PAINTERSLOFT: New Post New Work

PAINTERSLOFT: New Post New Work

New Post New Work

Haven't posted in a while.  I've been doing workshops, lots of book art stuff, watercolors and trying out markers, watercolor markers, watercolor crayons and sticks, inktense sticks......the list goes on.

Fractured Fairy original collage on board 2015 Marty Yokawonis.  Copyright protected.  No downloads please.

My own Epic Battle

I did something the other day to prove a point to myself. I deleted Facebook from my phone. It was a huge monster program anyhow using 179 MB which was straining the limits of my phone's 1.97 GB memory anyhow. I deleted Chrome as well and the Facebook Messenger. I downloaded Mozilla instead as it was a smaller size program. I logged onto facebook from mozilla and discovered to my surprise that the mobile interface is a simpler cleaner handy version that won't try to run my life. Yayyyy

I made these changes because I had joined an arts group for encaustic on facebook recently, a closed group, and the things those people posted and how they just kept cropping up in my newsfeed was turning my stomach and making me feel sick.  It also was making me hate encaustic. I  can't  explain why I didn't just leave the group.  Maybe because that's what the ringleaders, the controllers were trying to do. Weed out those they see as being undesirable and I didn't want to give them the satisfaction of driving me out. But I also don't want to see them when they are attacking and abusing other people.  So I  deleted Facebook as an app. Now they are gone from my newsfeed.  I feel like working in wax again. Harmony has been restored. I may never go near that group again but my name is in the membership list so I can go and read posts if I choose.  I think that's what I wanted to take back was choice.  I don't want their insufferable opinions being shoved in my face every time a war gets started and battle is engaged. If that Mattera woman wants to play chief tormenter and mommy moderator that's her call. At least I don't have to view it.

Making and creating is so vital to me, so important and crucial, that I can't let the ugly side of the art world in anymore.  I like Lynn whipple's, "Move Your Hands," directive. It's a much better fit for me.I can't change the art world divas and their ferocious desire to rule and destroy. I have to create in my own way, preserve who I am and what I see as my mission in life.  I understand that other people continue to try and live with the ugly side, deal with the backstabbing and rejection because they believe that putting up with the art politics will someday pan out and they will get recognition, gallery shows, acceptance. I don't want to have that kind of life. I don't accept that kind of  ass kissing subservience. Does Mattera have a shitlist and am I on it? Probably.  She says I'm absolutely meaningless to her but I bet if I submitted anything to a show she was judging she would take great delight in rejecting it just because she has power and likes to use it to grind people into the dirt. And if this imaginary scenario came to pass I'm sure she would post something in the encaustic group just to let me know she did it on purpose.  She's that kind of awful.

I have 4 followers.  You guys rock.  Thank for letting me vent.

PAINTERSLOFT: May/June

PAINTERSLOFT: May/June

May/June

I'm attempting to be a bit more regular with posting on my blog. Our garden is producing so much that we can't eat it all so we are canning and freezing  veggies nearly every day something needs to be picked. 

really big beets

happy plants

happy tortoise

and I am still making my books. I have a stack I am going to put on Etsy in the store.

books for the store

folded stitched decorative paper pamphlet

Art Journaling & Books

For the last two years I have been concerned with art in books. I have learned how to sew signatures, do coptic stitches, make five fold leporello accordion books, make single sheet flexagon books. Its been somewhat of an obsession. Less about projects or process and more about how colors or textures or collage feels. I bought a pour mold and used my blender to make sheets of paper. I bound my own books and it was deeply satisfying. As an artist I have tried to create images to send out as ambassadors into the world. My books are much closer to my heart. They only serve to please me.

Pink Girl

In my newest journaling adventures I have been doing more drawing along with decoration and text .

Spanish Chica

I have been looking at Chicano influences like retablos and ex votos and milagros and tatoo art/chicano art.  So in my journal I collaged and spanish chica girl the other day.  Most of the spanish people I knew in South Florida liked contrasts like really bold bright colors or black and gold.  So I drew my chica in black gelpen and gold ink pen. she is a mucho gusto pretty chica.

