Art talk

I realized that I haven't done an art post for awhile, even though I have been more involved in making art in the last month than I have for quite some time. Then it dawned on me: when I am in furious art creation mode the arts thinking that I do is divided into craft issues and composition issues. The composition issues get thought about in the sketching and painting. By the time I am ready to discuss them, the art has to be dry and ready to leave the studio. Often I find that a theory does not work so well once it has hit the canvas, or at least needs adjustment. So rather than gush about some nifty way of dividing space or some interesting color management scheme, only to retract the whole thing later, I keep the talk about that sort of stuff to my studio and the one or two close artist friends who I force to listen.

As for the craft issues, I doubt that there is much of an audience for it. I might be wrong, but I really doubt that the average Rants and Recipes reader cares much about archival issues of multi-layered polychromed concrete sgraffito. Maybe you will want to see a picture when the piece is done, but I doubt that you really want to hear my worries over the technicalities here.

While I have been avoiding the First Thursdays like the plague, it is high time that I do a gallery circuit, and will have something to say about something out there (of course June and July are about the slowest for gallery activity, but there is less chance that I will run into one of the artworld creeps that I want to avoid). At the very least, I will be going to see the rehanging of SFMOMA's second floor, and have every reason to believe that I will be ranting about it for some time (I have a very set idea of how the permanent collection should be curated and hung, and I see some horrid trends in the administration there).

I was hoping to post something about a friend's open studio, but could not make it.

So, if you really need some art talk, why not debate amongst yourselves:

Is synthetic sizing as reliable as rabbit skin glue?
Are Isabey brushes worth it?
Should Iris Giclee prints be sold as bonafide fine art prints? Are they archival enough? Is the lack of control over the number of impressions troublesome?

Or pehaps tell a funny story about finding that your best painting has developed many cracks and the paint appears, after two years, to be seriously underbound. Har har har. Artist gallows humor for you.