Standing left to right -William Merritt Chase,Frank Benson, Edmund Tarbell, Thomas Dewing, Joseph De Camp. Seated left to right - Edward Simmons, Willard Metcalf, Childe Hassam, Alden Weir, Robert Reid

What a great photograph (1908 – courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum Photo Archives).

In the late 1800′s a group of painters banded together to provide themselves an association that approved of Impressionism, the period’s cutting edge, and mounted quality exhibitions.  Leaving the confines of  The Society of American Artists, they were dubbed “The Ten” by newspapers, although the New York Times headline ran “Eleven Painters Secede”.  At their first meeting in 1898, they were Childe Hassam, John Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Frank Benson, Joseph de Camp, Thomas Dewing, Willard Metcalf, Robert Reid, Edmund Simmons, and Edmund Tarbell.   Winslow Homer had been invited but declined due to his distaste for organizations, and Abbott Thayer had been one of the group Society seceders, but preferred not to be part. There were no by-laws, no paperwork, and no officers.  There was an agreement that all members would  participate in an annual exhibition, and new members would be invited unanimously ( William Merritt Chase).

Not all members were impressionists, notably Dewing, a tonalist,who enjoyed the camaraderie of the group.  Alden Weir, who had remarked in the 1880′s that Impressionism “was worse than a chamber of horrors”, had changed his stripes.  All had studied in Europe and in Paris, specifically, which was de rigueur in the late 19th Century art world.  All painted until their deaths.  Robert Reid and Edmund Simmons turned much of their skill toward mural painting.  Most taught.  Chase started the Chase School which became Parsons New School for Design.

In an example of revolt, the exhibitions were hung in the new style which allowed ample room between paintings providing the viewers room to appreciate the individuality of the painters, rather than floor to ceiling, wall to wall.  Most exhibitions were held in New York and traveled to Boston, but the tenth which was mounted at the Pennsylvania Academy (where Chase was then teaching) showed 100 paintings representing all members. This, the largest of all the exhibitions, considered now to be the height of The Ten, was greeted with disappointment from the ever-jaded critics who said that the artists had “too restrictive a circle” and needed “external influence”.   The twenty-first and final exhibition was at the Corcoran in Washington DC where Tarbell was director of the Corcoran School.

In 1902, a New York Times article said The Ten “appear to live in some realm apart from mankind where the important things are not the struggle for existence or the Boer War, but whether Jack Jones has succeeded in painting a child in full sunlight just right…”  Sounds like they were living right.

Welcome to The Greenbrier

You may have thought that West Virginia was the height of rustic – and of course, you’re right.  Partly right, that is.  It’s about time you were introduced to “America’s Resort” – The Greenbrier.

The Greenbrier is over 230 years old and has aged in that magnificent way reserved for much loved places.  Thousands of acres of deep-rooted luxury tucked into the woods and mountains of southeastern West Virginia.  The Greenbrier was born as a health spa centering around the waters of the White Sulphur Springs – and relaxation.  The resort grew in prestige during the reign of the railroad magnates, serving ever more of the elegant, powerful, elite, and famous.  With over 700 rooms, history, horses, and an authentically gracious and dutiful staff, The Greenbrier is a five star resort on a very big scale.

Did I leave out golf?  You already knew about The Greenbrier Classic, didn’t you.  Fishing?  Take your pick: genteel fly fishing on grounds in Howard Creek or rough and ready native trout fishing – if you’re really nice to the locals.

The morning walking to work at The Greenbrier.  Life is tough.….	Paradise Row at The Greenbrier, built in 1832

The Greenbrier is the new home of Walls Fine Art Gallery, too.  David and I look forward to seeing you at the Artists’ Colony on Alabama Row.

Wow.  Skateboarding and Plein Air Painting Prohibited!  Leave-no-trace has long been a camping phrase, but evidently some plein air painters need to take a lesson.  Oregon has clearly had enough of painters coming to enjoy the scenery and leaving a potentially toxic mess behind.  Plein air painting has had a great bandwagon following that lacks some foundational instruction – not all of it in painting.

Take all you brought and leave all you found.

Do not use tree trunks to wipe your brush (blazes are not your job).  Donot drag your wet palette or canvas through underbrush or grasses.  Do not use leaves or grasses to wipe out your containers.  Do not dump any thinner or medium.  Wildlife will not sit for portraits and they may not take kindly to your being in their living room.  Do not expect to be able to drive all the way to your painting site, and don’t try.  Don’t leave TP flowers behind!  (pack along a ziplock for that)  Set up where you have the space behind you to back up and look at your progress without trampling the vegetation.

Editing is your job – leave rocks, limbs, and tree trunks where they are.

