tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61569295650451256962024-02-19T16:12:20.733-08:00The Art Pilgrim's ProgressClaudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.comBlogger76125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-69546177571744427142018-07-03T14:51:00.000-07:002018-07-03T14:51:17.637-07:00The Diptych Inside-Out<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizvQ9ayDhwUtFnswlF1yGoR8wlgpV9vc-MzjtYKcx3W5btb54gVJXw6htnFWjG5k_ii60CAAVngm3pI0HQ55maxHtFkhUXbWR2eKh46012DU47mVAcQEvP6-fVM3vCXPFI4qRp_ygYdQfu/s1600/Interieur+Exterieru+Inside+Out+Invitation.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1237" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizvQ9ayDhwUtFnswlF1yGoR8wlgpV9vc-MzjtYKcx3W5btb54gVJXw6htnFWjG5k_ii60CAAVngm3pI0HQ55maxHtFkhUXbWR2eKh46012DU47mVAcQEvP6-fVM3vCXPFI4qRp_ygYdQfu/s320/Interieur+Exterieru+Inside+Out+Invitation.jpg" width="247" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcKg2kMlRxZddkFXQNmFfjviRUoz1F0EzcZjQ9zI7G0L1RXs5KKWjWN2ZF8V-yWnyoSPZjyAIRHm4Vmw7Y2AWfp7B7HWemVrniVYj-42bCdvznb6q-X9sotEsD_oZLRXJOOT2L3K8JaIRn/s1600/Inside+Out+2018+Galerie+de+la+Ville+Press+Release.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1132" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcKg2kMlRxZddkFXQNmFfjviRUoz1F0EzcZjQ9zI7G0L1RXs5KKWjWN2ZF8V-yWnyoSPZjyAIRHm4Vmw7Y2AWfp7B7HWemVrniVYj-42bCdvznb6q-X9sotEsD_oZLRXJOOT2L3K8JaIRn/s320/Inside+Out+2018+Galerie+de+la+Ville+Press+Release.jpg" width="226" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For the current call-for-entry exhibition I am conducting at the gallery I curate, I challenged artists with two constraints relative to artwork they could submit for the selection process: the format had to be a diptych and the subject matter had to be the self-portrait, one representing the artist ‘from the inside’ and the other the artist ‘from the outside’. The title for this exhibition? Inside-Out, of course. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Artists could submit as many diptychs as they wanted, in whatever style they wanted, as long as the two works were the same media and dimensions (whether in two or three dimensions or a combination thereof). To be considered a true diptych, they had work as complete individual works when apart but to read as one work when side-by-side or in relation to each other.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The questions I got from artists considering whether they would participate or not were interesting, even revealing. There seems to be much confusion about what exactly constitutes a diptych. For this exercise, a diptych is created when two separate works fit together to create a combined, more elaborated single work, much like two puzzle pieces that abut and when they are joined reveal a more complex image than the pieces do individually.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">For a diptych to work, there must be visible connections between the two equally-sized halves. In some pre-Renaissance diptychs of older couples, for instance, men and women were painted in similar tones and hues. They may have had a repeated pattern on a piece of clothing or be seated in a similar, if not the same, environment. The compositions might have mirrored each other, or complemented each other, or the way the features of each were rendered might have established a commonality say of ethnicity or age or temperament…</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Another method to create diptychs is to create compositions that flow together when the two separate elements are joined. A gesture, form, colour mass, etc. that at first appears interrupted by the edge of one work may continue from the edge of the second work for instance, or visual elements that float in one may land in the other… The same or similar abstractions and distortions, exaggerations and textures, lines or shapes appearing in both images, or any aspect of the rendering referred to, mirrored, continued or repeated, can be used as the binding or connective tissue linking the two works to make them belong together. whether obviously or subtly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Some examples of the other diptychs created in response to this challenge can be seen on the Galerie de la Ville Facebook page at <a href="http://facebook.com/galeriedelaville"><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">facebook.com/galeriedelaville</span></a> . Better yet, the works will be on display there, at 12001 de Salaberry in Dollard des Ormeaux, Quebec, Canada, until July 15, 2018.</span></div>
Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-60367811926636297012018-02-26T06:34:00.000-08:002018-02-26T06:40:35.967-08:00Selecting Artists<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHWd4ncjBjViTH0C2Rz-N2zYGGbqndHPNgM-9HhfbrfB_tV63aWldfiXoxYJw2NyG5Phm4VYL8iBukBqhn4LhVhAZTQTplmqqNTV4ilrcQDUU_1svJ4P9Ot3DavMr0AezgiiOrwHRU_iyr/s1600/Gallery.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1374" data-original-width="778" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHWd4ncjBjViTH0C2Rz-N2zYGGbqndHPNgM-9HhfbrfB_tV63aWldfiXoxYJw2NyG5Phm4VYL8iBukBqhn4LhVhAZTQTplmqqNTV4ilrcQDUU_1svJ4P9Ot3DavMr0AezgiiOrwHRU_iyr/s320/Gallery.jpg" width="180" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">The Gallery<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Clay, stains<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">15” x 9” x 9” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">C. Ascher<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">I am in the
final stages of the process, a yearly event, of visiting artists’ studios
following their submitting dossiers and exhibition proposals. I am looking for
artists to feature in next years’ schedules of solo exhibitions at the gallery
for which I am the Director/Curator. It is one of my most pleasant tasks as
curator because I get to meet and have meaningful discussions with artists
about their work in the spaces where they create it, in their natural habitat
as it were. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">While the
artists are nervous to receive me for studio visits, even the most experienced,
they are also energized and encouraged. They tell me that no other curators
these days bother to conduct studio visits, something which I know because I am
an artist too and which always shocks and amazes me. They receive me at first
hesitantly, cautiously, but we are soon deep in conversation about their
imagery and style, their history and inspiration, their medium and processes,
their techniques and their concepts, and about how they situate themselves in
the broader artistic community.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">The layout of
the studios tells me volumes about the artists’ engagement in and preparedness
for planning a solo exhibition. I manage a big space. The exhibitions I mount
are not commercial, my aim is education, not sales, giving artists the
opportunity to focus on presenting or creating a unified body of work to a
theme or concept. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also schedule
exhibitions a year or more ahead, which means the existing work will not
necessarily be the work that will be exhibited. For each artist of six or seven
that I contract for a solo in any given year, I don’t contract numerous others.
