Lots more tiny changes…

Finally made the portfolio link active…

Began putting together some snapshots I’d taken a while back, with the intention of compositing them together into panoramic shots. First I tried something called Panorama Maker. Kinda buggy but it worked surprisingly well the first time around. The second time, it crashed my machine. Moving right along… Tried Canon’s PhotoStitch. If you own a recent Canon digital camera you own this. After tinkering for about two minutes here’s what came out:

(you can click on the leetle pictures to get huuuuge pictures, by the way)

Just finished reading Instant Art History (by Walter Robinson, a Byron Preiss/Fawcett Columbine Book, ISBN 0-449-90698-1), a book I had bought on the occasion of my November, 2000, trip to Spain, but which remained unread until maybe a month ago. My good intentions don’t always sync up with my follow-through; judging from the state of this website you should know that by now.

So. Given I did finally get through the tome, what did I get out of it?

For one: this book is a very rough survey of (mostly) the plastic arts. Actually, it’s mostly about painting, with passing mention to sculpture (in really major cases, like Michaelangelo, Rodin, and the zanier examples of Dada). Happily, the author devotes a chapter (there are 13, so even one whole chapter is a fair chunk of the book) to the artistic contributions of non-European civilizations: Mesoamerican, Chinese, African, Indian, Japanese, Islamic. Of course they’re given short shrift — come on, 4,000 years and four continents’ worth of civilization condensed to a mere 15 pages? But, hey, at least they’re mentioned as “art,” on equal standing with European contributions.

This was written to appeal to laypersons, not archaeologists or art grads, so everything is bite-sized and, just around the time you think you’re about to get bored, the author drops in a funny. Case in point: “Art is more than just a three-letter anagram for the words tar and rat.” Ha-ha! But this is exactly what I wanted: something I could breeze through quickly in order to catch a glimpse at the overarching “big picture” of art throughout history. The author helped me out immensely by spelling it all out for me in the introduction:

• “Throughout civilization, art has been used to express the entire range of human feelings and spiritual beliefs.”
• “Our notions of art and artists, although rooted in the older traditions of Greece and Rome, are fairly recent developments springing from European civilization. Even in Europe, it’s only during the last few hundred years that art was created for museums or private collectors. Before that, art was intended either for the church or for the king and his court.”
• “We presume that many primitive and ancient societies granted their artists a special priestlike status. The artist functioned as a shaman, a conduit for the gods on earth, a holy man. The Romantics of the eighteenth century revived this artistic role with a little self-consciousness. [...] In contemporary society, the artist continues to be thought of as a person with a special imaginative gift.”
• “The artist will always remain, to a degree, a servant of his client, whether that client is a god, the church, a king, the community at large or an art dealer. The question is how this service is manifested.”

Now, all this is probably obvious to the average art student out there but it completely escaped my notice until relatively recently. There are huge consequences implicit in all this, for me at least:

• The myth of the isolated, tortured artist is Romantic bullshit. Artists create and work pretty much in the same way everyone else does. There is no priesthood, there is no elite.
• Art for self, art for art’s sake is a distinctly modern, largely baseless notion. I mean, maybe there are some out there who have entire worlds distinct from our own that they want to reveal to us, but for the rest of us mere mortals it’s hard to make art out of nothing. There has to be a mission, a subject, a purpose that is generated “outside” of us.
• It makes sense to be producing “art” in relation to a “client/sponsor/employer” rather than suffering alone in the studio, then selling the effluent of my pain via some sleazy art dealer. That’s what I have been doing for the past few years — working as a commercial artist within this or that company, that is — though, by Graphic Arts Guild standards, I’ve been selling out extremely cheaply.

Mercy me! That is a weight off my shoulders. Still, my lack of relevant academia or typical “artiste” affectations will likely mark me as “outsider art” for years to come. Alrightee.

There are never enough words. Everyone knows I ramble. I am long-winded. I talk too much. And yet, I feel every word I say is necessary to describe what I’m seeing in my mind’s eye with full appreciation for what makes it worth describing: its shades, nuances and idiosyncracies. I remembered today something I have said aloud before: that the reason I draw, the reason I must draw is because drawing enables me to “say” what I cannot say with words. I “speak” with line, color and texture instead. If words were sufficient, I’d be a writer. But there are never enough words. That’s why we have art.