Good or Bad Art?

I recently joined an artist's guild that is centered around the idea of Beauty.  The artist's who started this guild are well respected painters who have taught others to paint during their careers and they have sought to produce artwork of a very high caliber both technically and aesthetically speaking.  They have a belief in the idea they call Abstract Realism.  While I don't wish to go into all the aspects of Abstract Realism, it is worth noting that the authors of this ideal believe that at it's core a work of art must be beautiful in it's conception.

"The struggle to captivate the elusiveness of beauty in all its expressions has yielded some of the most compelling paintings known to man. With the recent return to Realism, there is now a visual point-of-view in which subject matter is a vehicle—not the reason—for painting."

These artists have, for themselves, developed a strong direction of artistic expression.  They are influential representatives of their style of artistic expression and other artists, collectors , galleries and museums respect their point of view.  However theirs is not the only type of artwork being shown in galleries, museums, art centers, nor is it even popular among the majority of people alive today.

Ordinary people are capable of making something creative.  Give anyone a box of colored pencils and a sheet of paper and they will attempt to color something.  So universally popular is the idea of self expression and creativity that craft stores are now a staple in almost every community.  What is not available in a local store can be found easily on the internet.  Books and DVDS on every known kind of crafting are available in bookstores and online.  National, local and regional events are staged regularly to promote the sale of materials and educate the public and newly crowned experts are available to guide you through workshops to help you learn to use the material to create.

There really is no place for the so-called Art Brut artist anymore.  We are in a time when access to materials and qualified instruction make learning to create almost anything possible. To pretend to be unschooled and a genius in creative expression one would have to live without access to a television,  a library or the internet.

At the other end of this spectrum the artists who start studying their craft at an early age and devote themselves to  artist training for life are finding it much harder to compete with the tide of self expression coming from ordinary people who have been given time, materials, instruction and encouragement to find their inner voice and are leaping onto the bandwagon. Making art yourself has become a billion dollar industry.

This is a cultural struggle for expressive dominance.  Over time those who study art dispassionately will decide who won the battle for this age.  A hundred years in the future people will look back at this time of creative clashes and some names will be prominent while countless others will have disappeared entirely.  My 16 year old nephew likes Frank Sinatra and Dizzy Gillespie because he plays a video game where zombies in the desert are fought while Frankie and Dizzy sing and play swing jazz but he has no idea who Bing Crosby is or Danny Kay although he has heard a song by Dean Martin.  my nephew has no idea what jazz is, why it mattered or how it shaped our musical taste.  He just likes the songs and now listens to swing on Pandora on his android phone. I have plastic square drink coasters in my living room with images from Claude Monet like the famous "Waterlilies" painting.  High art has devolved.  Images have the value of the item they are imprinted on.  If I find an image online of some piece of art I like it can be saved to my computer and for a relatively small fee I can have it digitally printed onto canvas or a good quality paper, a mug or a t shirt.  The inks used will remain viable for seventy years.  That's a long wait until the image deteriorates and loses any initial value.

My point is that the idea of artist is going the way of the dinosaur.  Artists aren't special, aren't geniuses, aren't even relevant on a daily basis. Unless you are a very driven individual you will never achieve enough prominence to become famous and fame is the only way to gain an audience for your artwork.  Anything lower will make you a work a day 1099 contractor.  I don't say this to diminish being an artist but bucking a billion dollar crafting market that has mass appeal is daunting.  A beloved 75 year old mainstay artist magazine recently was bought, well eaten alive, by a crafting conglomerate interested only in establishing online shopping malls for crafters.  the conglomerate had no use for the magazine itself apparently and abruptly discontinued it's existence but kept it's advertisers and subscribers and threw them all into the pot for consumption.  Art is another consumable commodity.   Everybody is an artist - it's the new mantra.  I spent the majority of my life working diligently at my art craft wondering when the day would come that I could describe myself as an "artist." Spending hours drawing from life, studying color theory, learning about different mediums and spending thousands of dollars on materials for the painting mediums.  Entering juried shows, winning a few ribbons for my work, joining arts groups, spending money to do all that and still always wondering when I would get the green light. I finally realized there was no one moment that would define me as artist.  Now every person I meet tells me they have developed artist skills after taking a class or buying some paints or colored pencils.  I read magazines filled with stories of women who have found their "inner artist" and are splashing paint or stamping inks or collaging images with great zeal.  I ran a race in life devoted to mastering skills that nobody needs or cares about.  People stopped caring about what makes someone an artist and just started doing whatever felt right to them.   They didn't feel like they had to live up to any standard.

