Wall Slinging While Waiting for a Muse

There you sit waiting to be hit by a passing bus, a train or inspiration.

A full third of the stories you hear about art or artists hinge on the quest for inspiration.

Truth is most inspiration comes from the light bill. Yeppers most working artists have throughout history have sought just one thing what to do to get enough money to pay the light bill. Okay, okay so before ole Thomas the Wizard of West Orange they worried about getting enough gas or whale oil or bear fat to keep the lights on but the principal is the same, getting the bills paid. There is no reason or crime to it, it just happens.

Inspiration is a fickle thing, it comes and goes willy-nilly and there is no getting a handle on it, it is so mercurial that the ancients had a name for it, they claimed it came from a muse.

So artists could relax and take a deep breath, being stumped for what to do next was not their fault, it was just their muse taking a vacation.

Now that was fine in the beginning, what with all the time mammoth hunting and wolf fighting and dragon slaying and wife napping took, there wasn't a whole bunch of time for inspiration to come knocking so that was okay and if the muse took a week or two for a walkabout that was a good thing.

But as women started demanding more and more organization and order and things started getting all nice and neat and organized there came along a bunch of guys who thought, “Why should I go out in the cold and run through the woods risking life and limb when I could just stay in the cave and let the other guys do it.”

But the other guys weren't as dumb as all that and they knew that if a guy wasn't out hunting mammoths or fighting wolves here wasn't much left for him to do but wife nabbing and that was not an approved thing so they became suspicious of guys who wanted to lounge around the cave and the cave loungers discovered they'd better get a good excuse double quick so they thought and they thought and they said, “I don't have to go mammoth hunting or wolf slaying because I am doing something more important, I talk to God.”

Oh god, but who is that?

The cave loungers had to get a cover story pretty darned quick cause they weren't going to get that one past the hunters without a good cover so they worked and thought and they decided if they could predict the future and fell into trances and knew what the things that went bump in the night were they might convince the hunters.

Now all of this took a lot of time and while they were getting their story straight they painted on the walls of the cave so that they could explain their cover story to folks who just didn't visualize well and they worked hard at getting their story straight and in a few centurys they formed a bunch of guys who came from cave loungers and they called them priests.

Now the priests had all sorts of rules and stuff and some of the cave loungers didn't do all that well with rules, so they decided that they could talk to God and not be priests and they decided to become wall paint slinging guys. But you can see that that was awkward in a social setting so they just called themselves artists and kept slinging paint on the walls anyway.

Now this was okay, but the priests didn't much want to share their secrets of talking to God and the wall slingers didn't want to follow all of the rules so the two bunches of God-talkers didn't much get along. They didn't get along so much that they hated each other and they started to complain about each other and claim that they were the only ones who could really talk to God and they fought and a bunch of wall/paint/slingers got burnt at the stake cause they didn't much like the rules and they said so and the priests didn't like being contradicted so they burned the guys who complained the loudest.

And this went along for seven or eight hundred years until one day a guy saw the light and started the Renaissance. And once everyone got Renaissanced they started thinking maybe they should stop burning the guys who complained and put them to work making paintings on marble cave walls so that folks who couldn't visualize so well would see the light too.

But there was a big problem. If you ave been burning guys for seven or eight hundred years it is possible that they won't believe you or trust you and they won't paint your marble cave walls. So the priests had to think of something they could give the other guys which would make them want to paint marble cave walls and they thought and pondered and cogitated and they noticed that after being hunted and burned for seven or eight hundred years the wall slingers didn't have much and because they couldn't carry much while they were running and hiding they couldn't keep much and that made them poor and the priests said, “Let's give them money!”

Well that went over big and the slingers thought that they just might like painting marble walls and they took the money and started painting and when they ran out of walls, there being a limited number of walls needing painting, they started on the ceilings and that is why we have frescoes on the ceilings.

And for many years that worked out well until a guy called Lenin said, “God is dead.” and that made a huge crisis cause by this time there were a whole bunch of people who believed in God and they didn't want to quit but if God was dead who was going to talk to the wall slingers and tell them what to paint?

You can imagine this caused all sorts of problems. Without instructions from On High artists were left to do anything they wanted and they did and it was a huge mess what with one guy doing boats and one guy doing cars and one guy doing sports and a whole bunch of guys doing nekkid wimmen and one strange guy doing soup cans. It was pandemonium.

