ART

If you spend time with philosophers, navel gazing as one of my friends would say; it’s easy to get caught up in long-running, compound sentences that close every loop hole, define every slippery term and then, once you’ve boiled every assumption away, you have to repeat the treatise several times to detail what it was that you were discussing in the first place. Falling off the wagon is the chance you take and digressing into passionate expressions of some related issue is the penalty. After a while, after many disagreements and borderline arguments someone will observe, “I thought we were talking about This, or That,” and folks will nod respectfully, to resume their ‘Navel Gazing.’  

Art is such a simple little, three letter word but it embraces such a wide community and range of work that it surely would seem it deserves a multisyllabic word with a liberal array of x’s and q’s. Like philosophy, it’s easy enough to find two people who agree but its hard to find three. When people grow narrow or old they tend to either funnel their ideas and center themselves in a minuscule comfort zone or, they can do just the opposite. This is particularly true when it comes to art and music. Music is after all an art form but some would disagree thus I make this disclaimer. I find it ironic that we loved the outrageous, sexually charged music of Little Richard and Chuck Berry, to our parent’s disgust. Now most of my peers connect with a  similar revulsion for Hip-Hop and Rap. It’s not that the new stuff is bad, we’re just old. If there is a universal truth about Art it’s that the product reflects the culture, regardless of what we think or like. 

In college I did a research paper on Hans Holbein, a 16th Century, Flemish painter. He was a portrait painter, mostly of royalty or the newly privileged middle class. He was good, well compensated but he hated his clients. The rich reveled at their own likeness, displayed on walls in gold leaf frames for everyone to admire but they were condescending, inconsiderate and rude. By the 16th Century, artists knew very well how the eye is drawing into a painting and how, through design and placement, the artist can compliment or insult the people they painted. Holbein was known for placing a dog in the prime position as a way of conveying his low opinion of the subject; they were subordinated by the dog. Artists understand their genre and medium. They are the best judges of what has merit and what does not. We are better educated to the arts than the Dukes & Barons of medieval Europe but not particularly open minded about what we don’t understand. 

The advent of the camera freed artists to go beyond the literal, to create a new, visual landscape. If you don’t like the work of Jackson Pollack or Picasso, maybe Andy Warhol is easier to digest. His painting of the Campbell Soup can or his Gumball Machines are unmistakable and require no backstory. But the Soup Can and Gumball Machine are as abstract as Picasso’s woman with three eyes and no mouth. My old paintings have long since bit the dust. I do still have a small, white grease pencil on black paper drawing that won a prize. Maybe someday I’ll frame it and hang it somewhere. I have dabbled with the camera for a long time but not until the digital revolution have I been able to take it seriously. That sense of how the eye is drawn into the image works for the camera as well as the brush. Then you have Photo Shop, software that allows the artist to tweak color and lines, contrast and texture. Old school photographers look down their noses at the digital format. They are so invested in their dark rooms and the culture of Ansel Adams that they don’t want to consider anything new or different. I think it’s part of a growing old, narrow, comfort zone malady. I love Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lang but I leave space for new growth. I’d rather my feel for the arts be like the great cottonwood tree behind my house than the neatly trimmed bushes in my neighbor’s yard. 

My photographs are on display this month at a gallery in Kansas City. The raw photo is where I begin. It still requires the eye be keen in positioning the camera and framing the image. Auto-mode takes care of all the settings and some would say that’s where you lose the craft but I don’t think so. I get to play with the elements and tweak the settings after the fact. In the end, my purpose is and has always been to please the eye, not some self absorbed notion about sustaining tradition. Some of my shots are so common they need no title while others hang on the edge of abstraction. It’s simple, just like it has always been; if it makes you think and it pleases, then you like it. If you don’t like it, then you don’t like it. You are not required to like a piece of Art but that does not speak to theArt. It reflects your eye and your predisposition to the work. My show will be coming down in a couple of weeks. A few pieces have sold and with luck a few more will go. I will print and frame more and we will show them again.