Occasionally on ArtId, we get a person or company that contacts a number of our members through the contact page in their ArtId galleries offering artists anything from representation to licensing deals. Sometimes these offers are legitimate and, unfortunately, sometimes they are not. Because your contact page is open for anyone to use, these emails cannot be dealt with as spam. An email received through your ArtId contact does not mean that we have endorsed the company or person.

So, we'd like to give you some tips on how to discriminate between truly interested business people and those whose real goal is to get you to pay them a lot of money for nothing.

How to Compare

1.A legitimately interested person will identify themselves right away and give you information about themselves and/or their company.

Beware of emails where the writer does not divulge the company name or does not tell you exactly what they are interested in doing.

2. A legitimate email will most likely address you by name and make mention of your work, how the person found you, and why they think you are the artist they want to work with.

Beware of emails that appear generic and do not regard you or your work personally. Likely those emails are being sent to a large number of artists by cutting and pasting the same email over and over again into contact pages.

3. A legitimate proposal will work within a standard of operating procedures that exist within the art business world.

Offers that promise too much probably cannot deliver.

If you receive an email that you are unsure about, let us know and we will investigate it. When we know that an unsavory person or company is contacting our artists, we post a notice in the Announcements section of your ArtId which appears when you login.

]]> http://artid.com/members/artid/blog/post/3626 Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:10:21 +0000

TO ALL ARTID ARTISTS:

Please be sure to send us an email to info@artid.com with a link to your blog post about upcoming art shows or exhibits. We will post it in our Member Art Shows blog so art collectors have one central place to look for information.

Thank you and Happy New Year!

The Calder Game – Not Just for Kids

It’s a mystery…How could a children’s book could be so compelling? Perhaps it speaks to kid in all of us who, no matter how we dress ourselves up, still lives. Now and then a great mystery gets written and it is just plain enjoyable. No sex, no nudity, no romance, just simple code encrypting, mayhem and suspense. Author Blue Balliett is on to something. Chasing Vermeer, The Wright 3 and The Calder Game give the ten to twelve-year-old set an inside track on the art world, while speaking the language of intrigue. The characters, three emerging sleuths, are empowered by the adults in their lives (most of the time) to help solve different art thefts.

Balliett is a third grade teacher in Chicago and is clearly informed by her work regarding kids and art education. Convincing dialogue, descriptive writing and delightful characters all make for an inspiring read. Balliett knows child-speak and reveals the inner thoughts of the characters that describe some universal frustrations of that age. The author creates a magical tale with no shortage of sophisticated vocabulary and even inserts a glossary in the back of the book which separates fact from fiction (one of my favorite aspects). This frees the author to use artistic license in creating the plot and crafting the details of the story and at the same time does not misrepresent factual information. For example, Balliett reveals that the stolen Minotaur sculpture in the story is a compilation of several large sculptures created by Alexander Calder in the 1950s. She also discerns between fictional characters and those based on real people whom she has met in her travels. According to Publishers Weekly the book is a “smart playful story that never stops challenging and exhilarating the audience.” I have to agree. At the end of the story Balliett reveals the last name of a mysterious character, a young girl that potentially sets up the next story. Her name is Georgia O’Keefe.

I took The Calder Game to bed with me for several weeks and each night I looked forward to the next chapter. Would the missing character, Calder Pillay re-appear? Would the location of the large sculpture that was stolen from the town square in the remote English village be discovered? What secret would be revealed? The book illustrates the fact that artists do not need to be fully engaged in creating to enjoy art. A mystery can be inspiring way to end the day, a way to engage the child-like spirit that we can then bring to our easel. And the large print doesn’t hurt either.

Back in my days as a student of Architecture, I read with interest the writings of Charles Jencks on Le Corbusier, one of the giants of the modern movement in the 20th century. In advocating for the greatness of Le Corbusier, Jencks did someting much more ambitious: he propounded a theory of value to be applied to all art, based on multiple levels of meaning. All works of art, he says, fall somewhere on a spectrum from "Univalence" (single-leveled) to "multivalence" (multileveled), and truly great works are always multivalent.

