Capitalism for artists: It's not what you think

 The quintessential opera for starving artists. (Wiki Commons)

Here are two of capitalism's favorite sayings:


There's a buyer for every product.

If you build a better mousetrap, you will prosper.

For artists and artisans, both of those statements are wrong. Totally, profoundly wrong. And yet, art buyers seem to want to hold artists to them, demanding refunds even when the art they purchased was delivered EXACTLY as advertised, on time and at a low price.

First, the universe of buyers for art has shrunk along with the economy in general; in fact, it would be reasonable to guess that the art market has shrunk faster than other markets. When people wonder if they can put food on the table, they will not hang new pictures on their walls. And in case you hadn't noticed, patronage by royalty and the wealthy is a thing of the past, as well.  I may be wrong, but I have heard of  no royals having a writer, artist or composer at their beck and call for a nice yearly stipend. No Antonio Salieris*, in short, need apply.

Second, in art, there is no such thing as a better mousetrap. Each mousetrap is different, unique, original. 

Getting cold cash for warm art; How?

So how, then, is an artist or artisan to entice such buyers as are left to trade some cold cash for warm art? Advertising.

Few artists can afford a huge roadside billboard; few can even afford a few daily sponsored posts on Facebook. But most can afford to put a little soft-sell on their works someplace. Photographers can add their website to greeting cards and calendars they sell, if not to the bespoke or limited edition photographs. So can graphic artists. Painters would have a tougher time adding it to their work itself, but that's not to stop them signing the work boldly and recognizably and including a card with contact information in every sale.

One's first customer is one's best customer, so another capitalist saying goes. This one is at least partly true of art, right up the the time the fashions change or an artist's first collectors are fully stocked on things to display in their home or office. But with luck, they will have sent one of the artist's cards to a friend, who might also become a customer. Or a regular buyer might show a painter's work to friends who would also like to own some.

Key to all of it is letting buyers know your contact information, these days most usually a website where potential buyers can view more of the artist's work, and to which they can refer friends, and on which will be full disclosure about how to commission or buy the artist's work.

How does this REALLY work?

Today, a friend of mine refunded a teeny, tiny payment--2 quid--that a buyer had paid for two postcards because--gasp!--the photographer had included her website information on the cards. She had--in big, bold, capital letters--told buyers via her sales website that the cards came with the website information printed on them.

My friend could have kept the measly 2 quid and let the buyer go scratch. But one can't do that, either; while few people publicize artists for how good or accommodating they are, you can be darn sure they'll publicize the artist as a grasping moron over a 2 quid purchase, all over town and beyond. It's the nature of the beast--humans in general and chintzy art-buyer wannabes in particular.

Is there a solution to this? I'm clueless. I can't imagine it getting any better now that governments worldwide are further devaluing art and artists by withdrawing arts funding from schools.

A friend in the US told me two days ago that in the town where he lives, shop fronts are either art galleries or cute restaurants...for a month at a time, until the latest one goes belly up for lack of business. He is a Juillliard educated pianist and conductor whose last symphony gig went the way of many smaller symphonies as Bush's debacle began to roost. Fortunately, he also has an MBA, so he has gotten a new gig running a foundation to fund arts in the schools. In short, he's digging money out of the pockets of individuals a buck at a time so local kids will know crap from Crayola.

He needs to be making music happen, not dunning already strapped people for money so their kids--the same kids the schools are supposed to educate--won't end up clueless about the arts. People who are clueless about the arts, in a very bone-deep way, would naturally begrudge artists both the right to advertise their work and the right to be paid for it. Like every other sort of business in the world. Like that towering imbecile who spent two whole quid--TWO WHOLE QUID--for two postcards and then wanted her money back because she had failed to read the not-so-fine print telling her what the cards would be like, in addition, of course, to the full-color photograph of said cards. Unbelievable.

My photographer friend is at the threshold of taking a large bottle of Fukitol, but I trust she won't. She's too good for that...although what we are all going to do if a few of the richest 100, whom Oxfam this week said could solve poverty four times over with their wealth alone, don't start greasing the wheels of commerce...I have no idea.



*Salieri, Mozart's mentor, was supported mainly by the Hapsburg rulers of Vienna.

Oak Apple Day

Oak apples on the forest floor, c. Laura Harrison McBride 2013

There's one thing one notices fairly soon after moving to the UK: the place is a feast of small celebrations.

