Alex Alvis Art

Baring your Soul as an Artist

I know - it's supposed to be Inspiration Sunday.  I don't think I did Inspiration Sunday last Sunday either.  But maybe this WILL be inspirational to you.  I hope so.

The very act of creating art is an act of vulnerability.  This means an artist has to be careful.  It is important for the support group of someone who is a professional artist, particularly, to be ...well.  Supportive.  And this is more that just words.

An artist doesn't need to hear..."oh you make such wonderful art" as much as an artist needs to have time and quiet.  These are the most precious gifts because without them an artist cannot effectively create. 

It is easy for an artist's support group to misunderstand what an artist is doing often times.  It doesn't always look like we're creating when the fact is the act of creating takes an enormous amount of mental and emotional energy.

When we make whatever this something is that we make - that something comes from deep inside us and is most a manifestation of something resonating within our souls and spirits.  It must be so very genuine and authentic so it resonates with the same soul stuff of others.


Making that unique elusive expression of the world through ourselves is incredibly taxing.  Space for that must be attainable. 

Even more confusing to the people around us is that when we aren't in the process of conceptualizing we may be experimenting or transitioning or researching or educating ourselves and when doing those things - it can look (to someone who is not an artist) an awful lot like goofing around...or wasting time...or lack of focus...or procrastinating.

I particularly love nurturing the people and friends that I care about.  I enjoy spending time with them.  But I must know, even on a daily basis, when the time with them will begin and when it will end. 

I think this is because to do something other than make our art, we must detach from an intrinsic  part of ourselves to do it - this is as tangible to us removing an arm or a leg - to be in with you in a particular place ...in a particular period of time.  

Julie Mehretu

Julie's work is very amazing.  Huge huge canvasses filled in with layers of drawing and color and fluid motion filled with definitive lines and small details.  You can gaze at one of her works for a long time and never discover everything.  Here is the entry about her (in part) from Wikipedia.

"Mehretu is known for her large-scale paintings and drawings and her technique of layering different elements and media. Her paintings are built up through layers of acrylic paint on canvas overlaid with mark-making using pencil, pen, ink and thick streams of paint. Her canvases overlay different architectural features such as columns, façades and porticoes with different geographical schema such as charts, building plans and city maps and architectural renderings for stadiums, international airports, and other public gathering hubs, seen from different perspectives, at once aerial, cross-section and isometric. Her drawings are preparatory to her large paintings, and sometimes interim between paintings...

In 2000, Mehretu was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. She was the recipient of the 2001 Penny McCall Award.  On September 20, 2005, she was named as one of the 2005 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the "genius grant."

...In 2007, while completing a residency at the American Academy in Berlin, Julie Mehretu received the 15th commission of the Deutsche Bank and Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. The body of work she created, Grey Area, was composed of six large-scale paintings, completed between 2007 and 2009 in a studio in Berlin.


Mehretu's painting Untitled 1 sold for $1.02 million at Sotheby's in September 2010.  It's estimated value had been $600–$800,000. 


At Art Basel in 2014, White Cube sold Mehretu’s Mumbo Jumbo (2008) for $5 million. 


Mehretu is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery in New York and by White Cube in London as well as by carlier gebauer in Berlin.^"

Okay - we will talk about something completely different tomorrow (I know, it is technically tomorrow right now) - but this has been an interesting investigation into the art world, I think.

~Alex

Julie Mehretu

Julie is the number five on my list.  I cannot say more about her tonight though...due to extenuating circumstances.  Sometimes - as for anyone who runs their own business - real life intervenes from time to time and I have no time for anything else but a picture.

But a picture is worth a thousand words, right? :).   This image is courtesy of art21.org and Marian Goodman Gallery.

'Til tomorrow

~Alex

Top 5 Highest Selling Living Artists Who Are WOMEN ! (Part 2)

My offerings today for the Top 5 Highest selling Living Artists Who Are Women begins with the eccentric Yayoi Kusama.  (a thank you to Wikipedia for the information which I updated in part)

     Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生 or 弥生, Kusama Yayoi, born March 22, 1929) is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, sculpture, performance art and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern. A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.
     Kusama's work has performed strongly at auction: top prices for her work are for paintings from the late 1950s and early 1960s. As of 2012, her work has the highest turnover of any living woman artist. 
     In November 2008, Christie's New York sold a 1959 white "Infinity Net No. 2" for US $5.1 million, then a record for a living female artist.


