Category:World, Meet Jimmy

It’s important not to rant on one’s blog. Still, sometimes it’s the stuff that’s wrong with the world that whips you up into a right state. I’ve mentioned before that some gallery nights in Dallas are disappointing, that most of what hangs on walls and perches on pedestals is not good art. But it’s helpful for one to keep things in perspective by seeing what’s going on in other sectors of the art world, or really, other art worlds.

Saturday the kids and I met some friends at the Cottonwood Art Festival in Richardson, TX, for an afternoon of looking at what these artists are up to, not to mention eating kettle corn and drinking $5 beers in small plastic cups. Mmmm, it tastes so good in that plastic cup. We all had a good time; it helps to have low expectations. I can’t expect to be amazed by the art at this kind of art-under-a-tent public event. But, as it turns out, I was amazed… amazed at the crushing terribleness of the wares on display.

The photo above of a Thomas Moran-esque romantic, bluebonnet-strewn landscape, framed and leaning against a tree, was the one photo that seemed to need taking. (It’s priced at five figures, and it’s leaning on a tree!) Not that I didn’t try to take other photos during our stroll; I figured there was no harm in snapping pics of artwork that’s already in direct outdoor sunlight, especially if I said that I wanted to put it on my blog. Hell, you can take photos at the Fort Worth Modern, so surely you can photograph the mannequin figures shellacked with magazine pages, right? Wrong. I was framing my photo of said display, really digging for anything redeeming about what I was seeing at the festival–in this tent, along with the actual papered mannequin sculptures, there were photos of the figures in various settings, and I like it when people make something then take pictures of it on location–when the artist emerged from behind me to interrupt the shot. I told him I did an art blog, and he said no photos please. “We have prints available, and that’s kinda what they’re for,” he says.

Yes, this guy was patronizing me. I was nonplussed. I thought artists craved attention and press, even if it’s in a piddly blog like this one. But, as he seemed to see it, I was taking a photo in lieu of purchasing a piece, as if a snapshot taken of artwork in a tent at an outdoor community festival were like an mp3 on an illegal file sharing site, and I was about to shaft him out of a legitimate, purchased download. If it was just a concern of flash exposure damaging the artwork, I’d be more sympathetic, though the persistent sunlight all weekend would seem to be the bigger threat. But, it was a proprietary move by the artist: if you like it, buy it, because photos hurt his livelihood.

Maybe he’s right; I don’t know how things work in his art world. But, as our browsing the tents made very clear, engaging with the contemporary world, pushing the limits of our expressive capacities, and trying to say something new about “what it’s like to be a fucking human being,” as David F. Wallace puts it, is not how things work there.

These encounters with sub-par art always get me trying to articulate what distinguishes good art from bad art. The whole issue is complex, though this festival art isn’t. There is no complexity to be found there. There is technique, there are nice frames, and I’m grasping for a third attribute to add, but I have nothing to say that not mean-spirited, so I’ll hush up.

Since I was a kid, utterly ignorant of modern art past Picasso, I remember attending these events, like Mayfest in Tulsa, strolling through the tents, looking closely at everything for clues about what art was and how I could do it better, and I was always underwhelmed. It was like someone who has vague dreams of becoming a U.S. senator but, for all he knows, there is only his rural city council to aspire to. “Well heck,” he says, “I want to be part of governing, so I guess I’ll go for Catoosa City Council when I’m old enough.” Seeing all this uninspired, uninspiring visual product as a kid didn’t change my mind about wanting to be an artist, but it did make me wonder if this was all I had to look forward to.

Luckily, when I moved to Denton, TX, to go to college with the future Mrs. Public I ran face-first into actual contemporary art, and as much as I sometimes question the value of going to college to be an artist, I sure learned that there is this whole other incredible realm where strange and brilliant people strive to make strange and brilliant objects, basically for their own sake.

So, I attend these fairs to have a good time with friends and family, to be out in the early autumn air, to drink beer, to ponder whether or not Jim Public could do an event like this; and, even as my expectations for the art are immeasurably low, I’m always struck be the terrifying mediocrity of it all. For example, I was intrigued by the black scratchboard technique of rendering animals and then glazing over it with color to make them more lifelike; technically there was something to look at there. But, as we went on, I began to wonder how long it would be till we arrived at the next booth that featured the exact same stuff by a different artist: it happened within 30 minutes.