Today, for instance--May 29--is Oak Apple Day. Who even knew there was such a thing as oak apples? As a horsewoman, I had heard of road apples all right; those lumps of digested grass and oats left behind by horses. Love apples, too, are familiar. They are simply tomatoes, or as the French call them, pomme d'amour after the supposedly aphrodisiacal powers of the fruit.

But oak apple day. Different. Sort of like the unicorn? No. According to Mike Williams, PhD, "Oak Apple Day or Royal Oak Day is a festival celebrated in Britain on 29th May to mark the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, after the interregnum of Oliver Cromwell’s Republic. Its roots, however, like those of the oak itself, might go far deeper."

Williams' blog, Prehistoric Shamanism, gives quite a complete history of the celebration as well as the older understandings of the meanings of oak, particularly in Druidry. The word druid might have been derived, he notes, from language for "lover of the oak."

I'm fairly certain I was born a Druid. When I was seven, we lived in a flat in a borough of New York City known as Queens. There were a few parks nearby, one named Farmer's Oval in fact, but most of the trees lining the streets were maples and catalphas. I knew all about pollynoses--or as the rest of the world calls them, helicopters--and happily peeled apart the nut and stuck the green leafy wings to my nose along with all the other neighbourhood kids. But I had never seen an oak.

The lot my parents bought for the construction of our new home was on eastern Long Island, about an hour from NYC . It was virgin land covered with scrubby oaks.

Long Island is little more than a glorified, 115 mile by 25 mile sand bar. This was both good and bad, in my childhood opinion. I loved being able to go to the beach often; I loathed the abundant ticks that had been dispossessed when the woods were felled all over the island, and deer herds decimated.


My first visit to the lot for our new home was when my father went out to mark the trees he wanted left behind by the bulldozers. I was so taken with the acorns that had fallen everywhere that I gathered a bucket of them to bring home. I asked my mother for a box to put them in; I kept them under my bed and looked at them occasionally.

And then the demanding life of a seven-year-old intervened. There were dance classes, and homework, and visits to Grandma's house, and treks with Grandma for ice-cream sundaes, and my new colouring book.....So the acorns were left alone in their dark casket for quite a while.

When I finally remembered them, several seasons had passed. Indeed, it was almost time to move to the new house. I pulled out the box and opened it up, and there, crawling everywhere, were little white worms.

Ick. I don't doubt that I screamed. I also don't doubt that my mother screamed when she came running; bugs and icky things were not her strong suit. She threw it all away, made me wash my hands and probably the rest of me as well since she was also a bit of a germ freak and wouldn't have wanted me to catch "acorn bug disease." And so ended my love affair with acorns.

Frankly, I still don't like them much. OK. The little hat thingies are cute. But all I can really see when I encounter an acorn is a split shell with a semi-opaque wiggly thing coming out of it.

I might, however, come to love Oak Apple Day, providing no one reminds me too often that oak apples are merely the place a certain kind of wasp creates to hatch its disgusting larvae.

Regatta at Cowes (1934) Raoul Dufy (Wiki Commons)

Here's the quandary: Do I want to create art, or view it?

It is the same quandary I've had about writing, although to a lesser degree, but only because I have been reading since I was three, living in houses full of books, a world full of the written word. So I really cannot help reading. One reads to be entertained, to become informed, to find out about places to visit, about new foods, about why one's family acts that way...all sorts of reasons.

One does not view art for any of those reasons. Well, all right, possibly to find new places to visit, although even that function has been diminished first by colour photography becoming widely available to everyone, and now by instant colour photography being practiced by everyone in the universe via smartphones, I think, except my husband and me. (His mobile phone is an artefact; mine is somewhat newer, but it's a pay-as-you-go because the ONLY reason I have it is in case the car breaks down and I need to call AA.)

Those who can, do....etc.

So: the quandary, particularly poignant this week of Cornwall Open Studios, is to go and view or stay home and create.

There is one artist whose work I very much want to see. She's a glass artist. She creates stunningly beautiful stuff. I'd like to own a piece.

But is it worth taking a day off from painting, writing and promoting to do it?

I honestly don't know. I could ask the New Age goat-from-sheep question: What would I do if money were no object?

Oddly, it doesn't apply to this. I can afford the tank of gas, and even lunch. And possibly a piece of glass art.

What would I do if time were no object: maybe that's the better question in this situation.

Yes, it is. I KNOW what I would do. I would stay in my studio/office painting and writing (while trying to shift the promotion tasks to my long-suffering spouse), and make an appointment with the glass artist when I happen to be in the area for other reasons, thereby not wasting any of my time or hers.