     In comparison, the highest price for a sculpture from her New York years is £72,500 (US $147,687), for her 1965 wool, pasta, paint and hanger assemblage Golden Macaroni Jacket at Sotheby's London in October 2007.


     An acrylic on fiberglass-reinforced plastic pumpkin earned $605,000, sold also at Sotheby’s in 2013.


     Her 'Flame of Life - Dedicated to Tu-Fu (Du-Fu)' sold for US $960,000 at Art Basel/Hong Kong in May 2013, the highest price paid at the show.



Bridget Louise Riley CH CBE (born 24 April 1931 in Norwood, London) is an English painter who is one of the foremost exponents of Op art.   She currently lives and works in London, Cornwall, and France.
     In 2006, her Untitled (Diagonal Curve) (1966), a black-and-white canvas of dizzying curves, was bought by Jeffrey Deitch at Sotheby's for $2.1 million, nearly three times its $730,000 high estimate and also a record for the artist.   


In 2008, the artist’s dotted canvas Static 2 (1966) brought £1,476,500 ($2.9 million), far exceeding its £900,000 ($1.8 million) high estimate.


Chant 2 (1967), part of the trio shown in the Venice Biennale, went to a private American collector for £2,561,250 ($5.1 million) in 2008.


Oh heck!  I've run out of time.  But that was fun, wasn't it?  We will do part 3 tomorrow and maybe I'll throw in an extra top earning woman artist just 'cause I want to.

'Til tomorrow.

~Alex

Top 5 Highest Selling Living Artists Who Are WOMEN !

Does it surprise you that art is a male dominated field?  I would love your opinions as to why you think that is.  In the meantime, lets just see, shall we?  Who is selling their work for the most bucks.


Cady Noland for one.  She holds the record for the highest price paid for an artwork by a living woman.  6.6 million for her work titled Oozewald pictured above.  This from Wikipedia: "Cady Noland (born 1956 in Washington, DC.) is a postmodern conceptual sculptor and an internationally exhibited installation artist, whose work deals with the failed promise of the American Dream and the divide between fame and anonymity, among other themes. Her work has been exhibited in museums and expositions including the Whitney Biennial in 1991 and Documenta in Kassel, Germany. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and is the daughter of the Color Field painter Kenneth Noland (1924-2010)."

Would you pay 6.6 million dollars for this much to think about?  Hey.  Just asking.  I say good for Cady.  Very good.
 
Next up.  Marlene Dumas.  Marlene's work The Teacher sold for 3.3 million.  Here it is:


Here is Marlene's Wikipedia artists statement.  Good piece of writing I might add.  :)

Marlene Dumas (born 3 August 1953) is a South African born artist and painter who lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In the past Dumas produced paintings, collages, drawings, prints and installations. She now works mainly with oil on canvas and ink on paper. Stressing both the physical reality of the human body and its psychological value, Dumas tends to paint her subjects at the extreme fringes of life’s cycle, from birth to death, with a continual emphasis on classical modes of representation in Western art, such as the nude or the funerary portrait. By working within and also transgressing these traditional historical antecedents, Dumas uses the human figure as a means to critique contemporary ideas of racial, sexual, and social identity.

And tomorrow?  I will let you know who 3, 4, and 5 are.

Til then -

~Alex

Beatrice Wood

Just for fun and because I'm on ipad rather than desktop - I though I'd treat us to some Beatrice Wood.


Just because she's fun.  So just photos of her work and a few quotes.


My life is full of mistakes. They're like pebbles that make a good road.
-Beatrice Wood

"I happen to believe that there is an afterlife."

-Beatrice Wood 

Velazquez and his paintings Part 3

I promised more detail of Las Meninas - here it is.


So amazing.  Describing his work are words such as "mastery of expression, penetration into character and rendering the life of his sitter to the quick."

Here is a photo of an earlier work of his, El Aquador.  He hasn't mastered all his technique at this point and this is just so wondrous...red, yellow and brown.  The detail is stunning but this is not abject realism but perfection of realism blended with a painterly painting.  Check out the detailed photos after.  And I will go to sleep tonight and dream of being even 1/16th as good at any art I create....ever.



...talk about painting what you see and not just what you think you see...

'Til tomorrow.

~Alex