I leave you with a photo of the kids in the creative zone glazing their ceramic tiles which will soon hang in our kitchens or protect our tables from boiling saucepans. And I leave you with a final analogy. I usually avoid conversations about why so much art isn’t real or good, because I don’t like looking pretentious. But, imagine you’ve been immersed in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, enjoying all the latest advancements in graphics, player interface, sophistication of game play, and just having a great time: you’re a hard-core gamer, and the game developers have come through for you. Later you attend a local gaming convention and when you arrive you’re confronted with checkerboards created in different colors and sizes, and variations of those wooden games with golf tees like they have at the Cracker Barrel, and marbles. You finally see a plugged-in screen and a crowd of people gathered around two players actually holding joysticks; approaching, you realize that they’re playing a poorly re-made version of Pong, and, what’s more, no one seems to think that this is lame on every level of lameness. You try to strike up a conversation about Call of Duty and not only does no one know what you’re talking about, but they’re eying your camera suspiciously.

This is what it’s like, my friends.

As I was painting and sanding in turn, trying to build up a good-looking surface on this painting, I eventually started to see the image of a baboon running across the top of the canvas. Normally I don’t go seeking imagery in abstract artwork, especially my own; usually it’s impressions, visual and emotional, that I’m seeking. But, these paintings emerge through a process a lot like excavation, so when I see in them things that look like symbols or archetypes, it’s fitting to go with it and see if the image and the paint work together in the end. The image and the paint both feel primal, so I think it works.

Run Big Monkey is a big painting that took a lot of elbow grease. A friend of mine has this interesting idea that maybe I should set my prices by adding up the labor hours and multiplying that number by an hourly wage, which is an elegant theory; I like how it demystifies the way we assign value to artwork, at least monetary value. Paintings like these, however, for all their size and complexity, would probably have too high a price tag with that method. It is a cool idea, though, charging by the hour. What do you think?

I made this painting on top of an old canvas from a series of nine paintings I did in 2005 for a big LA show at Patricia Faure Gallery, which has since passed away with its long-beloved owner Patty. Those paintings were labor-intensive themselves, though less so than Big Monkey. I had the same idea then about pricing my artwork as I do now: the lower the price, the more likely it is to sell. I talked to the gallery people about the price for the pieces. I wanted them to be $4000 each. They talked me up to $6500, using the argument, which sounded great at the time, that a gallery of Faure’s prestige has to maintain a certain baseline price level; in other words, the fact that my paintings had been chosen by that gallery made them more valuable right off the bat. By the time I arrived for the reception the price sheet showed that they were $8000 each. None of them sold. Now, I take my share of the responsibility for this: had I made them better, they would have had a better chance with collectors. But, had they been priced lower, they also would have had a better chance.

Running an art career on my own, as I am right now, I feel a nice sense of empowerment. I can set my prices as I deem appropriate. On the other hand, lacking the connections that a good gallery provides, I am much less likely to sell any of these larger paintings, even at the fraction of gallery market value that I have priced them at.

It’s an odd dilemma that I’m in. $4000 is a lot for most of us to spend on a painting, even at the large scale of Big Monkey. Yet $4000 is a suspiciously small amount for seasoned art collectors to spend on a painting like this. In either case, something seems fishy. In fact, sometimes I think the best move would be to double my prices across the board so that they seem more legit. This quest of mine to make serious contemporary art at a decent price may be doomed from the outset. Perhaps if I can eventually persuade an art dealer to lend them some legitimacy and partner with me, then things will go more smoothly. In the meantime, I’ll just keep working toward my goal and try to make interesting things happen.

Run Big Monkey is acrylic on canvas, 87″ x 67.″ It resides in our living room, on the only wall that can hold it. Because it’s so big the bottom foot and a half is obscured by the loveseat in front of it, so it feels like it’s part of the household, vying for its own space like everything else in here.