And that's the way it has been ever since, guys doing this and that and any old thing they want because they aren't getting instructions from ON High, their Muse is on vacation, the wishing well is dry, and that's where we are today. No one has the instruction book.

Now that is a pretty good deal in my opinion. I'm one of those wall slingers doing willy-nilly anything I can and I don't really like rigid rules and regulations and I don't wait around for my muse to come home so I'm okay with things as they stand now.

But what about you?

Are you listening to the wind hoping to hear the word spoken? Are you looking for a Muse or a stroke of genius?

It would be a shame to waste all of the hard won freedom that our wall slinging ancestors gave so much for. They did suffer and die so that we could do any silly ole thing we want and yet and whole bunch of us sit waiting for the RIGHT inspiration.

Don't do it. Get out there and make something happen today. There are two shows coming up with no jury to keep you at bay and if you haven't worked up your entry you should be ashamed.

There is so much to inspire any artist here every day, it would be a horrible mistake to let all those past wall slingers down. Get busy, get moving, get entered, inspiration is yours to discover not some gift which comes only to the privileged few.

Holy Art Gallery, Batman

Sources

The basic quest in all of art, be it literary, visual or musical, is to find that one, universal element which can be instantly identified and universally integrated into the observer's understanding so that it merges with their personality and becomes complete in their understanding. They get it.

And you would think that as human beings we have so many things in common that this would be so easy it wouldn't require any thought or effort at all. That's where the part about human beings comes in.

Human beings are so contrary, so diverse, so complex that they just can't be boxed up and stored away. The minute you think you've nailed them dead to rights they go and do the damnedest things.

The greatest statesman and wordsmith of our times, Sir Winston Churchill, politician supreme, world leader and the spine that held the World together through the darkest hours of World War II painted. He painted delicate watercolors and he was for a politician pretty damned good.

The baby diva Pink, parent's nightmare and demon-child of all demon-children has manufactured the most outrageous public image imaginable, from pierced, swearing, knife-wielding, punk/druggie/rocker eclipsing even Kieth Richards and yet what does she do? She gets a shot at the Grammys and does a aerial act straight out of the Cirque and then marries has a child and becomes the most stable of stable normal middle-American women since the Republicans co-opted family values.

Ya just can't get a handle on some people.

So where does an artist turn for a base-line universalist concept? Do you chose only concrete things like boats and cars and buildings, scenes from nature like the rivers and lakes, streams and fields. The birds and animals we all know so that no one can wonder what it is you are trying to do.

Or do you like Picasso and Klee reject reality and create completely abstract images so that there is nothing to restrict the imagination or freeze the mind?

Do you use only human forms so that the viewer can rapidly identify the object or do you stick with nature and use plants and fruits as your only inspiration?

For years since the birth of the industry the dream factories have taken their inspiration from literature, Dickens, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck. They've found magic in love, lust, agony, ecstasy, death and life, they've built castles in the air with heroic tales and monsters and made our night's full of terrors unlike an since the days when men huddled around the campfires and whispered least the things that go bump in the night might hear.

But now even this wonderful resource seems to have dried up and the image makers have scrambled for something to make magic with and after much trial and error they have found it...comic book heroes!

That's right, the very thing that your mother swore would drive you blind, ruin your health and lead you into unsavory practices is now the primary source for all of our entertainment desires and needs.

I can't claim to be so lofty that I have never ventured into the multicolored pages of comic land where the caped and spandex clad save humanity from all manner of deaths, disasters and dilemmas. In fact I actually pre-date the gimlet-eyed comics code which saved all of mankind from the ravages of comic books forever.

Way back in the dark and dusty days of the Fifties when men were men and the women were men and the sheep were nervous, the good folks in our government listened to Dr, Fredrick Wertham, who swore that all manner of horrible things were directly linked to comic books like, juvenile delinquency, criminal behavior, degeneracy, sapped strength, self-abuse, and the heart-break of psoriasis. And so in 1954 the Comics Code Authority banned all comics having anything that they deemed unnatural, unsavory and un-American. Basically this meant no nekkid wimmen tied up being whipped and no nekkid wimmen being tortured by fawning Nazis and no nekkid wimmen.

I suspected at the time and still harbor a suspicion or three that the nekkid wimmen part had a lot more to do with the outrage than the fawning Nazis, mad doctors or any other socially unacceptable sort of person.