This begins to sound like I don't care for galleries and museums, surely an odd attitude for an artist.

But not for me. I loathe libraries, really loathe them. Aside from the damage the internet did to freelance journalism income, it was in many ways a godsend. I never had to go to libraries after that. (Well, not often.) And the arrival, in the US, of bookstores with coffee shops--Barnes & Noble, the late, lamented Borders, Books-A-Million--meant I could browse the NEW books and magazines, the things I really needed to know about and that the library rarely had. And I could have a cup of coffee and a bagel at the same time. In the UK, I was happy to find Waterstone's: same reason. And I admit to having been in both of them in Plymouth (and their coffee shops) many, many times, and one in Norwich.

A New York state of mind

But back to art. When I lived in New York, I would stop in galleries as I passed them. Noortman & Brod was on one of my east side shopping treks, and I have a little Henry Bright drawing I bought one day. (He was a British artist, so the work has now been repatriated.) I would stop in Hammer Galleries on West 57th Street; there I only looked. Too pricey by half.

I stopped once in a tiny gallery on West 55th, behind a newsagent's. There I saw a Dufy for which I could have taken a loan...really, not THAT expensive, but certainly more than I had on hand. And oh, to own a Dufy. (It's true; we only regret the things we DIDN'T do, as a wise man told me at the start of one of my careers or other.)

Ancient art got some face time

Anyway, gallery and museum-going was part of my life, and I saw lots and lots of things without effort. Lazy? Maybe. But driving for hours to see things I can see on the internet, when I have things I want to do and, yes, put up on the internet (where so much is sold anyway)...well, it won't happen this year. I feel slightly guilty about it. I did spend a day going to Chedworth Roman Villa a few weeks ago. But then, I couldn't see Roman ruins in New York City. And having studied Latin for six years in my youth, the whole Roman milieu had got under my skin.

I expect I'll spend the drive-time this week visiting either the Chalk Horse (you may recall I'm something of a horse nut, so it combines two things, ancient history and horses) or a grand house. Not Saltram; it's filled with Canalettos, but I've viewed them a good number of times already. A new collection at a new house, I think. And it will have to be in Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset or Gloucestershire, because I've spent the last seven years haunting the grand manses of Cornwall and Devon, having started visiting National Trust houses on holidays in our flat even before we moved here permanently.

Perhaps I should apologize to all the wonderful Cornish artists whose work I probably won't see in one fell swoop. Or I could put it another way: I'd rather join the ranks than gawk at them, and the easel beckons.

Thanks for your understanding.

The Fisherman's Friends: Return of the natives? Perhaps....

The Fisherman's Friends posted a short clip of one of their performances today on Facebook. That gives me hope that they will survive the tragic death of member Trevor Grills last winter, and return to the stage. Their tour manager was also killed in the accident at the venue where they were setting up for a performance.

Until I heard about The Fisherman's Friends, all I knew about sea shanties I had learned in primary school when the music teacher came around, once a week, and we sang folk songs. I don't, in fact, recall any shanties; I recall some Australian stuff, the famous kookaburra song every English-speaking schoolkid seems to know, for instance.

About two years ago, I saw a TV advert for prepared fish that featured a bunch of burly guys singing, identified as The Fisherman's Friends. Then a friend posted on FB that she felt The Fisherman's Friends had sold out by making the advert. And then I got a mailing about the DuMaurier Festival in Fowey. On it was the notice of a performance by--ta da!-- The Fisherman's Friends.

I still really didn't know sea shanties. And a friend was upset about the group selling out. (I figure artists in any genre have to make a living somehow, so I wasn't upset about them singing about fish. Now if it had been for an oil company or some other harmful outfit....) I figured it might be a good night out and so I booked what turned out to be the very last two tickets available. The seats were horrible, up among the rafters, packed in like pilchards, hot. Before the performers took the stage, I was thinking about how and when to sneak out.

But that concert was magic. To borrow a line from some old movie or other, they had me at hello. It was the imposing presence, perhaps, of all that handsome testosterone projecting into an expectant audience, most of whom seemed to know the group quite well. Or maybe it was the jeans and work shirts; who ever performed dressed like that? Elton John would be having the vapours. Even Mick Jagger would be having the vapours. And don't even think about Yo-Yo Ma, to whom black tie is de rigeur.

The music was fine and fun, and the singers were real people. They said they would hang around afterward to have a pint at the festival pub with whoever cared to join them. I wish we had, but it was a long drive home.

