Homeopathic whites

Here I am. I have dropped back the schedule on writing the blog to every other day or even every third day for a while. I have so much unfinished work in my studio. Those of you with various "feed" will get the blogs when I publish them and you who find me through Facebook will get the link on your home page when I publish. This is not a symptom of the blog ending. I have a lot more to write about. I keep a sort of flow chart so that when an idea for a post occurs to me I write it down, with little arrows like a genealogical tree showing how a series of posts might follow.

I am going to write about Homeopathy a little bit, not because of the practice itself, although I will tell you a little of that as an aside, but because I am going to describe a procedure in painting by comparison .

Homeopathy is an alternative medical philosophy invented by Samuel Hahnemann in 1796. Hahnemann was writing in an era when medicine was primitive, ineffectual and often painful and dangerous. He expounded a theory of "similars". That is, he believed that a very small dose of a substance that would give you a symptom, was useful for treating someone who had that same symptom. So if you had a problem with skin rashes he might have given you something that would cause skin rashes, like Poison Ivy. Because the remedies often contained noxious. or poisonous ingredients Hahnemann diluted them. In fact he believed that the more diluted they were, they more efficacious they would be. He would put a sprinkling of an ingredient, like salt or arsenic into a beaker of water. Then he would take a tiny eyedropper from that and dilute it with another entire beaker of water. From that beaker he would take another eyedropperful and add it to third beaker, and so on. Often the mixtures made contained no molecules of the original active ingredient actually present in the final remedy.

Homeopathy is discredited today although there are homeopathic remedies on the market. ZiCam for colds is a well known one, and there are people who compound and sell homeopathic remedies. Many of the products available today that say they are homeopathic, are not actually created by this dilution system. They just use the word to mean all natural, and harmless, selling their products to people who are unfamiliar with the actual definition of what a homeopathic remedy is.

The reason I brought all of this up is to talk about mixing paint on the palette though. My long suffering pink camera seems to have died, so I shot the following pictures with my cell phone. They aren't very good, but you should be able to see what I am up to.

I sometimes paint passages in extremely high values, notes that are very close to white but carry a smidgen of a color.This is useful in skies or the sides of boats in sunlight etc. I can mix up a pile of color to paint these passages this way, like a homeopath. I make a very high key (light) note using a lot of white and a pigment. In the picture below I used cadmium yellow.

Then I take a smidgen (like an eyedropperful) of that mixture and throw it into a new pile of white. That is shown below.


Often I will do this to three or so different pigments, with white, creating three piles that are very close to white but contain a little red or blue or yellow. With those three piles I can work in an extremely high value in broken color. I can use each of those different tints to express the turning of a form in bright sunlight.

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SNOWCAMP

Snowcamp I is full. I have a few spaces left in Snowcamp II if you want one now would probably be the time to sign up. If there is sufficient interest I may be able to add a third session I am not sure. The link is over there on the right in my sidebar.

Elected juries

Trial by combat, man vs. woman.

In my last post I discussed using previous winners as the next jury. Tonight I think I will lay out the moist conventional system for art juries, those elected by the membership.

The strongest argument for an elected membership is....well, they are elected. The artists who will be in the show decide who will be the judge. What could be fairer than that? Here is the usual process.

Most all art associations are governed by an elected board, who hire a director to actually run daily operations. Every year there is an annual meeting and the nominees for the juries are voted on by the membership at that meeting. But the process starts before that. The president, somebody on the board, or the director is detailed to call individual members and ask them if they would accept the nomination to the exhibition jury. If you intend to have a jury of, say, seven you need eight to ten nominees. If you don't have more nominees than positions on the jury it is hardly an election. That's third world dictatorship stuff. You simply have to have some nominees for the members to reject. Getting ten people to pledge their time, that are actually qualified, can be a lot of work. Many people turn down the responsibility, or served the year before and should are often eliminated from the jury pool. So being the guy who has to secure the nominees can be a big job, besides having to ask people to give up their time and possibly make a few enemies.