But once the nekkid wimmen went away and the Nazis weren't so fawning and the mad doctors had so much time on their hands there being no nekkid wimmen to whip, the comic book industry fell into a slump. Ya just can't hold the attention of a teenaged boy with Truth, Justice and the American Way.

So a few years later the nice people at DC, then the largest comic book publisher and still the flagship of the industry with the best artists and colorists discovered if you took those same nekkid wimmen and covered their heaving, panting, toned and trim bodies with spandex leaving naught to the imagination save the pulse rate of the readers you could tell the same stories and not get slapped around by the Comics Code.

By then teenaged girls had caught on to the whole looking and panting thing, what with Shaun Cassidy and Mick Jagger and Elvis explaining basic chiropractory, and they too wanted their own spandex covered boy type super heroes and that boys and girls is where Marvel showed up, cause DC was too gentile to do boys in spandex cause they might be mistaken for chorus boys and that would lead to another whole set of senate investigations and no one wanted that so they didn't and Marvels did and Peter Parker, no snickering, even though it is a bit justified and might actually be an intended double entendre, showed up with his spidey sense tingling and teenaged girls everywhere tingled right back.

And now everywhere you look there is some poor super hero desperately clamoring for your attention cause there are so many of them that there just isn’t enough crime for them all to keep busy with and besides ordinary criminals aren't much of a challenge for a real super hero so there they are washed up on the shoals of unemployment, aren't you sad?

Well you should be, cause while the heroes aren't working, just about every one associated with them is. Have you looked at the back to school supplies? There are Hulk backpacks and Batman thermoses, Spiderman book covers and Ironman T-shirts, Doc Oct windbreakers and don't forget the Death Dealer herself, Selene, every little girls' leather covered, corset wearing, ass-kicking super powered heroine and it doesn’t hurt a bit that the Great Kate, Kate Beckinsale who isn't any bigger than the average teenaged girl plays Selene to a butt-kicking T.

And where in all of this is your cut?

You wouldn't? You are a serious artists and would never stoop to creating a super hero. Boy I bet Boris Vallejo and Frank Franzetta are happy to hear that cause up until now they've pretty much had the whole magilla to themselves.

Super hero art and all fan directed art is going to be with us for a while and if you haven't tried your hand at it you are missing out on a revenue stream that just might make the difference in your tax return.

Sure the Comicons aren't the Guggenheim but they do reach a market hungry for art, maybe not your art, yet, but art none the less and if you aren't trying to get out there and reach them they won't come looking for you so you'll just let that whole demographic slip away.

Out of the Past

Yesterday I showed you a sketch I did several years ago back in the dawn of time when I was a Renaissance fair freak and often spent weekends at Scarborough Faire in Waxahatchie, Texas. The fellow playing the lute offered a prefect illustration for a poem I had written and I managed to get a picture from which this sketch was made.

The woodcut effect was achieved by running the pencil drawing through a electrostatic photocopy machine, (That's Xerox but they get all pissy if you call it that cause Xerox is a Trademarked name and the machine is an electrostatic photocopier), but let's just all agree to keep them happy and use the generic name and then they won't send all of their lawyers to jump all over me for calling it a Xerox.

This was before I found the wonders of computer generated graphics and could do all manner of strange and wonderful things.

But now I know and this could certainly be made into a woodcut or Lino and it would be much easier cause with a computer I can invert the image, switch the color balance from white and black to black and white and there you have it, a perfect paper pattern for laying on a Lino block and cutting away so that you can make a print.