We were hooked, though. We booked their concert at Theatre Royal in Plymouth the following fall. Then we went to one of the free performances on the Platt at Port Isaac the next summer. It is not for just anyone that I would force myself to walk up a cliff that would better serve as a ski run. And then we booked their next concert, meant to be in the April just past, in Plymouth.

It didn't happen because of the dreadful accident that took the life of one of their members, the singer of "The Last Leviathan," Trevor Grills. "The Last Leviathan" is not a sea shanty; it's a song about the environment, and it always--ALWAYS--made me cry. And that, too, was magic.

It was magic when I saw Nureyev dance Swan Lake in Atlanta in the early 1970s. It was magic meeting The Chieftains in Fort Lauderdale in the 1980s. It was magic seeing the work of a friend, the late Robert Steed--a member of the Ashcan School--on display at the Brooklyn Museum. It was magic seeing The Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre perform in Plymouth three years ago. I had seen them many times in New York, and had even seen the great Judith Jameson dance in "Revelations." But Plymouth was more magic than that; I have never, ever felt more appreciation in an audience, and it was deeply satisfying to be part of it. All this is easy to explain. It's more difficult to explain my affection for a bunch of regular guys from (mostly) Cornwall who sing simple songs well.
 
Maybe it's the bass voice of Jon Cleave, or his walrus mustache, or his wise-arse delivery of the group's patter. Or the almost Art Garfunkel-like lyrical appearance of another member. Or the fact that the oldest member, about 80 by now, taught many of them eons ago when all of these well-into-middle-aged men were schoolboys.

I read the book The Fisherman's Friends when it was published 18 months ago or more. It was entertaining, especially the part about swimming in Port Isaac Harbour before such things as sewage remediation had become a fact of Cornish life, and pushing quite unsavory things out of one's way so as not to get a mouthful. Scatology is often fun; look, for instance, at Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which is chock full of it.

I've been wondering how, and even if, the group is going to surmount their grievous loss. I'm hoping they will conclude that they must, that singers must sing. Still, they have loyal fans, and I expect we all want them to heal well, even if they should cease to sing.

But I can't imagine it, really. I can't imagine the air not being filled with those fine a capella voices tossing joy and memories into the clear Cornish air of the Port Isaac platt. I can't imagine the sadness of knowing there would never be another CD, or another fine evening of song and shared camaraderie at a venue someplace in England.

I'm hoping for more magic moments. I'm hoping for a magic moment when I can book tickets once again to a Fisherman's Friends concert...knowing full well that the remaining singers have surmounted some significant feelings of loss, have cried, have asked why...and understanding that in the end, they realized that through all things, their art matters. Their songs matter. Their friendship...so generously shared with the rest of us...matters. I hope it happens, their return to singing. I'm still not counting on it.

But I am clinging like a limpet to the ray of hope that arrived on my computer screen today when they posted a snippet of one of their performances at Glastonbury. I looked for it on YouTube but didn't find it, and it wouldn't load from FB.

I did find one of their performances at the Minack Theatre. That performance brings together many arts: song, the accomplishment of the theatre itself, the brainstorm of creating a theatre on a cliffside above the sea, the gardens that surround the theatre. So I offer it to the gods of healing and the gods of song, hoping it will soon be propitious for The Fisherman's Friends to honour their lost member and tour manager with songs for all of us who also grieve.

But if not, they are loved all the same.

Red pistachios

The pistachios of my childhood. (Photo from fda.gov)

I did draw today, another picture of a sheep. I wasn't satisfied with it, so I went downstairs to raid a cupboard. Aha! Pistachios.

I got out the jar and began shelling and eating them right there at the kitchen counter. I figure when the cap is full of pistachio shells, then I'm full, too, and I put the jar away. I should confess that this is a wide-mouth jar from Waitrose, so the cap is plenty capacious.

Anyway, I began thinking about pistachios, which was more pleasant than thinking about that sheep picture I don't like, or the sketch for yet another sheep picture that I got done today and ALREADY don't like. 

I decided that eating pistachios is probably a weight-loss tactic. I mean, it takes effort to break open the shell, pick the little nut out, discard the shell and eat the nut. I thought perhaps there could even be a net loss of weight.  Amazingly, I was not alone in this thought. There is a Pistachio Principle. To wit:

In December 2008, Dr. James Painter, a behavioral eating expert, professor and chair of School of Family and Consumer Sciences at Eastern Illinois University, described the Pistachio Principle. The Pistachio Principle describes methods of 'fooling' one's body into eating less. One example used is that the act of shelling and eating pistachios one by one slows one's consumption, allowing one to feel full faster after having eaten less.

