Julie T. Chapman - ArtBlog

Recently I was forwarded an email which I excerpt below:

Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approx. 2 thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule.

4 minutes later: the violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.

6 minutes: A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

10 minutes: A 3-year old boy stopped but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.

45 minutes: The musician played continuously.  Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace.  The man collected a total of $32.

1 hour: He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before, Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.

This is a true story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people’s priorities. The questions raised: in a common place environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

I found the story fascinating, and checked it at several online sites to verify its truth (eg, Snopes). Not only is the story true, but the WashPost reporter who covered it received a Pulitzer for the article.

What a sobering thing - that we might not perceive beauty in an ordinary, daily context!

My own past experience has taught me to be careful about the company one’s artwork keeps; when a piece I know to be good is hung with average county-fair art in a whitewashed cinder-block building, that piece dims…as though one good work of art cannot entirely overcome the mediocrity around it. Or think of your own perceptions walking into a gallery: if you see only quality work at every turn, you think the more highly of all of it. But as soon as you see something sub-par, suddenly the rest of the work feels more ordinary.

As a cynic I once knew used to say, art is worth only what someone will pay at a garage sale for it. Think of those legendary garage-sale finds we sometimes read about - the Picasso or whatever - sold for a few dollars, now worth millions.

What do you think?

I’ve been out of the (studio) saddle for a while here, due to traveling to Seattle to (a) do awards jurying for the Parklane Gallery show, (b) give a painting demo at the show, and (c) lead a 2-day mini-workshop while I was there. Tired? yep!

However, I wanted to let y’all know that I’m going to change the emphasis in my Feb 2010 workshop a bit and get us more into color and paint. WHOOHOO!! Scared? yep! but I’m looking forward to the chance to put together new exercises for this, AND to see what results from the artists who attend! It’ll still be fast-paced as usual (ie, we’re not going to sit around working on the same painting for 3 hours - you all know me better than that), but hopefully also stimulating in fresh ways as we discuss color and apply it to the exercises.

If you have questions, visit the Workshops page of my website.

If you have more questions, email me.

If you’re excited, call Triple D (406-755-9653) and give them a deposit.

I hope to see you in February!

My annual trip to Jackson Hole is, as noted, a wintercount of sorts for me. One of the most important parts of the trip is the afternoon I spend cruising the top galleries in Jackson, both representational and contemporary. Every time I do this I’m convinced anew that EVERY artist has to renew herself regularly, preferably through Seeing Others’ Artwork - whether through visits to galleries, museums, other artists’ studios, whatever. I’ve come away from visits to fine-craft shops all fired up with color and texture and the desire to mess with same.

Here are some of the notes I made in my sketchbook after Fall Arts Festival:

• Zhaoming Wu: beautiful, luminous, dissolving lights/shadows
• Rocky Hawkins: texture, abstraction
• Tom Gilleon, John Nieto: big negative areas worked with color and texture
•  Jeff Ham: giant, bold, colorful work (Jeff had 8′x10′ canvases in progress - drips, spills, color everywhere - on the walls at Mountain Trails Gallery)
• September Vhay: daring, clean compositions (September is a good friend and she’s been carving her own path and voice for a while, and I admire her for it)
• The thrill and satisfaction of color that is not tied to reality

The first thing I painted after this trip:

My annual trip to Jackson Hole is a winter-count of sorts for me. It’s 3 solid days of events - artist breakfasts, receptions, dinners, parties, and the Quickdraw - stretching from 8 AM to midnight every day. I can count on lack of sleep, standing up for hours, and being completely stoked from conversations with collectors and other artists. Observations from this year’s event:

• The Western Visions show at the museum (National Museum of Wildlife Art) was moved into new galleries this year, instead of being confined to the long narrow hallway which became so packed with people at the evening events that one had to turn sideways to move around. The pieces showed off beautifully in the gallery spaces - one could stand back and appreciate them from a distance.
• The show seemed lightly attended, in comparison to past years (though perhaps it was because we weren’t all sardined into the King Gallery hallway).
• The show overall felt *extremely* conservative - as if the submitting artists were sending in solid work with saleable subjects, but taking no risks. Many pieces did not sell. I am very grateful that my miniature did, as it stood out for being rather different, which made me anxious. I had two 6×12 unframed cradled panels, each with a reclining paint foal and a very abstract background, as my “piece” (see above).
• My sketch at the Western Visions sketch auction also sold, but for half the price of last year’s sketch (this seemed to hold roughly true overall for the sketches).
• For ONCE, the Quickdraw morning dawned clear and lovely! In 2007 and 2008 I was huddled under a canopy with cold rain pouring around me, painting with gloves on. It was scrumptious to have sunshine and festive viewers and not worry about snowflakes on the canvas. During the Quickdraw auction, prices seemed soft; animal/wildlife works brought higher final bids than landscape pieces. Here I went the conservative route - meaning I painted a drippy bear - and was delighted to have my 24×12, rather unusual composition go for above retail. My husband Paul runs interference for me during the actual hour of painting and reports out afterwards; he said there were probably a thousand photos taken of the back of my head (one assumes they were photographing the painting in progress), and that there were artists watching who wanted me to verbalize why I was making the color choices I was. (<snort> No time in one hour! come to a workshop and I’ll talk about it there).
• I always cruise the main galleries on Saturday afternoon; Jackson has seen some contemporary galleries move in recently, and I find these extremely artistically stimulating. Muse Gallery was having a show of Milton Avery / Richard Diebenkorn / Helen Frankenthaler; what I found most interesting there was the work of the twin brothers Doug & Mike Starn.
  There’s a new gallery in town - Altamira - in a newly rebuilt space just off the square. It’s a *fabulous* gallery space, and they’re showing Tom Gilleon, Rocky Hawkins, John Nieto, and Amy Ringholz, among others. Wonderful, eye-popping stuff.

So - Jackson Hole, September 2009 in a nutshell.

So I’ve finished up judging the initial round of entries into the Parklane Gallery show (Kirkland, WA) and I wanted to share with you all the notes I took while jurying (I also asked that these notes be sent to all entrants). By the way, it took me a number of hours spread over several days, and sleeping on my decisions between times, to finalize my choices.

The diversity of styles and subject matter - including some very original treatments of subjects not commonly seen in animal art - made jurying this show an enlightening and gratifying experience. I was delighted by the boldness many artists showed in their choices of colors and motifs. By the way, dogs, cats, horses, and roosters were heavily represented in the submissions, for some reason.

If your work did not make it in, please consider the following:

Photography of your work - A few of the images submitted were very small, making it difficult for me to evaluate the works thoroughly. Other pieces were represented by photographs (murky, skewed in the frame, blurry, or with extraneous background) which showed the work poorly. It is important to make sure that your values and colors are represented accurately, especially if you have large white areas in your work - unless you shoot with manual exposure, your camera can make these gray.

Quality - some of the work was not yet mature enough for exhibition; when evaluating your own art, take care to compare it to strong work by top artists. More generally, pieces really had to stand out in some way to be included, and all the elements in the piece had to work together and be of the highest quality, because there was plenty of very good art submitted. There were some interesting, original ideas that didn’t get in, and frequently it was because of a little weakness in drawing or values. In addition, there were paintings that had some good things going for them, but aspects of the pieces (often settings or backgrounds) needed to be treated with the same care as the main subject(s).

Quantity - I juried the show ‘blind’, so the images were simply numbered (not named). There were many artists who submitted more than one piece, which was clear from their style, and I would very much like to have included several of their works. However, since I could only choose 40 (I compromised at 41) pieces for the show, I was forced to make some extremely difficult choices. The organizers also specified that each artist could be represented by only one work.

Originality - there were many pieces that were solid works of art, and I hated to exclude them. But the work that got in not only met the foundation criteria for any good work of art (I discuss these elements in my workshops), it stood out in some way - usually by exhibiting an originality in some aspect that was appealing, striking, humorous, or thought-provoking.

A special note on the more abstract and experimental pieces: I enjoy and study abstraction, and it shows up in my own paintings. In the absence of good drawing - which abstraction often stylizes or abandons - the composition and values must compensate and be quite strong. Alternatively, some of the experimental work was highly original and appealing, but showed a little weakness in drawing or composition.

I cannot emphasize enough that there were MANY fine pieces that could not be included due to space limitations, and I agonized at great length over my decisions. Thank you to the artists for submitting such interesting work, and to Parklane for giving me the honor of judging this show.