Given all this, it’s my responsibility to make sure the artists I invite for
solos are able to meet their targets in terms of professionalism, production
and costs (I have misjudged only four or five times in the last 30 years). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Some things
about the artists’ processes or intents, themes or concepts are clear and
obvious in the individual works themselves. However, the full impact of the
artists’ aesthetic and philosophy is only revealed when many works can be seen
together, at the same time, as they will be in a solo exhibition. Gazing at one
piece then another and another and then at them all together surrounded by the
tools and materials of their making is what helps me describe for a public the
artists’ processes and the evolution of their creative thinking. For me, it’s
the only way to really know what deep questions to ask and, as the artists
answer them, how to understand those answers around, through and in addition to
my own reactions and assumptions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">What
interesting, and sometimes challenging, conversations we have during the few hours
the artists and I spend together in their studios! <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes it happens in one studio visit,
sometimes it takes two or several visits, but when our discussions achieve a
real artist/curator harmony, we are on for the exhibition!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<style>
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
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mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:"";
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Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-55174309053254902112017-12-27T10:07:00.001-08:002017-12-27T10:07:52.434-08:00The Picture is a Process<br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As I approach the end of another year, I consider the issues and solutions that have been the focus of my work as an artist who is also a gallery curator and an educator. In those roles, my greatest pleasures are either:</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>- to invite seasoned artists working in a variety of mediums or styles to join me in gallery to create works to a theme or concept which are then exhibited, or<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>- to bring artists together who would normally rarely interact and have them share in an exhibition experience that also introduces them and their work to a new, general public. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">As an example of the creation projects I have done, in October/November 2017, for the exhibition Lattices and Interstices at Galerie de la Ville in DDO, Quebec, I invited 73 artists to joined me. Each artist was given 24”x24”x1.5” wood panels and I challenged them to create works using them in their chosen medium/s. Artists were to express their own personal aesthetic. Our 117 panels were then displayed in a ‘lattice’ pattern to represent the support structure that artists of all societies create on which cultures can grow and thrive. During the exhibition phase of the project, the public saw the huge variety and scope of creativity, imagination, approach and technique despite the ‘sameness’ imposed by the fixed size of the panels.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Conversely, in April 2017, for the Art at Home exhibition I held for a month in an otherwise empty store I rented at Fairview, a popular mall in Pointe Claire, Quebec, I invited 16 artists to exhibit eight works each and created a non-commercial exhibition environment. The mall audience was invited in to look closely and at their leisure at the work; they could meet the artists, discuss the imagery and ask questions about the processes without fear of judgement or pressure to buy. Many returned again and again with their family and friends. Over 7,000 people who would never have thought to walk into a gallery enjoyed taking mental time out of being hurried consumers of disposables. Some even chose to buy or commission works from the artists directly.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO8t03V3wxM2S_4Hi_X85vDAMZCxjT_N01ND_qeXMwfQybW4JYk9C-74hSWr9ahBqJxQLbYYctiJGcUNr3D4oELoLebmw8pmVVJtEOaGLQp2UacM6-34d01ONwxWFhSemEv1jOPquftO97/s1600/Art+at+Home+Fairview+Edition+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="428" data-original-width="641" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO8t03V3wxM2S_4Hi_X85vDAMZCxjT_N01ND_qeXMwfQybW4JYk9C-74hSWr9ahBqJxQLbYYctiJGcUNr3D4oELoLebmw8pmVVJtEOaGLQp2UacM6-34d01ONwxWFhSemEv1jOPquftO97/s320/Art+at+Home+Fairview+Edition+1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So much of art today is misrepresented that these are ways I have found to return the attention to the fact that an art work isn’t just a product, it is the result of an artist’s process. There would never be the former without the latter, and where there is ‘expression’, there is always experience and intent motivating it, even if these are hidden or coded. It takes actual, real-time engagement and attention to see it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is a loss that our modern eye is conditioned by mechanical image capture methods. For many of us, it is rare that the experience of seeing images began with actual paintings or sculptures; if we pre-date 2000 we likely saw a photograph first, if not, we looked first at digital images. These methods eliminate the very sensation of process. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When mediated by technology, the seeing in art is reduced in time and space to a glance or a look and we are fooled into thinking we have absorbed the full experience of the work. The result is that when people subsequently look at a work of art in a gallery, they’ve learned to see a ‘picture’, not really a painting or a sculpture or a print or watercolour, or whatever the process the artist underwent to create it. To their eye, the differences between these creation methods are lost. To me, the tragedy is that they are not even aware of what they have missed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I hope by these types of exhibits to keep artists sharing experiences and to keep audiences attuned to the creation processes.</span></div>
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Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-20800388035401242302017-09-14T18:31:00.000-07:002017-09-14T18:31:11.991-07:00For the Love of It<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Look</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">C. Ascher</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The white or silver haired, some limping or with uneven tread, some pushing walkers, wander in, focused at first on the ground. When they look up, they are surprised. They see art on the walls, and not the art they might expect to see in a galley. They pause, examine, comment to each other and to their host as they gaze at works that are not pretty landscapes or romanticized people or decorative objects. Intrigued, they ask questions, some unsure, some deeply curious, some responding with suspicion, others with enthusiasm. These works use media like paint, clay or textiles in challenging ways, they are infused with meaning, they evoke deep emotions unapologetically. The discussion that follows is lively and engaged.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Some young people wander into the gallery. Their cell-phones are at the ready, quick-draw appropriators, knee-jerk reactors to visual stimuli. They don’t look, they scan, until the host stops them an points out what they see aren’t ‘pictures’ but processes. What an alien idea! But they stop, intrigued, pay attention as they’re told about the actual technologies used to create these images, technologies far older and far more timeless than the digital gadgets they hold.