20 x 30 cm detail from ‘Longing for Pondicherry’, Linen on wood, 70 x100 cm, in progress

Hanneke van Oosterhout just emailed me a detail from her latest painting showing a watermelon resting in an earthenware bowl. When I first discovered Hanneke, she was painting roses. I am able to admire one of them because it graces my dining room. Hanneke’s painting shows a yellow rose standing in streaming water while stretching upwards, both lovely and powerfully, with one of its leaves fluttering downwards.

A few years ago, Hanneke changed her motifs, now indulging in her love of fresh fruit and vegetable. She has painted still lifes of grapes, strawberries, apricots and plums with some of them resting in gorgeous china bowls. Looking at these still lifes makes me want to grab their fruit and bite into it.

While one inspiration for Hanneke’s still lifes is the lovely color, texture and taste of fresh fruit, another one is the Dutch master Adriaen Coorte.

This week, two paintings by Adriaen Coorte were discovered in a ‘drawer’ somewhere in Holland. These paintings will be auctioned at Sotheby’s for E 100,000.00 to 150,000.00. This past July, Sotheby’s auctioned another one of Adriaen Coorte’s paintings – THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN. Thus, Adriaen Coorte’s small, carefully balanced minimalist still lifes are becoming pricey.

Does the increasing popularity of Adriaen Coorte’s still lifes mean that a representational way of painting is becoming fashionable again?

UPDATE!
What I am really wondering here is,

Will our Dealers Survive?

Every artist has a relationship with at least one dealer — even if it is only a one-sided voyeuristic relationship. So it is relevant to ask:

Are they all going to go bust?

And if so, what happens to us? Do we need the dealers, or is the Fall of the Art World (as we know it) the best thing that could possibly happen?

On the one hand, the idea of cataclysmic change is always interesting, especially if it is happening to someone else. On the other hand, if you have been cultivating good relationships with dealers over the course of years, as Hanneke and I have, then the prospect of these people going out of business is pretty distressing. Distressing from an economic standpoint, not to mention from a personal one, since dealers can be pretty nice once you get to know them.

But it certainly does not look good. The New York Times paints a grim picture of the current art market:

Auction houses have begun to report sales that are less than half their level a year ago. In November 2007, the Christie’s evening sale of postwar contemporary art in New York totaled nearly $325 million; in 2008, the same sale brought in just $113 million. A share of Sotheby’s stock, which peaked above $50 in late 2007, now trades in the $6 range. . . the prices of work by young artists . . . are falling like bank stocks.

The world economy is falling apart, but it’s a great time to become an artist.

True, making a living as an artist can be difficult, even in the best of times. But there is more to being an artist than money . . .

Become an artist today and:

1. stop wasting your time on the internet
2. discover your inner value, even as your stock portfolio’s worth declines
3. work hard, and, by the time of the next economic boom, you may well be a successful artist

The last point is critical. Someone else (I think it was Obama) said it in one word: hope.

Remember, the economy goes up and down, but art transcends economic cycles . . . and so can you. Become an artist today!

. . .

What are your creative goals for the Depression?

Related, by Birgit:

• Obama and the Arts [34 comments]
• See also 24 comments on Daily Kos for above

Also by Karl Zipser:
How to Store Oil Paints

1. Tube Trouble?
2. The Greatest Invention Since the Paint Tube

How to Care for Brushes

1. Turpentine Trouble?
2. Storing Brushes
3. Cleaning Brushes
4. Shaping Brushes
5. Transporting Brushes

Frames and Framing

1. How to Gild a Frame
2. To Frame or not to Frame?
3. Internet as Frame
4. In real life, the frame matters

Things to Ponder

1. What is Art?
2. How to Make Art Last?
3. Is Art School Worthless?
4. Why is it Difficult to be an Artist?

Painting from Life vs. from Photos

1. From Life by Zipser
2. From Photos by Bodner
3. From Life by Bartman

How to Blog

1. How to Write the Perfect Blog Post?
2. “Bloggers have to Earn the Right to be Read”
3. How Should Artists Blog?
4. Can You Create in Public?

Here is a Bacon entitled Study from the human body

Contemporary artists also paint human anatomy. David Palmer paints human subjects engaged in movement. Jacob Collins paints human subjects more traditionally as stationary form.

A New York City dance group, the Ailey II dancers, enjoy popularity.

Body culture is rampant in the U.S. No longer just aimed at fitness, it advocates mindful movement. Amazon.com offers books such as

Is there a renewed interest in the HUMAN FORM? Will such painted human form express functional anatomy, mindful or any other kind of movement?

Le Géranium made news because of its high price at a Sotheby’s auction on May 7, 2008.

Saving my screenshot as ‘for Web and Devices’ made the colors more brilliant. Has anyone seen the original? How bright are the colors?

I assume most of you have heard about the WGA (Writers Guild of America) strike. I’m not sure how much attention it gets in other parts of the country (or the world, for that matter), but here in Los Angeles it’s a big story. This is after all an entertainment industry town, and the effects of the strike can be felt in every part of our local economy. My wife is a writer and a WGA member, as are many of our friends.

The strike has come about because of a disagreement between the corporations who own the movie and tv studios and the writers who create their content over how much, if at all, the writers should be compensated for their creative work. The writers contend that they should be getting a slightly larger share from the sale of DVDs of the movies they wrote. From the sale of a $28.95 DVD, the writer of the movie currently gets 4 cents, or as comedian Tim Kazurinsky points out, that ‘s 4 cents out of 2,895 cents. The writers are asking for 8 cents.