This system is not immune to being captured by a subgroup either, but it is less likely, unless that subgroup has critical mass at the annual meeting to outvote the rest of membership. Remember though, every year some people are going to be juried out. They will form a disgruntled cadre of rejected artists working to change or control the system. Sinced that seems to be automatic, when I hear that a jury is corrupt incompetent or blind I always remember that this is a constant in the system. Maybe the jury was corrupt and blind, maybe not. Every jury is accused of that
I have sat on many juries and overseen a lot of them. I have never seen a corrupt jury.

I have seen juries deliberately balanced between devotees of the traditional and acolytes of the avant-garde, to be "fair". Those juries often work this way, Real modern art won't pull vote from the traditionalists and extremely traditional work won't pull the needed votes from the moderns. You get a show full of Cuisinart fauve, things that straddle the boundaries of both schools without really exemplifying either one. Often these juries are flabbergasted at the shows their voting produced. No individual on the jury would have chosen that show.

Many organizations prohibit or at least discourage conversation about the pieces being juried. The work is placed before the jury, they vote and the next work is displayed to them. Very seldom have I seen an argument or anger during a jury. When I have, it was by a juror who was characterized by such behavior. Juries show up, and try to do a good job, generally. They are proud to be on the jury, it is an honor, so they want to pick out as good a show as possible. They will be judged by that. Most jurors try to select a broad range of work besides what they do themselves , believing they can reward quality in different sorts of painting. They almost never have it "in" for a particular artist. If you were juried out of a show, it truly happened because they thought your painting was weak. Maybe you should have a look at how you can improve your art by the next exhibition, instead of jiving yourself that the jury is blind or biased.

More about juries

I have spent the morning working on an illustration for the blog about oblique recession in drawing and it is still not ready. So I will write again on juries as I have further thoughts.

So, I think bringing in outside juries is inappropriate for an elected artists members organization. A one time show or art center will often have no choice but to do this, as they lack a sufficient "in-house" pool of informed jurors, or a least peers to the juried.

There is an odd difference between an art jury and a civil jury. On an art jury I think it best to have people with great expertise and discrimination. In a civil jury the best choice might be a reasonable "everyman" bringing no specialized expertise to the proceedings and representing all of society. The art juror represents a group of artists who can't all be there to make aesthetic decisions for the institution. There are more pictures clamoring for wall space than there are walls, not everything can hang, and some things are not of a quality that the other members would want to hang alongside so some pictures can hang and some cannot. Someone has to decide which is which.

Here is one solution to the problem . This would fit plein air events particularly well I think.

THIS YEARS PRIZE WINNERS ARE NEXT YEARS JURY

You win one of the top prizes, you are on the jury next year. This has a number of advantages. They are;

• Since they won a prize last year they have been singled out, at least this one time as having done excellent or the best work in a given show. This plus the vetting they received when becoming a member argues for their expertise.Doesn't prove it, but places them in as a reasonable choice to make good decisions.
• It removes last years winners from the prize pool this year. Jurors judge shows but are excluded from winning prizes. That gives others a chance to win a prize that year. A few extremely talented members can take all of the prizes year after year. I don't think that is desirable either. They can't do that if they are on the jury every few years.
• There is now a payback to the organization by the prizewinner who can return the blessing that has been bestowed on him, by serving for a morning to help the organization do that for other members. With the prize comes a duty.
• This is a real open system. People will become jurors based on their merit ( at least more often than not) not many surprises and not many ways for small cabals of the mediocre to manipulate the system for their own benefit, again a constant problem. To control the juries you have to make excellent work. Spiking the nominations won't do it.
• It eliminates "spiking" the nominees. In many institutions some poor sadsack gets the job of calling around to members and asking them to be on the juries. It can be a drag because often the prospect will tell you no. Sometimes with a rude reason why. It is easy just to call your friends. When the membership receives the list of nominees for the jury about half of them are from the same circle of friends or amateur watercolor class.Unlike a slate of nominees from some one individual member or the president of the organization or harried director, the line of succession is clear.
  

A thought about juries for exhibitions

Old print of trial by water


Several of the commenters on the last blog were very confused by the oblique stacking design stem I brought up in the last few posts. In order to explain that better, I have to make an illustration. Doing the blog is a time eater that I have to manage. I have done lots of illustrations already, but they are time consuming. The best posts I have done often had illustrations and they are worth the time, but they take about an entire day or more to generate. For someone posting every day, that quickly becomes unmanageable, I have to have them in the works for days as an addendum to my regular blog creation. Here I am doing that again. Someday there will be a pamphlet, and the illustrations will be useful then.