He compares in detail Le Corbusier's apartment block in Marseilles, the "Unite d'Habitation", with a contemporary church design (of which I could find no image) in the form of a cross of thorns. In the church, the concept is striking but unyielding, with the functions of the church forced mercilessly into the symbolic form. Once we have grasped the symbol, there is little else to learn from it. In the Marseilles block, on the other hand, every element of the design serves multiple functions, with structural elements which are also sun screens, space dividers and surface pattern. The richness of the design continually yields new meaning.

I am intrigued by this idea which strikes me as a very fruitful standard of judgement for works of art, more because of its challenge than because of its unchallengeable truth. I applaud anyone who proposes a standard of judgement for art which attempts to encompass both traditional and modern art. Each standard challenges my own subconscious standards, helping me understand both art and my own prejudices.

As standard of greatness in art based on levels of meaning would immediately challenge all art we can classify as minimalist. The essential forms of Brancusi and Mondriaan depend for their force and perfection on the elimination of everything irrelevant. There is a striving for perfection, for the archetype, and when an artist achieves it we recognize the purity, the "hard won simplicity" as greatness. But perhaps these works are not really univalent; they force us to consider the full meaning of each line, each juxtaposition of form, achieving a richness in simplicity.

Well, what about Andy Warhol? His "borrowings" are aggressively unaltered, untransformed, except by the act of reproducing them and placing them in a gallery. For me, the image itself is quickly exhausted of any new levels of aesthetic experience; I know the image by heart and can turn away from it in a moment without loss. But the implications on other levels are richly thought-provoking. He is asking us to look freshly at our daily visual environment, and to begin to understand what it means about who we are and how we deal with images on a daily basis. Can we really handle an image rich in meaning if we are trained by our culture to proccess thousands of images quickly and superficially?

Then there are minimalists like Mark Rothko, whose color field works over many years seems to devote themselves to the juxtaposition of one or two colors displayed against a ground tone. Why are they so compelling? The answer seems to be that he chooses combinations that are alive, that "do something". What is really in front or really behind? Are the squares of color swelling? How does the choice of colors accord with or conflict with our sense of gravity?

But what I know about myself is that I prefer the richness of levels of meaning to the purity and simplicity of a single idea perfectly expressed. I will always respond more to Rauschenburg than to Rothko, to Klee rather than Mondriaan. It is also what I love most about nature itself: complex beyond comprehesion, but full of suggested patterns, possibilities, in short, levels of meaning.

Paul Klee is fascinating in his exploration of the basic elements of art - line, color, shape - but never forgetting the full richness of their possibilities. There is always texture, movement, the suggestion of space, the possibility of association. There is always the richness of seeing the process of making recorded in the final work. And there is alwys the whimsy which speaks of a dialogue with the emerging image, rather than the grand plan. I feel like I am creating the work with him, seeing a line trun into a grid, a grid become a surface, seeing each color suggest the next.His art is a wonderful melding of analysis and understanding, on the one hand, and impulse and intuition on the other.

I like levels of meaning in a work. I'll go beyond that to say that in images on a 2-dimensional surface, the tension between the demands of the surface and the evocation of our three-dimensional world are probably the richest source of ambiguity and levels of meaning. What separates the still lives of Chardin, or a century later of Cezanne, from the ordinary is our lively awareness of their position in the frame, their control of the surface shapes as well as the elements of form.

I know why Degas and Cezanne are my favorite artists of the impressionist era. They exploit this tension between the surface and the described reality to its utmost. Since the two levels of meaning are ultimately polar opposites, if you are unwilling to sacrifice one to the other, the result is a visible struggle, as satisfying as it is demanding. There are many other levels of meaning in the works, based on association, narrative, the psychological impact of color, but the life and death struggle of the space and the surface is for me the most exciting.

There are no self taught artists, but there are many lessons beyond the formal walls of the classroom. Museums have long been places where artists can sharpen their skills, and many welcome students with sketchbook in hand. Some paintings within the museums you frequently visit may become old friends that you must spend time with even when you are there to view a special show.

At Stockton's Haggin Museum "Sophistication", a 1908 work by Harry Wilson Watrous, is such a work for me. So are the Albert Bierstadt works in the museum's permanent collection. My fascination with "Sophistication" led a young friend to give me the box pictured here from the Haggin's gift shop. Scattered about the world there are several related painting by Watrous depicting a young woman, or women, dressed in black and white, and gazing into their own world rather than out at the viewer.