Well, my idea was ALMOST true. And in my case, I've eaten pistachios so often for so long, I'm a really fast pistachio picker. No matter. I really like pistachios. The contest is between them, cashews and pecans as my favorite nut.

The pistachios I ate today have beige shells. That's the usual color of pistachio shells...except in the New York City of my childhood. Then the shells were always bright red, and our hands were dyed with it if we ate any amount at all.

Pistachio ice cream atop a scoop of strawberry. (Wiki Commons)

 
It never occurred to me to wonder, back then, why the nut shells were bright red but pistachio ice cream was always green. As it turns out, the shells were dyed red to hide stains that occurred when the nuts were picked by hand. What sort of stains might those be, then? All I can think of is blood. Well, OK. One other possibility but I don't want to go there. I ate a lot of pistachios when I was a kid in New York.

As it turns out, the ice cream contained dye, too, as the nut meats are sort of beige with maybe a bit of green.

Pistachios have significant health benefits, can be used to line plant pots instead of pebbles, and are also useful for arts and crafts. According to Wikipedia, pistachio shells are used for "holiday tree ornaments, jewelry, mosaics, and rattles."

I don't do crafts. Usually. Once I made a little garlic basket. It was the monthly project of a garden club I belonged to when I lived in Delray Beach, Florida, and thought I might possibly become a Lady Who Lunched. I didn't. I ended up opening a little art gallery, which is, actually, still a sore subject, so I won't talk about it now. I don't know what happened to the garlic basket, but it did have some use beyond holding garlic; I STILL know how to make a simple basket. I also know how to field strip a Beretta automatic and shoot the eyelashes off a gnat (well, actually, just the head and groin of targets.) I don't expect to ever use either of those skills again.

I do expect to eat pistachios. Probably tomorrow. But I will not be creating jewelry or mosaics or anything else from the shells, except garbage.

Pistachios as nature intended, a great diet food. Sort of. (Wiki Commons.)

The artist's muse and The Art of Eating

 

A proper plate of cassoulet. Last week, mine looked nothing like that. A cautionary tale. (Wiki commons photo)

The Art of Eating is one of my favorite books on food. It was written eons ago by the late MFK Fisher, an American food writer but not a chef. Her descriptions of her time in France are erotic...and she says not one word about anything sexual...and so are her descriptions of food. Some of her recipes are glorious. Others are pedestrian at best. 

Somehow, that's comforting. Most of us eat, most days, in very pedestrian ways. And then we get a wild hair, and create in the kitchen. I often wonder whether my past 40 years of creating new recipes was, mainly, a deflection of my desire to paint. But I don't wonder too long, because, after all, we have to eat.

But sometimes, we exceed even the pedestrian potential of MFK Fisher on her worst day. Usually I do it when I decide to use someone else's recipe instead of my own for a dish I've made up, improved on and generally added to a fool-proof repertoire. Last Sunday, I did exactly that.

***

When I was a young writer, in Manhattan, I had heard of a magical dish called cassoulet. The name alone was so redolent of the France I was, at that time, still dying to see that I hungered for it, despite the fact that I don't like beans much.

One Eastertide, when the tide of our fortunes had turned and royalty checks were rolling in, I decided it was time to go to the East Village to a French restaurant and have cassoulet.

I adored it.

I decided, like mixing paint colours, that I could approximate it, and approximate it I did. Believe it or not, I got a darn good dish out of the following: tinned Northern beans, peperoni slices, tinned chicken breast, tinned deviled ham, spices and herbs on hand, a tablespoon of tomato paste, and lots of browned chopped onions.

Naturally, I moved on from there and developed a dandy cassoulet with canned Northern or Haricot beans, chorizo, organic herby sausages, chicken breast browned and sliced, a couple of browned duck legs, browned chopped onions, herbs and spices. No tomato. Nor did I cook it in the oven. I used a Dutch oven on the hob. Not classic, but darn, the stuff was always good.

But then I courted disaster. I read a recipe for REAL cassoulet online, and also the same food writer's quickie version of the dish. I won't mention his name because I don't want to give the miserable sod any ink...and also, I've judiciously forgotten it.

So, I went with his quickie version for last Sunday's guests, not wanting to actually spend three days at the task beforehand.