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Encouraged to look closely, they begin to see subtle textures, tonalities, surprising details in the imagery. Hands, minds and hearts have been busy conducting materials into experiences these young ones would have missed entirely by letting their cell phones ‘see’ the art for them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Other youth stand before the work because they are themselves makers. They are excited to see the engagement in technique, imagery, imagination and invention, but they are even more interested in getting their own images on the walls of the gallery. Their looking is responsive but also competitive, they can copy this, they can reproduce that, how did that get made? They are impressed but also jealous, and they are greedy for the acclaim and gain they think their own work would get if only it hung on these walls. To them the host points out that while they are richer for the experience of seeing others’ images, while they’ve been stimulated and encouraged, they who love the work aren’t buying it. She points out the crowd of other appreciative viewers in the gallery but the very few red dots on the walls and asks, “How will you gain if the very people who love the work and appreciate it don’t buy it?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It is ironic to me that young artists still cling to the idea of ‘fame and fortune’. Older people are downsizing from detached homes with divided rooms to open-concept condos, divesting themselves of the accumulations of their lives to fit into smaller spaces. The young have little money, what they earn goes to pay for electronics and entertainment and smaller and smaller living spaces. Those in the middle live on debt. While they should, by all rights it is disgusting that they don’t, most artists can’t make art expecting ‘to sell’ or to “make a living”. Given that reality, why shouldn’t they then make imagery that doesn’t conform to expectations or worry about pleasing others? Why shouldn’t they make imagery that challenges them personally and pushes them into more and more meaningful relationships with their media, techniques and subject matters?</span></div>
Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-35599448178320597482017-08-31T11:49:00.000-07:002017-08-31T11:49:06.934-07:00Defiance<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">44”x30”</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Claudine Ascher</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I have learned over many years of teaching art that it’s a fine line we walk as educators, whether we teach in ‘the system’ or in so-called ‘alternative’ venues. Too many times, when we think we’re imparting knowledge and nurturing self-confidence in aspiring artists we are only helping to create ego.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">An art classroom is maybe 95% of the time NOT conceived as a studio but a borrowed or modified space defined by place, resources and time. As teachers, when people feel constrained by any of them, or more usually by all, they feel forced to cut corners. They reduce the learning to projects and hurry it along towards products rather than creating learning experiences. Three essential elements to art making, technique with media, process and concept are sacrificed, set aside as if they are expendable, especially when children and teens are taught.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">What we actually impart when we rush a class along from product to product is pseudo-knowledge, the feeling in the students that they’ve learned a subject or acquired a skill. Unless the student already identifies as an artist, is especially dedicated to acquiring skills, is unusually attentive, has exceptional memory and immediately applies the knowledge to personal practice outside of class, little of what is learned will be retained even short-term except the illusion of knowledge.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Self-confidence is encouraged when there is entrenched skill developed by surmounting obstacles and overcoming difficulties both physical and otherwise; students learn to develop strategies by which to create despite their own fears and hesitations. These incremental victories happen as tactile skill development is paired with ideas and understood with more and more emotional complexity. When difficult tasks are accomplished with less and less guidance, the learning experience moves from dependence to collaboration to independence, detail and mechanics are supported by concept. The knowledge structure is created by exposure, application, analysis and aware repetition, attentive repetition, conscious repetition, and fuelled by a mix of so-called instinct and personal, as opposed to imposed, intent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s a tall order. To teach art in this way persons trained to function within the system of imposed constraints would have to become a resister, even a revolutionary. First and foremost they’d have to change their concepts of their roles as educators. Whom do they serve? And what exactly are they teaching? If they claim to teach art, they must make sure they are actually not teaching through art, though if they are themselves products of the imposed system, they might not see the difference. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Once teachers decide that they teach Art, they will then have to change their students’ concepts of themselves as art learners, beginning by never calling them ‘artist ‘until they’ve learned what that actually means. If the teachers themselves are - or even if they were - artists, in all that the profession entails, that task will not be as daunting.</span></div>
Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-29067147394932247972017-07-06T15:13:00.002-07:002017-07-06T15:13:57.792-07:00Molly's Message<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg28G4p5Dn3iZ0TyuQgr65zBE_iXJMLgOEJ8o25IXpfMMCmc9HZWRsZ_KTJ9dtWGV185g5-iDtKIeg5DVX2M3mr9Kw2EB9Mxkzi2jwnUmyMFu3QboZgmJVJrr_rCfLMu1WwnuWh7OSc55aP/s1600/thumb_IMG_0191_1024.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="768" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg28G4p5Dn3iZ0TyuQgr65zBE_iXJMLgOEJ8o25IXpfMMCmc9HZWRsZ_KTJ9dtWGV185g5-iDtKIeg5DVX2M3mr9Kw2EB9Mxkzi2jwnUmyMFu3QboZgmJVJrr_rCfLMu1WwnuWh7OSc55aP/s320/thumb_IMG_0191_1024.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I am Molly. I was a rescue. I came to my new home at 5 years of age with a serious case of periodontal disease caused by the neglect of my former family. It has resulted in my developing chronic rhinitis, a condition that leaves me struggling constantly to breathe. I’m ten this month. For the past two years I’ve had repeated dental procedures, tests and all manner of vet visits. I have been on countless courses of antibiotics, anti-histamines, and anti-inflammatories,, all of which are taking a toll on my liver without doing much to alleviate my condition. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I am a Schnauzer, bred and genetically predisposed to dental and liver problems. It’s too bad my original family didn’t do the research about my breed when they decided to get a dog. With a bit of conscience, they might have acted to preempt as much of the long-term damage as possible. But, to them, a dog is a dog, able to live for eight hours a day in a cage, go without regular walks or contacts with others of its species, be happy with minimal attention from its humans, and cope perfectly well with abandonment when its presence in ‘the family’ becomes inconvenient.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">All I can say to you if you are considering getting any animal is examine your motives carefully and then:do the research. This is a life you’re taking on, not a being you can use and discard at your convenience. A vet I was once taken to tried to justify charging exorbitant prices for countless </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">‘exploratory’ tests by claiming that ‘owning a pet is a luxury”, but in fact, that’s a self-serving attitude. The ‘owning’ of a living being is not the point, and anyway, it’s a two-way deal. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">You expect unconditional affection, fun, company, loyalty, obedience, perhaps even protection; we animals have expectations as well. Too bad for us that we can provide what is expected even when you don’t, and that you can be too dumb to understand, too focused on your authority to pay attention or too exploitative to care about our needs. If you don’t, don’t kid yourself, YOU are the lesser form of life, not us.</span></div>
Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-19540622607284487842017-05-11T04:40:00.002-07:002017-05-11T04:40:45.492-07:00Art at Home<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqf2rTjMqLziT70_QpFP_GSOJX-zV7KamtyVx8Ph1rE3nNbTeBxefZ0qVQHfjkIbKojKCHlWkoCJ0lHlNcoqigYam6-Z5Oqf-i56lAxLure5jBs5yZtelwEutiRQb3QCOz-Sp7hEVCQYpb/s1600/70.+Art+at+Home.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqf2rTjMqLziT70_QpFP_GSOJX-zV7KamtyVx8Ph1rE3nNbTeBxefZ0qVQHfjkIbKojKCHlWkoCJ0lHlNcoqigYam6-Z5Oqf-i56lAxLure5jBs5yZtelwEutiRQb3QCOz-Sp7hEVCQYpb/s320/70.+Art+at+Home.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">L’Art Chez Soi - Art at Home</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">April 8 to 28, 2017</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Life as an artist has never been easy. It is particularly difficult at a time when the culture moves towards a purely profit-based retail mentality. This perforce promotes all that is competitive, mass-produced, obsessively innovative, ‘cheap’ and disposable. Not art, in other words.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I thought about these things as I walked trough my local shopping centre and saw the number of stores boarded up. They wore signs saying things like “soon to be the site off a great store! ’. Obviously, the ideas and strategies ‘the mall’ has represented since the 50’s are no longer sustainable. Wy? Is it just because of the Internet or could people be ready for something else?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I saw one store that was empty but not boarded up. I peered into the space through the see-through accordion doors. Ah, not empty. A vast, open space with clean, white walls lined almost floor to ceiling with a white metal lattice. and lighting tracks and fixtures that would illuminate the space beautifully once lit. For me, it was perfection! What an ideal place in which to create something completely unexpected and surprising. Not a sale, no. An exhibition of art that would re-direct shoppers’ thinking, their very mental state, by NOT being about sales.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I got the space for one month with one week of it to create the exhibition. Titled L”Art Chez Soi, (This is Quebec. In English: Art at Home). my ‘store’ exhibition opened on April 8, 2017 and ran until the 28th and featured sixteen artists, each exhibiting eight works. In that time, over 7 thousand mall shoppers stumbled upon it and were blown away. They were amazed that a mall would showcase art by professional and relatively well-known local artists, that there were no sales people but only the artists themselves with whom people could choose (or not) to chat about the work; that they could take their time to examine the work at their leisure, that they didn’t need to read didactic panels, listen to audio guides, or refer to catalogues to do so; that they could have no intention other than to enjoy the experience.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Sure, the artists were interested in sales. However, there were no prices on the wall. There was nothing on the walls other than panels with each artist’s name under her/his work. If visitor were interested in knowing the prices of works, or obtaining factual information about the artists, they were directed to a cabinet. There, they would find binders where they might see each individual’s’ CV, artist statement and the descriptions of the works and where they might pick up the artists’ business cards. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">There was only one sale. However, every artist felt the experience was rewarding and successful. They paid a minimal registration fee but for it, they got attention, contact and exposure such as they would never have had even in a museum. By sharing the gallery sitting during blocks of three regular store hours, every one got to spend quality time with each other and with viewers, talking about their art, imagery, techniques, intents and themes, something that would never happen in a commercial gallery. No one was under pressure to do anything but enjoy the experience, and seven thousand plus visitors and sixteen artists did. </span></div>
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<br />Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-52556106065733891552017-02-27T16:57:00.001-08:002017-02-27T16:57:07.579-08:00Art Education for Artists<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXeN5ijx4HBDGjH4NUNO8Gq_WK58ltT1gXl5vDnYnBS4OuMd038w-sAyqht_WyPKbWXmLCto5YSExeOeGN5sCl3Pcusyv4IO35-uo7mnMuP7wMeQgLIoFELT19768jBjrYfohXM8Wxv55-/s1600/The+Art+Lesson.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXeN5ijx4HBDGjH4NUNO8Gq_WK58ltT1gXl5vDnYnBS4OuMd038w-sAyqht_WyPKbWXmLCto5YSExeOeGN5sCl3Pcusyv4IO35-uo7mnMuP7wMeQgLIoFELT19768jBjrYfohXM8Wxv55-/s320/The+Art+Lesson.jpg" width="286" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The Art Lesson</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Cay, high relief</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">C. Ascher</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">University art education programs, at least the programs about which I am aware, seem to limit their training of teachers for elementary and secondary levels without requiring them to have proven artistic practices. This means that teachers can qualify as art educators without being artists. They are trained to teach THROUGH art and to think they are teaching art.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“What’s the problem?” you ask. Well.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>For the teachers, if they get jobs actually teaching in elementary or high schools, they will happily use art to teach all manner of socializing attributes. After all, in a school curriculum, the point isn’t to teach students to BECOME artists but to expose them to methods by which they can express and communicate more effectively in whatever more desirable profession they are directed into.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>That’s assuming that schools have an art program, that the art teacher isn’t re-purposed to teach say math or sex education, that actual art materials are available, or that there is an art room that hasn’t been converted to a computer lab. Because teachers who actually get jobs in ‘the system’ have accepted that hey are Teachers, that they can end up teaching whatever subject they are assigned.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The big losers here are the poor, unsuspecting students who take art classes thinking they will be taught to make art and become artists. If they’re in a school with an art program, the most they’ll get are ‘projects’, usually with some kind of hidden socializing agenda (recycling, for instance, because it’s good for the environment but better for the school budget). </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Like taste testers, ‘art’ students will be rushed from exercise to exercise, rarely repeating any because society and most parents want engineers or scientists in the family, not artists. They’re cured of their art disease with the “you’ll starve’ pill, or become scared they’ll end up having to teach like their teachers, usually their only contact with ‘artists’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>These art students are especially losers when they go take art classes in ‘alternative’ educational contexts like an art centre, because too often they encounter elementary or high-school-trained teachers who couldn’t get jobs in the system. Even worse then, because these teachers aren’t trained to think of students in alternative contexts as clients who pay expecting to learn what they couldn’t in schools.