There seems to be a trend among certain still life painters to make paintings that feature fruit or objects anthropomorphosized or engaged in some kind of activity. Are paintings supposed to be cute? There is some precedence in Dutch still life painting with it's morality plays on temperance and abstinence but not to the extremes that it's being taken to today. While I don't object to this kind of art, and I would never want to censor anyones muse, I just can't figure out the motivation for it.
      Many of the artists involved in "visual puns" have a highly polished, if not "hyper-real" technicque. Is that what happens when you push your technicque that far? Does one become bored painting an apple on a plate and begins to entertain thoughts of the apple dancing with the plate? Do they feel somehow that still life painting is a minor art compared to painting the figure or landscape and that in order to be relevant it needs to justify it's existence by proving how "smart" the artist is? Aren't many of these paintings just thinly disguised forays into surrealism?
      Perhaps it is the threat of being called a "realist" that bothers these artists ; a term that many artists seem to go to great lengths to deny. Realism is a kind of catch all phrase that is used to describe any kind of painting that features representational imagery. To me, a realist still life painter is one who paints found objects in much the same way that a landscape painter finds a location. Avigdor Arikha would be a good example. He paints the umbrella left on the table, breakfast setting, etc; If you're a painter who arranges a still life and than shines a spotlight on it, you're more of a "Classical realist" because the world isn't made up of little dramatically lighted vignettes.
      Personally, I don't respond to visual puns because they seem to originate from the world of advertising where the idea is that if you can make the viewer smile in a nano-second then they will remember and possibly buy your product. Great still life paintings will reward contemplation. Even the highly polished paintings of Zurburan are transcendent. Technicque becomes secondary to issues of light, and how the light is used to construct objects with a variety of mass and density and translucency. Paintings can be magical but painters should not think of themselves as magicians. Painting visual puns puts the artist in a game of one-upmanship with themself," let's see, in my last painting i had the apple flying over the crowd of turnips on a trapeze, so in my next painting I'm going to have the bananas attending a funeral for the tragic death of the apple."
      As I said I don't really disparage this kind of painting, after all it's still within the realm of representational painting, and quite often when the pun is more subtle and the painting is allowed some breathing room the results can be quite beautiful. I guess to me it's just kind of sad that in today's art world where representational paintings are still called "academic" that many painters feel they need to somehow justify their existence. You can often find this in figure painting as well. It's as if a figure bathed in light is anachronistic unless it's ironic. or psychological, or symbolic. I guess I just really respond to paintings that are in the moment, where the artist is painting the apple because sometimes apples can be so beautiful that they'll bring tears to your eyes. I don't need symbols or performance because those things will come of thier own volition. Every artist brings to their paintings all their life experience, their tragedies and their joys. When an artist makes a great painting of an apple, one of those paintings that almost seems to paint themselves, those deeper meanings are there waiting for each viewer to respond to in their own way. When I look at Chardin I can sense pathos and joy and melancholy. A single seville orange can be as noble as an emperor, or as humble as a servant or both at the same time. I would have hated it if Chardin had ever felt the need to spell things out for me.

     I like Odd Nerdrum. Well, not the artist, his work. I don't really know the artist but he really does seem kind of odd. He walks around wearing old masterish robes and jaunty hats. My best instincts tell me that I shouldn't like his paintings. Aren't they just pastiches of Rembrandt and Klinger with a little Road Warrior thrown in? Sometimes his subject matter is so over the top that it's laughable; Kitsch, as the artist likes to call it on his website. Yes, Odd is inspired by Rembrandt, but the Rembrandt of the Polish Rider, and the Man with The Helmet and the Battavian Oath.(the former two no longer considered to be by Rembrandt)(says who?). The fact is that Nerdrum is a student of paint. He is a painter's painter and he has the talent to bring it off. Some of my favorite Nerdrum paintings  feature only one figure. Theres one of a young man wearing an armored breastplate holding a plant that is truly sublime on many levels. He is at a crossroads. He is ready for battle, but instinctively reaches out for the comfort of nature. Another favorite shows a figure prostrate before  a puddle(well?) with his face half submerged in the water. Nerdrums mastery is hard won. He was fighting the good fight on behalf of traditional painting while many of the "new masters" (who have clearly borrowed from him) were still in their cribs or not yet born. We can see him working his way through  Van Dyke and Rubens and of course Carravagio before finally settling down to become a student of Rembrandt. But of course Nerdrums best work is no more Rembrandtesque than Rembrandt was a Carravagisti. If influence is the platform that gets you to a better place, than I say hats off to you!
        Bo Bartlett is often as bombastic and as obnoxious as Nerdrum. Sometimes he  can be a little whiny" poor me my daddy made me go hunting and my wife no longer loves me". But quite often the original intent is left ambiguous enough to hit on deeper meanings. Bo's ability to create large compositions and color schemes that hold together is astounding. His earthy "Pennsylvania Academy " palette is punctuated with color accents revealing perfect pitch. As with Nerdrum some of his most compelling pieces focus on a single figure. He has the ability to reveal women in thier own skin, absent  the male gaze, as if we are privy to a scene being witnessed by the artist surreptitiously. Think Degas and Bonnard. One of my favorite paintings features a large cow on an arch shaped canvas.(what's wrong with me?) The light and color are transcendent. A silly painting that manages to be sublime.
       Scott Prior is an artist whose paintings often feature garishly acidic color schemes that look like Thomas Kinkade paintings after he took some drawing and painting lessons. This gives his somewhat idyllic and nostalgic paintings a bit of an edge. Life seen through a polaroid colored prism. In fact the artist quite often uses snapshots taken with an antique polaroid camera as an aid. Generally I don't care for photo derived imagery but the artists imprimatur is so evident that it's clear that the photo is merely a jumping off point. I once witnessed him working on a small still life painting where he had arranged some objects on a deck railing with the landscape as background. While painting on site, he also had a polaroid of the scene that he had mounted in a shadow box with a little penlight shining on it creating a chiaroscuro like tableaux. As I watched him paint I could see that he was referring to the photo and the actual scene equally. He told me that he only works with very small synthetic brushes and uses the same basic method whether working on an 8" by 10" or a 5' by 6'. He has a painting that shows a nude woman standing in a submerged woodland that could easily have been painted by Nerdrum or Bartlett but Scott has a humility and awe in the face of nature that clearly the other two are lacking. He seems to find the world a genuinely astonishing and magical place and expresses his gratitude with the gift of light. Rarely do his paintings feature electric light or midday scenes. Usually the light is at it's ebb, look quick or it'll be gone. All three of my "guilty pleasures" have that in common. The ability to render light on forms in a way that makes me glad to be a painter.