Paint Wilmington painters know all this stuff – and more.

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(Eiffel Tower)	(Carribean)	(Statue of Liberty)	(Chicago Skyline)

of a region and its tourists. Charleston has its paintings of palm trees and marsh, and Maine has the waves on crashing rocks. Local need not be eloquent; he must, however, have the area’s landmark scenery as a priority – over great painting, over whatever might move his spirit – and a keen eye for what sells.

Aldro Hibbard

The Regional artist knows and feels his locale to the exclusion of all others. Tom Thomson, Harry Leith Ross, Aldro Hibbard, and even Paul Cezanne come to mind. He chooses to paint a beauty that is revealed by long observation – as if painting the dear friend, beloved and unidealized, rather than the starlet.

Local and Regional are often confused because they’re in the same place, painting ten feet from each other. But neither their paintings nor their audiences are the same. The audience of Local is relatively large and is more likely to pick up a piece of art on the basis of color and sentimentality, buying artwork created specifically for that market. Since most art is purchased while people are on vacation (it’s true), it goes without saying that they are going home with a pleasant reminder of their trip – a sunny

Harry Leith Ross

Eiffel Tower, palm trees over-leaning a clean Carribean beach, or a Grand Canyon sunset – often enough a reproduction.

Local’s audience is not intrigued at all by Regional’s paintings. ‘Before Sunrise’, ‘Tired Evening Light’, or ‘Wet Pavement’ would constitute a vacationer’s nightmare.

The Local painter is recording a place as seen from a tour bus window – painting 200 year old houses without plumbing problems, weddings without marriage, and Jamaica without poverty. The Regional painter depicts the life of a place not just its landmarks, so Local’s audience might perceive Dickensian when it’s looking for Disneyland. Tables turned, Regional’s audience finds the view from the tour bus vapid. Clearly Local and Regional serve their own, distinct audiences.

Paul Cezanne

Often, the Regional artist doesn’t understand (and neither do his family, friends, and neighbors) why the whimsical, colorful, frivolous painter is laughing all the way to the bank, easily selling relatively unskilled work day in, day out, while he can’t feed his kids. (Why don’t you paint those pretty pictures like Joe does? You know he’d probably give you some pointers…) Regional is trying to sell in his hometown just like Local. The wrong audience Regional’s audience is spread thin and cannot be easily pinpointed like Local’s. He’s got his job cut out for him. Where do fine paintings sell? Everywhere. One at a time.

I was once told by a prominent director of conservation from a prominent museum that Contemporary Art is known as Job Security in the conservation field.  Easy to understand given artists’ haphazard or uninformed materials choices or the informed decision to go with temporary materials.

Having just purchased a replacement dishwasher, I wonder whether you can elect to include a service plan with your elephant dung painting by Chris Ofili ($960k  at Christie’s in May 2010).  Is service after the sale (or installation) included in the fees tacked on to the hammer price of over $4 million for the late Felix Gonzelez-Torres pile of candy which sold at Phillips de Pury last month.   Does your homeowners insurance pick up the tab if your neighbor’s daughter, the one with the eating disorder, sits down to munch on that candy?  Or what if the gentlemanbugs (the ones in the brown tuxes) get into them?   What happens to the value if Orkin sprays this artful pile?

Ok, so we live in a period of history where a Plexiglas box filled with sperm is called art.  Fine.  It’s no secret that outside a landfill, both elephant poop and candy bio-degrade.  They are impermanent.  The artists are surely aware of this.  If you’re looking at acquiring one of Robert Gober’s dozen donuts, he’s done the preservation work for you and those $200k donuts are probably good for a minimum of a few decades.  But if the artist works in ketchup, does he not intend for the piece to be temporary?  If the artist works in house paint and dirt, does he not intend impermanence?

Once the price for dirt, poop, or condiment art goes into the hundreds of thousands, the happy owner has a vested interest in circumventing the artist’s desire for degradation of said art,  just as I have an interest in circumventing Whirlpool’s desire for short product life and obsolescence.

OMG.  The artists have sold out to the build-poor-quality, support-commercialism, corporate-america, almighty-dollar, buy-more-stuff philosophy!  What a shock.

This post is really just an excuse to show you some portraits I find extraordinary, that few people notice – because they are Portraits.

The problem with many portraits is two-fold.  Namely, the artist and the sitter.  The field of portraiture is unusually laden with moderately successful, completely mediocre painters. But even a poor painter might paint a good painting on an off day…  It’s supply and demand at work in the sense that Dooney and Burke knock-off bags are sold at Target – poor quality, but I want one and the good stuff costs “too much”. The truly pitiful part of today’s portraiture is that so much is done from photographs!  Why would you want a painted copy of a photograph?