Characteristic of this painting and others such as "The Passing of Summer" and "Confidences" are an interesting lively use of negative and positive space, lights and darks, sending the eyes dancing around to bits of interesting detail and always back to the faces. Delicate shadows and shadings shape the forms, and despite his love of blacks and white his color choices are excellent.

"Sophistication" represents a young woman who is rather daring for her time and place. In 1908 there is a cigarette in her hand, and she is having tea in a public place unaccompanied, a sophisticated modern woman indeed-- probably wants the vote enough to risk getting arrested in a demonstration. And that averted gaze, off in her own thoughts, also implies story, life in motion both before and after this vignette.

So what do I take away from this painting as an artist? It reminds me to keep honing my drawing skills. It points up the power of strong value contrast and the rhythms of negative and positive spaces. It reminds me that one may not need a large palette, but if little color is used it must be used wisely.

On another level it causes me to think about the importance of observation, not just observation of form and color but also of the body language of people which is so unique and so telling.

Think about some of your favorite paintings. Why do you love them? What can you learn from them?

If I've piqued your curiosity about Harry Wilson Watrous you may want to take a look at the American Gallery website http://americangallery.wordpress.com/2009/12/12/harry-wilson-watrous-1857-1940/

When will our Museums learn to give back to the surrounding communities?

Museums look for support from the communities that surround them but often give little back to the area artists and arts organizations that support them. I do not know if this is typical in all areas of the country or just the few Museums that are close to where I live in New York? Still I do not feel that Museums in general do enough to help enrich the lives of the artists and arts organizations around them. For one example I would take the DIA Museum in Beacon, New York the DIA has a wonderful building with a beautiful art collection in an area of New York that has a flourishing arts community and lots of artists.Still the DIA Museum does nothing to create shows for area artists or other area arts organizations. I feel if they did sponsor and create local art events it would be beneficial to them and to local residents who would visit the Museum to see their friends and neighbors art works displayed or other arts performace. The DIA is not alone in this attitude as you find it in other Museums such as the Museo de Bario, MOMA etc. I would love to hear back from any and all Museum staff if they feel these comments are not fair? Hopefully I am missed informed and can be enlightened by your comments? I think Museums do need to work with the communities so that more people would feel comfortable in visiting these institutions and supporting them through memberships and other donations. I am a member of all of the Museums listed above and I do feel it is important for artists and arts organizations to support Museums and other cultural institutions in the area that they live in, but it would be nice to see the Museums support the community, artists, and arts organizations back as well. I look forward to a future where I will be able to visit these Museums and not only see the best art from around the world, but also see the newest and best art works being created by local artists as well.

Cuban American Artist Jose Acosta

I was at the counter of an instant printing place and I stood up for some reason, not looking, when I went to sit back down, there was someone in what was I thought was still my seat. So there I was sitting in a strangers lap, totally embarrassed, but he was laughing and we struck up a conversation. Ballet Teacher? Is that so? I started lessons the next week.

I cross-trained for a few years but finally I gave up ballet to study calligraphy in earnest. I was involved in a local guild and we were having Peter Thornton in for a workshop. I volunteered to send out the flyers. I had no idea who Peter Thornton was, but I had seen some of his work. Just before the workshop I got a call from a gentleman asking if there was room in the workshop and I said there was. He asked about Peter’s background and qualifications, which of course I had to make up because I hadn’t a clue. After I had given him the sales pitch the guy broke into hysterical knee slapping laughter. It was Peter. I was busted and embarrassed, again, but we had a great workshop, even though he teased me for the next two days, he thought it was so funny.

In 1995 I attended a calligraphy conference in Trenton NJ. There was a week long class offered called Non Traditional Tools in a Traditional Craft. This was good timing, I wanted to incorporate more contemporary calligraphy in my graphic design work. Walking back to the main gathering room after the first night’s opening lecture, I was fumbling in my purse for matches and dropped a pack of cigarettes. (That’s one of the ways we stayed thin enough to dance, I don't recommend it). The man walking behind me picked them up, handed them to me and asked for one. I had cigarettes and no matches he had matches and no cigarettes. He asked how I was finding the conference so far and what classes I was taking. I told him I was going to be studying with some guy I never heard of named Michael Clark. You can guess the rest. I have a real knack for putting my foot in my mouth. I have had many more excellent teachers over the years, and too many stories to tell here.