Foundations and Perspections

Upheaval - Part of Fotoweek DC DEADLINE EXTENDED to Monday, September 10th! Exhibition Dates: November 3rd - December 2nd, 2012 CLICK HERE to learn more and apply! In celebration of Fotoweek DC (November 9-18), the gallery will host a juried photography exhibition that explores the theme Upheaval, whether in our own lives or throughout the world - illness, political unrest, and natural disasters are examples. This is a media specific photography exhibit that is open to all artists nationally and internationally. Juror: Brie Castell is the owner and chief curator of Castell Photography in Asheville, North Carolina, one of the south's finest galleries specializing in contemporary photo-based media. Castell works with established and emerging artists from around the globe for exhibition and representation, and brings to Asheville leading authorities in the field of photography for educational programming. Castell has also been a working photo-based artist for over 12 years, has exhibited extensively around the country, and is in numerous public and private collections. In April of 2008, Brie was an exhibitor in The Artist Project at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, an exhibition of undiscovered artists which attracted more than 50,000 visitors. She was a featured artist in the Fall 2009 issue of Eyemazing Magazine, an award winning Amsterdam-based photography publication. Castell received her MFA from East Carolina University, and currently teaches photography at Virginia Intermont College. OTHER EXHIBITION OPPORTUNITIES 5x5(x5) - Small works show Deadline for Entry: October 8th, 2012 - CLICK HERE to learn more and apply! Exhibition Dates: December 8th- 30th, 2012 Description: Back by popular demand, this small works show is a juried exhibition that invites artists to submit work that cannot exceed 5” in any directions. This is an all media exhibit open to all artists nationally and internationally. Juror: Stefanie Fedor is the Executive Director of Arlington Arts Center. Before joining AAC, she served as the Assistant Director of the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center where she presented over 80 exhibitions of contemporary art featuring the work of both emerging and internationally renowned artists. She has additionally managed and directedexhibitions programs at the Maryland Institute College of Art and New York University. Before relocating to the Washington DC area, Ms. Fedor was the Membership and Regional Alliances Manager at ArtTable in New York, a national professional organization for women in the visual arts. In this role she advocated for and supported the leadership of women in the arts. She has remained active with the organization and was recently elected to serve on the Board of Directors as the VP of Membership. Between the Lines: Contemporary Drawing Now Deadline for Entry: Nov. 5th, 2012 - CLICK HERE to learn more and apply! Exhibition Dates: January 5-27th, 2012 Description: Between the Lines: Contemporary Drawing Now is an exhibition that examines current trends in drawing today. This is an all media exhibit ranging from pencil on paper, to the conceptual, and to the three-dimensional. It is open to all artists nationally and internationally. Juror: Linn Meyers is currently a DC-based artist with a BFA from The Cooper Union in New York City and a MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries both nationally and internationally. Meyers' work is in private and public collections in both the United States and abroad; DC area museum collections include The Phillips Collection, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Smithsonian American Arts Museum and The National Museum of Women in the Arts. Meyers has received numerous grants, residencies and awards, including the Pollock Krasner Award, Artist in Residence at The Hirshhorn Museum, and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. She has produced site-specific wall drawings at museums and galleries, including The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Paris Concret in Paris France, Morgan Lehman Gallery in NYC, The Phillips Collection and Katzen Center Museum in Washington, DC, and many others.

Knock On Wood

I created this some years ago for a special project and thought you might enjoy a look. Is this a wood cut or a Lino? That's for you to think about and I'll give you the answer tomorrow.

Be Prepared

It's finally happened, the clock has moved, the months have passed and it is time once again for you to start thinking about what you are going to do for the holiday season.

Oh no, it's too early, the weather is warm, the days are long and there's nothing even remotely frosty which doesn’t come in a can, leave me alone and just let me muddle through back to school time and I'll think about this in February.

Sure you do that and you'll let another holiday season slip by without using it as a vehicle to promote and sell your art. If every merchant from the car guys to the raincoat crew peeking out of dark alleys has a holiday marketing plan don't you think you should be getting something together?

It's all ready too late for you to start planning for the fall holidays and if you don't want to get left behind you'd better get your 2013 plans locked down and ready.

Let's take a look and see what you've missed.

There's Halloween. All of those spooks and goblins and the legions of Harry Potter and Narnia fans not to mention all of the grown ups who will dig out their Bela Lugosi capes and false fangs and the dark shades so they can play like Tom Cruise at the opening of Risky Business. And what about all of the nice, female lady type people who spend so much to look so good all year long, do you think for a second they went to all of that trouble so they could dress up like a zombie or the mummy? No, no and hell no, they want to be noticed for all of those days at the gym and all of those hundreds of crunches and they buy a whole bunch of Elvira dresses and fright wigs so that they can show the Mistress of the Dark that a suburban housewife doesn’t give up all of the goodies when she says “I do.” And there’s a whole bunch of elves and faeries and if you have cable I'll just bet there's a Bo or two not to mention the inedible Kenzie, so if you haven't figured out what you are going to put in the pumpkin patch for the coming of the Great Pumpkin you are just out of luck.

