WWE’s signing of Mexican luchador legend Mistico some months back is likely a decision the board of directors would like to have back. From the moment he arrived, he has really failed to execute any of the exciting moves he was famous for with any degree of consistency. Him screwing up his entrance on his first night with the company should have come with a pamphlet explaining the concept of foreshadowing. Of course, WWE would also never allow someone to make a name for themselves using their own name, so the masked wrestler was rebranded “Sin Cara,” or without face. This is all without mentioning that he’s already been suspended for alleged steroid use, and has recently ruptured his patella tendon while performing, expecting to miss anywhere from six to nine months. He’s more or less had his way with the company, one could say. Then, this happened.
Last time I talked about the kind of art I hate. This time I’m going to talk about how much I hate being an artist in a non-art environment. Specifically family functions.
As an artist I find it not only frustrating, but insulting when people, including my family, say, “Oh go do this…you’re the artist.” Yesterday I went to my sister-in-law’s baby shower and there was a baby clothes decorating table. You know, like 200 white ones-ies and a butt-ton of fabric markers. I heard the above statement more times than I could count upon my decision to go make one (it was more by force, but we won’t get into that…). This happens in other instances too, like at bridal showers where someone is supposed to make a bouquet out of the ribbons from the obnoxious amount of presents the bride to be receives. Artists everywhere are cursed and therefore forced to endure these god-awful rituals. Isn’t it bad enough that we’ve picked one of the dumbest careers in the world? And then my aunt says, “You should design baby clothes!” You think I don’t know I’m capable of doing that crap?
Better yet is when your mother (sister, aunt, brother, etc.) comes up to you and says, “I want a drawing!”
Of what?! What do you want a drawing of!??!!? How about you look at my work and pick something you like and I’ll give it to you? I can’t count the number of times my mother has asked me to paint a fucking “mural” in her bathroom. “You know, I have all those bamboo sticks in vases, do something that matches that…”
These projects are what we call “ugly babies”. My mother has been heckling me for years for a drawing of “the kids”. Last Christmas I finally gave in and drew a portrait of my five siblings. I found the dumbest, most unflattering pictures I could find of each one of us, collaged them together, and drew them. Mom was…pleased. My little cousin asked for a picture of the Jonas Brothers for her ninth birthday and as I sat there drawing it, all I could think was, “This is not what I’m going to let my life as an artist become.” Granted, the call I got of her screaming her head off about how much she loved it made it a little less awful, but still…
I don’t even need to get into the fact that I hardly draw anymore unless I’m tracing something– that’s the beauty of printmaking. And that not only do I have no interest in drawing my family members, or drawing FOR them, but does anyone have any idea what it’s like to be trivialized into some arts & crafts moron? Just because I have an interest in art does NOT mean that I want to make things out of bows and scrapbook materials. I’m all about having fun and making things that aren’t fine art, but when people assume that those things are something I want to do all the time, or better yet something I’m really good at, simply because I’m an artist, I want to light myself on fire.
My family has a very basic understanding of art, meaning that being an artist means you’re good at drawing. Concepts? Forget it. They look at my art and say, “So a horse that’s dead? Is that some comment on society?” (hold pistol to temple) “Is that red because you were angry when you made it?” (pull trigger) Referencing historical artists and movements is just plain useless, and trying to have a conversation about these things is pretty much impossible. I took my mother to MoMA one year and all she wanted to do was look at Starry Night. Of all the beautiful and influential works of art in that gold mine of a building, she picks the one painting whose popularity makes me want to vomit.
Women of Avignon, The painting that potentially BEGAN modern art? Nothing.
De Kooning? Chagall? Nauman? Braque? Picabia?! Kahlo?!? DUCHAMP!? SCHIELE!??!
Not even Cezanne! Just Starry Night.
Oh, it’s enough to kill me, but I digress.
The point is that just because I’m an artist, or even an art major, doesn’t mean that I should be expected to do all the stupid arts and crafts that you mere mortals do.
So, what have we learned from all of this?
Don’t invite me to a shower of any kind, ever. The mere thought of it makes me want to hulk out and break things into tiny pieces.
When I was younger, my father, who was (and still is) a Hudson River painting collector/dealer, tried desperately to expose me to as many different things as possible and is probably the main reason that I am the collector/hoarder that I am today. I do greatly enjoy and respect the luminescent pastorals that the Hudson River School had to offer and hung from time to time in my house, but at the same time, they were not the types of paintings that I saw myself owning and hanging in my own house.