If you remain open to possibility and abandon your sense of fear, all things are possible. Pay attention, the synchronicity is there. The universe sent me these teachers exactly when I need them. Alex taught me much more that ballet steps, he taught me about the visual line created by the body. He had many memorable quotes but the one I remember most fondly and use the most often is “A good dancer never blames the floor.” Peter taught me practice and patience and the dangers of comparing myself to the person sitting next to me. Michael taught me to experiment, to see, to build a relationship with the letters and revere their form. Form, line, focus, discipline, dedication; dancing was just like lettering and lettering was just like dancing and on and on the connections go.

So, when you are looking for a teacher and you are ready, one will appear. Take my advice; if you have to, sit on them.]]> http://artid.com/members/calligraphy/blog/post/3508 Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Visual impact is the first thing we work toward in a painting, with color, value, and composition forming a triad of essentials. After the sense of sight, we most often appeal to that of touch. We want the viewer to be able to imagine from our visual clues the silken smoothness of a fabric, the rough bark of redwood or oak, the scratch of a kitten's tongue, the heft of a stone. Less often we spark the senses of taste, hearing, and smell. When I developed "Heavenly Aroma", I hoped to visually depict a smell.

I was afraid the painting shown here was a little too "local" to make it into the highly competitive juried show currently open at Delicato Winery. Only about 30% of the paintings entered made the cut, and I had better hopes for my other entries. "Heavenly Aroma", entered in the whimsical category, relies on those floating Cheerios making sense. What I had not counted on was that while the wonderful odor of baking Cheerios is unique to Lodi CA and a few other communities with General Mills plants, signature odor is a universal characteristic of towns and cities. Gilroy, CA says garlic; Hershey PA is awash chocolate scent; roasting coffee, simmering tomato sauce, cattle pens, oil patches, and other products leave an unforgettable memory associated with various locations. I really need not have worried about anyone not "getting" what the presence of those floating Cheerios meant.

Of course the painting had to have other strengths to make it an acceptable work of art. It works as a composition because the various angles of the structures (the buildings, fence, and sidewalk) keep the eye moving. The seemingly random pattern of the Cheerios also guide the eye back into the painting when it might follow the fence off the page. Verticals break up the long horizontal lines, and notice the runner is moving toward the center of the painting rather than out of the painting. Shadows are not intense, in keeping the the low light of a cloudy day, but there is enough value contrast for the painting to read well from a distance.

I chose ink and watercolor for this work, a media combination I frequently prefer for cityscapes.

Look at your own paintings as well as those of other artists. How many senses do you appeal to in various works? Does viewing Edvard Munch "The Scream" hurt your ears? How often have you looked closely at a painting to see if the artist had built up an irregular surface or created it purely with line and color? Visual art indeed offers a sensory feast.

The other day a member asked me how she could get more visitors to notice her gallery among the multitude on the site. I gave her several suggestions, including sending people to your gallery through other media such as Facebook, blogging about it, or using key descriptive words in your text.

Another way is to have a niche, a little corner of the art scene which, when a viewer is looking for it, they will find only a handful artists who qualify. If you are an Equestrian painter, or a painter of infant portraits, your chances are vastly improved.

Are you a niche artist? Do you, like Vermeer, have a trademark subject which instantly identifies the work as yours? There is a lot to be said for it: you can get very good at it, you know your market, and buyers looking for a certain item or subject are much more likely to find you. It has worked really well for artists in the past who were good but not great, who understood their strengths and limitations. George de la Tour made a name for himself doing paintings lit by a single source, a candle, within the frame.

The best examples are the little Dutch masters, who all carved out a niche. Vermeer himself was one in spirit, though his genius raises him to the level of greatness beyond and doubt. Cuyp specialized in landscapes with cattle (he turned out an excellent cow), while Terborch was known for his superior rendering of satin.