…and a hell of an adventure. We spent 4 days packing in, camping, riding, and packing out of the Great Bear Wilderness (part of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex), which is the vast wild area south of Glacier National Park. Notes of interest:

• It is very difficult to take photographs from the back of a moving horse.
• 15 miles in the saddle at one time can make the butt sore, along with utilizing various muscle groups in ways they don’t normally get.
• Advil and Vanquish really help with butt soreness.
• For reasons I don’t quite understand, heart-attack food and wilderness go together. (We ate breakfasts that consisted of french toast and half a pig’s worth of bacon, or biscuits and gravy, or pancakes and sausage…).
• Draft mules can carry simply amazing amounts of stuff. Not only that, I watched with admiration as each mule carefully maneuvered its high’n'wide panniers or packboxes to miss all the trees crowding the trail.
• A good saddle horse is worth a lot when you’re back in the wilderness.
• Horses and mules get awfully fresh after 2 days of lazing about on a high-line with occasional turns loose in the meadows and forest. (Pack string rodeo is disconcerting, to say the least).

Our hosts were Jay & Kim Diest; Jay has spent half a lifetime packing for the Forest Service in northwestern Montana and living in the wilderness while so doing. His vast experience with stock, campcraft, knots, dogsledding, hunting, and packing is humbling, and he probably represents a dying breed. Jay had stories galore and we clamored for more.

A study in contrasts and irony: this is a wilderness airstrip which Paul (my husband, and the guy on the red roan) had flown us into when we owned a bush plane.

 You better have good steady stock when you’re riding a scree slope like this one.

I’m still sorting through the 1100+ photos that I took, and feeling a bit let down to be back in civilization. Though that first hot shower after being in the back of beyond is always damn nice…

Heading off tomorrow on a pack trip into the Bob Marshall Wilderness (known to Montanans simply as “The Bob”), a large chunk of pristine western Montana running south from Glacier National Park nearly to Helena, mountainous and full of wildlife and solitude. I hope to have a couple photos to post on my return.

In the meantime, if you didn’t see it in my Artzine, do please check out the new online Wildlife Art Journal, being edited and written by Todd Wilkinson. The articles are breathtaking in variety and scope; I believe Todd will be publishing this four times a year. Probably best it’s not more often, as the issues are extremely rich in content. It’ll take me several weeks to explore all the good stuff in Fall 2009. I’ll be the next artist in the “Five Questions” series, which is currently featuring Susan Fox and Andrew Denman.

And since this post really is a bit scatterbrained in nature, here’s a photo I took this morning. Nature in most of its forms fascinates me (well, except for mosquitoes…and maggots…). Being an animal artist means getting to act like a kid around all kinds of wildlife:

A gallery dealer of mine and I were chatting once about a certain well-known wildlife artist, and the dealer said “I’ve heard all the stories about this artist copying others…but how can you wildlife artists keep coming up with original ideas?”

My answer to that: time in the field. There is nothing like going to the source - the animals themselves - for fresh inspiration, new light, seasonal stimulation, whatever. Whether your fieldwork is a zoo, a pasture, a park or preserve, or your own backyard - time with the animals will renew you artistically.

This morning I made one of my favorite field trips: driving the full Red Sleep Mountain loop at the National Bison Range, about 55 miles from my house. The road is 20 miles long and usually takes me at least 3 or 4 hours, depending on the wildlife. Today, the bison were in the high pasture and nowhere near the road (you’re not allowed to hike off road), but fortunately pronghorn were scattered all over the north side.

I also had the delightful experience of seeing, and even photographing (sorta) my first wild badger - I saw something small running through the prairie and my first thought was “cat”. Then I thought “what the aitch ee double hockeysticks would a kittycat be doing in the National Bison Range??” When I caught up to the critter my second thought was “raccoon”, but it was too low and lacked a tail. I lucked out and caught just a couple shots before the badger went to ground. Coolness! And, as always, joyous to be out soaking up Gorgeous Wildlife Energy.

I haven’t been in the cheeriest of moods lately due to a number of factors (financial stress, the ugly nature of the health-care debate, rather chilly weather in August - not ready for summer to be over! - and life, the universe, etc.). My husband, a former rocket scientist who now works with complex economics, sent me “10 trading rules” that seem rather apropos for life in general:

Rule 1: Believe you can win. If other traders can do well in the market, so can you. However, if you don’t have enough courage and confidence in yourself, you will never achieve success. The events over the past year have tested many people in this regard and some now think the game is rigged against them. Nothing could be farther from the truth as opportunities remain. Those who will win in the markets first start by believing they can do it. Then they back up that strong belief with serious hard-work and determination to find their trading edge. However, it starts with you first having faith in yourself. [Ed: believe in yourself as an artist!]