But a bigger issue, and possibly the main one, is that the networks and studios want to pay the writers nothing, that’s ZERO $, for tv shows and movies that they (the corporations) post on their web sites. The corporations claim that these streaming videos are “promotional”, and that they shouldn’t have to compensate the writers for posting them. But these “promotional” shows have commercials, just like any regular tv show, and are a huge source of income for the studios. They just want to keep it all for themselves.

As Mark Harris notes in his Entertainment Weekly Online column, “Why the Striking Writers Are Right”:

“The problem with this position is that writers deserve a share of revenue for material they help to create. Not a share only if the revenue is really, really a lot. A share, period. If it turns out that streaming video is a goldmine, then both sides will get a lot of money. If it turns out not to be, they’ll get less. Corporations are fond of reminding their employees that they’re all a ”family” during tough times. But when families sit down to dinner, Dad doesn’t get to say, ”I’m gonna eat until I decide I’m full, and then we’ll see if there’s anything left for the rest of you.” The right of a writer to earn money from work that continues to generate revenue cannot be dependent on how comfy studio and network heads are with the fullness of their own coffers.”

The studios are responding to the strike by showing reruns, and more reality and talk shows. But many of the more popular talk shows themselves will have to be reruns, since people like David Letterman and Jay Leno don’t come up with all those clever lines off the tops of their heads. They are created by a staff of, you guessed it, writers. To their credit, both Leno and Letterman are supporting the writers’ position in this dispute.

For the personal reasons mentioned above, and also on principle, as an artist, I’m siding with the writers as well. It seems obvious to me that the people who profit from the success of a creative product should include the artists who actually created it, not just the executives who made the phone calls and brokered the deals. I don’t watch a whole lot of tv to begin with, but until this strike is over I’m not planning on watching any. I’m going to vote with my remote, and say no to corporate greed. I hope many other people do the same.

==============

Here are a couple of videos about the strike that you might find interesting:
Tim Kazurinsky on WGN
the writers of The Office

The Arts section of today’s The New York Times examines the strange history and odd future of an artist considered to be one of the geniuses of the 20th Century and possibly the greatest of the Abstract Expressionists. Ironically, he remains–by design–virtually unknown to the general public and this despite the fact that he may have been even more prolific than Picasso.

For those of you unfamiliar with Clyfford Still, he is most certainly the ultimate manifestation of an artist’s contempt for commercialism, museums, galleries and collectors.  He is famous for denouncing the galleries and museums of the art world as Nazi gas chambers.  After a brief period of selling and displaying some of  his work, Still retreated to a remote farm in Maryland and spent the remaining decades of his life painting furiously, cursing critics and the commercial art world and hiding his work.  In a one page will he specified that his body of work could never be sold, never be separated, never be shown next to another artist’s work and could only be shown to the pubic in a Clyfford Still museum that would be built by an American city and would exclusively house his entire collection.

In August 2004, the City of Denver announced it had been chosen to receive the artworks contained within the Clyfford Still Estate.  In preparation for the 2010 opening of the Clyfford Still Museum, representatives of the city of Denver and a British art historian were recently allowed into a sealed and secret warehouse in Maryland to explore the inventory of 2,393 paintings, representing 90 percent of Still’s paintings. (Estimates are that there are over 10,000 drawings and sketches that will also be housed in Denver.)  The paintings alone have been conservatively valued by Christies at well over $1 billion if they were to be brought to market.

You can read the full story–and I highly recommend that you do–by clicking here, but I’m less fascinated by Still’s art than I am by his drama.  When the Denver museum opens, a vast body of work that has been hidden for almost half a century will rock the art world, rewrite the history of 20th Century art (or so the critics and historians will tell us) and relegate the current reigning masters of Abstract Expressionism to second class status.

Ironically, for an artist who spat on the commercial art world, the revelation of his work will obviously have a huge impact on “the commercial art world.”  There are an estimated 150 Still paintings in circulation, sold before he retreated into his furious misanthropic seclusion.  Just this past November one his paintings went for $21.29 million at Christie’s in New York.  One can only imagine what this may do to the work of other Abstract Expressionists, likely pushing renewed interest in the school and sending values through the stratosphere.  How ironic that the habits of an artist who despised the commercial art world more than any other artist in history, in fact taking his contempt and disdain to the level of an art form unto itself, may be responsible for the biggest windfall the commercial art world has ever experienced.

Collectors in possession of paintings by de Kooning, Motherwell, Pollock, Hare and Rothko must be drooling–and it will be thanks to the man who hated each and every one of them, their galleries and their collectors.  In the end Still’s war against the commercial art world may prove to be the most brilliant commercial marketing strategy in the history of commercial art. And then there is one other interesting point to consider.  Who exactly has determined that Clyfford Still is one of– if not the greatest of the Abstract Expressionists– and one of the artistic geniuses of the 20th Century?  Well, Clyfford for one and then, of course, the denizens of the commercial art world that Clyfford Still so arrogantly consigned to Hell.

Don’t get me wrong. I profoundly love these paintings. But I am much more in awe of the grand opera that this artist has created as his legacy.  And like Picasso, one might argue that he was more of a showman and theatrical genius than an artist.  And the artist who has best been remembered for his condemnation of the commerical art world may likely end up being remembered as having produced the most commercially valuable collection of paintings in art history. Clyfford Still is either furious or laughing his ass off.

If you are currently doing both, selling via your website and through a gallery, what are the agreements that you have in place with the gallery? Do you sell certain types of work on-line but not through the gallery?

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