Periodically I wonder if I should try to become a niche artist. When I am in a fallow period, trying to prime the pump, I always think I should return to what I do best...whatever that is. There's the rub: if I chose a niche, what would it be?

I have had many "specialties", favorite subjects to return to. I have also had many people tell me what they think is my best thing is. However, their advice invariably reflects their taste at least as much as my expertise, and tends to spread itself evenly across my subject areas.

My first specialty was portraits; I concentrated on portraits through my college and graduate student years, and have always kept at it. There are regularly people I meet whose faces make me itch to paint them, and a lot of my portraits are the result of my asking someone to sit. I also do house portraits, animal portraits, even portraits of cars and motorcycles! But portrait commissions have never dominated my art business.

Architecture has always had a special place in my work; I love structure in all its manifestations, but particularly when it leads to unintended conjunctions and compositions, as in old mills and decaying barns. Actually, my millscapes are the subject area which has led to my highest percentage of sales. That would be one way to choose.

If I look at my landscape work over the years, what stands out are the skies, the dramatic clouds. My favorite landscape painter from the past is John Constable, and the skies are clearly what distinguishes his works from all others. My landscapes have been called gloomy, but I don't see them that way. The clouds are a marvellous instrument for the expression of energy, of feelings, and for the harmonization of all the colors found below.

My great passion in 2009 was rocks and rockfaces, which are also a source of accidental structural elements. Rocks have had an almost spiritual attraction for me for a long time: I collect them, display them, build with them. The house which I now live in with my wife, which we designed ten years ago, is centered around a monumental fieldstone hearth, built entirely from rock I collected myself. Every rock has its own character, much like the character in a weathered face.

But wait! I have just returned from a visit to Stowe, painting and skiing, so it is very clear to me at the moment that snow is the thing I do best...maybe. I love winter, I love what snow does to transform a landscape, I love how it both modifies and creates light, how it makes pattern in the alternation of dark and light. I can feel that I will now be doing snowscapes in the coming days, rich with lavendars in the shadow, warm with creamy tones in the late light. I can't wait to milk again the magic of snow.

So is that my niche? For the moment it will be. Or should I do just boulders in the snow, or old barns in the snow? It's niche work for the time being, until the next passion comes along. For me, the passion trumps the niche.

When I first joined artId.com, I was almost immediately challenged by another artist who seemed, by and large, much more experienced and knowledgeable about this whole thing called art than I will likely ever claim to be... He didn't seem to like my work and I really didn’t like what he seemed to be trying to say to me about it. I evaded his remarks as best I could and I got rather defensive in return, to say the least. I didn’t like what he was insinuating about my “art” because, at the time, it seemed like he was trying to tell me that all the elements of an innate ability are found within my work, but it seemed to me that he (more than anything else) thought my work lacked something. Talent, maybe? Or perhaps my work has something about it that seems unstudied or amateurish? I don’t know exactly what it was that turned him off of it. His remarks made me think, though. I hate to admit it but it’s true.

Before this confrontation I had my sails all set to delve into the waters of erotic art, which is something I have always had an interest in and I was just starting to feel brave enough to give it an honest go until I was challenged. I am not sure what it says about me, but in the end I didn’t feel very courageous anymore.

Not one to be easily deterred, I moved forward anyway even though I was still a little rattled.

Over the last few weeks, I toyed with the idea of what I thought I might, as a painter, be able to convey in keeping with my original intent (to create erotic art) before the negative encounter in question reared its ugly head. What I discovered inside my mind was something close to fear. I found I didn’t really have the nerve to take the notion of an erotic image too far any more. In essence, I was knocked down a peg or two. Maybe I needed that and maybe I didn’t. Who knows?

Still, I thought a lot about the concept. I played around with some ideas. What I came up with was something rather subdued, rather naive even, if I am honest.

In the end, instead of going full-on crazy with the subject of erotica I decided to take it slow. I decided I wanted to convey what I personally find subtly alluring. I wanted to capture the essence of a certain moment, a visual observation, that affected me. This is where the concept for this newest painting of mine came from. I was watching Lord of the Rings with my husband over the Christmas holidays and there was a moment in the film where one of the lead characters leaned down toward the ground and his hair hung down across his face and his mouth was open just a little to reveal a row of blessedly normal (that is to say imperfect) teeth. Well, that moment struck me. Frankly, I thought it was beautiful in its own exquisitely masculine way. Quite beautiful indeed. I realized it was this kind of moment and this kind of feeling that I wanted to recreate. With this concept in mind I decided this painting would be my fledgling attempt into the world of eros.

