This morning, I grabbed a coffee from the local shop to the train station. In there, I found a flier called 'Coffee News'. In that, not surprisingly, were some adverts. I thought, "Hmmm, it's only a single page, local distribution, the ads are probably cheap. I'll take a copy." Of course, something called 'news' needs some editorial content, but as you can imagine, the space allocated was small. In fact there were only three articles with any meat. Hold that a moment, when I say 'meat' think more cocktail bite than porterhouse steak. Nevertheless, it was encouraging to see that this publication was popular with the fine arts.
For example, there is the annual gnome convention in the Australian NSW Glenbrook Park. I kid not! The 'Free Weekly Coffee News' has balls. So I read on. There is an art exhibition in Hornsby, represeted by six local artists and properly curated. It's free. I might take a look. Then this: A black lab named Marvin is painting pictures with his tail in Rhode Island. It continues to explain that the talented pooch is raising money for his local animal shelter. Let's see how this is done: The dog's wagging tail quickly created a work of art. G I V E M E A B R E A K ! -- what the heck is going on here? While it's all fine and dandy to raise money for some worthy cause like an animal shelter, and it's fine too to sell paint marks on a peice of paper caused by a wagging dog's tail dipped in paint, let's PLEASE not call it art. This is degrading. This is sad, and this is wrong. I might not be quite as annoyed but for the fact that there is a local artist scurrying arround producing purile thoughtless incipid 'abstracts' - some of which may be indistinguishable from Marvin's portfolio, and unfortunately seems to be making a few sales. We must remember, such activity is ONLY on the backs of great trail-blazng visionary painters and this sort of trash could not possibly stand on its own. To be applauded are those who paint abstract, but on the basis of stellar ability in the production of realistic works; those who have learned color, composition, form, texture, vibrancy, hue, impact, weight and balance. There are those who can produce an abstract that makes the viewer weep for unexplained reasons. To be sure, there is a lot of 'art' out there, and we are happy about that, but perhaps there is a little too much tail-wagging.
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spOOkspOOk's art is owned by Jeremy. He has practiced drawing and painting for about 40 years, and might get good at it one day. spOOk's art is focused on graphite portraits. Archives
October 2016
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