An art site for our time

4 Responses

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1. Shelby Dillon says

   That. Is. Hys­ter­i­cal. Your feel­ings about polit­i­cal art are very sim­i­lar to my feel­ings, as well as how I feel about a lot of conceptual/performance art. It took years for me to real­ize that not all artists were self-centered imbal­anced peo­ple. The irony is that most of the suc­cess­ful artists I’ve met are the nicest most grounded peo­ple you could ever come across. Sigh. Some peo­ple need to just look around and real­ize they aren’t the cen­ter of the uni­verse. If you stay inside your own head for too long, you lose touch.

   29 March 2010, 3:29 AM Reply
2. Emgee says

   Since I agree with both of you regard­ing polit­i­cal art, I am in my com­fort zone here, although I try my best to take into account the fact that other people’s tastes and pref­er­ences dif­fer from mine. I do despair though, when it seems that tal­ent and espe­cially abil­ity (see “What­ever you do, don’t paint from the heart”), run a dis­tant sec­ond to an artist’s abil­ity to mar­ket themselves.

   Depend­ing on how you define suc­cess­ful (mak­ing a very com­fort­able liv­ing from their art), I have known only a few suc­cess­ful artists, but only one — Charles Wysocki — was truly a nice gen­tle­man and quite grounded. Most of the nice, grounded, tal­ented artists I know are either barely mak­ing a liv­ing at their art or hav­ing to work at other jobs to make ends meet, a sit­u­a­tion which in turn takes away from their resources to make art.

   29 March 2010, 9:44 AM Reply
3. Chad says

   The Obama paint­ing looks like a dis­as­ter because of the appar­ent skill of the artist. With more skill, it might have had a punchier, 1970’s polit­i­cal art kind of feel to it—something more akin social real­ism. But, despite not lik­ing the art­work, I’m not ready to paint like Thomas Kinkade quite yet. Mod­ernism isn’t going any­where. And, I say this with the great­est respect to our blog host, David, who can paint a great a great pair of jeans.

   31 March 2010, 2:17 AM Reply
4. Jay says

   Pres­i­dent Obama with a taco halo? God help us. This is why I refuse to post any­thing in pub­lic until I can paint well enough to make peo­ple think I have “tal­ent.” This is what comes from decades of being told, “just paint/draw/write what you feel.”

   1 April 2010, 10:59 PM Reply