So as an aside I think I will talk about juries at exhibitions. I attended the Annual Metting of the Rockport Art Association the other night and much of the talk after the meeeting was about the juries. It often is. Virtually everyone rejected by a previous jury has a plan for re-doing the juries, a constituency of the rejected, calling for no juries, or juries from outside the organization. Maybe college professors, or newspaper critics or museum curators, REAL EXPERTS.

I have sat on dozens of juries, assembled more than a few and been the president of an art association where it was part of my duties to sit in on, and oversee, the juries to ensure that it was "straight". I have been an "out side juror many times. I have had a very good look at the system.

The other evening I was talking to a woman (or was it two? they were small) who told me that she (they?) thought an outside jury of experts from the REAL (official) art world should come in to separate the quick from the dead. Maybe an art critic from a newspaper. I disagreed gently , being 32 feet tall and weighing over 1,600 pounds. "No ", I said, waving a finger the size of a kids baseball bat at her, and beginning to puff up to a gargantuan size. I began flapping my arms and hunching over, as I hissed through clenched obsidian teeth the size of tombstones .
, I sez:

"This is a juried association of hopefully qualified members. They have been vetted by jury and allowed by the strength of their art to become an artist member. There are art associations that are open to all comers or have thousands of members that often operate on that system. But I think it is tyranny! ( As I said this I spit streams of red hot nails and brads out of my ears) I think that the member ship should govern itself, selecting that jury is part of governance. It is the aesthetic "conscience" of the members. The elected jury stands at the gate and says "This shall not fly! below certain levels of quality we will not go!"

Often there is only so much wall space and many paintings clamoring for that limited space. Some triage has to be done, they all can't hang. They must be sorted, graded. We may disagree on what quality in art is or "goodness" whatever, but it is the best way to put together an exhibition. Pick the "best paintings" and hang them, return the weaker ones to their creators who will now join the other exhibited, in planning the the installation of people who they believe WILL favor their own art.

The membership has a body of vetted artists from which to select a jury, they know those artists and will generally appoint those they think most qualified either by reputation, ability or judgement. They know the nominees and are generally aware of their attributes. Over the course of years they have probably rotated through juries and sat next to them at judgement time.

The members have the right to decide for themselves who will jury them. Bringing in an unknown stranger, usually one who doesn't even paint, to manage this for you, is likng inviting the guy down the street to mange your personal life. For an art association, what gets shown in the exhibitions is important. Exhibiting the art of its members is it's primary mission. A membership needs to summon from its own numbers artist who can represent them on that jury. Like a democracy, not everyone gets to vote in the senate, but you certainly want to a say in choosing who does and have a number of nominees from which to choose rejecting some and approving others.

The membership needs to decide for itself what it wants on its walls their decisions may be erratic, but they will be their own arrived at in the fairest most democratic way. Self governance and not governance by unknown experts from the worlds of journalism, philosophy or writing but practitioners of the craft. Very few are great judges of crafts they themselves do not practice.

An outside jury is usually imposed from above, by the board, or the director. Generally when a membership is informed of the outside juror it is as a yes- no vote (like in 3rd world dictatorships) or the next juror is simply announced to them ( like in the time of Dirk Van Assaerts) by a newsletter from the staff or the board or the exhibition committee or who knows who. Often it is convenient that a member knows so and so at the college and that seemed as an easy way for the board to deal with the jury problem. Everybody is always upset about it (remember jurying automatically produces a noisy tribe of the disgruntled carrying torches and at the gates).

A CONSTITUENCY OF THE MEDIOCRE!

There are definitely mistakes and preferences in jurying, it is an imperfect system. Sometimes an artist is rejected and you wonder why? "Looked good to me, well established artist too". But the greatest number of the rejected, were rejected for very good reason and almost any jury would have eliminated them. There is a wide range of quality in the paintings presented to a jury, with usually about half being very amateurish indeed. Its like the first shows of a season of American Idol, mostly train wrecks that make you ask "what made them think they could do this?" interspersed with the very occasional diamond".

Thats enough for today, more tomorrow.