manifesto

I had a substantive conversation last night with a friend who is also an artist. Like myself, this artist had the advantage of being raised in comfortable circumstances in a family of successful professionals. Many of his friends, like mine, were reared and continue to live in those situations. I asked him if he ever felt that friends and family treated him like a “novelty” and was delighted by his laughing confirmation.

I paint the things I think because then I can make them real. There’s a lot of stuff going on in my noggin’ and my work allows me to sort that stuff out, and sometimes make sense of it. Occasionally, I’m asking the viewer to make sense of it for me. The ideas are rarely pretty, cute, or sweet. Look at the world we live in. On my good days I try create something visually compelling, and formally competent. It may even be beautiful. There is very little that is truly new in visual art, and that is not my goal. As I’ve stated before, as a painter, my work is bound to a long lineage of painters before me. It is also informed by my own experience and environment.

Talent or curse, painting came to be an avocation I could no longer ignore in pursuit of more common material benefits. Believe me, I like material benefits. Any romantic notion of an artist struggling in a garret is a load of crap. The creative process is hard. Artists practice the same base skills that are required in any successful venture; patience, ingenuity, decision-making, discernment, commitment and the ability to actually finish something that they commenced. My first inclination has never been the sale of my work; it’s been to get the ideas out there. But I am enough of a realist to know that sales provide more freedom, greater opportunity, and a roomier platform for an artist.

What I have a real problem with are those that don’t value the intellectual component of the work. There are those who try to helpful with “creative” ideas to “market” my work, but I have decided to pursue the difficult path of the painter that doesn’t paint what others want her to paint. Andre Malraux said, “The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.”[i] I have chosen to live with this path.

What is the point of all of this babbling? I take this very seriously. It’s not a hobby or a craft. I just want lay people to understand why my temperature goes up when they make certain suggestions, and why I probably won’t follow their suggestions. For this reason, there are things I will and will not do. Some of these things include:

·       I probably won’t paint what you tell me you think I should paint, and if I do I will charge you a lot more for it

·       I will not exhibit work at a venue that also sells earrings, Christmas ornaments (and I love Christmas ornaments), or decorative pottery. Sculptural ceramics yes, but not pottery. (this does not include museums and their attendant gift shops, but I don’t think I have to worry about that)

·       I will continue to make my Christmas cards only for the people I send them to

·       I will never call an inkjet print a Giclée

·       I will continue to believe that good art made today has to be about something - otherwise it is just decoration. And yes, I believe still-life, landscape, text and abstraction can all convey meaning. The about something has nothing to do with what or how something is represented. Goya and Rockwell shared the same sense of timing.

·       I won’t faux anything. Faux implies that the work is either very old or made under duress, neither of which is true

·       I will not buy any mass-produced wall decorations from a chain store unless they are plastic, illuminated and Santa

So, in a few years, I guess I’ll see you at the bonfire!

---

[i]  Malraux, Andre, Voices of Silence, Doubleday. 1953

porridge

about bowls

People need widgets. I make the widgets that you to sell to people. I make them so that you and I can have bowls. Because you let me make widgets for you, you may have many more bowls than me. Others make widgets for you so that they may have bowls too. Once upon a time, when we kept making more and better widgets, we got to have more bowls. The sheriff made sure you were kind to us while we were making more and better widgets every day. Then you learned that desperate people in faraway places would make widgets for a cup, rather than a bowl. These people are often very young and treated very badly, but they put up with it because a cup can change their life.

now about those widgets

Everyone needs a widget. It took a long time and hard work to make a perfect widget. People had to keep trading in old widgets to get new and improved widgets. Finally widgets were perfect and people didn’t need new ones very often. But you still wanted more bowls. So you hired some magicians. The magicians understood that people with more bowls thought they were better than people with fewer bowls.  Their magic made people believe that having your new and improved widget would make them seem as though and think that they had more bowls than they actually did. Now, there are millions of old widgets lying everywhere. You don’t think the sheriff should make you clean them up even though they hurt the birds and fish.

some things I don’t understand about bowls and widgets

A few years ago you broke almost all of the bowls. The sheriff came and fixed your bowls. He hoped you would fix mine, or at least let me start making widgets again. You did neither. You just kept buying and hoarding all the bowls for yourself. It takes a lot of work to keep the bowls useful. It’s funny; it takes much more work keep my few bowls useful than it does your thousands of bowls. The sheriff helps you with your bowls, but you don’t want him to help me. I need my bowls and if they break again, I may never again be able to make widgets or use bowls.

some things you don’t understand about bowls and widgets

If I can’t make widgets and use bowls, your widgets become obsolete and your bowls seem useless. And those people with cups? They now want bowls and they have started making doodads that are better than widgets. They also make bowls. Why? Their sheriff taught them how to do so.  Using his own bowls.

next time: the hocus pocus of obtaining more bowls.

review

ballroom, 52 x 42, oil on canvas,  (c) sioban lombardi 2011

I am delighted about the write-up that The Exceptional Ordinary received on ARTLOG. I am exhibiting with Gwendolyn Zabicki, a gifted visual and skillful painter. Our works have an interesting conversation.