If your family is anything like mine, there may be some “interesting” looking faces floating around the gene pool.  Hanging such things around the house can lead to friends turning down invitations to dinner.  A friend’s family had a portrait of a great-grandmother hanging over the sideboard in the dining room.  She had apparently been a rather formidable woman, and her likeness was enough to make small children eat their vegetables and have nightmares.  So frightful an image did she make, that the family dog was known to put his from paws up on the sideboard and bark at the portrait until forcibly hauled away.

Portraits can be official, of George Washington, say, or a bank president, or a university chancellor.  Official portraiture is pretty predictable in its structure and attitude – although some can be surprising and cause quite a stir.  But again, many of these are currently done via photo. Even in the deep dark past, Holbein is suspected of using the camera obscura to get the likeness of a busy Pope or Henry VIII.  Sitting for a portrait does take time out of one’s day, but why hand over substantial sums for a copy of a snap shot?

The red-headed step-child thing comes in when no one wants Grandma’s portrait, or the bank gets shut down, or neither Brittany nor Tiffany wants the double portrait done when they were 5 and 7 years old.  Unless a portrait was painted either well or by a known artist, interest in hanging the portrait wanes drastically beyond the generations that actually knew the sitter.  The better conceived and painted the portrait, the better the shot it has of continuing to be shown.  But often as not, at the time of passing goods on to the next twig on the family tree, grand-children start ducking out of the house when it comestime to claim the portrait of great-great-uncle James (I think that was his name) twice removed.

As long as a portrait is anchored to its family or institution, it has anunderstood history, a raison d’etre.  But sever that rope and portraits become some of the least desired and least expensive art  in the market.  Where you and I luck out is, knowing a good painting when we see one.  At the auction or “antiques” shop, we can snap up a good painting for cheap just because it lacks a story, because it is a Portrait.  If you’re unsure of your skill at spotting a Good portrait, go for the official ones.  They were/are almost always done by an artist with a substantial track record. If you’re squeamish about having a painting of someone you’re not related to on your walls, make up a story.  We have one client in particular who has bought “ancestors” and is on the look-out for more.  Look at portraits from before 1960 – more will have been executed directly from the sitter rather than from photographs.

For those considering having a portrait painted, if you select the artist carefully, the portrait may indeed become the heirloom you’re hoping it will be.  And why do red-headed step-children get such a bad rap anyway?  I have one.  His name is Todd, and he’s terrific.

Just that quote brings to mind two elements of today’s art market. First, picture frames, once carefully and individually hand-crafted, picture frame moulding is now milled and finished entirely by machines and ready made frames are those same modular units Jan speaks of.  Paintings are standardized to fit the frames produced by an industry of factories that are  focused on speed, efficiency, and controlling cost with minimal thought for the quality of the end product.  Artists paint 16×20, 20×24, 30×40, because a factory half way around the world wants it that way.   Really?  Where is “pride in craft”?

Artists are usually cheap when it comes to framing their own work.  (You know it’s true.)  ’It’s the painting
that’s important.’  ’The darned thing has to be shipped around the country, why put a good frame on it?’  ’The buyer will put the right frame on it.’  ’The deadline’s tomorrow!  It’s a 16×20 – I’ve got a 16×20 frame here somewhere – done – out the door.’  The result is exhibitions of, say, 15 artists where the frames are nearly all alike both in their conveniently modular sameness and in their lack of contribution to (and often distraction from) the painting.

Time and money –  productivity over process – completion over creation.

All those artists’ reasons are valid, and I could add to the list.  ’Some galleries can’t tell the difference and bang up the good frames.’  ’I don’t know where to go for a good frame.’  ’I can get an expensive frame but it’s not necessarily good for my painting.’  ’I don’t have the money.’  It goes on, but the  value of craftsmanship is put in question.  Does craftsmanship stop at the edge of the canvas?  If the painting deserves the making by the artist, does it then not also deserve the thoughtful crafting of its frame?  Who does stand up for the art and present it in its best circumstance?  The artist, the gallery, maybe the framer, and the collector are the painting’s defenders.

“Without the stern vigilance of craftsmen demanding only the best, the modern tool manufacturer sells a quality of hand tool that is shameful.”  -Jan Sturmann

Years ago my husband and daughter were watching an interview witha Japanese Kimono maker.  He did things the old way with hand dyed and woven cloth, traditional vegetable dyes, hand stitching every bit of embroidery.  Beautiful work.  At the end of the interview, he was posed the question:  ”Down the street, I can find a kimono that looks a lot like the one you have here, but it only costs a couple hundred dollars while yours is thousands.  Why would I spend the money?”  ”When I make a kimono, every stitch carries my spirit into the garment.”

