Ending Lending?

Painter Mark Kostabi’s slogan sums it up “Ending Lending is Beginning Winning”. Artists have traditionally consigned artwork to galleries. When the artwork sells, the gallery and the artist splits the sale 50/50. When the work does not sell, the artist gets the art back. This is the way the game is played and it is ludicrous. In this scenario, the artist literally loans the gallery collateral at no risk to the gallery and with no interest on the loan. An alternate way of doing things might be to imitate, oh I dunno, how about… the way every other business on earth operates: The gallery should just buy the art from the artist. How hard is that? If the gallery cannot afford it, either they should find an artist who will sell them work for what they can afford or they should get out of the gallery business, which they are not in if they cannot afford to purchase inventory. Of course, this works in the benefit of the gallery too — you can mark up the work 200 percent if you like. Buy 10 paintings for $100 each. Sell them for 20 grand each.

His argument makes perfect business sense. But that’s the problem, see? As soon as you apply traditional business rules to art, you begin to commodify it. What does that mean for artists? Stop taking risks. Make work that you know will sell, because that is the only way to get artwork purchased by a gallery. Galleries, in turn, will only buy work they know will sell.

What does the art world get once art gets commodified? Well, frankly, it gets Thomas Kinkade.

Now, if you are a gallerist, you can probably assume that a suite of Mark Kostabi paintings has a pretty high likelihood of sale. Buying outright from him probably makes great sense. It’s easy for Mark Kostabi to demand up-front payment. But 95% of the work that goes into galleries hasn’t been sanctified by the establishment. The art on the fringes only finds its way into the public eye through this model of shared, modulated risk.

I’ve been with a lovely gallery here in Seattle for over a decade. They have been incredibly patient as I have slowly matured my body of work, as well as when I took a sharp detour into another body of work. They (evidently) believe in what I am doing, and are willing to share a risk with me. My shows with them have been a mixed bag. Some have sold OK, and some have been real stinkers. Yet they soldier on—confident, it seems—that there is a trajectory here that we share.

2012011401

2012011401
oil on canvas
24″ x 24″

2011121001

2011121001
oil on canvas
24″ x 24″

work in progress

Good morning in the studio. Here’s a detail of a work in progress.:

Hand-Made Stretcher Bars

It’s a perennial gripe of every painter: stretcher bars are just too damn expensive for what they are. I’ve been working on 24-inch square canvases lately, and if I get the nice heavy-duty stretcher bars, they are about $5 each. So each canvas, just for the bars, costs me $20. (Add to that: corner keys, canvas, staples, gesso, etc.)

I’ve long thought that with a little ingenuity I could make my own. I’ve given it a go with some help from the internet. A hat tip here and a hat tip there. I’ve taken some ideas from out there, added some of my own tweaks, and I think I have a system that works. It’s a bit of work, especially to get set up the first time. But the savings are substantial: I spent an hour or so cutting yesterday once I was set up, and made about $120 worth of stretchers.

Set the blade on a table saw to fifteen degrees, and rip studs in half to get two pieces of stretcher bar stock out of each length. The angled cut will provide the “lift” that will keep the canvas from resting on anything but the very edge of the frame.

Mitered corner cuts finish the shaping of the lumber. Now you need joints that can expand.

Mark the corners so you can keep track of matched pairs once they run through the saw.

This is a splining jig. It will hold the stretcher stock in place so that the spline cuts are aligned.

Clamp the stock into the jig to hold the corner aligned while it runs through the table saw.

I’ve used a double spline joint. Two cuts through the corner are filled with splines that I cut to be a snug fit, tapped in with a rubber mallet.

A little work with a nice Japanese saw and the splines are cut flush to the stock.

Using a vise, I bent the ends of a turnbuckle so that it can fit in the corner of the frame to act as the “corner key” should the canvas need to be tensioned. (This is the same method I have always used for store-bought stretchers, too — the manufactured ones are really expensive.)

Needless to say, you need to sand the whole thing a bit so you don’t have any rough surfaces or sharp edges, especially on the edge that touches the face of the canvas.