I think that creativity might be something everyone should try to develop.  Maybe the ideas of having a rigorous professional training before you can be considered a true creator aren't valid anymore.  I don't miss having to run the art race anymore.  I feel pretty good about doing what I know how to do even if nobody thinks what I do is very special, or artistic, or even good.  I think I've traded Ashes for Beauty.  I am who I was created to be and my creativity is an aspect of me but not the definition of me.

Why did  I join an art guild if art is just for everybody and self expression trumps artistic aesthetics?  Well it's not an easy answer.  I have the option of doing both is probably the easiest way to explain my decision.  I can walk in their world because I understand what they are offering to the world and to other artists.   Unfortunately for most of the wider groups of people flinging paint in their daily lives they wouldn't be able to cope with the guild's skill set.  I have honed my skills over my life and I may not be as great a painter as the founders of the guild; I'm not a genius like Rembrandt but I am a painter skilled enough to at least follow their principles.

I hope my paintings are done well enough that they survive my lifetime with grace and go on to have value outside of their association with me.  perhaps it is that ability to endure that makes art good.  Time will tell.

Translater or Transmitter

I recently posted in a discussion forum on ArtWanted where I've had an online portfolio since 2004.  The Art Discussion was about "Everyone being an artist" which is actually problematic for the majority of people because so many people have a sense that art is only really art if it's "good."  Really? Okay then define good art so everybody can tell what to look for.  At this point people usually resort to comfortable blandness and say things like, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," or they get defensive and may say, "I know good art when I see it." "I know what I like."

Okay, maybe we do know what we like in a piece of art but why are some artists revered while others are completely forgotten?  Probably the greatest figurative artist of the later half of the 20th century, according to a majority of art historians, was a guy whose claim to fame was dubbed the screaming popes.  Google this: artist who painted the screaming popes. Immediately the first return will be the 1953 study after Diego Velasquez' Pope Innocent X by artist Frances Bacon. Bacon was so enamoured of the Velasquez picture that he painted variations of his own interpretation 45 times in a 20 year period. Most of these images are grotesque in the extreme and there's nothing sacred or popelike or even sane about the garish images. They are visual nightmares.  Margaret Thatcher described him as, "that man who paints those dreadful pictures."  So okay he wasn't popular with the majority of people yet after his death his entire messy studio building was taken apart and everything was transported to Dublin and lovingly reconstructed exactly as he left it.  Even the trash was included.  His work spoke to people in some way beyond visual appreciation.  He touched a nerve.

So this is the gist of what I posted the other day.  I include it here as an image since we don't allow right clicking on the AW site anymore.  I had to prt scrn and save it as a jpg image.

The Earl was Earl Cunningham.  Look him up to see what his art looks like. I ended that post by talking about art journaling.  Before 2011 I had never even heard the term.  I stumbled across these videos on youtube that described how different people created their journal pages and I was amazed at the inventive techniques they often employed in ways that made sense to them to accomplish their vision.

I have always tried to do my own artwork with as much technical proficiency as I am capable of.  In this sense I am "good." In this sense, also, I am mostly a translator of what I see.  It's much more difficult to be a transmitter.  Your work might not look very proficient.  It might look weird to you in many ways.  It might look like something a child did.  It might also bring you and others great wonder or joy.  It is the releasing of something intangible.  Something not born of skills but born of heart and soul.  It might even be a little bit scary to let go and dive in.  I have tried to let go and sometimes I feel lost, confused and uncertain as i try to feel my way from mark to mark. It's also exhilarating to not have to be in charge but to let some inner impulse take over.