Everybody loves to paint pictures. The “Joy of Painting” is in full bloom in this
country. The late Bob Ross would be so
proud of the burgeoning industry he helped create. The Internet is awash with artist’s websites,
blogs and how-to videos promoting this extremely pleasurable activity. Scratch one cheerleading blog and it leads to 20
others. Making art is an all-consuming
passion. And it helps keep our minds off
troubling world affairs that we can’t do anything about anyway.
The problem is what to do with all the paintings you create. You can’t sell them all, and sometimes you
can’t even give them away. Storage capacity is never adequate. It is hard to
believe people are so blind to their merits, considering all the heart and soul and enthusiasm that went into creating them.
But even you don’t like them so much after you are done with them. Then when
you dig one out of storage years later, it looks better than anything you are
painting today. What happened to the joy of
painting?
As a self-employed artist, I must try to sell my paintings. Despite my deep love of the painting process
and unabashed conviction that I am a companion on a spiritual journey with the
great painters who came before, I must candidly admit that my traditional oil
paintings are way down on the list of essentials for a civilization survival
kit.
Nonetheless, many people still like to decorate their walls with paintings of one sort or another. And
a few collectors get genuine emotional satisfaction from looking at original oil
paintings that fall within their highly selective aesthetic range. We are fortunate if our work attracts one or
two of them when we are getting started.
The rent must be paid and art supplies replenished, after all.
Art investors, on the other hand, like to speculate that the
painter they collect will be the next Jean Paul Basquiat or Gerhard Richter,
and that a fortune awaits at Sotheby’s or Christie’s when their work is ultimately
put up for auction. You may have heard that Richter’s enormous, tediously
worked, purposely fuzzy, black and white oil painting copy of a black and white photograph
of a Milan plaza recently sold for
$37 million at Sotheby’s, setting a new auction record for a living
artist. The buyer was a Napa
Valley vineyard owner who said the 9
foot square work “just knocks me over.” The
previous owners of this painting probably felt the same way, as will the next
owner of this painting. These great
works of contemporary art are so beloved by their owners that they like to
recycle them through the auction houses on a regular basis to give others the
chance to get “knocked over” before they arrive at their final destination,
some world-class museum as a generous, fully tax-deductible bequest from the
estate of a prominent collector.
These investors tend not to come knocking on the studio
doors of painters of traditional subject matter – onions, apples, blue and
white ginger jars, and the like. I don’t
really care. I’ve never had much
interest in making money, but I’ve always made sure I’ve had just enough of it
to get by on so I can continue painting pictures. And I don’t consider myself a disillusioned
artist at all, since I’ve never marketed my work hard enough to get to that
state of discontent.
Unlike a lot of artists I’ve met, however, I’ve never had a
family to support. Too many talented
young artists have had to work full time in other fields to support their
families. One guy I knew supported his
family by painting houses for a living, while continuing to paint still lifes
in his spare time. Louie was a
passionate Italian with a rugged face and broken nose, who was
prone to brief episodic seizures when startled by someone’s approach. Louie couldn’t get gallery representation for
his paintings. He told me he was making
the rounds of the Midtown galleries with his portfolio one day and was getting rejections
at all of them. When he walked into one gallery,
the elderly owner took one look at him and cried out, “Michelangelo,” and
fainted dead away. The Avon
ladies get much better receptions cold-calling their products. The last time I saw Louie he told me he was
no longer painting pictures. “I’m not
going to paint any more pictures until I’ve sold all the ones I’ve already
painted,” he said. Good luck with that!
Some of us “starving artists” envy the way painters have
been treated in other countries, particularly those in the Communist bloc
during the Cold War era. Those terrific
Russian artists had to paint a few pro forma portraits of Lenin and Stalin, of
course, but they had plenty of art supplies and models and time to paint some beautiful
figurative paintings, being descendants of the great Repin and Kramskoi, giants
of painting from the pre-Soviet era whose influence continues today in Russia and China. A similar system of largesse for artists
was operated by the Dutch government for years.
Unlike the Russians, though, the liberal Dutch may have been too generous. Many of the artists spent most of their time
lolling around cafés in the 1970s, I was told.
The last of the subsidies ended in 2012. Here in America,
I am hopelessly lost in the unprincipled aisles of capitalism’s free
market.
For those of us smitten by Robert Henri’s “The Art Spirit”
and similar inspirational pep talks, it is unfortunate that most people don’t
care at all if the painting they buy was painted entirely from life by an
artist using his own two eyes and brain and brush handling skills to interpret
the scene before him. They don’t care if
the painting was copied from a photograph or created entirely on a computer. It doesn’t matter. If it looks good, it is good, paraphrasing
Duke Ellington’s quote about music. As
with most things in this morally bankrupt world, the bottom line is Machiavelli’s
observation that the end justifies the means, no matter how mechanical and
inartistic the result may seem to more sentient beings like yours truly. Most folks just want their paintings, prints, posters,
photographs or collages to remind them of their beloved pet dog, a
trip to the Mojave Desert, a scene in a Disney movie, a ride on a San Francisco
cable car, or whatever. Nostalgia is a
powerful sentiment.
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| Peonies, Oil on Canvas, 20x24" |
Meanwhile, your own pretty good painting of peonies,
which you knocked out in three hours in the throes of intense passion before
the flowers wilted, and which warranted a victory dance to the crescendo of the
tune playing on your cassette tape deck, better match the color of the client’s
walls or it’s not leaving your studio. That’s
the reality we learn early on in our careers.
You resign yourself to the fact that two framed “original” oil paintings
produced in some sweat shop in China
and purchased for a total of $50 at a mall warehouse in suburban New
Jersey are about all the fine art most people can
take in one lifetime. You want a copy of any oil painting ever painted? Just click on one of those Chinese art factory websites. Some people combine
their vacation cruises with a trip to the ocean liner’s art salon where the
wares of “internationally known” artists are hawked immodestly.
Before dealers took control of the art market in the late 19th
Century and opened Pandora’s box, the only subjects fit for painting were fruits
and vegetables, flowers, trees, mountain ranges, buildings and people. And the paintings had to look pretty close to
the real thing as it existed in nature or you wouldn’t be getting much business
in that earlier fiefdom of artists. Now you
can paint anything you feel like any way you want using any reference material at
your disposal, call your work original art and sell tons of it, providing you
are adept at marketing and self-promotion and are in several top-notch galleries around the country.
So how does an ethical oil painter who wants to remain true
to his abiding love of creating paintings only from life, taking all his
inspiration from nature, just as Robert Henri and his contemporaries did, fare
in a market where “skim milk masquerades as cream” and anything goes and nobody
cares? Don’t ask me right now. I’m thinking about troublesome world
affairs that I can’t do anything about either.
