America, where gimmicks trump genuine achievement

When people talk about artist Scott Wade's dirty pictures they are not referring to the salacious content but to his preferred medium, grimy car windshields. I have to admit this is an amusing idea, particularly when the subject is the reinterpretation of a renaissance masterpiece like Boticelli's Venus.

But browsing through his site, one eventually has to confront a question like this: Aside from the choice of medium, how good is he as an artist? In this country it sometimes appears that we value cleverness over actual achievement, wit over work.

Maybe Marshal McLuhan was right. The medium is the message.

Hands and arms

There is nothing better than working on that at which you are weakest. Hands? Noses? Ears? If they are a weak point it's good to hit the weakness head-on and work on it until it's no longer a weakness.

Marcello

From Saturday afternoon at the Art Students League in New York. A long pose, about an hour and 20 minutes.

Diana in the American Wing at the Met

Quick sketch. Kinda makes Diana look like she's standing on a stack of books, doesn't it. Oh well, a 15 minute sketch from the cafe in the enclosed courtyard there. Very relaxing spot.

'The Mourners' at the Met

In the group of artists with whom I associate, everybody is talking about the show of drawings by Bronzino at the Met. It is an unusual and perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime show that brings together all of the 70 or so drawings known by this artist.

OK, I did see the show but maybe I'm a bit jaded, or maybe it's because I've been looking at reproductions of many of these drawings for years. Maybe it was that stuffy, claustrophobic, dark room where the Met holds all of its drawing shows, but I was not as excited as I expected to be.

The show that DID excite me is on the first floor in the Met's Medieval Galleries and it's simply called "The Mourners." The mourners in question are a series of 37 or so alabaster sculptures created by Jean de la Huerta and Antoine Le Moiturier for the base of the tomb of John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy. They were created in the mid-15th century and most are in exquisite condition after 560 years.

Part of the charm experienced when viewing these sculptures is that they are each only about 16 inches tall. Another part of the magic is the dramatic manner in which the Met has lit them. Follow this link to the Met's description the show and look for the further link there to the FRAME display online which will allow viewers to rotate each of these little masterpieces 360 degrees.

Saturday afternoon

No matter what else has gone on during the rest of the week, I know that on Saturday afternoon I can drop into a zen-like state as I try to render the human form as observed in the model's poses at the Art Students League. The League has been in operation since the 1870s and has occupied its current building since 1898. The studio where we draw is on the second floor across from the gallery. I was told that our second floor studio was used at one time by William Merritt Chase, among others. But the roster of students who've studied there is as impressive as the faculty.

James Lancel McElhinney teaches anatomy and drawing the human figure there and I've been working as his monitor for a couple of years now. For more info on the class and what it has to offer follow this link to our Facebook page.

Nobody doesn't like Banksy

OK, maybe Queen Elizabeth doesn't like Banksy. And maybe if you're the building landlord, depending on what image he puts on your wall, you might not like Banksy. But it's hard not to love the work of an anonymous graffiti artist who has this much wit and such a comprehensive command of potent imagery as this fellow has. The image above, done in New York City, is rumored to have been commissioned by the building owner.

His work is in a number of museums. Or was, anyway. In some, it only stayed for a couple of hours before the guards noticed that something new had been smuggled into the place and surreptitiously stuck on the wall.

Banksy is the nom de brush of a so-far-unidentified British graffiti artist who is believed to be male and born about 1974. His renderings can be witty and edgy commentaries on our consumer culture but they can just as easily be damning political commentary. They are never mundane.

Executed quickly with the aid of large-scale, pre-cut stencils and a limited palette of spray-paint colors, Banksy's works, when they can be removed or pried loose from their building exteriors, have sometimes commanded sums in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, though it's not clear that the artist himself realizes any of that profit.

Soon we'll get to see a film made with his co-operation. Exit Through the Gift Shop is scheduled for release, Spring, 2010.

There's a link to his own web-site here, which includes the trailer for the movie, graffiti he has posted around the world and photos of Banksy art in museums.

Channeling Vermeer

The painter Jonathan Janson does an amazing job channeling the spirit of Jan Vermeer in the creation of his nonetheless rather contemporary paintings. (His website here.)

You might be surprised to know that Janson is not shy about sharing the secrets of painting like this old master. His website offers discs and a book on how to imitate the working method and technique of the 17th century Delft painter. The book is a very worthy effort, but like a lot of self-published books it suffers terribly from a lack of editing. (The copy I bought has substantial groups of pages that were cut and pasted to reappear in other places in the book as if Janson was not quite sure where they really belonged.) Nonetheless, his gist of the method is reasonably presented and very workable for the average painter.

Janson's affection for Vermeer goes even further in his highly developed website, the Essential Vermeer, which includes a number of quite useful devices seldom encountered on the internet, like a scale comparison of each of Vermeer's paintings and a thorough discussion of Vermeer's probable use of the camera obsucra.

Lucian Freud, a shy painter speaks

What looks like a fascinating film about Lucian Freud will be released next week in Paris to coincide with the artist's birthday. Called The God of Small Things, Lucian Freud Captured on Film was put together by Tim Meara. There is a trailer for the film that one can see on the website, Painting Perceptions, maintained by Larry Groff, here.

Groff has also put up an extensive and thoughtful multi-part video interview that will provide considerable insight into the work of this artist, whom Robert Hughes called "our greatest living painter." The normally shy and somewhat reclusive Freud was filmed in 1988 for that interview.