Does the hand-made, hand-crafted, hand-carved, hand-painted become imbued with the spirit of its maker?  According to Dr. David Hawkins in the book “Power vs.  Force”, it does.  ”Thus, we find that computer-generated art and even reat photographs never calibrate as highly as original paintings.  A most interesting kinesiological [muscle testing] experiment, which anyone can try, is to test the strength of a person who’s looking at an original painting.  Compare that result to what happens when you test them while they’re looking at a nechanical reproduction of that painting. When a person looks at something that has been hand-crafted, he goes strong; when he looks at a reproduction, he goes weak…Dedicated artists put love into their work, and there’s great power in both the human touch and human originality.”

Which brings us to element number two: reproductions.  Giclees are the widgets of the art world, to be had for cheap.  The painter who works for the reproduction market does not have the perspective of a fine artist, no matter how capable he is.  Particularly onerous is the giclee on canvas.  When first printed, good luck telling the difference between it and the original from across the room.  Pray tell, what commodity is there that the more there is of it the more valuable it becomes?  Not diamonds, not faberge eggs, not sports cars, not fine art.  If a painting has an identical twin in the form of a giclee, can I, the collector, believe in the uniqueness of the painting?  Faster.  Cheaper.  Poorer quality.

“With only direct sweat labor, would human dignity allow the building of strip malls, tract homes, McMansions, and superhighways?  What happens to our souls encased by machine-made objects of dull perfection?”  -Jan Sturmann

(Amazon does not permit any affiliates from within the state of North Carolina because of confiscatory taxation.  Therefore, any links to Amazon are only to provide a possible service to you.  We don’t get a dime whether you buy the books or not.)

Letter Writing

There was a time when we wrote letters not emails – when we kept journals not blogs.  What would we know of Vincent if he emailed Theo?   Even if we had the lawyers’ and media’s snoopers find the emails in some cast-off hard drive, we would have lost the drawings in those letters.  What if Vincent had been telephoning Theo??

Delacroix wrote about color and drawing and art history:  ”The work of a painter who is not a colourist is illumination rather than painting. If one intends something other than cameos, colour is, strictly speaking, one of the founding principles of painting, no less so than chiaroscuro, proportion and perspective… Colour gives the appearance of life.”  Now, that’s worth reading.

Who of the letter-writing artists of the past was doing so with the hope or expectation of of a broad audience? Blogging does not allow for the thoughtful give and take of hand-written discussion where the topic may be relatively intimate between two well-versed parties.  Emails are notorious  for being sent without a second thought and homogenized with cryptic texting code.  Bemoan the missing penmanship of the hand-written word, the personality, the tonality, the choice of paper.

The value of diaries or years of correspondence is in their depth and their humanness.  It is in the things shared between the lines and aside from the topic at hand. It is the completeness of the world of thought of an individual, expressed in more than words.

I write thank you notes but not letters.  I’m thankful for the people who do write and extra thankful for those who write well. Blogs are immediate and current but what happens when we get that electromagnetic pulse that the History Channel talks about? We lose all the 1′s and 0′s on a bunch of servers.  All the knowledge and the chit chat – POOF – gone.

I highly recommend good paper and a special pen.  Nothing like tools and materials you love to keep you on task.  (-and French was not Vincent’s first language.)

“Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news.” – Anne Frank

1877 to 1917 were years replete with being fired, dropping out of school, a little soldiering, and short-lived romance, but Thomson eventually found his way to serious painting in 1914. In the three years he was alotted, he produced hundreds of small paintings, several of which were converted to larger works on canvas in his shed  (aka studio).

The work has a great graphic quality similar to some of the Prairie School printmaking and painting that would appear later, south of the border, as well as a Craftsman sentiment. His brushwork and color get compared, favorably, to the Stars of art history, but because he was mostly self-taught and spent a great deal of time in the wilderness, let’s just be amazed by the beauty and distinction of the paintings.

Thomson painted with a number of the people who would later become known as the Group of Seven. His paintings can be seen at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound, Canada, along with the Group of Seven.

There isn’t much a painter couldn’t learn from Tom’s paintings – color, composition, value, choice of subject, love of subject.  And certainly looking at “Dawn” below, I see Russ Chatham’s work.  For a collector who has chosen to do his homework, the biggest lesson in Tom’s work centers around recognizing consistent excellence.  Although every painter has bad days, the dud should be the rarity among jewels, not the other way around.

My thanks to Savannah painter, Robert Isley, for the heads up on Tom a few years back. It’s great to see quality work that I didn’t know about.  Hope you’ve enjoyed it, too.