has been writing, curating, collecting, and making art for over a decade. He is a contributor to the daily blog Cool Hunting, and his writing on photography has been included in several magazines across North America.  Jonah recently published a collection of his Polaroid images of couples kissing in a book called Kissing Pictures 1998-2008.  Tickl magazine will feature a spread of these playful and erotic Polaroids in their next issue due to be released in summer 2009.

Jonah currently lives in Vancouver, Canada with his French Bulldog named Beckett, and works as a family doctor focusing on inner-city health issues.  He is presently working on a new series of dioramic photographs called Noir, based on early 20th century crime scene photographs.

Wesley Freese, “Practicing”, Oil on Linen, 24″ X 24″

One of my favorite writers on art, and painting in particular, is Raphael Rubinstein.  His 2006 essay “A Quiet Crisis” was one of the most relevant contemporary articles on art and painting for me personally.  What has always seemed apparent in his writing is an impression that he truly does understand the process of painting, and that he’s not just interpreting the products of  visual (painting) culture from the outside in.  Earlier this month, Rubinstein published an essay in the May edition of Art in America on what he has coined “Provisional Painting“, trying to illuminate an as yet unclassified thematic approach in contemporary painting.  His essay moves the ball forward a bit in discussions concerning contemporary painting.

Rubinstein writes of his increasing awareness of provisionality in the practice of painting that “deliberately turn[s] away from ‘strong’ painting for something that seems to constantly risk inconsequence or collapse.”  The deliberate turning away might be due to a foundational skepticism inherent in the genealogy of modern art, which he says began with Cezanne.  This foundational skepticism is born of the modern struggle with the medium of painting, and in the case of younger artists, an attempt to “spurn the blandishments” of the art market.

Christopher Wool, “Untitled”, 2007

Five contemporary painters are cited that illustrate Rubinstein’s provisionality.  Raoul De Keyser, “constantly asserts the impossibility of painting free of touch ups, mistakes, accidents, set on laying bare the seams, the second tries, the failures” (quoted from Jean-Claude Vergne); Albert Oehlen, whose “work, which manages to be at once antiseptic and messy, continues to draw great pictorial force from its abject awkwardness.”  Christopher Wool‘s “paradoxical pictures in which the artist seems to have obliterated a painting-in-progress and then presented this sum of erasures as the finished work.”  Mary Heilmann, whose paintings “[suggest] that treating painting as if it were ceramics, that is, as a medium free of weighty cultural expectations, is key to Heilmann’s art.”  Michael Krebber ”appears to say, painting is what I do but let’s not get sentimental about it or waste unnecessary time or materials; this is all you’re getting for your money.  And yet Krebber’s disdain for painting could equally be interpreted as a sign of overvaluation of the medium”.

Rubinstein calls up reference to three other painters with recent exhibits as historical context for the five contemporary artists above.  Joan Miro, Martin Barre and Kimber Smith.  Miro’s work from 1927-1937 and “lack of finish, aggressively crude figuration, and extensive doodling and cancellation marks suggest a painter at war with his medium.”  Barre’s work “could well appear as anti-painting, whereas what [he] wanted to show, through the traces or points of impact in a clear surface, was what painting could be if disencumbered of object, color and form.”  Smith, as a second generation Abstract Expressionist in the most hostile decade to painting (1970′s), “splashed Matissean insouciance over the serious minded legacy of Abstract Expressionism” yet “does not fight at the fore, but neither does he fight at the rear; indeed, he fights not at all.” (Hal Foster, Artforum 1979)

Raoul de Keyser, “Untitled”, 2002

Rubinstein co-ops the argument of the “impossibility” of painting, explaining it as “a conviction that an earlier generation of artist has left only a few scraps to be cleaned up” or that “nothing could seem more presumptuous or inappropriate … than to set out to create a masterpiece.”  The entertainment of the impossibility has led many contemporary artists “to reject a sense of finish in their work, or to rely on acts of negation.”  Provisional painting is “the finished product disguised as preliminary stage” or “major painting masquerading as minor painting.”  Rubinstein concludes with a suggestion that the provisionality of contemporary painters’ works “is an index of the impossibility of painting and the equally persistent impossibility of not painting.”

Is painting impossible?  This idea seems prescient only to a painter that is concerned with making a name for him or herself within the history of painting.  This is a big art market concern.  There are enumerable painters making traditional landscape, still life or other abstract paintings who either ignore or don’t know about the alleged “impossibility” of painting.  Painting is not impossible to them, it has consequence to them personally, and to his or her audience.  But the idea of impossibility in painting does reflect painting’s limited role in societies and culture.

In the 1970′s painting was “dead”, only to be reinvigorated by the post-modernists.  Painting was “pure” in the 1950′s which led to the celebration of monochromatic, dull and lifeless paintings by many artists in New York, and which I believe history will not be kind to in the long run.  Painting is not going to have the influence on society that television or photography or digital media has had and will continue to have, but it never did.  Show me the era, or the example, when the genre of painting cast such a big shadow on society.  It never existed!  Even before the inventions of other media in the 19th and 20th century, painting always had a limited role in society.  This ideology of “failure” and “impossibility” is more marketing pablum, and less about the practice of painting.  Nevertheless, fifty years from now you can bet that college art history books will have a section on painting after the millennium, perhaps entitled something like “Provisional Painting: The Impossibility of a Dead Medium” followed by the next chapter “The Resurrection of Painting”.

The thing I often object to are critic’s claims that traditional forms of painting are somehow obsolete, boring and/or not culturally relevant.  It makes me wonder if critics know what actually goes into creating a painting, or if they have the faculties to view a masterfully constructed painting.  I appreciate Rubinstein’s essay a great deal, and even though the concept of the impossibility in painting is widely accepted among critics, it certainly hasn’t infiltrated many painter’s actual practice of painting.  As I’ve written before, a painter whose work is excessively conceptual, like most of the artists listed in Rubenstein article, is usually masking an underlying lack of knowledge and skill as to how to paint.  It leads me to question: is provisionality really a euphemism for lack of skill or ability?

Albert Oehlen, “Gericht”, 2006