New blog now open for business

Hooray!
A Stork has brought a new addition to my blog family-

My art and art techniques-the art of gurmeet

This a technical blog for those interested in the nitty-gritty of creating artworks.

A display of my paintings

Is she admiring my works ? Or is she thinking -"What tosh!"? -




Some more of my paintings on display-

Sickness in the Left

Pathologically minded uber-leftist and loathsome cartoonist Ted Rall is fired. Patterico has more.

A sample of a sick mind -Rall mocking widows of 9/11 terror :


Such nobility! No wonder he is a hero to the Left.

(Cross posted at Liberty News Central)

What a bloody marvellous painting, part 5

A peep at the train

by
Rudolf Swoboda
1892

Detail 1

Detail 2

I discovered this lovely work and the 19th-century Austrian painter through Niall Feguson's interesting book "Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World ".

When one looks at the works produced in the nineteenth century, one cannot help but wonder -What happened? Where did all that knowledge, skill and talent vanish? How did it come to be that the Gods of the 19th century like John William Waterhouse, Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John Singer Sargent were dethroned by the preening lice of the 20th, like Picasso, Rothko and Rauschenberg.

Just compare and contrast-

Ophelia, 1889
by
John William Waterhouse

Untitled, 1963
Oil, silkscreened ink, metal, and plastic on canvas
by
Robert Rauschenberg

From the WtHA quote collection

Andrew Klavan-

We turn to the arts for insight. Instead, they give us lies.

Modern->Postmodern->Altmodern?

Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009: same mindlessness with a new name?

Charles Moore gives it the treatment it deserves-

The unbearable pointlessness of subversion

Rather like fashion ("Pink is the new black"), art is told to reinvent itself more often than it can cope with. It could only go on being Modern for so long. Then it had to be Post-modern. Now Post-modern is a bit 1990s, so there has to be something else.

As the cruel fashion magazine editor in the film The Devil Wears Prada decrees what rises and what falls, so contemporary art requires a similar brilliant, heartless dictator. This role has been filled for longer than anyone can remember by Sir Nicholas Serota. He became director of the Tate Gallery in 1988. He changed the name to Tate Britain and built Tate Modern across the river. He is the Maecenas (with public money) of the modern.

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As you enter the show, a notice reads, "Please be aware that some works in this exhibition contain images of a sexual nature". But if this raises your hopes, please be aware that all that is visible in this category is a "TV Wall", on which you can watch something called the Dildo Seesaw.

More typical of the work on offer is a High Definition Video called The Plover's Wing, in which a man wearing a dead badger on his head interviews an Israeli mayor. Or try "Installation of Fedex Large Kraft Boxes 330508, International Priority, Los-Angeles-Tijuana, Tijuana-Los Angeles, Los Angeles-London", which consists of six perspex Fedex boxes which have been cracked in transit. Near the entrance, a gigantic "Squeezebox Jukebox", which is played at two o'clock every afternoon, contains nothing but Left-wing protest songs: Free Palestine Now, Here We Go (for Women of the Working Class), War Pigs.

Beneath the patient chastity of the Tate's Ionic columns, these "spaces", installations and heaps of rubbish – the last is an exact description, not an insult (or not only an insult) – "identify", according to the exhibition's official "supporters", "with Tate's willingness to take risks". What are those risks, I wondered, as I listened through headphones to a story called Giantbum, in which a madman described his "expedition" through the bowels of a giant ("metaphors for cultural recycling").

There is no financial risk – the taxpayer sees to that. There is no risk of attack, because the targets of such satire there is are the usual ones – bankers, war, people who are nasty to "Native Americans". Is there an artistic risk? For something to be risked in art, there has to be some sense of pre-existing rules, something which is then remade, rethought or challenged. There has to be an orthodoxy to overthrow.

There is no such sense in Altermodern. So long ago has form, or painterly or sculptural skill, or harmony, or tradition, been rejected that it feels as if such things are no longer even known. In fact, nothing is known, or thought. The work just sort of sits there – acrylics, photographs, tape recordings, electrical gadgets, scraps of clothing, plastic toys, cardboard boxes. It is like a vast jumble sale of things which no one can ever have wanted.

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With Altermodern, the boredom is absolute. The show barely even repels. It is utterly pointless. Possibly Mr Bourriaud might reply that the pointlessness is the point, and start talking about his cultural "negotiations" and how the show "wilfully flattens out any cultural hierarchies", as one rushes from the room.

But I know, and I suspect he knows, that no one's heart (or head) is in this. Altermodernism is required by the patron, so it is brought into being. Far from challenging orthodoxy, it repeats it – the orthodoxy being that art's purpose is to "subvert". It is not the beginning of anything, but the fag-end of something.

In this case you must read the whole thing.

A comment to the above article-

The art is not in the "installation" or exhibit, it is in the blurb that goes with it describing just how, exactly, it is supposed to be art.

Another-

I think that the exhaustion of contemporary visual arts is palpable. It is decadent - not in the exciting way proposed by Sally Bowles, but in the sense that it is not only boring, it bores itself.