Cheapskate recap:
store-bought stretchers — price for wood: $20
home-built stretchers — price for wood: $1

The Beginning is Near.

signal:noise part II – earth

This is part two of a series exploring disturbance in the signal:noise ratio in my generation. The first part can be read here.

I have long argued that we should eliminate the word “nature” from the English language. There is nothing that can’t be said better without that word, and the use of the word itself sets up a dangerous dichotomy that becomes ingrained in our thinking. Usually, when the word is used, it is in opposition to humankind: “nature” is everything that we haven’t built, domesticated, or spoiled.

The danger is in the forgetting that we, ourselves, are nature too. The moment we cease to understand that we are entwined in this mesh is the moment when we begin doing real damage. This moment, on a societal scale, began at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and the effects have multiplied since. This attitude of otherness, combined with a religious belief that “nature” is put here solely for the use and abuse of humanity, buys us rising seas.

If we eliminate the word, perhaps we can begin to chip away at the dichotomy. Perhaps, too, we can begin to heal our psyches a bit by once again having the knowledge that “we” is a broader term than we have understood.

Lin Jensen, in Deep Down Things, puts it like this (emphasis mine):

“Social ethics refers to human society and how it is organized, the way people behave in groups and interact. But how we humans behave toward each other can’t be separated from how we behave toward earth itself… Our human livelihood is held in mutual trust with all other beings, the survival of the earthly community predicated on an unavoidable prerequisite of fairness.”

Beyond abandoning the word “nature”, then, how can we gain this connection? If you are lucky, you just might find the answer under your fingernails. If we want to rejoin the biosphere psychologically, we need to reconnect with the earth physically, and this necessarily means getting our hands dirty. Dig in the earth. Plant seeds. Pull weeds. Make compost. Eat food that you created. You don’t need to live in the country to do this – we have two apple trees in large pots on our deck.

I’ll confess to being a bit of a hypocrite. This year’s garden, despite best intentions, died the death of a thousand other obligations. We ate precious little that we grew this year. Be that as it may, some of my happiest days are the days I spend out on our small property digging in dirt, chopping wood, or planting seeds.

This spring, as I was planting the bean bed, I carved circular troughs around the stick tipis that I put out for the beans to climb. I spaced seeds around the circle, and then gently folded the earth back over the troughs with my hands. As I did so, I felt a throbbing under the earth — a heartbeat in the soil. After a few startling seconds of confusion, I realized that I had disturbed a mole, and the throbbing I felt was his attempt to get away from me. The soil is packed with living beings, from the microscopic to the mole-sized. This richness is a requirement for our very lives. “Sterile” soil is dead soil, and dead soil doesn’t grow food.

There is some evidence that exposure to dirt “trains” our immune systems, and that so-called modern life with its sterile environments has led to an increase of asthma and other reactive immune-related diseases. Dirty is healthy, at least in some sense of the word.

Of course, it isn’t just about soil. Absorbing an understanding of our inter-connectedness is just as easily accomplished through a calm, present observation. It doesn’t need to be a beautiful sunset or a spectacular waterfall – in fact, it may be better if it isn’t. The ordinary is profound.

As Gary Snyder says in his essay Good, Wild, Sacred:

“There’s no rush about calling things sacred. I think we should be patient, and give the land a lot of time to tell us or the other people of the future. The cry of a flicker, the funny urgent chatter of a gray squirrel, the acorn whack on a barn roof – are signs enough.”

Having a sense of the soil, the seasons, the creatures with whom we share our places – these are understandings that can begin to balance our signal:noise ratio and root us to “place” in a way many of our generation have lost. That dirt under your fingernails just might be the ticket home.

~creative commons image by flickr user bonguri

signal:noise part I – place

This post is part of a longer series of observations about a decades-long process of intentional disconnection that has had unintended psycho-spiritual ramifications for a whole generation of men and women.

