mcauleyhouseartists: Welcome to the Fun House

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Welcome to the Fun House

Emmanuel

Even though it was a rainy, chilly Spring morning you could feel the warmth in the Art room. Emmanuel was working on one of his geometric designs while David pounded out four collages. Everyone was really feeling creative as you can see. A couple of the artists were painting while some others were exploring mixed media. Meg, Angie, and Ruth Ann were all doing amazing work. I think collage is not just a serious art form, but one that has a long tradition in modern art. Collage became an art form during the Synthetic Cubist period of Picasso and Braque. At first, Pablo Picasso glued oil cloth to his surface of Still Life with Chair Caning in May of 1912. He glued a rope around the edge of the oval canvas. Georges Braque then glued imitation wood-grained wallpaper to his Fruit Dish and Glass (September 1912). Braque's work is called papier collé (glued or pasted paper), a specific type of collage.
During the Dada movement, Hannah Höch (German, 1889-1978) glued bits of photographs from magazines and advertising in such works as Cut with a Kitchen Knife, (1919-20). Fellow Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (German, 1887-1948) also glued bits of paper he found in newspapers, advertisements and other discarded matter beginning in 1919. Schwitters called his collages and assemblages Merzbilder, a word derived from the German word "Kommerz" (Commerce, as in banking) which had been on a fragment of an advertisement in his first work, and bilder ("pictures"). I just finished a 10 week collage class at the MoMA and was able to spend time studying the work of Schwitter, Picasso and Hannah Höch. It's great to be around other fellow artists that appreciate this art.

Here are a few more photos from today:

David

Meg

David

Great job everyone ! KK

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.