All posts by keith

Art, copyright

Can I just say FUCK Shepard Fairey?

Steelerbaby Blues – News – News – Pittsburgh City Paper
I don’t really care if his art is derivative, and that he steals all his ideas from elswhere. I don’t care that he tags stuff in the street. I don’t care that he’s a massive sellout to the ideas he espouses.
Wait a minute–
Yes I do. Nothing irks me more than some asshole who claims “fair use”* when he literally steals other artist’s work without acknowledging it (until he’s made to), and just barely doing anything to it to modify it, and turns around and issues a cease and desist order to some one who uses one word that he claims he’s trademarked and that no one else can use–never mind that it’s a very common word in the english language–in a product that bears no resemblance to his own in any way.

*Which as collage artist, I know that the work has to be tranformed in some way, so it’s not just a copy, and there are a lot of legal gray areas, and the law is pretty screwed up, as is most of the copyright code (see my post here). But we can leave that for another time.
So,I’d just like to say:

OBEY
rise_above

This
Jackass

Art

Thomas Nozkowski

Paintings

Untitled (R-8)

More at nyss.org

Thomas Nozkowski has been one of the most quietly influential painters on the New York scene over the past two decades. Some people may find that statement surprising. After all, where are the tokens of blue-chip status that would attest to this position of influence-the retrospectives in major museums, the glossy hardbound coffee table monographs, the auction block records and so on?

Well, I did say quietly influential, after all. Undoubtedly to the detriment of his worldly career, though always in the service of the one career that counts, namely the progress of discovery and invention that occurs in the studio, Nozkowski has set his face against everything that signifies “importance” in the contemporary artworld: for instance, he has eschewed the large scale that has been de rigueur since the time of the abstract expressionists, who would nonetheless be shocked at the present situation in which artists tailor their work to the overweening proportions of museums that have been built to impress and dominate rather than to create intimacy. And he has avoided, as well, the systematic working methods that on the one hand are valued as signs of aesthetic rigor and on the other are so convenient for establishing the stylistic consistency and signature “look” essential to establishing a trusted brand name, in art as much as in any other retail field.

What I like is that he has kept the scale of his work small. Human size, more or less. sizes that anyone can hang on their wall, not museum/corporate size. I like this and the essay got me thinking about size in my waor, and art in general. I may post something on that at a later date.

Art

Jonathan Jones: Art is Dead–Long live art.

Jonathan Jones: Art as we know it is finished | Art and design | guardian.co.uk

Art is fun, it’s a laugh, it’s entertainment, it’s spectacular, it’s cool … art now aspires to be all the things fashion is. And so it cannot accomodate the awkwardness of a Kossoff: cannot be a bone in anyone’s throat. Its success is totally bound up with the same fiction that anything is possible that has inspired banks to lead us all into a looking-glass world.

I’ve tried to resist this fact for a few months, but I’m done with illusion. Art as we know it is finished. It is about to be exposed as nothing more than the decor of an age of mercantile madness. On what bedrock might a new art arise?

Art

Woodcut–work in progress

I’ve started working on my first woodcut ever, and I’m doing what’s called a reduction print, which uses one piece of wood for all the colors. Basically what you do is, cut away what you don’t want to print, and with this method you have to plan your cuts carefully, and should, probably, print from light to dark. It’s a two color print (three if you count the white of the paper: which is actually important for this print.)and I printed the first color today.
Here’s some pics, and some explanations.

The block

Here’s the block, with the areas that will only have the color of the paper cut out. (The whit areas are wood filler that I used to fill some areas that I cut out, but didn’t want to.)

carving
Carving

Carving 2
More carving

Test print
Test print
rolling
Rolling out the ink with the brayer.
blue printed
The blue is printed

That’s it for tonight. I’ll be doing some more cutting, and printing, and will show more pics in a couple of days.

Art

In a show

Åarhus Gallery is having a show called 44N 69W: Radius Belfast. It starts March 5, and runs through the 29th.

[It’s a]Salon style show featuring artworks created within the last year by artists any age or training, living within a 30 mile radius of Belfast, Maine responding to Aarhus Gallery Call for Art.

Aarhus Gallery will donate 20% of sales from the show to local Food Banks within a 30 mile radius of Belfast.

Opening reception is March 6–5-8pm. Be there or be square.
20% goes to charity, so if you go buy my painting $20 goes to a food bank in the area (and you get a nice painting: it’s Red, Blue, Green–M&Ms, by the way).

[Edit] To answer the question yes I only have one piece in the show (that’s all each artist gets to put in it), and it’s this one:

Red, Green, Blue--M&Ms, Acrylic on Canvas, 8x10 inches
Red, Green, Blue--M&Ms, Acrylic on Canvas, 8x10 inches