The Thing About Artists Is. . . Part 2
Still a WIP
Nope I’m not done yet but getting closer. Which is good because I’m getting a little tired of working on it. I’ve got to figure out where I want my grassy shadows and make them stand out a little more. Also I have a line in the grass that needs to be worked with. Other than that it is pretty much finished.
The grass has been mind numbingly slow, which reminds me why I developed my style so long ago. I got bored doing the background part so I kept cropping and cropping. When I do a painting like this, I say “Oh yeah, that’s right. I hate doing backgrounds with no contrasting elements” You’d think I would remember that.
Too real, too common
I sent a jpeg to my equine artist friend Barb McGee. She said she loved it, and it was the best that I’ve done (her work leans heavily toward realism) and then added her suggestions for improvement.
I emailed back, thanked her for her suggestions, told her I agreed with much of it. But then said that this isn’t my best work, nor is it my most realistic (though it’s in the running.) I hope it sells well and I am overall pretty pleased with it so far.
But this piece’s major flaw is, it is too common an image and too realistic. By too realistic I mean for judges. I won’t ever use this piece for competition or jury selection for any artfair I do. Not because I think it is weak or less a piece of “Art” than say Cowgirl. But because most judges will think that it is. Right or wrong that is how it works in my little section of the map. (This was the subject on which I have so many cranky stories that I mentioned in yesterdays post. Oh yes, I could tell you stories.)
I may strive for realism on one piece and then embrace color and impressionism on the next because I like challenging myself. I try to see how far I can push my personal boundaries with color usage and then again with hyper realism. I use images like Cowgirl for judging and images like my colt for making money. Cowgirl will sell but chances are not as well as the colt. (I am speaking about volume numbers of print sales. Both originals should sell easily. In fact already had someone want to buy Cowgirl out of the gallery but I’m holding on to her for a little while.)
A story I will tell
So much of the animosity from the income study comments came from the differences between art elitists who would like to sell their work, but struggle because it doesn’t connect with the majority of the public. And the sellers of traditional work (like myself) who receive derision from those who can’t. (Why is that anyway? Elephant dung on canvas is avant garde while a floral is fodder for the unenlightened. Oops there I go.)
In the end, I think it often depends on which side of the fence you’re sitting on. Here’s my favorite example.
We have a college in the area that offers art instruction. A long time, much loved and much respected teacher of this college recently retired from teaching. (He has taught many of the artists in the area) And so now has time to work on selling his art. (which is quite good) He does art fairs and a few gallery shows. At a reception for a gallery show he said . . . (again paraphrasing here) “I know I always told you that your art should not be a reflection of what the public thinks it wants. (long pause) I was wrong.” He didn’t explain it much other than now that he is trying to sell it, he understands.
You might even say, he is now “enlightened.”
That makes sense. What judges want is often shaped by their personal taste and by the entire history of art if they’ve got degrees. Some of that is always subjective.
It’s almost pot luck if the subjects that move the artist include subjects that have popular appeal. Some of the things I do have great popular appeal. Kittens and birds. But when I start getting into esoterica like still-wet newborn kittens, something that to me has an overpowering joy and emotion, it only reaches other hard-core cat nuts who’ve raised kittens and most of the people who want a fluffy kitten are looking at the blind squirming wet thing wondering why I put that much work into it.
We’re not any of us painting for the public at large anyway.
We’re painting for people who share our particular real interests. I’d like to do more prehistoric animals. I’m working up to doing prehistoric animals. When I get to the point where I can compose them well completely from imagination — because there are just no real models to be had and anything like that is some other artist’s concept — then I may start to reach a small niche of people who also love dinosaurs and Pleistocene mammals and so on.
And it’ll go right past anyone who doesn’t. By loving horses, you tap a huge market of people who share your feelings. If it was aardvarks it would be a narrow niche.
My daughter also made the point that people in general respond to positive images — to art that shows a good side of life on a pure animal level. Paintings of landscapes free of billboards and often with lots of game animals sell, and people want to live with them.
For some reason though my big cats didn’t sell as well as I thought they would for how well they were done — and my daughter said it was because to live with, they’d be a little threatening, a large predator right loose in your house. It takes a cat nut to see that the tiger’s in a good mood, someone familiar with cat body language. And then to be so fond of tigers that it overcomes the discomfort of having a life size one on their walls. They sell well when I do them small, but when I did them life sized it was a very different matter!
Yet maybe I should’ve just gone directly to a zoo or natural history museum with those old pastels, where they might fit right in with the exhibits and fit context. Once art leaves the artist, it’s in the context it’s going to and marketing it is just finding that context.
Angry young people are very comforted by dark art — dark subjects, angry themes and so on are a relief to someone going through a lot of personal trouble and rage especially in situations where that’s denied and eveyrone’s pressuring them to be happy when they’re not.
Some of those grow up to be avant garde wealthy and want something no one else has… and then that’s where the high-priced elephant dung shock art comes in, it’s someone trying to push the boundaries when they’ve already gone down and arguments over “what is the proper subject for art” have been kicked apart for over a century. Some of why it doesn’t appeal to me is that it’s flogging a dead horse. People paint what they want to now, and have for a very long time.
But decades ago in art classes in college that could not include the artist wanting to paint anything that would be popular in Southern Living or anything like that — any subjects that nonartists really love. The artist is supposed to only want to break taboos and can’t have some side of personality that just resonates with baby foals or fluffy kittens. It’s all a big social game.
Art pricing is very subjective and rests on reputation, so the judges are important and the competitions help establish value. You may be right that this isn’t a competition piece — but only on that prejudice because the painting itself is absolutely splendid. I’m not even into horses per se or baby things unless they’re cats, and I love this foal.
Robert says alot an says it well, I agree with his observations as stated above. I am glad, Mona, that the artist that is you does what your do. I love your work, I also think it has a uniqueness to it. If your subject sell well, all the more credit to you and your art, I say. I do appreciate your observations, though — much food for thought and understanding of the art culture(s). I am glad that you do “both: kinds of art.
Thanks Angela and Robert, I probably should have clarified that I don’t think my looser works is more elitist in nature. It just just a little more “outside-the-box.” Or at least as outside as I get.