Q: How do you feel about donating your work to auctions?
Studio with work in progress
A: Generally, it depends on who is doing the asking. If it’s an organization that has been supportive of my work, I am pleased to help with fundraising. If the organization and I have never connnected before, their out-of-the-blue request sometimes feels disrespectful. Artists invest decades, vast amounts of money, and plenty of blood, sweat, and tears to become the skilled creators that we are. And a New York artist’s overhead is considerable. I know of no artists who create their hard-fought work only to give it away.
Under certain conditions, however, I will participate. Here is my response to a recent donation request.
Dear…
Thank you for contacting me. Certainly your organization sounds worthwhile.
However, you may be unaware that artists may deduct ONLY the cost of materials when we give our work to auctions. I suggest that you ask one of your supporters to buy a pastel painting and donate it next year (there is a one-year waiting period for collectors to take this tax deduction). Then we have a win-win-win! I get paid, the collector/donor gets to enjoy owning my beautiful work for a year AND take a tax deduction for the full amount that he/she paid for it. Plus, your organization gets to sell my painting at next year’s auction.
Don’t you agree this is a better approach for everyone involved?
Sincerely…
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from Artists* # 313
Barbara and Tomas in Panajachel, Guatemala
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Proclaiming that the object in Surrealism was fundamental, [Andre] Breton suggests a radical transition in surrealist creation, one that liberated the poet-artist from all constraints in the making of the artistic object. Breton’s text calls for a “revolution of the object,” suggesting that in the placing of an object into a new context, and thus attributing it with a new meaning – also called a “detournement” – which takes precedence. Drawing in his interpretation of Hegelian subject-object relations, Breton describes the “object” as a work of art that relies on a philosophical procedure, affirming the surrealist process as one that is realized in the experience of apprehending the object through a dialectical method. Citing the work of Marcel Duchamp and,Max Ernst, Max Ernst, Breton explains that an object may become a product of surrealist creation through the simple “manipulation” of it. Here ”manipulation“ is defined as a procedure which reveals the object in its original and new state at the same time. If taking an object out of its original context and placing it in a new space creates the potential for a creative act, then this text seems to validate the surrealist practice of collecting. As the collector acquired objects and unites them in a gallery or a home, they assume new significance contingent upon their physical juxtaposition to other objects.
Moon Dancers: Yup’ik Masks and the Surrealists, edited by Jennifer Field, Introduction by Christina Rudofsky
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Travel photo of the month*
On the ‘Mi Teleferico’ line, La Paz, Bolivia
*Favorite travel photographs that have not yet appeared in this blog.
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Pearls from artists* # 312
Barbara in her studio. Photo: Izzy Nova
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
For the young James Joyce, true art is “static,” while false art, which I will here call artifice, is “kinetic.” These qualifiers, static and kinetic, refer to the effect of the work on the percipient, not to any property of the work itself. Proper art stills us, evoking an emotional state in which “the mind is arrested and raised above desiring and loathing.” Improper art does the opposite, aiming to make the percipient act, think, or feel in a certain prescribed manner. Artifice foregoes the revelatory power that is art’s prerogative in order to impart information, be it a message, an opinion, a judgment, a physiological stimulus, or a command. Whether the information is good or bad, true or false, pleasant or not is unimportant: artifice isn’t improper because it is immoral but because it hitches the aesthetic on intentions originating outside the aesthetic realm. In other words, where art inheres in autoletic expression (expression for its own sake), artifice inheres in practical communication. Proper art moves us, while artifice tries to make us move.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Q: What’s on the easel today?
Work in progress
A: I continue working on “Acolytes,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38” x 58.” It’s slow going at this stage as I refine my drawing and bring everything to a high state of finish. My work is all about details.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* # 311
On the road in Bolivia
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
In nature, light and shadow create ephemeral moments of beauty. To experience the transition from sunset to night we must await and cherish each fleeting moment and not just the finale. We must be attentive to beauty revealing all its moods.
Amy Tan in In Character: Opera Portraiture, John F. Martin, Foreword by Amy Tan, Preface by David Gockley.
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Q: How much of your work is autobiographical?
“The Champ,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26″ x 20″
A: I suppose all of it is, in the sense that often I can look at a particular pastel painting and remember what was happening in my life when I made it. As I get older, however, it’s becoming more difficult to remember the circumstances surrounding my earliest work. Certainly, the cultures of an ever-expanding number of countries – Bolivia last year – are influencing my imagery for the better.
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Pearls from artists* # 310
“Danzante,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 38″ x 58″ image, 50″ x 70″ framed
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
As Immanuel Kant explained, aesthetic rapture is a peculiar kind of subjective phenomenon, since it presents itself as anything but subjective. It asks to be shared with others in hopes that they too might experience this thing that has had such a profound effect upon us. Naturally, the desire to share our astonishment is bound to be frustrated as we meet people who respond to our beloved work with indifference or even revulsion. We then remember that the affective power of works of art varies from person to person, and even from moment to moment within the same person’s life, a fact we usually put down to personal taste, though little consideration is given to what that term might mean. People have their own inclinations, and given that the aesthetic is held, not just by Kant but also by common wisdom, to be a private affair, its variability across the broad spectrum of human personalities can only seem inevitable.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Travel photo of the month*
New Year’s Eve in Los Cabos, Mexico
*Favorite travel photographs that have not yet appeared in this blog.
Comments are welcome!
Pearls from artists* #309
Barbara’s studio
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
It is a strange thing to catalog the conflicting theories as to what the first artists thought they were doing down there in the caves, because the truth is that, to this day, we do not know why we make art. In the end, art may not have been our invention at all. It may well have appeared in history as it does in the life of many individual artists: as an outside call, a sudden flash of inspiration, an inner wanderlust exerting such a powerful pull that ultimately we would have to say that Picasso got it wrong: the early humans did not invent art. Art invented humanity.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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