In 40 years of having dinner parties, that recipe resulted in the very first time I felt it necessary to apologize to guests for the sorry condition of the meal they were fed. It was watery in the extreme, and I had to ramp up the oven to finish it off. My oven being what it is--the builder version that came with this new house, and a wonder of horrid engineering--it burned a bit before it became something other than beans-duck-sausage-lamb soup.

However, the dessert--mine, all mine, from concept to execution--saved the day. What was it? Almond custard-style ice cream and lavender sorbet, each served on a round of marzipan and drizzled with rose syrup. (OK. I bought the rose syrup in the local olive/Middle Eastern store. But the rest was made here.)

I didn't paint much this week. I think my muse was damaged by that blasted recipe from hell. I know my digestion was...and my pride. It seems to me a lot of artists probably like to cook, since it's combining things and coming up with a new product. I think, though, I would advise them to be careful, if using someone else's food palette, to be careful of their muse.

Boids

My grandmother's birds, drawn by Laura yesterday with her brand new box of Crayolas! Sixty-four colors!

What's a boid?

See those blue things in the picture? Boids.

I never spoke Brooklynese, despite having been born in Brooklyn. I was raised in large part by my maternal grandmother who was French-Canadian by way of Montpelier, Vermont, and always claimed that she spoke the King's English. In fact, my memory suggests that her accent was quite bland, with most things pronounced exactly as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of American English would have specified. And thank goodness for that; regional accents mark one, especially in America which is much more stratified than the UK.

My grandmother also taught me many other things. She taught me how to sew. She taught me how to cook. She taught me that the ONLY appropriate colour for nail polish and lipstick for a respectable woman was red. Yes, I've violated that one! But I do attempt to keep the colours ladylike...which is not anti-feminist in light of the personal accountability and insistence on equality in meaningful things that she also taught me.

And she taught me how to draw birds.

I used to draw ALL the time. I used to make the neighbour boy, three years older than I, draw with me. If he didn't, I gave him a whack on the head with my pink plastic hair brush. I loved him, you see, and I was only three.

But I didn't know how to draw a bird in flight, so my grandmother showed me. I wonder if that's something everyone knew back then, how to represent birds in flight kiddie-style. I wonder if anyone knows it now. I wonder how many mothers, grandmothers, aunties and other significant adults sit down and draw with their toddlers. I should think it would be just as important for the toddlers' mental development as reading to them. It develops awareness of spatial relationships, observation skills, colour appreciation, curiosity about the world...all sorts of things.

But the emphasis has been so much on reading and maths the last couple of generations, I really wonder how many kids ever had the fun of seeing how Dad drew a cow and telling him that wasn't how cows looked; cows were bigger, or had horns, or their tails were longer and so on. My Uncle Eddie used to draw farm animals for me. His were really good. I particularly liked the pigs. All this was odd since the entire family had lived for generations in Brooklyn, where if there's one pig or ever has been since the invention of the motor car, I'd like to know about it.

Among the first cuts to school funding is always arts instruction. And yet, art offers so much in educational value, and even more in human values. Certainly, life is easier if one reads competently, and if one can do sums enough at least to balance the monthly budget. A smattering of science, geography...and so on. But why leave art out of it? Most students are not going to become physicists nor world explorers. Most will need to do something in their spare time; maybe art. They will need to decorate their homes: art. They will need to show their own kids how to have fun with finger paints and make a total mess of the house: art.

There is art in every aspect of human life and every aspect of human life needs art. If a person can do no more than paint my grandmother's birds on a cardboard box to decorate it as a gift, isn't that enough? To add some hand-painted primitive flowers to a crumbling kitchen wall that there's no money to repair? To draw something to entertain a sad child? Aren't those reasons enough to ensure that art is taught in schools? Then, when broke or the victim of poor planning or in need of a skill to improve a place or a life, the adult can come up with a creative way to cope because he or she is not afraid of art.

Art and socks

My husband's socks ALL look like the socks on the left and right.

Of all the hateful household tasks in the world, at the top of the list must be matching socks after doing laundry, folding or rolling them, and putting them away.

It's not difficult with my socks; I have socks in probably every colour except red. I even have purple socks. And some soylent green ones, although I do have three very similar pairs of black socks.

Kiddie--or artist?--socks

But my husband has only black socks. Well, except for the four dark blue ones and two brown.

And that's where art and socks intersect.

All his black socks are from only two manufacturers. One kind has a gold stripe woven into the toe; the other kind does not.