I’m happy to share with you that I’ve made some progress since my first Jimmy, Meet World post, in which I took a look at my look to see what I could do to make myself less freaky-looking as I introduce myself to people in my community. I got a haircut.

I’ve spent most of my life with hair that draws on the “bell” motif. At first, the bell was the result of my mom cutting my hair to fit the times–think Luke Skywalker. Later, I was just reluctant to maintain a coherent and/or respectable appearance. My mind was usually on other things, things like art and what song lyrics mean and, later, how best to parent a short-tempered daughter, and so on. Even mirrors conveniently have shown me only what I want to see, which is just enough of my features to recognize myself as I wash my face or check for pepper in my teeth; my scruffiness is edited out by a brain that hasn’t cared about scruffiness until now. Only in photos did I see myself as I looked to others, like a sad sap from the ’70s.

What I have now is versatile: it can be styled back or up or forward. I can probably get it to stand up in an inspired-looking mess, like you see in portraits of old classical composers. But what’s key in this cut is the clean edge around the ears. It acts like one of those slim, solid frames that contain a de Kooning or Joan Mitchell painting: it gives permission for whatever is within–or above in my case–to be as crazy as it wants to be. Most of the time, however, my hair will probably look a lot like it does above, as I spend the day pushing my fingers back through it. But I reserve the option to tousle and texturize as needed.

So, I got a haircut. I tell you this not because I’m in a sharing mood–I like to share, but I have some sense of self-censure, too–but because what’s happening on this site and in this blog is the journey of a virtually unknown artist from his current state of near obscurity to one of public note. I’m drawing up plans right now for the first direct phase of meeting my local public here in Garland, TX, and those will go up soon.

This blog is handy for me. If I say I’m going to do something here, I’ll feel like a jerk if I don’t do it. I’ll be announcing my first venture into the actual, physical public in the next few days.

I spend a lot of time in the studio, which some of you may recognize as a standard suburban 2-car garage with paintings and free-standing walls in place of automobiles, a fact that, to her great credit, my wife has endured since we moved into our first house. Do cars really need their own room anyway?

This is where I do a good deal of manual labor (i.e., making art), looking, and thinking. In the photo, I’ve just finished the former and I’m engaged in the two latter. The looking is how I determine if a piece of artwork is good or finished or needs more work, and the thinking includes all of that plus anything else that’s rattling around in my skull.

What I’m thinking about in the photo, besides how close to done the painting on the left is, is how I’m going to establish a sturdy career. One would think that having been an artist all my life, and a professional one for seven years, I would be past that point. People who would think this include me from the ages of around 18 to the early 30’s or so. To be an artist, and I use the term broadly, you have to face the economic reality that there is an absurd lack of demand for contemporary art in the broad market and an even more absurd glut of artists out there to fill it. We have to be persistent, foolhardy, and a little delusional, and we have to distinguish ourselves. This is what I’m thinking about.

In the last post I was examining my appearance because the career I’m building is a public one, and I need to do what I can to be presentable. My goal isn’t to make public artwork–though it doesn’t exclude it–but to find ways of being an artist in the public, a presence in the community, a local artist. Becoming familiar with the people who live and work where I live and work is a big part of this vision: I want a grassroots art career. I’m not interested in ingratiating myself to the elites of DFW and beyond in order to have a shot at a blue chip art career, a career that most of my neighbors will never know about, because contemporary art is an exclusive world. It’s an exclusive world I love, but one I want to expand to include everyone whose interest I can spark with a little pavement pounding and neighborly goodwill on my part.

And this process, which has the potential to go in all kinds of directions, and which I’m really excited about right now, is what you can expect to be documented in this blog as I go along. And, your reading is an important part of the whole thing. Now I need to nail down my game plan for getting out there with the good folks of north Garland…

I want my artwork to reach a lot of people and a lot of different kinds of people. Working toward building a large, diverse audience helps me achieve two goals: 1) I’m more likely to make a living doing this, and 2) I satisfy the drive that artists–all people, really–have, to cross the barriers that separate each of us, to make that human connection. Self-expression is just one half of why I make art. It’s not enough just to pull up for a jump shot, release the ball from your fingers, then turn and walk away: you want to see if you make the basket, and you want to see the crowd’s reaction.

