mcauleyhouseartists: Ted's Corner

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Ted's Corner

Ted

Lucy's Flowers

I'm so excited to share Ted's Art Review of Linda's show at AS220. In addition to being an art reviewer Ted is also an artist. I appreciate Ted's contribution to the blog and look forward to sharing more of his work with our readers in the near future.

Ted's Review: " Watch each work slowly. Let it perform for you. Watch from a distance, and like a dancer the art will fill its stage. Let the corner of your eye detect its movement. Listen to feel its pulse and rhythm. Relax..It is a companion not a possession. If you try to fix it with your gaze it will hold its breath like a prisoner in a spotlight. Start to look away and "Lucy Flowers" billow and huddle each other stage left. Stare and they devolve into a couple of lifeless glazed doughnuts."

Gratitude

Behind the Bar (another painting) A city is rising full of life. Trees leap from the ground. The colors harmonize like sound. Chips of light protect a third dimension to the silhouette of "Brother Man". The still bowl and snaking cord in "Gratitude" balance as carefully as anticipation; faces peek, bricks flex, edges come and go- these children of the artist cannot sit still!

And if you are reluctant to touch those seductive textures, perhaps because of a tragic experience you once had with a soap bubble, you can still connect. These bold performers will take one step forward and shout,
" I AM." - Ted

About the Art Program

5 Ways to Grow as an Artist

So how would a Cassatt or a Henri or Picasso approach painting differently than we do today? How might this heartfelt fear of others controlling our painting process impact our self-understanding as artists? Here are five possible answers:

1. Making a successful picture is not the goal. Think of periods, such as childhood, when we grew, our self-understanding changed and we became more of who we are. There was an endless stream of events where we expressed ourselves and slowly began to discover the things that pleased us. As with the sense of freedom characterized above, the entire payoff was growth. The events of life when we grow are the things that happen along the way. Making art should be exactly the same. Paintings are just the series of events or steps we take. Let them go. Keep moving. Or as Henri implored, “Keep living.”

2. The painting process is always a beginning. As soon as the freshness evaporates (we are bored or lost or acquire interest in something else), stop. Do not think in terms of finishing. Picasso lectures eloquently on this. Finish is the death of our work because it means we are painting an expectation or “to be like” and that puts the brakes on painting to see and feel more deeply. Every beginning is a new prompt, a new point of departure. Begin everything. Finish nothing.

3. Ignore non-artist authorities. Juries, the grantors, the gallery, the direction from above are just so many fingers in our pie. All external measures are dangerous because they not only push us to performing, as opposed to creating, but their sense of worth takes over our own. This is precisely what Parisian artists fought against.

4. Get into a prolonged creative process. Have dozens of paintings in your studio that have been abandoned for one reason or another, left in various stages, unfinished but always complete as expressions of who you were at that moment. Work on several paintings simultaneously. You are not making shoes.

5. Furnish the world with your beauty, let the world see, touch and feel who you are. Scary I know. It is so much easier to hide within safe fortresses, the sources of praise and dignity that we can count on by pleasing our audience. This is the dreaded condition called style. We cannot be free to be who we are if we are not always risking being who we are in front of others.