I worked and worked on this painting for hours. At first, I was thrilled it was turning out so well. It was a pleasure to wake up in the morning knowing that this painting was waiting for me. Within a week or so it was finished.

Then? Fear set in. Criticism took over. I started to look at the painting through disparaging eyes. What if the guy with all the negative feedback is right? What if this is wrong with my paintings and that is wrong with my paintings? I no longer saw my work through my own eyes but through the eyes of a critic. It was (and is) frightening.

The more I thought about it the more I realized that if my style as an artist (and yes, I will go so far as to call myself an artist) falls short in the eyes of some, what can I do about it? Nothing. What I convey to the world in whatever form it is in is the only way I know. It is who I am. To alter my process or to alter my method of painting to please someone else would be wrong. I can’t do it. Instead, I will work through the discouragement maybe for the better. Maybe for the worst.

It’s easy to get caught up measuring “hits” to your website when you are selling artwork online, and then wondering, “Why so many hits and no sales?”

Remember, hits are people, too. Not just faceless numbers on a statistic sheet.

January is a great time to go back to your ArtId gallery and look at it from a buyer’s perspective. Ask yourself some questions and see how you might improve your gallery according to your answers.

-How did those people find my gallery?

-Who are they?

-What were they looking for and not find?

-Did I tell them enough about the artwork?

-Did I tell them enough about myself?

-Do the images in my gallery do my art justice?

-Are my prices too high for them, too low?

-Did I make it easy for them to buy my work?

-How can I get them to come back if they didn't buy today?

A few simple changes could convert those hits into buyers!]]> http://artid.com/members/artid/blog/post/3461 Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

On January 7, 2010 I had the great privilege of attending the opening of the Latino Artists at the University of Connecticut exhibition. I was fortunate to be asked to participate in this exhibition and I am so glad I accepted. The opening party was fantastic with over 200 people attending. The 8 artists that were exhibiting were also in attendance and I am glad I got to talk to them and also take pictures with them. Some are very established in the art world while others are the rising stars of today. Everyone enjoyed the beautiful exhibition and the great foods supplied by our sponsor restaurants DeMaya, Tacos Guadalajara and Quechua Restaurant.

The event also had great Music by Manos del Candombe and a beautiful color catalog with images of all the art and artists in the event. Participating artists were Jose Acosta, Claudio N. Altesor, Ed Bianchi, Rosa E. Colón, Duvian Montoya, Hernán Restrepo, Arnaldo Ugarte and Inés Villanueva.

The exhibition was a collaborative effort between University of Connecticut and Vida Social Magazine. The curator of this exhibition was Tatiana Mori a fellow Latina and UCONN alumni. Special thanks to Dr. Michael Ego, Professor of Family Studies at UCONN and Tamara Guevara, Chief Editor of Vida Social magazine. I would also like to thank all guests who attended and showed their support for the arts.

This was the 1st Latino Artists Exhibition that I have participated in this year 2010 and I know that there will be many more to come throughout the year in all parts of the world. So if you are a Latino Artists please find and participate in as many Latino exhibitions as you can. They are an excellent way to network and meet other Latino Artists and the exposure will help you obtain information and future exhibition opportunities.

I think 2010 will be a fantastic year for all Latino artists that are prepared and willing to find creative ways to exhibit and show their art to the public. For Latino Artists I see a lot of future collaborations and fantastic exhibition opportunities as Galleries, Museums and Institutions see how successful Latino Artists Exhibitions are. Best of Luck to all my fellow Latino Artists our future looks bright and colorful.

Cuban American Artist Jose Acosta

I am a huge fan of Tom Robbins. I really am. I just read Skinny Legs and All and in this book (for anyone who hasn't read it) one of the main characters is an artist. A painter. Her names is Ellen Cherry Charles. In the story she painted funky landscapes. Near the end of the story she painted a mural on the wall of a restaurant where she worked as a waitress. In the story, there were patrons who were dumfounded by the scene she created (dumfounded in a good way) and then there were those who shared the trite old sentiment that goes a little something like this "I could have done that." Or worse: "My five year old could have done that."