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Yes, I’m frustrated. I’m frustrated because I am dealing with people who have come from university art education programs to teach in alternative contexts for which I am now responsible, and they are not delivering. They see ‘alternative art education’ only as leisure or recreation. I am frustrated because despite their self-satisfaction as teachers and their degree-backed belief that they are artists enough to teach, I have to try to de-program and make them effective art centre teachers., even as I encourage them to practice art. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I have a suggestion to make to university since I’d rather hire artists to teach art, but they need to learn teaching techniques. Have two branches of the Art Education Bachelor and especially Masters levels degrees. Keep one for the generalists, the ones interested in getting into the school systems. Have another for artists with professional practices who want to learn teaching techniques appropriate for art centres and other art-dedicated venues. Let there be places where students go to learn to become artists from people who actually believe it’s possible and prove it by example.</span></div>
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<br />Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-84546134749505240002017-02-19T21:20:00.001-08:002017-02-19T21:20:45.497-08:00To Sell or Not To Sell?<br />
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="35" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" QFormat="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" QFormat="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" QFormat="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" QFormat="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" SemiHidden="true"
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">C. Ascher<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">How come when I don’t post anything for awhile on my
Blog, there is suddenly a large number of ‘audience’ from Russia in my
statistics listing who don’t actually seem to be reading my posts? Just
wondering.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Anyway.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">I have an exhibition coming to an end at a local
museum. It’s been strange not having my sculptures all over my house. I am at
once happy for the extra space and missing them. The ones at the museum are part
of my collection, some older works in my key themes and finishes I’ve held on
to for inclusion with newer or new work in a solo. Unless I or the curator of
the exhibition space have a specific vision for the exhibition, say a dedicated
theme or concept, then the inclusion of ‘older’ work creates a continuity for
my audience. They can see the evolution of my ideas and techniques.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">This is a problem for new or inexperienced artists. They
are so eager to sell, they put their pieces up for sale as soon as they’re
finished. Before, that meant waiting for the exhibition, but today with the
Internet, it’s almost an instantaneous thing. It’s a pity, because then artists
apply for exhibitions but don’t have a representative body of work from which
curators can build them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">My advice to artists as a curator is: don’t be too
eager to ‘sell’. The first danger is that they won’t, a devastating
disappointment for some who base their idea of artistic success on sales. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The second is that they will produce ‘for sale’,
meaning that they will make their esthetic decisions looking out towards what
they think MIGHT sell or what they see others sell (many paint landscapes for
this reason). The third: It’s a real downer if artists haven’t yet established the
actual market value of the work because it can be too easily under or overpriced,
impacting the relationship with commissions or clients who want to bargain.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">And fourth, it can mean not getting an exhibition in a
not-for-profit context – say in an artist-run centre or a museum like the one
where I showed – because the artist had not enough work available to show a
curator or commit to an exhibition.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<style>
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table.MsoNormalTable
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mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA;">Sometimes, not selling the art is much better for the
artist’s career.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-66401804728644557682016-12-09T08:53:00.000-08:002016-12-09T08:53:24.255-08:00Showing Emotion<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBDLqTxoUjqftKlv-LX2rZ0lVeiA-mwqQOhebe71yRFIua9nxZcbNNL68Wl10g2KTptyoWKO1p2p2jVvlpDCeLP-M-ocfpFD77Ptyd5KhLrnu5vQHYmN7so6t0CgGsnBZQcqFRgSWs-Mdl/s1600/Head+Spaces+Bonzai.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBDLqTxoUjqftKlv-LX2rZ0lVeiA-mwqQOhebe71yRFIua9nxZcbNNL68Wl10g2KTptyoWKO1p2p2jVvlpDCeLP-M-ocfpFD77Ptyd5KhLrnu5vQHYmN7so6t0CgGsnBZQcqFRgSWs-Mdl/s320/Head+Spaces+Bonzai.jpg" width="214" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Head Spaces: Bonzai</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Clay, glazes</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Claudine Ascher</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I had dolls as a child. Of course I played with them, mostly by taking them on imaginary journeys, introducing them to magical and monstrous creatures of all kinds and telling them all kinds of stories. I loved to play with them this way, but always there was a part of me that felt sorry for them. See, their faces were blank no matter what, their eyes forever frozen in their zoned-out stare. I knew they were ‘my’ dolls, but</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">No matter what the adventure, no matter what funny or serious thing they were told, my dolls’ expressions never changed. They could show no awareness of the world we shared, nor contribute anything to it that I didn’t. I knew instinctively that in truth, they were secret agents: a bride doll, a baby doll, a red-lipped doll with feminine clothing, each forever an expression of her or his creator’s intent (this was pre- gender-neutral wording, though the dolls, genital neutral, were seemingly way ahead of their time).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Looking at art as my aesthetic sense awakened, I saw this same kind of facial neutrality in many of the represented people, at least in those that were given defined features. I looked at faces in painting and sculpture that were for the most part at rest, the people expressed emotion more through the attitude of their heads and the direction of their gaze than through the changes in their facial musculature. Women especially were mostly represented as if what they felt did not (could not) mar their well-rendered physiognomy in any way. They were meant to be not individuals but representations of humanity, and facial expressions are too expressive of a specific personality.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s since I became a figurative artist myself, and worked extensively with models and created both two and tree-dimensional works that I understood something more about expression-neutral faces in art. 1) Models can’t hold smiles or frowns or feel strong, face-altering emotions during extended poses. 2) By their nature, artists working from photographs can lose the feeling of immediacy and spontaneity of the face-altering emotion; 3) Expressions are very difficult to render, even living, real gazes are difficult to capture in works that aim to express ideas or concepts; better neutral than uncontrollably grotesque, comical or comic-book in ‘serious’ art; 4) representing a face mid-emotion often individualizes the subject and runs the risk of fixing the action in a specific moment rather than representing it as eternal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">So, to a figurative artist, the challenge becomes to be able to express emotion through facial expression without losing the feeling of a person in a moment while simultaneously expressing a universal human state.</span></div>
Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-56498130929347710482016-10-28T13:20:00.001-07:002016-10-28T13:20:07.836-07:00Nobel's Dylan Dilemma<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqtV2e76g1394PT14HIGDVbGzdNel_q7z8GGB7XAOS2JUgJd_Es-mlGsWsZDFlBbhJYwSOHK400k3GtKPuNjRcNDweZyzL5_4WvejkvEAZWw3ejQ6N-4k0JPO1iEOpg3Pjs7S84t95v9Fx/s1600/IMG_0054.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqtV2e76g1394PT14HIGDVbGzdNel_q7z8GGB7XAOS2JUgJd_Es-mlGsWsZDFlBbhJYwSOHK400k3GtKPuNjRcNDweZyzL5_4WvejkvEAZWw3ejQ6N-4k0JPO1iEOpg3Pjs7S84t95v9Fx/s320/IMG_0054.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Blowing in the Wind</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">colour pencil on Stonehenge</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">30” x 44”</span></div>
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C. Ascher</div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s the big buzz these days: Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. Imagine that! Speculation and controversy have of course resulted - imagine, popular culture getting the nod from an exclusive organization often accused of being elitist (the divide between ‘the great’ and ‘the common’ has never been wider, with the latter edging the former back by sheer numbers, though in either case, it’s money that keeps the tug-of-war going).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Now, everyone’s on about Bob Dylan’s refusal to acknowledge the Nobel prize. It doesn’t surprise me. He is an artist, not ‘a performer’ in the do-what-everyone-expects sense of that word.. There has always been a huge dilemma for artists created by 1) the conflict between art for its own sake and commerce; 2) the very tricky relationship between personal truth and mass appeal; 3) peer recognition when it is re and mis-directed into competition and one-upmanship in endless awards ceremonies’; 4) the appropriation of celebrity and fame by those with political agendas or the desire to associate themselves with (buy?) success or credibility.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The Beatles stopped touring when they were overwhelmed by fan adulation, having come to a place as creators when they were more interested in music as a form of research and in pushing their own boundaries than becoming more and more peoples’ fantasies. They wanted to control their work, not be controlled in their work.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Artist can begin their careers wanting recognition and praise, they may be competitive with others of their art, but these are more about confirming that what they are creating is bigger than themselves. Once that is established, they turn their attention more and more to growing, evolving and mastering their vision. They have to, or they become little more than manufacturers, repeating formulas for mass consumption. This is what makes great artists greater, not awards that in the end mean nothing if they come with strings - and the Nobel comes with huge strings, not least of which to force artists who don’t need that kind of validation into ethical dilemmas relative to politics and money.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Dylan doesn’t need to explain his actions. Let people interpret them as they are free to interpret his lyrics. That’s what poetry is about isn’t it? That’s what art is about. If the Nobel people don’t get that then what’s the point of their awards?</span></div>
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<br />Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-80031057620140826822016-08-21T09:10:00.002-07:002016-08-21T09:10:58.790-07:00New Realities<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNZosy23NAVKmiWJvup4EywmTTAzDaEwSqVog3rgNEkGTNjJPnTyX3rSHN570E8bjf2Xh2nBiypguXgnYrvoUavUr6GNljpWwUPyw-LARbCtYuusSbmRNl5e-uNi2IT0XpXWvvNK3XfhB7/s1600/65.+If+They+Can+Do+It%2521JPG.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNZosy23NAVKmiWJvup4EywmTTAzDaEwSqVog3rgNEkGTNjJPnTyX3rSHN570E8bjf2Xh2nBiypguXgnYrvoUavUr6GNljpWwUPyw-LARbCtYuusSbmRNl5e-uNi2IT0XpXWvvNK3XfhB7/s320/65.+If+They+Can+Do+It%2521JPG.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">If They Can Do It</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">clay, underglazes, glazes</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">approx 14” circumference</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">C. Ascher</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I have returned to the clay studio after nearly seven and some months off from a shoulder break. My right arm still doesn’t work well, but I can’t wait any longer. iI’s almost the end of August, I have an exhibition planned for January and clay takes time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>All I’ve been able to do over the past months is draw because while I’m ambidextrous when I sculpt, I do 2D work with my left hand. I’ve done some 190 drawings based on a kind of interpretative portraiture. Unable to work from models as is my usual, I’ve used pictures from all my human and animal family and friend photograph albums as source material. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Surprisingly, I really have enjoyed focusing in this way. The intense examination of photographs I’ve only ever looked at casually or nostalgically (practicing what I suggested in a previous blog entry) has given me some new insights about relationships, influences, attitudes and social conditioning. It was a forced exercise but turned out to be very valuable for my creative process.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The trick has been to return to three-dimensional thinking after so long with two dimensions. It’s a completely different brain that conceives full, weighted forms than the one that works from flat shapes and the illusion of space and of volume. To draw ‘from life’, I have to transport forms that have depth, mass and weight to one physical plane with two dimensions, width and ‘height’, both in relation to the scale of the flat surface on which I’m working. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Sculpture involves weight, mass, balance, volume, form, structure, and because the medium I work with is clay, it also involves chemistry, engineering and architecture. It also requires two equally working arms. Alas, my right arm is now inexplicably a good 1,5 inches shorter than my left - how the heck did that happen? - the shoulder cracks like crazy, it hurts, and the muscles are just beginning to reform. It seems that in the short term, I’m to be much more left handed than I’ve ever been in the past.T he new working reality. All I can do is adapt and hope things will go back to normal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I approach my preparation to sculpt in the same manner that I approached training in competitive sport. I believe that art making is as much dependent on stamina, strength, focus and control, all art making is but especially sculpture, as synchronized swimming or high-board diving (my sports). And I find it as physically engaging as I did dance. Once the initial inspiration hits, the process of realizing the image in real time/space with a physical medium for presentation or exhibition is as rigorous as training for a competition or performance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I just hope my joints are still up to the challenge.</span></div>
