Art and the Homeless

It is Halloween, and in the spirit of, I indulge the impulse to post a blog entry about it. The plight of homeless people is a grave matter all through the year. On this night the usual rational questioning into the cause and consequences of homelessness surrenders to the irrational. What if the plight of the homeless is fate? Neither a simple human failing, nor victims of circumstances, what if the cause of homelessness were to be a curse? Real horror is told in a book describing war atrocities at first hand, SOLDIER, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY, by General Sir Mike Jackson, and which I was just now reading. As told by a life-long professional military man, inured to the reality of war, the General doesn't conceal his personal horror in its pages. He participated in every NATO involvement from the peak years of the Cold War, right up to the occupation of Afghanistan. Horror is effective propaganda. To be correct, semantically, is to call it what has become familiar to all as terrorism. It p...

Interest in the artist—as subject—either as a celebrity or object of pity, increasingly pushed the subject matter of art into the background. The subject--in art--was finally felt to be dispensable. Later, subject matter was re-admitted to art, both by artists, and by critical observers. Nonetheless, in the meantime, something had changed -and permanently. Paintings "had" a subject before the painting itself began to be construed as subject. This is now so obvious as to be banal -perhaps why it was overlooked, before. Before absolute abstraction, a painting without a subject would not have been considered a painting.  This seems an almost trivial distinction until you realize that with the return of subject, the painting was as yet itself a subject, a subject-within-a-subject. Subject in art, now, is taken for granted—hardly noticed—present or absent. We are now so accustomed to looking at art as a thing-in-itself, that it is possible to discourse at length about a painting w...

After thickly applied paint—as a feature of oil painting—had its moment, it didn't recede into the past, but became another vernacular idiom of Art. Deconstructing the making of art in this way is not intended to tamp-down enthusiasm for the aesthetics of art, but to increase understanding of the means. If everyone who loves art tried painting in oils this digression would be unnecessary. How is the elan of creating to be expressed? Art, like many things, is a feedback loop. Try something, step back to look at it, and, if it "works" continue. If it doesn't try something else. Or, return to it under different conditions, and so on. Originality is new, and different, combinations of limited options. Oil painting is like that. Objectivity is always behind, and at the height of the thick paint craze, it was noted that the thickness dimension did not reproduce well in photographs. This was received more as complaining by artists, creative frustration, than as a criterion. ...

Oil painting is a lot like modeling in clay. The material qualities of oil paint, particularly the clay-like quality of oil paint, was not expressed by artists until the middle of the 20th Century, with experiments in Abstract Expressionism. Thick paint eventually achieved iconic status. It had connotations of richness. When artists started gilding "paintings" with Gold leaf, it was too much. It was a great fad, but at this point in time, "deep dish" abstract art is played-out. It feels too heavy, vulgar, even gross to be art. Stuffed with material excess, we feel full, suffer from indigestion. No more, please. Abstract art by definition lacks a subject. When the subject was restored to balance the aesthetic effect, thick, heavy-impasto paint became meaningful. Aesthetics should never pander to gluttony. Excess can be, but is not necessarily, better. The intention is not to fling a load of paint and hope it hits the mark, but to conserve the subject -to let the subj...

Oil painting, specifically art created with oil paint, is an activity that requires the use of gloves. Close-fitting, impermeable on the palm side, and disposable when saturated with grime make a good fit. Protecting the hands is not the main object. The purpose of wearing gloves while painting in oils is free artistic self-expression -freedom from inhibition because of the objectionable qualities of the medium of oil paint.  Oil painting is, in plain words, dirty. That statement is a matter of candor because of the unmentionable nature of dirt. Much has been made of art's sublimation of that which is base. Raising the base to the sublime would justify the medium of dirt (paint), not necessarily a disqualification, as it might be in other contexts. A good analogy would be gardening. Seasoned gardeners dig in the soil wearing gardening gloves. It would not be obvious to those who have neither painted, nor gardened, that gloves are needed. Figuratively speaking, oil paint is—like the...