Rule 2: Don’t be seduced by results. You must stay in the present and focused on executing each trade to the best of your ability. Don’t let yourself think about how much you’re going to win (or lose) in the market or how great of a trader you are or not, but instead focus on what matters most - each and every trade you make. Do that and the results will take care of themselves. [Ed: each painting is its own new challenge; the Chinese have a saying: “Every painting, first painting”.]

Rule 3: Sulking won’t get you anything. The worst thing you can do for your prospects of winning is to get down when things don’t go well. If you start feeling sorry for yourself or thinking the trading gods are conspiring against you, you’re not focused on the next trade. Good traders readily accept their mistakes and move on to the next trade. They don’t let one bad trade carry onto the next one. [Ed: throw the bad ones away and go on to the next piece.]

Rule 4: Beat them with patience. Every time you have the urge to make an aggressive trade, go with the more conservative one. You’ll always be OK. The moment you get impatient, bad things happen. In tough markets, stay patient and let others beat themselves. [Ed: sooner or later your work will be recognized, if you focus on your own vision.]

Rule 5: Ignore unsolicited advice. You’ll have lots of well-meaning friends and experts who want to give you advice. Don’t accept it. In fact, stop them before they can say a word. Their comments will creep into your mind when you are trading and conflict with your own strategy. If you’ve worked on your game, commit to the plan and stay confident with it. [Ed: stay true to your passion as an artist.]

Rule 6: Embrace your personality. The key is to find what works best for you. There are many approaches out there, but there is only one trading approach that will utilize your best skills and talent to create and sustain an edge. The worst mistake you can make is to simply embrace a strategy of someone else that doesn’t match your own personality and strengths. [Ed: see #5]

Rule 7: Have a routine to lean on. Every trader should follow a mental routine on every trade. It keeps you focused on what you have to do, and when the pressure is on, it helps you manage your nerves. You may not have control over the market, but you have control on how you trade the market. Having a routine will inject consistency that will keep you calm under pressure. [Ed: make art a part of your regular schedule - daily, weekly, whatever - and keep at it.]

Rule 8: Find peace in the market. The market has to be your sanctuary, the thing you love, and you can’t be afraid of making mistakes. Yes, you’ll experience both good and bad times, but you must enjoy and revel in the challenge. [Ed: the process is more important than the product. Never lose the joy of creating!]

Rule 9: Test yourself. Don’t look for easy trades and setups at all times. Test yourself by working hard trades and difficult markets in order to test and improve your skills. For example, if you’re uncomfortable with trading options, spend a month just trading options. If you’re uncomfortable with shorting stocks, spend a month shorting stocks. We only get better if we constantly test what we think is most difficult. [Ed: try new methods, materials, subjects…keep yourself growing.]

Rule 10: Find someone who believes in you. Having confidence in yourself is important, but it helps to have someone who believes in you, too, whether it’s a spouse, a friend, a teacher, or a mentor. No man’s success can be entirely attributed to his own actions. You must surround yourself with people who believe in you at all times. [Ed: boy, this is so true.]

I recently received an email from one of the regulars on this blog, who wrote:

“I have recently started painting in oils again after a long stint with acrylics.

Would you consider a blog topic about how artists approach the need to varnish the finished work (especially when using oils). Do they actually wait the recommended six months to sell a finished work so it can be varnished? Do they use retouch varnish first then the final varnish - or do they even varnish at all?”

What I do: wait as long as I possibly can before varnishing. Sometimes a painting needs to go out to a show or gallery within a few weeks of its completion, but I’ll make sure the surface feels hard-dry everywhere before varnishing. I recently read that it’s better to protect the surface with varnish, even if you’re not waiting months, than not to do so at all.

I don’t use retouch varnish; my understanding is that it’s intended for use on a painting in progress, so that the artist has a similar level of sheen everywhere (no ’sunken’, dry areas).

I do two thin coats of final picture varnish, and I like the spray stuff - no fussy brushes, bubbles, etc.

OK - how about everyone else?