One evening, my father, as he was wont to do, asked me to review a Sotheby’s catalog with him in our living room at home. There were a number of Hudson River School paintings of interest that were up for auction, but as he continued to flip through, something caught my eye. It was a lithograph of Bellows’ “Preliminaries (to the Big Bout)” (1916).
The subject matter coupled with the close attention to figures and Continue reading →
So, there’s this British chick, right? Keira Rathbone. She makes art with a typewriter. A typewriter. How hipster is that? She runs the paper through the typewriter, typing on it, changing which character she uses depending on what kind of texture she is looking for. Peep this:
As you can see, from the detail on the right, this image uses a lot of periods and commas and the British pound. Continue reading →
I am a Photoshop nerd. I’m not quite sure how it happened but whatever I’m here now. Currently I work for a wedding photography studio as a retoucher, graphic designer, photographer, and jack-of-all-trades studio assistant. As of lately I’ve been reflecting on the state of the photograph as it is in today’s world. When I started toying with photography in my teens, digital was relatively new but for the most part unreliable and low in quality. My first camera belonged to my grandfather who was a photo-enthusiast/amateur, I started using his fully manual 35mm Nikon Nikkormat SLR camera (circa 1970s) in which I had to learn and understand how to properly expose a photograph on film. I didn’t develop my film or print my own prints in a darkroom until college; but still, when my friends had bulky digital cameras producing sloppy digital jpegs, I was going to the one hour lab and holding in my hands true photographs, photographs I could hold, bend, hand out, tape up, frame, behold.
Today I’m on the other end of the spectrum, sitting at a desk for hours clicking buttons, writing actions, formatting and reformatting, and retouching, cloning, healing, photoshopping.. etc. Don’t get me wrong, I love retouching and I love photoshop. I love learning everything I can and most of all I love taking a photograph and turning it into something entirely different. However, it’s increasingly apparent that digital photography is completely changing how everyone sees photographs. They expect surreal perfection now. It’s not uncommon for me at work to have a bride come in and sit for an hour or more going through all of the retouching she wants done for her wedding album.. I get requests like “My arm looks so fat in these, can you make them skinnier in ..like all of them! Oh, and can you make me tanner in these shots, I worked soooo hard to get tan for my wedding and it sooo doesn’t look like I’m tan!” It’s the photographer’s fault! “Also, my husband’s bald spot, could you like.. hide that somehow? He looks old with it showing..and can you whiten my teeth in this portrait, they look gross” etc etc. Really nothing surprises me anymore. The thing about it is that in twenty years, this bride will open her wedding album to show her children and she’ll say “this was me when I got married, this was me skinny and tan and without flaws…” and in a sense.. what she has in her hands is a fraudulent document. You weren’t that skinny, you did have a pimple, and I’m sorry, but your husband did start balding early on. It’s life. These things make up who you are.
Photography as a medium is both dying and blossoming simultaneously. Our world is changing, media is changing, and we as people are changing. Photography is now more accessible than ever before. We have cameras in our phones, in our computers, in our pockets, and wherever else you might want one. We have apps to add “artsy” effects, we have photo-editing software come standard on any new computer we buy, and we have the internet which is overly saturated with a plethora of tutorials and free training all for some ad space profits on YouTube.
We as people view photographs differently. We know you photoshopped your head onto Arnold’s body back from when he was in his prime. We know President Bush was not humping that bear. We know Lady Gaga is unattractive. The photograph used to be a true to life (for the most part) document of reality, and now what is it? A photo can take on the life of a virus, stolen off a celebrity’s facebook page, manipulated by some 4chan punk, passed down, copied, recopied, re-edited, manipulated, reposted on the web, always changing and spawning into entirely new imagery. What is a photo? When entire global advertising campaigns for major brands have photographs which never get printed, can you still call them “photographs?”. The photo went from digital sensor, to computer, to design, to layout, to web/tv/email advertising, but was never made into a photograph, a print. What is a photo? When you can take an image on your phone, edit it on your computer, upload it to the web, and can share it with a massive audience all without ever understanding a thing about the medium.