“Where are you from?” is, for most of us, a question easily answered. Those of us who didn’t have a confusing process of continual relocation as children (as an Army brat might) have an address that we can mentally refer to. For me, it was the southwest corner of the intersection of Pioneer Blvd. and S. 44th Street. The small brick house was built in 1964, just a few years before my birth. A significant addition was made in 1976, including a sizable basement addition dug by hand with shovels. When my parents bought the house, they could look south from the house and see cows grazing. By the time I can remember, all that existed south of the house was miles and miles of more houses. It wasn’t suburban, exactly. There was a grocery store that we could walk to, and traffic was heavy on our street. I suppose it was some sort of urban life, but compartmentalized and homogenized, made of similar houses and “perfect” lawns. It was a place stripped of place-ness. As Gertrude Stein famously said about a return to her childhood locale, there was “no ‘there’ there.”

I have a quick and ready answer to the question of from whence I come, but that answer is too easy, and perhaps misses the point entirely. Anybody asking the question is looking for more than an address or the name of a city. They want to know what formed you, be able to categorize you, understand you through a societal shorthand. What influence does place have on a person, and — assuming that it does for the sake of this post — is that place that influences the same place as the one we reference in our mental address book? Is there a deeper connection to a place that becomes programmed slowly over generations (as I have argued here)? Or can you break a person from place simply by relocating them?

And is place more than a locale? Is it regional? How connected is it to the land, its seasons, its climate? What about culture? As we become more mobile and homogenized, is “local color” a quaint artifact to be preserved in pockets for the amusement of tourists?

I suspect that disconnection from place does violence to the psyche. We end up wandering dogs: having been moved across the country by our owners, we run away and desperately try to find our way back to that place we knew. The trouble for so many of us, though, is that we never knew place at all. So we wander, searching, with no end in sight, as expressed by musical artists of my generation:

The cops shone their lights
On the reflectors of our bikes
Said “Do you kids know what time it is?”
Well, sir, it’s the first time I felt like something is mine
Like I have something to give

The last defender of the sprawl
Said “Well, where do you kids live?”
Well, sir, if you only knew what the answer’s worth
Been searching every corner of the earth

– Arcade Fire, Sprawl I (Flatland)

_______________________

Wake up we’re here
It’s so much worse than we feared
There’s nothing left here
The country has disappeared
If the winter trees bleeding, leave red blood
The summer sweet dreaming, April blush
But none of that is ever gonna mean as much to me again.

– Wilco, Country Disappeared

Lin Jensen, born the same year as my mother, touches on this a bit in his book Deep Down Things: the Earth in Celebration and Dismay:

Like so many others of my generation, I’ve witnessed the place of my birth, indeed the world of my birth, erased like incidental words from a blackboard never to be rewritten again. I fear what this loss of place portends for each of us, humans and otherwise. Will we lose the wisdom that earth itself teaches? We need to go home again, and we need to remember that our real home is the very dirt under our feet. It was a footing we were once intimate with.

This process hasn’t begun in my generation, clearly. But I do think that we are the first wave of casualties, the collateral damage. Lin Jensen knows how this breaks down:

Our bodies always know where we are even when we don’t. Seasons rise and fall within us on blood tides of hunger. Daily need roots our mouths to the subsoil. When we lose sight of this, the fundamental wonder of it still lies fallow in our very tissues to be called forth again as joy. This wonder, this springing joy, is our only health. Our sanity is measured by the presence in us of such wonder. Lose it, and we go mad. We deal in real estate. We become incoherent with talk of “property” and “title” and “rights pertaining to thereof.”

How, then, can we recapture a connection to place, as a way to begin to heal? How do we find those threads that tie us to a locale, and braid them into a rope to which we can hold? Part of the answer, I believe, lies in a connection to earth — not THE earth — but soil, rock and root. As Jensen says in the quote above, “the very dirt under our feet.” I’ll take that up in part II.

True Believer

I believe in Minimalism so strongly that I own two copies of “Minimum”.

Framebuilding

Maple frames for 6″ panels, in process on the work table.