The socks were not all purchased at the same time. Thus, they have not all been washed the same number of times. Thus the dye has not faded to the same shade in all of them. Thus one cannot just grab two black socks with gold stripes and put them together. The dark blue socks further complicate matters, as they appear, at times, to be almost as dark as the more faded of the plain black socks.

I'm getting a headache....

More like stockings....but knitted like socks

I suspect Simon could just match up any two stripe-less socks and any two with the gold stripe, because he simply wouldn't care. After all, he would reason, they'll be hidden by trousers, mainly.  But for me, they must be an actual pair...or as close to it as the naked eye--an artist's eye, trained in seeing subtle tonal gradations--can manage.

It's a thankless task. I'm never sure whether to let the laundry pile up so I only have to do it about every ten days, at which point there are at least 20 matchable socks to deal with or more if he has done something like lawn-mowing and gotten a pair smelly halfway through a day, or more often so there are fewer socks.

Nor can the sock-matching be done in dim light, so I can't leave it for after dinner, even now when the sun is up until 9. I could drag it all into my studio, where the things that saves my sanity for painting, a pair of high-wattage full-spectrum lights, would help. But then I'd risk getting blotches of paint on all those black socks.

Corporation man socks.

Wait. This is a good idea. A tiny blot of cadmium yellow hue on one pair, some lovely Winsor Red on another, maybe some Naples Yellow on another, and so on. I could even mark the Gold Stripe socks on the stripe with green or blue.

I doubt Simon would notice. He didn't notice when the coppery red hair I had when we met had turned to dark brown before we got married, a period of about eight months. And he's a bit far-sighted, so it's unlikely he'd notice a couple of colourful dabs on his socks unless he happened to be wearing his reading glasses when he got dressed. Which will never happen.

Art and socks are much better bedfellows than I first imagined; I really intended to write about appropriate socks for artists. But as it turns out, bringing a little artistry to the socks of engineers turned out to be more valuable, at least to me.

Now, if someone can tell me how to prevent sock disappearance....so I don't end up with one purple sock with the mate turning up some weeks later from some mystical hidey hole in the laundry room....

Handmade granny socks?

(All sock photos Wiki Commons)

Purple bunnies

 (Wiki Commons)

One of my favourite art books has always been The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides. He was an instructor at my alma mater, The Art Students League of New York, but eons before I got there. Still, I expect his teaching permeated the building, along with the century-old scent of turps and printer's ink and clay and fabric sizing and lousy food from the student-run cafeteria and grime from the New York streets that blew in the door and up the stairs to the dark, gray hallways lined with lockers lined with grunge And students.

I don't know why I picked up the book the first time, or where. One of the main features of the League was that there was no reading list. One learned by doing, not by reading. Still, since I'm also a writer, I'm a reader; I can't resist an art book, either instructional or coffee table.

I could have found the Nicolaides book at Lee's Art Shop, a huge emporium of art materials and books almost across the street from the League. Or it could have been in the now-vanished bookstore at 57th and Broadway. No matter. It helped me in the early years, and then I left it behind when we moved to the UK; we only shipped essential books, costs being what they are.

So, last week, I bought a new copy from amazon.co.uk. And I began to read it again.

"Through constant effort, patient groping, bit by bit, certain rules have been established relating to the technique of picture making. These rules are the result of man's ability to relate the laws of balance, which he has found in nature, to the business of making a picture," Nicolaides writes in the introduction.

Later, he writes, "Man can make only the rules. He cannot make the laws, which are the laws of nature. It is an understanding of these laws that enables a student to draw. His difficulty will never be a lack of ability to draw, but lack of understanding."

And from there, he goes on to advocate that which I think professionals in any art form do: Learn the rules, and then break them according to your understanding of the universal laws that apply to your art form.

If, for example, you wish to explore the possibility that finches generally fly upside down, at least in the green sky you are painting, your work will go better if you actually know what a finch looks like and have done enough learning of the rules to produce it, either realistically or in the abstract. If you know that grass is green and sky is blue, if you are going to break that rule, then you need to know that if you make them both green, there will be no difference and viewers will not get the point. And you do, as an artist, want them to get your point. Why else communicate with pictures?

Frankly, the part about breaking the rules has been the most difficult for me to achieve. It wasn't terribly hard to learn the rules and even to intuit and/or observe the underlying laws. But I am, by nature, fastidious and somewhat given to academic standards. For example, when I was in kindergarten and we were all told to draw Easter bunnies, the other kids drew green ones and pink ones and blue ones. Mine were all brown. The teacher asked me why I drew only brown bunnies. I told her it was because that's what color bunnies were; bunnies didn't actually come in pastel hues, something I knew at five years old and was willing to fight for.

