Balancing Art and Business

I saw a sign recently that said 'If you're an artist you're already a success.' It's a nice thought and true to some extent, but there are still bills to pay. I'm always interested in how artists manage to juggle the demands of art with the demands of practical life, whether in history or at the current moment. As a working artist, my interest in the question is not academic. So in pursuit of answers to the question, for myself and in general, I went to the SURTEX/Stationery Trade show last week in New York. So much color, so much design and pattern, much cuteness and cleverness - aisle after aisle. I learned a good deal (for example, did you know that there is an award called the Louie for the best in greeting card design?) and picked up plenty of useful information. Some booths took up a lot of real estate, but as I wandered I  kept my eye out for the smaller, more personal approach. I found quite a few artist/entrepreneurs who are managing the balance very well. Amy Smyth has had enough success with her basic line - http://www.amysmythmadeit.com - that she has initiated a second one, Ecka & Pecka, named, charmingly, for the imaginary friends of her niece. She spoke of the satisfactions of taking the business side seriously in order to make a life from her creative work. Further on, I found a couple of family efforts. J-Dig cards - http://jdigcards.bigcartel.com - is the product of two brothers who share the creative work (one for the ideas, one for the designs) with the help of a spouse who does the marketing, while Clouds & Ink http://www.cloudsandink.com is the combined effort of a daughter and her father - he creates paintings from which she selects patterns to use with her line drawings in card designs. They all reported success and satisfaction with the creative and business sides of their efforts. If you're an artist who has found a good balance, leave me a comment and let me know how you do it - I'd love to help spread the word.

Quilting Women and Tibetan Monks

I'm a great advocate of finding common links between disparate cultures and people - I make that sense of shared humanity the primary tenet of much of my teaching - so I was pleased to see that today's NYTimes articles about the Quilt exhibit at the Folk Art Museum (the final exhibit before it turns the building over to MOMA) and the Tibetan Arts exhibit at the Newark Museum gave me new material. The organizing principles of quilt making and of the mandalas of Tibetan monks are both reflections of a similar human need - for order, pattern, and regularized meaning and beauty. Quilts seem much less exotic - homey, crafted of familiar low value materials such as simple cottons or even discarded clothing, normally made by women whose arts are traditionally less valued than the brawnier arts of men, they come into being to serve a practical purpose - warmth for a bed and a spark of color amid the drabness of daily life. Tibetan mandalas, on the other hand, are made as a means to touch the divine and act as a form of prayer. They are painstakingly constructed, colored grain of sand by colored grain of sand, according to ancient traditions of iconography, by revered holy men. Part of their meaning is that they never last - like fragile life itself, the physical reality of the mandala is soon dispersed to the winds and gone. What remains is only the truth of the memory. But is that so very different from a quilt? First, note the pictures and see the fine use of geometry and mathematics in both forms. But similarities go deeper: like the iconography of the mandalas quilt patterns were often revered as a connection to a personal or community history with designs being passed down from generation to generation. The Tibetan community of monks relates as well to the communal activity of quilting bees. Yet surely much of the historical handiwork of woman was created painstakingly in isolated living rooms - no matter how much effort went into each careful stitch there might be no one to notice but a few family members. As with the ephemeral mandalas, the creator of a quilt had to find in the act the satisfaction of creation. And with the exception of cloth work preserved with care, like these quilts at the Folk Art Museum, much is gone forever, used up with constant wear - blown away by the winds of time. Both these exhibits display works of great, and very different beauty and meaning, but together they say something deeply true about being human.

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/05/12/arts/design/20110513-folk.html
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/05/12/arts/design/20110513-tibet.html

Working with Flowers - you're invited!

Flowers, like children, are tricky subjects for artists. Both have such innate sweetness and beauty that the challenge is to find something to say that isn't cloying or sentimental. Flowers have been on my mind lately as I've been preparing work for a show that opens tomorrow. It doesn't hurt that the flowering trees and tulips in my city neighborhood are particularly lush and fragrant this Spring, too - every step out the door brings a feast of color and fragrance. Most people know Van Gogh's Irises - for the extraordinary price they commanded a few years ago as much as for the spectacular image of strong lusty life he created - but he wasn't the only one who tackled the subject and came up with something unique. Georgia O'Keefe is another familiar in the language of art and flowers. Where Van Gogh celebrated the twiny vigor of a healthy patch of earth, O'Keefe stepped up close and gave us intimate, forceful portraits of individual flowers. One of Van Gogh's important influences was Hokusai, who with other Japanese Ukiyo-e artists made prints of familiar scenes - these irises are an example of Hokusai's keen eye and lovely sense of arrangement on a page. One of my favorite flower artists is Rachel Ruysch, a still-life painter from the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century - this little painting is a poem to the beauty of flowers but with a rich gravitas that contradicts any lingering sentiment. I've included one of my paintings, a spray of tulips in a white vase. Please come to the show if you're in the Philly area - you'll see not only my work (with some of my handmade artist books) but also that of 4 other artists, including weaving, ceramics, watercolors and drawing. 

2nd Floor Front Gallery - 1704 Walnut Street, Philadelphia PA 19103 - Wednesday May 4 5-8pm (opening), Thursday May 5 Noon-6pm, Friday May 6 4-9pm, Saturday May 7 Noon-5pm. (The Gallery is in a working architects office, an interesting space located at Walnut and 17th St near Rittenhouse Square)