mcauleyhouseartists: A Cane Becomes a Work of Art

Monday, January 9, 2017

A Cane Becomes a Work of Art

Russell has been coming to the art group for almost 11 years. He's not only a talented artist, but a former car mechanic as well as a mason. He has struggled over the years to maintain consistent housing. However, I am happy to report he is safe and warm now in his room at Crossroads.

Russell in ingenious in his ability to keep something going when most people would have given up. Here he is with his cane, which we have repeatedly repaired with duct tape. He has recently added padding, a few reinforcement clip bands, new pads, and key chain. The cane looks as if it's a clarinet that turns into a cane when needed.

Russell has sold many drawings and small paintings over the years at the "Art from the Heart" show. A friend of mine has one of his paintings "Dancing with Red Shoes" hanging in her kitchen. I love seeing it when I visit her home.

Russell's cane is definitely a work of art, but so is the owner.

Thanks Russell !

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.

Art is Our Voice

Monday, January 9, 2017

A Cane Becomes a Work of Art