The thing that made Ellen's mural so special was that it inspired and encouraged another character in the story to offer her own brand of art to the patrons of that same venue... And the story goes on from there. Things happened, lives were changed. Energy was put into motion.

Well, Robbins, in his infinite and subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) brilliance gave an answer to that worn out I COULD HAVE DONE THAT statement-which seems rife with indignation and void of open minded acceptance of the courage and triumphs of others-and the answer was this: Maybe you could have done it-but you didn't and I DID! (that may not be an exact quote-but the sentiment is there).

I loved that. What a concept! After reading this book and several others that this author has written I find myself liberated somehow. I find courage to do what is in my heart to do as an artist. Inevitably there are folks who will come along and say they could have done that. Or worse, they will challenge you by declaring that your art is not art at all.

I really don't know why, exactly, this kind of thing operates so strongly in the art world. A banker doesn't challenge another banker by saying the first banker doesn't really know what banking is. A nurse doesn't say to another nurse that she just doesn't know what nursing is all about (although hopefully all nurses know exactly what nursing is about...) One truck driver doesn't say to the other truck driver that he could have done THAT. On that same token, I would never tell a truck driver that I could do what he does because I am certain I could not!

Anyway...

I am of the opinion that in this day and age (yes, I said this day and age-like my Granny) a creative injection is what the world needs. I am not saying if it feels good-do it. That leads to disease and unwanted pregnancies and all kinds of other problems we as a society could do without. Rather, I would suggest it is time to coin a new phrase. I think that new phrase should be this: if it feels good-make it. Paint it. Draw it. Build it. Throw it. Sew it. I can't help feeling this way. What can I say? Robbins made me do it-ummm-think it.

As we approach the new year, I am realizing that it is now ten years since ArtId took birth (as MindsIsland), and just how many articles I have written and posted over that period. I took a look, and discovered that many of the older ones were not presentable, having been crudely converted from native HTML to our present platform. I have just completed a process of spiffing them up, in high hopes that someone out there might care.

This post is for those who have enjoyed my writings, and are interested in poking around among the many I have done in the past. It is a summary of the main topics I have dealt with, and some instructions on how you can find them. Because if you don't know they are there, you can't even decide whether you care or not.

If you go to the featured blogs page, there are search categories down the lefthand side of the page, letting you search for articles on business, technique, art and so on. These are helpful, but to explore the writings of a given contributor, you need to click on their name - in my case, Peter Barnett. This gives you the subset of all their posts; it also gives you the ability to do a subsearch based on "Tags". The subsearch will get you to a specific topic group.

My earliest (and longest) series is called "Image and Meaning"; there are 26 of them. Each compares works by two artists treating essentially the same subject, and talks about differnt artistic choices made to reflect a different message. You could say this group comes directly from my past life as an art historian, and includes many comparisons which I would have shown to my classes. An example is the two works shown here: balcony scenes by Goya and Manet. Manet made a regular practice of referring to earlier works of art, but transforming them to totally change their content.

Another series of posts has the topic "Plein-Air Tips". These are practical tips from my own experience as a plein-air artist. Since these build upon each other to a degree, I suggest that someone calling up this group begin at the bottom of the list and work up to the top. I can imagine that an artist beginning to work out doors might be interested in reading through the whole set.

A third series I called "Favorite Artists". Each post deals with the works of a single artist, or in a few cases a group like "the little Dutch Masters". Of course, if your interest is to find comments on a particular artist, you can find him and call him up by name from within the list of Tags.

The rest are either smaller series, or posts without a clear group. There is a small series on famous patrons in the arts, another on the nature and appeal of landscape as a subject. The way to see if there is anything you might enjoy looking at is to browse through the list of tags; there are dozens of them. I would like to think there are a few of you out there who might enjoy an hour of browsing through my attic.