The show will remain at Robert Bills Contemporary until August 5, 2011. I hope you can stop and see it. I'm anxious to hear your thoughts.

visual disturbance

My husband is a musician and composer. He is sonically circuited. We travelled recently and audio problems developed with the in-flight film. It almost sent him over the edge. Static and poor reception on the car radio elicit a similar response. I sympathize with his reaction, although my sensitivity lies in the visual realm. It has from an early age. I hated when friends would decorate their doors with stickers. It ruined the visual plane of the door. I also hate adhesive price tags placed on package labels.

This sensitivity doesn’t have anything to do with style, ornament, sparseness or excess. It has nothing to do with age or newness, beauty, ugliness, mess or cleanliness. Rather, it is activated when a particular element, combination of elements, or placements of elements are so discordant, one’s visual experience of a thing or place is subverted. I can’t get around it.

Disparate elements are often successfully employed when humor, satire, irony and parody are intended. I’m not referencing those occasions. I’m concerned with the visual disregard for place, time, context and participant. It’s carelessness that occurs in everyday life and in art making. Consider white-flocked Christmas trees in Florida, a photorealist painting executed in Day-Glo colors, a nude wearing spectacles. I could go on and on.

Of course this is strictly a personal problem, but a problem that has served me well when determining the “doneness” of my own work. Often, my first idea for a painting was not my best and this is the place where fault in the overall conception shows up. If my eyes consistently travel to one place in a painting, there is something wrong. In fact, right now I’m thinking of cutting a particular painting into two pieces.

While it can be personally heartbreaking, it raises the bar on work that still needs to be done. If I want to grow, I have to maintain a certain level of dissatisfaction.  Right now I am good, but I want to be better.

opening tonight

ain't it a kick in the pants

I'm the kind of person that never likes to ask for help, but after viewing so many great projects on Kickstarter, I decided to try. Kickstarter is a venue where creatives can seek funding from a broad, at-large, internet community. In return, artists offer really creative premiums to funders. My project, Frame Utopia Nope!,  will allow me to frame large works on paper for an upcoming show.

Please take a moment to look. If you aren't interested in my project, there are dozens of others that need help funding their work.

Remember? It's part of that creative economy we talked about before...and it's an economy no one talks about when discussing the recession. Thank you!

fetch

"snap" 
13 x 20
oil on shellacked paper
© sioban lombardi 2010

Winston Churchill suffered from depression. He called it his “black dog” referencing its familiarity and constancy. I know this black dog, however unlike Churchill’s pet, my friend’s presence occurs in direct proportion to the extent I allow external forces to effect me. Given the state of the economy, the absence of a creative peer group, my failure (despite more than 200 applications) to secure employment, and the general feeling of helplessness those conditions produce, sometimes I win, and sometimes I lose.

I had not seen Fido for more than 10 years, and when he reappeared last summer I was surprised by two aspects of his return: The first being my failure to recognize his presence. Certainly, I had experienced intense grief after the death of my parents, but there the relationship between cause and effect was clear. While my move from Brooklyn to Chicago was wrought with emotion, it was a happy event marked by accomplishment and a return home. Yet after two years away, where every conversation was interesting and every waking moment was productive, silent days spent largely alone furnish a void easily populated by doubt, apprehension and melancholy. My ability to concentrate, let alone create is challenged on a regular basis. 

The second surprise is the persistence with which the dog has reentered my life. Sometimes he sits quietly at my side, encouraging me to play Free Cell solitaire for hours, wearing the same clothes I wore yesterday, and maybe the day before that. Then, with the blink of an eye, I can plummet into a pool of despair so cavernous that I doubt my ability to surface. Everything is an absolute. This will never end. Any change would be welcome.

The operative phrase here is “blink of an eye.” In fact, eleven years after first recognizing the dog, I know his presence is a deception. In fact, moments of sadness are countered by moments of joy and both are buoyed by much-of-the-mundane in between. I know that the dog will eventually go away. I believe he will visit again. But amidst all of his comings and goings lives the certainty that I am loved and cared for and that I love and care for - all in a life much larger than my immediate situation.