Alex Alvis Art

W.A.R.

!Women Art Revolution is a documentary film having to do with art history...as this is of course Art History Thursday.  If any of you have seen this film, let me know what you thought of it.  I have not seen it yet myself, but I will.  There is a lot of footage with Judy Chicago who painted this painting called The Three Faces of Man.

© Judy Chicago - Three Faces of Man

Unfortunately - today between construction on the ranch and making time to work, that is all I have for us today.  I hope you have been enjoying your day :)

Tomorrow is Friday!

'Til then!

~Alex

Today, I am going to share quotes with you from my Artist to Artist book from the sections:  The Language of Art and Mysticism, Magic, & Spirituality.  As I have said before, I hope you are touched by these quotes and it helps to know that throughout time artists have felt the same things while creating that you do every day ...know you are not alone when you go out there and create.

They tell you that a tree is only a combination of chemical elements.  I prefer to believe that God created it, and that it is inhabited by a nymph. ~Pierre Auguste Renoir 1841-1919.

At one time the earth was supposed to be flat . . . yet the probability is that life, too, is spherical and much more extensive and capacious than the hemisphere we know. ~ Vincent Van Gogh 1853-1890

The mystical will always be with us. . . . A whole mass of things that cannot be rationalized - new born thoughts that are still not properly formed. ~ Edvard Munch 1863-1944

A work of art is finished, from the point of view of the artists, when feeling and perception have resulted in a spiritual synthesis. ~ Hans Hofmann 1880-1966

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way - thing that I had no words for. ~ Georgia O'Keeffe 1887-1986

Everything has two aspects:  the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and meta physical abstraction. ~ Giorgio de Chirico 1888-1978

Painting is, in my opinion, a richer language than that of words . . . . Painting is a language much more immediate, and, at the time, much more charged with meaning. ~Jean Dubuffet 1901-1985

The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined.  It moves in a mind.  It is not there physically at all.  It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. ~ Philip Guston 1913-1980

I would like to express man's relation to the world and to himself - and to some spiritual force outside himself. ~George Tooker 1920-2011

Great art is art that strips you of words, and then allows you to find the new words to describe that experience. ~Eric Fischl  1948-

So that's all for this Sunday's inspiration!  Hope you have been having a great weekend and I'll see what I can come up with for us to talk about tomorrow.

'Til then.

~Alex

Evolution Revolution

Happy Art History Thursday!  Can you guess who we will be talking about today?

But first, I just want to say.  There are some artists out there who are constantly fretting about finding "their style" of painting or sculpture or ...whatever it is they create and I say...stop it! 

Instead.  Relax!  Through your lifetime create and create and create - do it the way that it is in your heart to do it.  To put constraints upon what you do because you have been convinced by someone(s) - or you just think so yourself - that what your work looks like today is what your collectors expect and want and so on...could very well be limiting your contribution to art and the evolution of your work and to the whole world of art while you are here. 

If you are thinking those thoughts I say: Don't Do It! - look at those thoughts squarely in the eye and then...stage a Revolution!  Imagine if the Beatles just kept writing songs like "It's Been a Hard Day's Night" and never wrote "Across the Universe" or "Let it Be"?

What if the artist who painted this picture continued to paint like this all his life?
Well, and why not?  It's a very nice picture, don't you think? 

Can you believe that 22 years later the same painter painted this same scene and it looked like this?
These paintings were both created by Paul Cézanne - they are of Mont Sainte-Victoire in the south of France. 

I want to share with you an excerpt from a wonderfully written article which was published in The Guardian written by Kevin Rushby in May 2013:

Cézanne immortalised the Mont Sainte-Victoire 87 times – and even purpose-built his studio to ensure a good view of it. Photograph: Kevin Rushby

. . . . For our brief overnight stop in Aix, I'm determined to visit Cézanne's studio (atelier-cezanne.com), purpose-built so the artist could easily view his mountain. His tiny house has miraculously survived much as he left it: his hat is on the peg, his backpack waits by the chair, and on the wooden desk stands his last wine beaker, dry and purple-stained. It is as though the man has simply flown from the window and is out there with the nightingales. All around are objects recognizable from his paintings: the olive jar, the wooden rosary, the empty bottles and the armless cherub figurine, mundane objects that he transformed into thrilling and potent images.

Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from la Route du Tholonet. Photograph: The Gallery Collection/Corbis

During Cézanne's life, few people, a handful only, came to this place. He had abandoned the art world of Paris and been depicted as a failure by his former friend Emile Zola in the 1886 novel L'Oeuvre.

Our guide to the artist's studio, Gabriel, makes a face: "After that, the two men never spoke again."

Gabriel shows us the extra-tall door in a corner of the room, which allowed Cézanne to take big canvases outside to paint in natural light: "He lived on an allowance from his father then, when the father died, Cézanne inherited everything."

Cézanne's stubborn refusal to give up on painting must have been particularly annoying to his parent, a self-made man and bastion of the local bourgeoisie. No one liked the young Cézanne's works, except the occasional maverick American. At one point some citizens of Aix actually asked their unwanted artist to leave. Sales of his paintings were so rare that the lower room of this one-up-one-down house became choked with canvases.

In the upstairs studio, I find a chest of drawers under the north window that contains souvenirs, photographs and mementoes, among them a letter written to Claude Monet and the clay pipe that features in The Card Players.

Cézanne's studio in Aix. Photograph: Kevin Rushby

Last year, over a century after Cézanne died, it was reported that one of the five versions of this painting sold at auction for over $250m. It's a shame, I reflect, looking down at that cheap clay pipe, that his father didn't live to see the moment when his son's painting became the most expensive the world has ever seen. Mind you, if he had, he would also have witnessed his grandson selling off those treasures for a few francs in the days after Paul died.

Leaving the studio we set off up the hill to find the viewpoint where Cézanne painted many of those Mont Sainte-Victoire pictures. Like the studio, it is still much as he found it: a fabulous panorama of pantiled rooftops and cypress trees stretching out across rolling hills to the spectacular peak topped by an enormous cross. One local who spied on the old white-bearded painter reported that his technique could be highly unorthodox. He once got so angry with his failure to render the sublime colours and forms that he grabbed a nearby rock and smashed it through the canvas. . . . .

Now I'm going to have to check my passport, make sure it hasn't expired and make arrangements to go to the south of France this summer with my dear sweet hardworking husband.  I don't think he'll mind.

Here are some other nice things to read about this area of France and more about Cézanne painting Mont Sainte-Victoire:

http://www.fantasticprovence.com/section/culture-fashion_r5/the-mont-sainte-victoire-by-paul-cezanne_a928/1

http://usa.loccitane.com/fp/Provence-For-Lovers,82,1,a879.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aix-en-Provence

So that is our Art History Thursday today.  Next Thursday it will be October!  Hard to believe.

Hope your day is full of creative goodness and maybe a classic butter croissant (or two) ...something I am suddenly craving...  :)

'Til tomorrow!

~Alex

Our different approaches to Art and Art Making

So I have been thinking about types of artistic talent.  What differentiates the talent of Van Gogh, for instance from the type of artistic talent Norman Rockwell possessed, for instance?  It is terrific that there is different types of artistic talent because there are all different tastes when it comes to the what people like to look at.


If an artist has a "job" to do, a purpose in the world, what would it be?  One thing I believe it is, and this is only one thing of course, is to give us a way of seeing deeper or more profoundly at what is around us.  When a painting is painted or a sculpture created or music composed magic is added to the sounds and sights of the everyday world; color and vibrancy or darkness and tragedy is brought to what we see; a singular moment in time is frozen in an artwork that has some certain quality about it enhanced.
 
Max J. Friedlander, wrote in his book "On Art and Connoisseurship" that (and I am borrowing this paraphrasing of Friedlander's book from Dr. Jose Rodiero's webpage)
 
The distinction between an artist that has “grit,” “shit,” or ugliness and one that has mere “beauty” is similar to the artistic differentiation between what constitutes an artist of genius and what constitutes an artist of talent; an aesthetic duality first argued and developed by German art historian Max J. Friedländer in the 1930s, through which he explicitly identified certain artists as “fighters” while others he deemed “victors,” regarding their disparate approach to art and art-making.   For Friedlander, “fighters” are artist with overwhelming genius but little talent (i.e., Bosch, El Greco, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Goya, Van Gogh, Bocklin or Ryder), while “victors” have much more talent than genius (i.e., Memling, Carracci, Reni, Mengs, Bouguereau, Gérôme, Wyeth or Norman Rockwell).  Everything in art comes easily to the “victors,” while “fighters” fight to create, struggling with everything and everyone, including themselves, existence, nature, the universe or the duende.  Occasionally, a few great artists have equal portions of genius and talent, such as Michelangelo or Raphael.  Yet, even among those two giants; it is clear that the Florentine is the fighter, while the Umbrian is the victor.