It is arguable that, as artists, one of our primary goals is to produce a reflection of what we understand as reality. If we are artists working in the Western Tradition, or simply raised in it, we are heirs to 600 years of realism. Though much Western art in the last 100 years has rejected this tradition, it is still a very powerful force. Whether it is a photorealist like Tennett, or the pervasive legacy of the impressionists, art dedicated to reflecting the real world is everywhere. But there are lots of choices, because there is no single definition of what is real.

The strongest thread since Renaissance times had been to define reality as the world as it appears to us from a certain viewpoint. With the invention of mechanical perspective and foreshortening, Renaissance artists were able to to create a convincing illusion of the world as it appears to our eyes a stunning leap forward from previous depictions of the world. Within a century, Caravaggio had upped the stakes by forcing that reality out from behind the picture plane, invading our space and demanding an immediate and visceral reaction. The power of these images is that we as viewers are necessarily involved whether passively as spectators or actively as participants, because the image is shown to us through our own eyes. Art based on the camera is the logical extension of this definition, because the camera is a surrogate eye, our eye.

It is hard for us to remember how many other definitions of reality there can are. We can see them in the choices artists have made throughout art history; but we no longer think of them as "realistic". Students being exposed to past artistic traditions often assume that artists have been "trying to be realistic" but failing, when they were in fact practicing a kind of realism we no longer understand.

Before the advent of Renaissance naturalism, the most pervasive approach to representation was what has been called "essential realism". This is what we see in painting and relief sculpture form Egypt and Assyria to the far east. There is no notion of limiting the image to the depiction of a single viewpoint; instead, the most essential elements of the subject are combined to create its "most real" totality. The Egyptian depiction of Torus is a good example: it combines the most characteristic shapes of the foot, the leg, the torso, the shoulders and the head, some which we would see in a side view, others in a frontal view. The "head on" eye in a profile face is a perfect paradigm of the approach: the canine head can only be "really" described in profile; the eye is only most real from the front. It is interesting to see Picasso revisiting this approach by putting two fullface eyes in a profile head.

Another challenge to our concept of the real is found in the approach seen in ethnic art from around the world, notably in African Masks. This approach has sometimes been called "magical realism". The artist is not content to "represent" his subject, he wants to embody it, to give it a vessel or a home. The mask "is" the spirit it depicts, much as the bread and wine of the Eucharist are the body and blood of Christ. Of course, since this goes beyond what science can understand or verify, it is labelled superstition and dismissed...but the power of the masks are undeniable. I find an echo in works by artists like Klee.

But the Western tradition itself is by no means monolithic in its definition of reality. For Plato, who can be seen as the father of all our philosphy, the visible world is far from real; it is like shadows projected on the wall of a cave. Each physical instance of an object like a tree, or a person, is just an imperfect approximation of the reality, the essential tree or man. This "idealism", which values the paradigm above the individual instance, led to the strong classical core which runs through western art.

In the Renaissance itself we see the conflict between the individual or ideosyncratic, represented by the art of the north, and the ideal, championed by Italian art. Both traditions are infected with the new fascination with observed reality, but in the north this fascination raises the love of the particular to a level not acceptable to Italian artists like Leonardo, who thought they were wonderful in detail, but had not concept of what was important and what was trivial.

In the 19th century was see other competing definitions of the real arise to challenge the established tradition. One is "social realism", which basis its challenge less on artistic approach than on subject matter. To a social realist like Courbet, the most "realistic" depictions by David or Ingres are simply out of touch with "the real world". If you are depicting gods and heroes, then you have no right to call your work realistic.

The impressionists, notably Monet, came up with yet another radical challenge to the realistic tradition, based on the new understanding of perception, of the mechanics of vision. To an impressionist, our first unspoiled perception is the truest, before it becomes contaminated by interpretation based on habit and experience. It may not be "Reality" with a capital "R", but it is as close as we can come with our eyes. The visible world is impulses of color and light; we only "think" it is a tree. In fact, we think it INTO a tree, in our mind.

At this same time the camera came into its own, coloring the way we see, and leading ultimately to the emergence of photorealism. It certainly confirmed the underlying assumption of the world seen from a point of view; the camera, like the eye itself, is by definition tied to a point of view. But as we use this wonderful tool, lets try not to forget all the other definitions of reality which wait for our attention.