Then there's National Food and Football Overindulgence Day, commonly known as Thanksgiving. You think all of those dreadfully clever Japanese and Korean folks have been building those enormous wide screens so you could see Ice Road Trucks in glorious sixty inch danger? No, they want you to watch football. And don't think for a second that they do it just for football spelled football, they do it for the big money sport futbol. There are a world of soccer fans just waiting to see Messi dazzle the opposition with his skill and Rooney and Giggs destroy City and Reynaldo make female fans faint at the very sight of his masculine backfield in motion, so the whole world is waiting for you to get off the couch and buy that wide screen and what exactly have you done to get a piece of that action?

That's what I thought, nothing and now its too late for this year cause there's a six month lead time thingy so you'd better mark your calendar for next year. Don't you remember, an artist, Norman Rockwell created the Thanksgiving we all remember. He did it on his mat board for Saturday Evening Post and we've all been longing for it every since. Not that Rockwell's Thanksgiving has anything to do with the close quarter combat of a family Thanksgiving. Wanna make Seal Team Six cry, force them to sit through a traditional family Thanksgiving!

And then there's Christmas right around the corner and the New Year and I'll just bet you haven't done anything about them either. How can you expect to ever make your art pay for itself if you sit on your hands and let opportunities slip by?

It is even getting close to too late for Valentines. Now with Thomas Kinkade gone to the Big Gallery there's a gap in the light and gay end of the art world and while I don't think you should sell out, you might be able to take advantage of it and slip in something you've done for all of the right reasons and it happened to turn out light and happy. You can't be blamed for that now can you?

But if all of that is lost, what can you do?

Calendars.

There's still time for you to use your Giclees and prints to put together a calendar for 2013. Every little crook and nanny has one, there's a Hogwarts calendar and a Slytherin calendar, a Dallas Plowboy Cheerleader calendar, an Elvira: Mistress of the Dark calendar, a Playboy/Hustler/Penthouse calendar, a Sudoku, Trivial Pursuits, Jeopardy calendar, a cat, dog, horse calendar and then there's all of the artists. That's right all of the big-time, important, serious, famous, dedicated artists have a calendar, Rembrandt, Degas, Matisse, Michelangelo, Rodin and Andy Warhol!

Why aren't you getting in on the loot?

There is just no excuse. If you are broke you can do it yourself with an ink jet printer, a laminator and a spiral binder. You can use each of these things for half a hundred uses and if you are serious about making your art into a business you get a tax write-off for buying equipment. It's office equipment so you can take the total value and not have to depreciate it. Just make sure you keep it in a space dedicated to business use only and don't cheat and make laminated pockets of your social security card or you driver license.

If you have a coin or two there are two easily available sources, Staples, where you are going for your envelop stuffer calendars anyway or Vista Print.

http://www.staples.com/sbd/cre/programs/copyandprint/calendars_holiday_cards.html

http://www.vistaprint.com/gallery.aspx?pg=42&page=1&txi=15203&xnav=TsrImage&xnid=CategoryPage_Wall+Calendars+%28linked+item%29_Photo+Gifts_All+Products

Now way back in the day, when Edsels roamed the earth and Packard wasn't a forgotten marquee, getting something printed was a big, hairy, time-consuming deal. You had to assemble the negatives, proof them to be sure they would print right, convert them to an inter negative if you shot them on slide film and take them to a print shop where if you were lucky you could get a runny pink and green proof in about ninety days.

Now you can do it all in your home computer, take it or send it to your print contractor and they'll grind it out in ten days if they are busy which is why you should be doing it now and not when they are swamped with all of the other calendar orders which will come in in December cause the business will put them off until the last minute so that they can get their money together and because there are more important things to be doing and because it is still a pain in the ass...so do it now.

Take the time to select twelve of your most exemplary images and use them as your calendar. Once you have the file put together you can take it or send it and start trying to come up with the coin to pay for it. Trust me you'll be glad you did it and when all of the other guys are sitting on their hands in January you'll be getting calls from clients who have seen your work on that calendar hanging in the dentist's office where they have been trapped for the last hour and a half while some giggling mad man tortures them and the expects them to pay by the second for the joy of having a root canal and anything to distract the eye from what is being done is a gift from heaven and don’t you want to be that angel? That special angel?