Ooops! After I finish cursing - Accidental Design Elements in our Art

Every day that I sculpt I have accidents that happen.  Occasionally a sculpture will leap off my worktable and break into several pieces and - since I'm working with clay that is made out of paper and dries in the air - things happen to the sculpture all during the creating process.   For instance, once the sculpture is started and I add clay to a certain area, that new wet clay is placed onto the existing dry clay and while it is drying, moving portions of the sculpture around.

When I first started working with this material, I tried to correct these "accidental" rearrangements of my sculpture but now I will consider these accidents to see if they actually help the design or make it unique in some way.  I have decided that the accidents are sometimes a form of unique guidance and serendipity and welcome many of those accidents as part of my creative process.

Many artists today and throughout history knew accidents were often a good component in helping them create their works.  Of course some accidents will just feel like a catastrophe! 

What do you think?  Do you believe that art doesn't "just happen" because of perfect planning and perfect control that it also happens by seemingly random accidents sprinkled in?

Check out the quotes below (thanks to art-quotes.com) from artists regarding accidents in their work.  Which is your favorite?

It's time for me to get to work.  I hope your (and my) art accidents are all good ones today.

~Alex

All painting is an accident. But it's also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve. (Francis Bacon)

It's the nasty and the accident that form the foundation for elegance that comes later. (Nick Bantock)

In art, there is one thing which does not receive sufficient attention. The element which is left to the human will is not nearly so large as people think. (Charles Baudelaire)

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don't really know what we're doing and when we do, it doesn't seem to help. (Bono)

Oops! I wonder how that blob of paint turned up in the sky? – that must be how many a bird 'happened' in a landscape and how extra leaves were added to overhanging branches. (Jeane Duffey)

Accident is veiled necessity. (Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach)

Accident is design / And design is accident / In a cloud of unknowing. (T. S. Eliot)

There are many accidents that are nothing but accidents - and forget it. But there are some that were brought about only because you are the person you are... you have the wherewithal, intelligence, and energy to recognize it and do something with it. (Helen Frankenthaler)

We try not to have ideas, preferring accidents. To create, you must empty yourself of every thought. (Gilbert George)

It may have been accidental but you knew enough to let this alone. The intelligent painter is always making use of accidents. (Charles Hawthorne)

The most persistent principles in the universe are accident and error. (Frank Herbert)

I have meant what I have done. Or – I have often meant what I have done. Or – I have sometimes meant what I have done. Or – I have tried to mean what I was doing. (Jasper Johns)

A creative train of thought is set off by: the unexpected, the unknown, the accidental, the disorderly, the absurd, the impossible. (Asger Jorn)

We never learned how to solve problems, create effects, get concrete results. So we hope for, and rely on fortuitous accidents. What we do by accident we call 'creative.' (Brian Knowles)

You need accidents, otherwise it is fake. (Sotirios Kotoulas)

Experiment by applying a few strokes suggesting the subject and see what happens... develop the piece from interesting accidents. (Jean-Francis Le Saint)

It was accidental before but now it's become my method. (Hui Lin Liu)

At first laying down, as a fact fundamental, / That nothing with God can be accidental. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

I throw down the gauntlet to chance. For example, I prepare the ground for a picture by cleaning my brush over the canvas. Spilling a little turpentine can also be helpful. (Joan Miro)

Surprises are the joy of living. Surprises directly touch the soul. Good surprises energize and bad surprises teach. (Alev Oguz)

Accidents, try to change them - it's impossible. The accidental reveals man. (Pablo Picasso)

When a person is prepared to receive something, a series of accidents takes place. (Irving Sandler)

Every brushstroke has a certain tension, a certain nervousness. Every brushstroke is, in a sense, some kind of accident. (Raphael Soyer)

As soon as you accept the accidental effects, they are no longer accidents. They are necessity – the part of yourself that you could not expect or design beforehand. Thus the realm of your creativity grows wider. (Kazuaki Tanahashi)

The unforseen event, the 'accident,' the unexpected all play a very large part in my creative play. I prefer to let the materials suggest the direction of a work. (Burnell Yow!)