        I know that there are many of you out there that have been waiting a long time for someone to finally figure out what the magic ingredient, the missing link, if you will , is that made the Old Masters so great, so here it is. Larkspar.That's right, if you can get your hands on some hard to find larkspar and mix that sparingly with your paint than you too will paint like a Master. Well, not really, but it sounded good didn't it? The real secret to being a better artist is to work your butt off way past the point of exhaustion. That's it. Even with that theres no guarantee of greatness but without it theres a guarantee of mediocrity.  There are just way too many of us out there(including me) putting our hard earned bucks down to get just the right medium, the perfect brush, baby calf fed linen. I want you to go to the window right now with your maroger medium in hand and yell "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to fake it anymore!" Heres the bottom line, great artists are born not made. That doesn't mean that they didn't work hard. They were driven to succeed. In a way it's good that theres not a lot of that old master kind of greatness to go around because it gives the rest of us schlubs something to strive towards. The best part of a marathon is not the finish line.
   I've attended a few workshops in my time and invariably you have artists who feel that some kind of osmosis might take place if they get close enough to the artist or use the same methods. What I found useful from a workshop was listening to the artist speak.Picking up on their work ethic, their proffessionalism. You can learn to paint like an artist you admire but you can't be them. The mold is only good for one cast. Somebody asked me the other day how I came to have a style. I was a little taken aback because as I explained to the person, I've been trying my damndest not to have a style. I figure that I'll just paint the things that I'm motivated to paint and try to get the paint down with some kind of clarity and maybe a little bit of facility. If a style or look is going to happen I don't want it to be intentional. I had a style once. People thought it was pretty cool. Some of my artist friends were a little jealous. They were like " man, you're so lucky you have a style. Your work doesn't look like anyone elses. I gotta get me a style going." Problem was that it began to feel kind of like a straight jacket. Here I was carving out this little niche saying this is my thing, but artistically I was dead in the water. My "style" was kind of like a roadblock preventing me from being the artist I was supposed to be. I see this happen to a lot of artists. Sometimes they can do pretty well, you know " oh I just bought an original so-and-so, you can tell his style a mile away". But you get the feeling that they're not looking at the big picture. Gettting back to the "old masters", most of the ones that I admire and that made it into old age, had major changes in the appearance of their work.Rembrandt, Titian, Velasquez, etc.I highly doubt that any of them tried to cultivate a "look" or signature style.. They just did their thing and hoped for the best. Art colleges tend to cultivate this whole having a style thing. It helps during a class critique if you can say that your  drawing is poor because you were trying to find that place between Twombly and Agnes Martin. You know what Rembrandts favorite brush was? His fingers. I always tell my students that style is like frosting on a cake. If you don't have a cake, what good is the frosting?