Moreover, it is the opposite of 'avant garde' in that behind exhibitions like altermodern is a set of cosy, publicly-funded asssumptions. These artworks are usually called 'challenging' and 'cutting edge' and are backed up by a critical language full of 1980s political antagonism: 'subversive', 'interrogative', 'transgressive'.

And more-

Many modern so-called artists appear as shallow self-publicists. It is questionable whether their work has any aesthetic or intellectual content; pickled sharks and unmade beds come to mind.

The trouble is that modern art is easy. Its production does not require years of experience in refining the artist's mind and developing technical skills. It is worthless like popular culture. Yet it is not popular culture but rather something that has gulled weak minds among the section of the population that has pretensions to education, albeit in "soft" subjects like the arts.

So well said -modern art is easy!

U.S. President -chimp no more?

Note -This was initially posted on the Liberty News Central. However, since this has much to with artists and their freedom to critique popular and populist figures, I am reposting it here.

The happy days for cartoonists showing the US president
as a chimp are over. It will not be tolerated in the Obama age.

To those of us on the non-leftist side of the barricade it has been obvious for decades that one of the most potent weapons in the leftist arsenal is their readiness to shoot the charge of 'racism' at the drop of a hat. They have used it to effectively to oppose policies and people they don't like and to defend their own, to induce guilt on a civilizational scale and weaken the moral fabric of a whole way of life.

If we didn't live in an nightmarish Orwellian world, it would be obvious to all that the modern day racism is now an official platform of the left -it is the leftists who clamor for race based quotas in admissions, jobs and contracts and it is the 'rightists' (i.e. libertarians like myself) who would like to live in an absolutely color blind world.

Thus we have another round of grapeshot from the left's favorite weapon. We are told that this cartoon, which is actually quiet intelligent and amusing, is racist-




It allegedly portrays Obama as a chimpanzee, something which is denied by the artist. But what if it were? Why would portraying Obama as a monkey be racist? And if so then why was endlessly comparing Bush to simians not racist?






Different rules for different races. That's racism. And it now overwhelmingly comes from the left.

It is ironical and tragic that the artistic establishment is solidly leftist because the left and artistic freedom are like oil and water -the much vaunted 'pushing of boundaries', the much tom-tommed 'edginess' simply disappear when a favorite leftist project is critiqued. Thus you have thousands of images of Bush as chimp -but one image which is only indirectly suggestive(if even that) of Obama as a simian is intolerable. The cutting edge artistic expression only cuts one way. When it threatens to cut the other way, then the defense of artistic freedom doesn't seem so important anymore.

The cartoonists know they are now walking on a minefield while trying to show Obama -a minefield they fully connived in creating. For years they had full freedom to slander Bush -and they did it with gusto. Despite all the talk of 'police state', no midnight knock ever came for any artist. Yet one innocent cartoon in the age of Obama and the knives are out.

Cartoonists treading lightly when drawing Obama
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Editorial cartoonists are bending over backwards a lot these days, as they try to satirize the nation's first black president. And when they don't, the result is the kind of outcry that erupted this week after a New York Post cartoon featured a bloody chimpanzee — intentionally or unintentionally evoking racist images of the past.
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Scott Stantis, editorial cartoonist for The Birmingham (Ala.) News, said he received several complaints this week that his Obama drawings look "simian." As a conservative in a city that's 77 percent black, Stantis has learned to consider the feelings of his audience.

"Being the typical American editorial cartoonist — doughy, white, middle-aged — I'm more than willing to accept that I don't know what may or may not be offensive," he said. "But editorial cartoons are supposed to be offensive, and provocative. We're entering new waters here. What can you use or not use?"

"All my characters look simian," he said. "I don't make Obama look nearly as simian as our former Gov. Fob James, who I DID draw as a monkey, on more than one occasion. And he's a white guy ... I'm sorry, but when it comes to African-Americans, you just don't draw monkeys."

Ted Rall, president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, said that Obama's race has affected how his colleagues do their jobs: "Without a doubt, people are stepping more gingerly. People are tiptoeing their way through this."

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Perhaps race relations would improve, Lester said, if black people lightened up a bit: "They're not too good (at being) made fun of. We can all take a joke."

No, the race industry hustlers can't.

(As they say, read the whole thing.)


Hey, artists, show some courage -do unto Obama what you did to Bush:




Update -look who is leading the 'Anti-racism' protest-
the infamous race baiter Al Sharpton. If he were a Republican he would have been run out of politics by a hyper-hysterical media mob eons ago. Just a sampler-

1991: A Hasidic Jewish driver in Brooklyn's Crown Heights section accidentally kills Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old black child, and antisemitic riots erupt. Sharpton races to pour gasoline on the fire. At Gavin's funeral he rails against the "diamond merchants" -- code for Jews -- with "the blood of innocent babies" on their hands. He mobilizes hundreds of demonstrators to march through the Jewish neighborhood, chanting, "No justice, no peace." A rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, is surrounded by a mob shouting "Kill the Jews!" and stabbed to death.

Oh yes, needless to say Sharpton is from Obama's party.

Update 2- John Hinderaker-

Democrats will no doubt continue to use Obama's race to try to silence criticism, but they can rest assured that conservatives will never unleash the kind of mindless hate against Obama (or anyone else) that we have all witnessed from the Left over the past six years.

