WHAT IS STYLE?
By the 1980s, I had been making art already for fifteen years when I learned there was a gallery on Madison Avenue that, once every month, hosted an open house for unknown artists. It was a chance to show your work to a curator. If the curator liked it, a show might follow. Armed with a selection of slides, I waited nervously until it was my turn to show what I had done.
The curator looked attentively at every image, and. perplexed, turned to me and said: “ Your work is interesting but you don’t have a style. You need a style.”
Read MoreSigning a Painting
Why do I resist signing my name to a painting? I can’t be the only artist with this problem. I wait and wait, sometimes years, until I can barely recall when I actually completed the work.
Read MoreI was reading John Elderfield’s excellent book, “The Drawings of Henri Matisse,” and came across a Matisse quotation that attracted my attention. Matisse said that In his earliest works he
“found something that was always the same which at first glance I thought to be monotonous repetition. It was the mark of my personality which appeared the same no matter what different states of mind I happened to have passed through.”
Finding and then defining this “monotonous quality” is not an easy task.
Read MoreART THAT RATTLES
Long ago I read that art is inherently revolutionary because it challenges the viewer to rethink past assumptions about reality. The artist, in effort to find personal expression, presents a new vision or language which rattles earlier precepts, and forces the world to see itself anew.
Read MoreCollaging Guston & Dubuffet
What fascinates me most about making collages is how disparate elements interact with one another to create something entirely different, unexpected, than the individual parts. The process is like a mystery unfolding in front of your eyes. And the artist is the detective. Frequently, some unnoticed mark, color or line in one element interacts with another in a way that hadn’t been anticipated. Collages have this wonderful surprise that keeps me coming back for more (Work/Collages).
In this blog, I wish to create a collage of words chosen, somewhat randomly, from the essays, lectures or interviews of two of my favorite artists: Philip Guston and Jean Dubuffet. My hope is that the juxtaposition of their words will sharpen our understanding of each artist while also broadening our view of art, and how it is made.
I will be quoting JD from the MOMA publication The Work of Jean Dubuffet, by Peter Selz with texts by the artist, and Philip Guston, Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations, edited by Clark Coolidge.
Read More