Let’s talk about art. Nay, let’s talk about “cute” art. As an artist and Master of Fine Art candidate, I’d like to think I have some sort of idea of what art is. It’s easy enough to say, “It’s art because I say it’s art.” Marcel Duchamp loved that shit, and I don’t necessarily disagree with that sentiment. I do however disagree with so-called “artists” wasting my time not only visually, but in my studio, right in front of my face, with their cutesy images of owls and bunnies frolicking through the woods, increasing my lab fees because of how much ink they waste on a stupid print of a butterfly. To me it’s the equivalent of taking a digital photo of your pet and calling it a photograph, or a photo of you and your boyfriend snowboarding and turning it into a print and showing it at a critique (yes, this happens more than I’d like to admit).
Let me first make it clear that I am totally aware of how inadequate I am as an artist; in fact, I remind myself of it daily. I am certainly in no position to say another person’s work is garbage, unless it just so blatantly horrible that I’m forced to be an asshole about it. And here we are.
It’s obvious that I’m referring to specific people when I write this, but I’m also addressing a larger issue here. It’s safe to say that there’s a very large community of people, whom I will not label here (but you know who they are) that eat this kind of imagery up like it’s a Thanksgiving Day feast. It’s not that the visual aspects of this type of work are terrible; in fact, sometimes they’re pretty nice. As a slave for anything cute, mainly felines, I find myself torn (which thus pisses me off even more) between actually buying into this garbage and having to consistently remind myself that there’s nothing behind it: no substance, no context. A “dead behind the eyes” sort of piece. And how do I know this? Well, because the artists have told me so themselves.
There are graphic artists (I only use that term because that’s usually what this sort of stuff gets thrown in with, or illustrative art) that are crazy talented. They can draw, they understand composition, craftsmanship, and most importantly, color and technical refinement within a selected medium. People who have a strong and apparent understanding of these elements are people I can respect to some degree, but when you’re taking JPEGs from Google image search and filtering them in Photoshop and then coloring them in like a coloring book, I can’t respect you.
Let’s talk printmaking, specifically silkscreen, for a minute. There is a huge difference between creating a graphic image that is, say, 12 colors (thus 12 separate layers, or more) that are perfectly registered (lined up), and is in a perfect edition of more than six compared to a one or two layer print that you can’t possibly screw up because there’s nothing to it and it took you three hours to make. And especially when you have nothing to back up your work! No explanation, no concept, no narrative that follows it, no inspiration other than that you’re maybe kind of dorky and like to wear flowers in your hair.
Can you see the difference?
And just for some context, that first work is a piece by Camille Rose Garcia, considered a modern pop-surrealist, and “Her paintings of creepy cartoon children living in wasteland fairy tales are critical commentaries on the failures of capitalist utopias. Creative influences include Phillip K. Dick, William Burroughs, Henry Darger,Walt Disney, as welll as politically aware bands like The Clash and Dead Kennedys. Her recent solo show, Ultraviolenceland, explored ideas of violence and empire.” (taken from the artist’s website) See?! Concept! Context! Inspirations!
How do you think it feels to be struggling every single day to figure out not only how to translate your ideas into a visual language, but come up with an adequate idea in the first place, and then have some cutesy chick in a floral dress say, “I don’t know, I just like looking at things so I make them. I don’t really think about anything when I work. I don’t have any conceptual ideas.”
How does that feel, Marena? Well, I would equate it to something like this:
The only comfort I can take in the hype that is given to this sort of work is that only one demographic is buying into it on a serious level, and they’re usually of the same idiotic mindset as the people who are creating it. As long as they keep to themselves I’ll be happy.
Write a book about a bunny, illustrate it, and then maybe I’ll give you the time of day. Art should not only be about skill, but about evoking emotions in both the viewer and the creator. If the best your work can do is make someone go, “OH MY GOD, AWWW”, then get out of my face.
Finally, here you will see my point illustrated perfectly.
And now I will shamelessly plug my website where you will find nothing of the above: marenamitchellart.tumblr.com
Beards! I appreciate them so much that I’ve decided to appreciate one special beard each week here in the Fashion section. Celebrities, pals, dads, brothers, you name it, they could potentially be the next beard of the week!
First up?
Constantin Brancusi
Famed sculptor from the early 20th century, this Romanian lug has quite the beard, which I was first exposed to today during my art history class.
Yes, his contributions and advancements in three-dimensional work shaped art for years to come, but let’s not overlook this man’s most important contribution to the world, that lovely facial hair.
the self-hating hipster 