(emphasis mine)

Loner

Some more of my recent doings-

Loner
mixed media on paper
50 X 71 cms

Detail 1-




Detail 2-

The evening thinker

I apologize for the long hiatus( briefly accounted for here).

Among other things, this was what I was upto-

The evening thinker
watercolor
20.5 X 30.3 cms

detail 1-



detail 2-



update- I should have mentioned : the painting is based on a striking image taken by the lovely Mrs.LNC*(and who is also the lovely Mrs.WtHA*)

* LNC= Liberty News Central
WtHA= What the Heck is Art?

Foreign artists in India- Stuart Robertson

Click for a larger image

A watercolor by Stuart Robertson

According to his profile here-

Stuart Robertson's love affair with India began when he first visited in 1985. He moved to India in 1989 and lived and stayed on for 7 years, working in Delhi - where he met his wife - and travelling extensively throughout the country. He has returned regularly and his fascination with the people and culture has grown as his paintings have evolved from realistic depictions to simpler representations grasping the mood and feeling of the subject matter rather than literal detail.

I first saw Robertson's work at the now defunct India Today art gallery at Connaught Place, Delhi several years ago. While I was impressed by his large watercolors of India, I remember feeling then that there was something, some Je ne sais quoi missing. A case of if only..... To take an analogy, if I had been the class teacher of Stuart Robertson (and he a little boy), I would have written on his report card-"Good, but can do better" - and then regretted having written the comment. Because at his best he is striking and one cannot but be......um, struck.

Yet that Je ne sais quoi still lingers as an aftertaste.



Previously in the Foreign artists in India series-

Scott Burdick and Susan Lyon
Lady Charlotte Canning
Julian Barrow

Sanjay Bhattacharya, please don't be Anakin Skywalker!

Sanjay Bhattacharya is possibly India's finest painter-

Click for a larger image
Shadows after the light
52.5 X 152.5 cm
oil on canvas
1995

Except when he does something silly like this-

The escape
152.5 X 106.5 cm
oil on canvas
1995

One is left wondering -what is going on? Are an itinerant (and giant) cup and a saucer (or two) loitering at the doorway of this haveli expecting alms? Is this Alice in wonderland, perhaps set in Rajasthan(Alisha in Bundelkhand, say)?

I suspect this is Sanjay Bhattacharya trying to impress the modernist ulta-seedha (without head or tail) crowd, the kind of people who can stare with admiration at a canvas painted jet black and go 'ooh' and 'ah' over disembowled bodies that adorn many modern paintings.

Oh no, Mr. Bhattacharya - there is no need to pander to this brainless mob, even if it overflows at the arty-sharty cocktail set. You are far too good for that. Put all the Souzas, the Husseins, the Bawas of this world along with legions of modernist and post-modernist hacks(hard to call them artists) together, and still they would not even be worthy of lickng clean your ass(not that you would like them to).

Pardon my vulgarity but we live in vulgar times (go to any art gallery or watch an edgy 'comedy' show on the BBC) and as the finest jedi of the Indian art it is vital that you do not pass over to the dark side.

May I remind you, in the end, that this is the Sanjay Bhattacharya we all love-

Cityscape-II
watercolor
22inches X 30inches

What a bloody marvellous painting, part 4

This one is one of those works that forces out an astonished gasp from from the viewer. It left me stunned for a long time and though I appear normal now I am still startled inside.Bloody marvellous, indeed!

The Persistent Dream of Youth
oil on canvas
120 x 72 inches
by
Christopher Pugliese

See a larger image at the Art Renewal Center. Direct link.
See more of his paintings here.

Compare and contrast-
a poor excuse for art from one our Great Cheese (mahan cheez)-

Study for Resting Scribe - I
watercolor
by
Atul Dodiya

Picasso to his son-"I wish you were dead."

Paul Johnson on Picasso from his interesting book Creators-

The all-powerful machinery of the Picasso industry—his regiments of women, his chateaux, his gold ingots, his unlimited fame, his vast wealth, the sycophancy that surrounded him—none of these brought him serenity as he aged. It seems to me that his personal cruelty and the evident savagery of much of his work (so different from the indignant savagery of Goya) sprang from a deep unease of spirit, which grew steadily worse and terminated in despair. When he realized that his sexual potency had gone, he said bitterly to his son Claude: "I am old and you are young. I wish you were dead."

Irony is thick here- with all "his regiments of women, his chateaux, his gold ingots, his unlimited fame, his vast wealth, the sycophancy that surrounded him", one might overlook the fact that he was a communist.

Don't these celebrity leftists-then and now- lead a highly charming and decadent capitalistic life?

(emphasis mine)

"so studied, so self-indulgent, so fake"

Andrew Bolt-

To generalise, perhaps wildly: the gloomy, marginal and dysfunctional is celebrated, and the mainstream resisted as oppressive and shameful. It’s as if artists are rebels in search of a cause, looking for the great enemy in a society which actually cossets them. It’s so studied, so self-indulgent, so fake. So bogged in the peripheral and the trivial.

So right!