I drew pictures with brown bunnies and green grass and blue skies and pretty flowers and all of it was, for a five-year-old, quite realistic. The problem is that I'm still doing it. And yet, photo realism bores me, and I have no patience to recreate what the camera sees. For me, that doesn't answer the musical question who gives a rat's ass. So my "realism" is compromised to begin with. 

I think it might be time to break out of the mold. In that vein, I ordered a box of 120 Crayola crayons last week. I was thinking about some of my favorite colors, among them leaf green and salmon and there was a sort of alizarin crimson--called something else by Crayola, but on those lines. I'm hoping when the crayons arrive I can relive my childhood, revise it and actually draw a couple of purple bunnies. You can call it artistic self-analysis, if you like. Or you can call it Fred for all I care.

But I'll let you know how it works out.

Purple neon bunny....from Wiki image by Picasa

LATE BREAKING NEWS: The Crayola Crayons just arrived!

The Colour Orange

I don't mind terracotta too much; it is closer to red than anything else, and Persimmon isn't too bad. The rest of them give me the heebie-jeebies.

I don't think I can have artful thoughts in the presence of the colour orange.

I've used orange on occasion; everyone has used orange on occasion. But here's the thing: A friend convinced me to try a new platform and its basic colour is orange.

Blogger's icon is orange, but you can alter everything else to suit yourself. Not so with the new site. Almost nothing can be changed, most especially all that orange. That site  is in beta test, so perhaps they will add functionality later. For now, though, I have concluded that the new site works when I want to do a political rant, but I can't even think about an art-oriented topic when its ugly orange home page is on my screen.

The meaning of orange

I looked up the meaning of orange to see if I could determine why the artist in me detests it so.

Here's what I found, with commentary in italics:

It is a power colour. I don't want that sort of power when I'm involved in art. It's too heavy.

It is a healing colour. Shouldn't art heal? So why would I loathe it?

It is said to increase the craving for food. Uh oh. Stop right there.

It also stimulates enthusiasm and creativity. Well there you go; it does precisely the opposite for me. Indeed, I would run and hide--or go nuts--if someone put me in an orange room.

All the information about orange above was found on Emily Gems website.

None of that information gave me a clue; if anything, it indicated I was far outside the norm in my reaction to orange. So I kept looking.

The colormatters website noted that:

"Orange is symbolic of autumn.

"Children all over the world are drawn to orange.

"Orange is the color (sic) of life rafts, hazard cones, and high visibility police vests."

I've never liked autumn. When I lived in New  York City, I loathed it so much, my husband decided that to save our sanity, we had to go to Key West--endless summer--for most of November. When we got back, it would be winter, and I don't mind winter.

I'm not a big "kid" person, either; I mean, they're fine--I've taught them in fact--but I don't go all gushy over them.

Somehow, visions of life rafts, hazard cones and police vests do not bring out the artist in me. Go figure.

But at least I was getting somewhere in understanding my antipathy to orange.

Locked in in orange, or locked out--depending

There were, on the same site, two more suggestions as to why orange does not appeal to me. First, it is the colour of prison uniforms in the United States. I used to be a citizen of the United States...you know, that nation that has a greater percentage of its population incarcerated than any other nation, including China with four times the US population and a reputation for being fairly miserable to its citizens. So perhaps that is an influence. Except that I've always disliked orange, and until recent times, US prison uniforms were usually gray.

Orange also stands for the Northern Irish Protestants; I am a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, and I frankly think Ian Paisley is a vicious, ignorant demon. So perhaps that has something to do with it. But as noted, I've never liked orange, and although we studied The Troubles in school in the United States, I think my dislike of the color predates that.

On the other hand, I completely adore freshly squeezed orange juice and squeeze oranges every single day when they're in season. I won't even buy bottled or frozen stuff; it's not orange juice. It's some sort of flavoured acid with bits in it. Ick. During non-orange season, my breakfast juice of choice is apple with elderflower.

I can come to no reasonable conclusions. I just don't like orange, and it completely freezes my muse. Completely. So I guess Blogger, which subjects me to only a tiny bit of orange, is stuck with me.

I did put up an art blog on the new site on Wednesday, and it got a lot more readers than it does on Blogger. But heck, I own the work, so maybe the answer is to write it here and re-post it on the new site, covering my eyes as I do so.