     I am an Art magazine junkie. I subscribe to three and read many more that I borrow from friends or peruse in the library. I enjoy reading about artists that i admire and encountering the work of artists that are new to me. Many of the magazines also feature demos and discussion of the artists technicque, which to me is shop talk, and something that I really enjoy. The problem is that there isn't any analysis or serious criticism. Not all realist art is equally good. Not all art by established realist painters is of the same quality or caliber as their best work. If tradition based painting is to be taken seriously, tradition based art must be seriously discussed. Some magazines seem to coincidentally only feature articles on artists that happen to have full or half page ads running. I'm not necessarily against this but it would be nice to read a review of an exhibition that was more than a shil.
     I understand that it is hard times for tradition based painting (isn't it always) and nobody wants to rock the boat, or bite the proverbial hand that feeds, but with the opening of so many ateliers and art academys it is clearly time for some culling and gleaning.If I see one more painting that features a top heavy vase with silver dollar leaves on a navajo blanket painted in a buttery chiaroscuro I'm going to scream.(picture Munch) What the "realist" art magazines don't seem to get is that the best artists transcend their chosen methods of working. Beautiful paintings are sublime, they are not at all like furniture where I might admire a well turned chair leg. When a work of art moves me, I'm not thinking "nice brushstrokes". After the initial spell is broken I might try to figure out what it is about the work that I respond to, but chances are that the key ingredient will remain elusive, as it should. Can we really say that Rembrandt is a great artist because of his use of thick and thin paint, textural variety, dramatic lighting etc.?; Because Rembrandt has had a lot of imitators over the centuries who are not great. Not at all.
    Unfortunately. many of the art magazines that are out today have managed to stay afloat through the days of minimalism and conceptualism by featuring articles that appeal to the amateur or hobbyist with the occasional article thrown in for the more proffessional. That's understandable. Without that readership they probably wouldn't have lasted. But many of them seem to be aware that tradition based painting is having a comeback of sorts and the quality of the artists and the feature articles has improved, but not to the level that it should be. One still life painter who I greatly admire has had her work featured in three of the magazines that I subscribe to, almost concurrently. Each article was almost a carbon copy of the others. If her work is worthy  of this kind of attention then it is also worthy of some careful scrutiny. Not all of the paintings featured were of equal quality. Some were incredible and some were good and some were misfires. Would it really hurt the artist professionally to say so? Would the subscription rate drastically decline? Doubtful,
     There is a need for a magazine that is geared towards the serious artist and serious art fan. In order for there to be discourse there has to be discussion. The legacy of tradition based painting has to be more than glossy articles that read like travel brochures. American Arts Quarterly, a small book like missive that comes out four times a year(hence the name) would be a good blueprint to start with. Unfortunately, they don't really cover a lot of artists or review a lot of exhibitions. They usually review two or three exhibits in each issue and that doesn't really provide a lot of coverage. We need our "Art in America" or "Artforum" but without the doublespeak that passes for knowledge in those magazines.

                     It seems to me, inexcusable that Jacob Collins's painting exhibit at the Hirschl and Adler gallery was not reviewed in the N.Y. Times. I often here the art "crickets" lamenting the fact that there doesn't seem to be any kind of cohesive movement or direction that artists are working in. Pluralism seems to rule the day. They seem blinded to the fact that, indeed, there is something afoot and that it is a kind of grass roots movement that really doesn't need the approval of  crickets to stay afloat. Maybe that's the reason that this movement, which has been called "Classical Realism", to which I prefer the terms "Tradition Based Painting" has been so blatantly ignored.
   How else can you account for the fact that you have a large contingent of artists working in Brooklyn, who have set up their own ateliers ( art instruction studios), meet to share ideas, exhibit at the same galleries, and yet haven't really been written about by any of the Crickets" for the local major newspapers. The Times has been caught napping and is really missing the boat. Do they really think that their readership cares whether or not the work that they write about is "avante-garde". The Times needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Modernism had it's century. It was very nice and often inspiring but now it's over. "let it go!" 
   Many artists today have come to realize that making good art is 90 % sweat and 10% inspiration. That's not  a joke. Students who study with Collins and in other private studios are expected to learn their craft. There are no short cuts through this process. There are no expectations of fame, or papparazzi infested gallery openings. The idea is that the pursuit of beauty and truth through art is a noble calling and that if one is lucky enough to get even a glint of what that could be, than that's all the reward that you're ever going to need.
Maybe that's why the N.Y. Times doesn't get it and probably never will.

      Several weeks ago the Times published a review of the "Americans In Paris" art exhibit at the Met. The review was fairly negative and loaded with the usual criticisms of turn of the century American art. ie; It didn't lead to any movements, it's an academic and anemic version of european Impressionism, didn't produce any artists of note. While it may have seemed that way if you're looking at the era with eyes that are still holding onto ideals from the 60's and 70's and still referring to works of art with the hackneyed phrase "academic", recent history has shown that the American impressionists did plant a seed that was to be picked up later by american realist painters of the late twentieth century and early twenty first.It seems ironic or moronic to me that at the time the review was printed there was an exhibition of paintings by Jacob Collins who's work can be traced directly to artists of the Boston School and happens to be one of the most influential painters and instructors working today.The Times did not even review the collins exhibit, choosing instead to review the John Currin show.(figure paintings that are so bad that he has begun to include pornographic imagery just so people will look at them)
(to be continued)