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page 4
Stone Riley
Greybeard's Rant page 4
(my real artist's statement)
(C) 2005 by Stone Riley
Do you want to paint some scene wherein it is as if some soul is lost in a dark forest? No need to work up all those freaking trees the way you used to have to do, with all those freaking twigs and leaves and bits of shade and pine cones and all that other shit, and all of it arranged by geometrical perspective. No; our paranoid grip on superficial appearance has been broken. Now two or three big well colored and well arranged strokes might set the scene quite adequately, leaving you with time and canvas in which to offer possible elaborations of the actual intended central theme. In short, painting has become a proper medium for storytelling. In the Modern mode it now approaches the human voice's liquid fluency.
Of course the trade can't keep up. There is that. Ironically, the ambitious painter, one who wants to do what great painters do -- communicate deep reality now -- must be independent of success. Screw the jurors. Screw the competitions, the magazines, the galleries, the museums. Screw 'em all. That industry generally exists on a thin profit margin and therefore hates to gamble. Just like a hardware store or grocery, the typical art gallery depends on classifying merchandise into well-known categories so as to allocate their space and hours effectively. And when these people act as jurors that's almost always what they think is good. Of course. What you sell is good because a good person like you is selling it. They often even have the effrontery to preach "consistency" as a virtue, as if Van Gogh and Picasso, Matisse and all that lot either would or could repeat a picture from Tuesday morning on Wednesday afternoon. Ignorance. They do not know the process. Screw 'em all.
Of course the current worldwide expansion of Western culture and the economic boom in Asia have created an unusual situation for the art trade's upper end. The art trade's upper end is temporarily awash in cash. There is a gold rush fever. Western paintings are now desired to cover walls in places where Westerness alone can be worth a million bucks. And the art trade's response to this is what you would expect. Naturally it has become a kind of ponzi scheme hyping and peddling wall coverings. You should see the trade shows. Everyone except the gullible investors and successful peddlers freely admit it's just the same old tired formulaic meaningless crap.
(continued)
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