Thinking about this stuff is always going on in my head. But, in my years of being an artist, I’ve given very little thought to what’s going on on my head. So let’s take a minute here to reflect on where I’m at on the outside, the side you see. If I’m going to be an artist with any kind of public presence, appearance deserves some scrutiny. If I can get the way I look a little more under control, maybe this grassroots art career will be a little less tricky.

I give you, Jim Public…

1. The overall shape here is thin, so far. This is good for public relations, especially since I’m still relatively young. As I gain years and weight, I can pull off a rounder figure if the career’s doing well: we assume that heavy poor people overeat because of their failures but that heavy affluent people overeat because of their successes. Also, if we use U.S. presidents as a barometer, our last overweight commander-in-chief was Taft, whose term started just over a century ago, while President Obama today is right up there with the lankiest. So, for me, slight makes right. And even though Santa and Buddha are both popular and portly, they have much to give and ask nothing in return, so they’re on a rather different, jolly plane from the rest of us mortals who have to make a living.
2. The hair is mouse brown and limp, and there’s a definite bell shape happening. It needs attention, be it lots of product to lift it up while keeping the length for some Depp-effect, or a good trim to expose the ears and give the head more of a strong, recognizably geometric shape. The hair must be dealt with realistically, however, because time spent doing hair is time spent not doing art.
3. The heavy-framed, dark glasses lend an educated, yet disabled look. You see people like this every day, who leave the inner animal in us thinking, “Good for him, carrying on bravely in spite of his impairment, and he hasn’t been killed and eaten yet!” As an accessory, the glasses work okay, imparting a thoughtful, physically nonthreatening presence that will help me when I greet people.
4. Face shaved = good. And some thin chops to strengthen the line of an otherwise vague, rounded jaw. I’m not thrilled about the gap separating the burns from the hair, which make them look like dangling, hairy earrings, but the sideburns will do for now. This face does not exude masculinity on its own, so the framing facial hair helps a little. But only a little: better for the mind to be virile and the body to be just manly enough to pass. Plus, in this photo, the burns define the cheekbones, which I didn’t realize I had.
5. The facial expression is neutral in this photo, and I’m happy to see that it’s not too weird or sullen or cranky. Adding a touch of smile will get me closer to the safe-zone for the grassroots art-career-building. The smile needs to be sincere rather than ingratiating: nothing’s worse than a stranger approaching you with a grin that says, “Hi. I want something from you.” My goal as a friendly neighborhood artist isn’t to convince anyone of anything but my existence. The world is full enough of folks whose greetings reek of opportunism. I’m serious about this: if you know that I exist and make art, then I’ve done my job. So, yeah, this facial expression is close to what I need to introduce myself to you, I think.
6. One last thing before the scrutiny ends and I’m all done looking at my own photo is the shirt and collar. It’s blazing hot in north Texas this summer, as always, and I had thought the light-weave, collared shirt was only about survival, but once again I’m pleasantly surprised that it looks okay, too. Especially note the collar, open one extra button for ventilation: while the shirt itself is a sturdy classic style, the open collar suggests a hint of unbridled creative passion. Striking that balance between refinement and savagery may just be the key to making it as the artist I want to be.

To conclude this self-critique, let me say that I’ve tried to be fair and practical about what the photo shows, and, unless I’m more delusional than I realize, I’m not as bad off as I had expected. I will keep eating vegetables, getting haircuts, using product for texture and body or whatever it is that my hair needs, sporting spectacles, remembering to shave, practicing good posture and smiling just enough not to look crabby. And I’ll get more of those shirts. Maybe half-roll the sleeves for that getting-down-to-business look.

As for the business I need to get down to, there will be more on that. Things are going well in the studio; it’s outside of the studio that needs the work.

One last thing. I’d like to thank Jim Public’s Girl and Jim Public’s Son–JPG and JPS henceforth–for their technical assistance with the photo shoot today. I couldn’t have done this without their eagerness both to pose as stand-ins and snap the pictures.