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Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-49029818341453070942016-08-20T16:59:00.001-07:002016-08-20T16:59:42.543-07:00The Artist Re-Natured<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOS9RszkAKGJ5r5IKveXi4Xa7KIjdvgU6QDTHD2DYN4YM1jrI8n6hH0rEcAbGwIk0pWrTRNHmyOcI-JauRcbu4EFcr9CuV_KjKhs-Oc8xwko2QQ4IpwLrguzwSuI_7CzplxATMlmVhFhR_/s1600/65.+Proud.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOS9RszkAKGJ5r5IKveXi4Xa7KIjdvgU6QDTHD2DYN4YM1jrI8n6hH0rEcAbGwIk0pWrTRNHmyOcI-JauRcbu4EFcr9CuV_KjKhs-Oc8xwko2QQ4IpwLrguzwSuI_7CzplxATMlmVhFhR_/s320/65.+Proud.jpg" width="218" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">44''x30''</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I had this faith, see. As a kid, I believed that artists were people with exceptional courage, creativity, passion, compassion and the kind of focus nature has, a focus fuelled by purpose. This is because they had vision that sees behind, beneath and beyond even the things other people dismiss as common, useless or base.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>To my child’s eye, artists managed to see together and at once what others kept separate, things like ‘religion’, ‘psychology’, ‘philosophy’ and ’politics’, even when outside forces worked to silence or control them. I thought this is what gave them what people called talent’, what created their ‘fame’, this and their intimate and enviable relationship with the physical and metaphysical worlds through their media. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I believed artists brought people together by inviting them through their works into a world of personal but inspirational emotions, impressions, expressions, speculations, ideas, understandings, conceptualizations, and imaginings. They encouraged and invited reactions in all who viewed their imagery, regardless of any consideration other than a shared human existence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This faith is what led me to want to be like them and want to be with and support people like them, modest as our efforts might be by comparison. So I became an artist, an art educator, a gallery curator and an arts administrator. For well over 35 years I have served in these capacities, and in that time I have come in contact with hundreds of other artists. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>During that time, I have also come in contact with municipal politicians, municipal employees, educators, citizens with an interest in the arts, members of the general community, government bodies, granting agencies, other curators, dealers, buyers, collectors, children and adult students of art, in other words, with the entire population of personalities who in one way or another are involved in art and culture.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>After all these contacts, I now understand that artists are people with the POTENTIAL to be exceptionally courageous, passionate and focused. Alas, I came to see that in fact, while artists I’ve met intend to BE artists, most lack two of the basic traits I expected to find in them: they are neither courageous nor truly aware. Most focus on self-promotion and on gaining a foothold in the ‘art millieu’ but stand by silently as they and their kind are sabotaged in all aspects of their lives. Well, no artists are not silent. I hear them complain bitterly about their lot without seeing them stand up and do the work required to change it. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I don’t think an artist’s purpose should be simply to make art, gain approval and make money. An artist’s purpose should also be to protect and defend Art against all its detractors, those in governments especially who cut, cut and withhold funding to anything related to art and culture while making great gains from artists’ work both socially and economically. They keep artists poor, needy, beholden and afraid to make any waves whatsoever for fear of more cuts. They convince the public that they save money for more important things even as they rob huge sections of said public of their culture. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>My faith in artists hasn’t changed. However, I now see that many who make art or who call themselves artists are also beaten down and resigned to their lot. They accept the decisions made for and about them by others as if they’re children who need to be disciplined, and as a result their passion has become so internalized that it is for all intents silent and powerless. They don’t fight for what is their due and they live by what they are told, not least of which that to be respected they must be productive loners hidden in their studios and grateful for any attention at all.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>My purpose outside my studio has become to help artists see the lie in that and find their courage. They can start immediately. They can develop relationships with local governments and communities to which they have direct access and become involved in creating their own opportunities as involved citizens who stand firmly behind the arts. It is their right.</span></div>
Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-7544110336177169312016-07-24T08:56:00.002-07:002016-07-24T08:56:33.685-07:00Getting Real<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Here we go again. Every year it’s the same story.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It’s certainly a proud moment when a student completes an assigned work or an amateur puts the finishing touches on a copy or borrowed composition. A teacher or, in my case, a curator, can be open to showcasing this pride to a wider audience in a show-and-tell or a gallery display as encouragement, provided the source material, whether a teacher who assigned or corrected the work or its creator, is identified. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>However, it is a difficult line to walk between encouraging people’s artistic creativity and feeding the illusions they develop with the completion of a few artworks, especially paintings. Putting amateur art objects out for public view has a terrible side effect: it helps foster the illusion that their creators are now ‘artists’. That is wonderful when their reaction is to hunker down and get serious with their artistic practice. Unfortunately, too often, all it does is lead them to expect to sell the work and churn out more of the same, except instead of relying on teachers they fish the internet for images and ideas.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In an episode of the Original Star Trek series, a female character announces to imprisoned Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock that she has composed a sonnet. When she recites it for their edification, Spock, surprised, points out that it’s a Shakespeare sonnet, written centuries before. The indignant woman responds, to paraphrase, “That didn’t stop me from re-writing it yesterday”. Of all the inspirations people have drawn from that wonderful television show, this one may be the only unfortunate one: the woman is a patient in an insane asylum. Alas, the Internet is now haunted by people who can defend their appropriation (close associate to plagiarism and theft, often ingenuously identified as ’inspiration’t with the same indignant claim.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Copying is a wonderful experimentation tool; classes are great places for people to get exposed to and assigned ideas, be shown and share techniques, have their mistakes critiqued and maybe corrected; copying and pasting images available in magazines or on the Internet gives people access to otherwise inaccessible subject matter; showing the exciting result of this is good initiation to public exposure. There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of these activities as long as they are used as learning or research tools, and as long as the source material is credited to its creator. However, for a person to then be able to claim ‘I am an artist”, these activities, whether individually or together, are not enough practice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Artists are people who have stocked a space with the medium or media with which they’ve been learning, experimenting with and which they’ve researched. They’ve prepared the grounds, the tools and the materials of their own choice and with which they will work for their own reasons, having honed in on what it is they aim to create. They’ve decided on a subject matter and imagery they will address, perhaps they have an idea of the themes they will explore and develop, and given themselves a preliminary starting point compositionally or conceptually, perhaps through sketching, photography or collage. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>As importantly, artists have set aside time for their creation, they consider it their ‘job’, and they’ve committed to a working schedule of some kind because they understand their own discipline, stamina, endurance and focus. They will do this work not just to sell, not with an exhibition in mind (though one planned in the future may help set an end-date for a series), not to show off their ability or to gain fame but for its own sake. They will do this again and again as the most important, the most necessary activity of their lives.</span></div>
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<br />Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-42056274199873202022016-05-13T16:19:00.001-07:002016-05-13T16:19:59.212-07:00Homage to a Beloved Friend<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I lost my darling Bambi today. The sweetheart was at the end of her energy - she’d not eaten much the last couple of weeks and nothing since yesterday. She lost a good six pounds in four months, which for a 19 pound, 11 year-old miniature schnauzer… I’m afraid it’s because of my broken arm. She was always fragile, a rescue dog with epilepsy, weak liver, arthritis, and soft teeth, but she was doing really well until my accident in January. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I have no doubt that the stress we were under as I healed, including dealing with my other dog, her schnauzer buddy’s new diagnosis of chronic rhinitis, pushed her sensitive immune system over the edge. I suddenly kept finding new bumps on her body that turned out to be very fast growing cancers. By this morning she had three as big as golf balls and at least six others from marble to pea size. There was no way she had enough flesh to remove them all, and anyway, her lack of appetite was a good indication that she had more growing inside.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Until yesterday, despite her weakness, she was going for walks and chasing sticks in the garden. Today, however, she could hardly sustain her tail wagging. She couldn’t even swallow her pain pills. She was ready. When I wrapped her up in a towel, she just settled into my arms and leaned her head against my shoulder. In my friend’s car she curled up on my lap and held her bead up towards me. When we got to the vet’s, she didn’t shake, she didn’t try to jump off my lap to hide under my seat, she didn’t try to go to the other dogs waiting in the anteroom or to get to the exit door. She just sat, warm in my embrace. When we were called in and i sat once more with her she didn’t react to the vet’s touch as he shaved her leg and put in the needle, she just lay against my chest, heart to heart as I stroked her,, her soft head resting on my arm. I only knew she was gone because her head slid down slightly towards my elbow. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">She loved to chase sticks in the garden and in parks, and balls and stuffed animals in the house. I made a kind of lane for her with a hall carpet and a big pillow at the end against a wall into which she’d crash at full speed after catching her ‘prey’. She liked to bark at the world through the living room window, sitting on the back of the couch to look out, but when friends arrived she greeted them with such delight no one could resist her. She looked to me, her best friend, with such a mixture of mischief, joy, devotion and trust that I was blessed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I think only those who share that much love with an animal know such a blessing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s good I have done many sketches, drawings and paintings of her over the eight years she was my friend, and that I’ve caught many of her moods and movements in photographs. She is gone but will ever be present, and she will continue to inspire me, as do the other beings, human or animal, that I’ve loved and lost over the past number of years.</span></div>
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<br />Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-12187012863581547892016-02-23T15:14:00.001-08:002016-02-23T15:14:48.272-08:00We Got the Power!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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What keeps many artists motivated? A strong connection to feeling and emotion that drives their creative process.</div>
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I teach adults to make objects with art-making media. That’s the simple description of what goes on in the class. The complexity is teaching them how to make those objects be art, as opposed to being artistic or creative. What’s the difference, you ask? Emotional truth. Art happens not only when someone masters a tool, medium, technique or style, but when that process is powered by feeling. For something to be ‘expressive’, the art world’s word for emotional truth, it must express SOMETHING. And that’s where adult students run into serious trouble.</div>
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Now, the best place to go looking for true feeling is at the moment of first contact with an experience, whether that experience is physical, like riding a horse for the first time, sensory, like stroking a dog’s fur or touching a snake, emotional, like hearing about a loved one’s accident, or intellectual, like having an ‘aha!’ moment in a science experiment. All types engender strong feelings that remain with us long after the experience becomes history. For many of us, however, the clearest memories of feelings are of those we remember from childhood. By the time we’re adults, we’ve learned a number of feeling-suppressing techniques, like moralizing or judging, or ways of explaining, justifying or wallowing that obscure the pure, original experience. Our response as been-there-done-that sophisticates becomes not about remembering the feeling but considering what we did or thought about it, or what others expected us to. That makes imbuing works of art with emotional truth very difficult for students.</div>
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Example: In responding to an assignment given to her by another teacher, a friend recently tried to identify the emotion a favourite story inspired in her. The object was for her to then render not the story as an image, but the emotion it inspires in her. That’s a sophisticated exercise that depends on the student’s level of self-awareness: in a state of self-observed reverie, the student must recall the story’s emotional impact, not its content alone or the thoughts or ideas it subsequently inspired. Children do this naturally. Many adults have to relearn it.</div>
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This is the story my friend turned to for her assignment; she recounted it to me as it was told to her (there are apparently various versions but they aren’t the object here) :</div>
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Six men are stranded by a snow storm in their far north camp in the woods. They are away from their families, and it’s Christmas. The Devil appears to them and makes them an offer. He will send them home for the holidays and return them safely to their camp IF they refrain from swearing or cursing the entire time. The men agree. A canoe appears and they embark though the river is frozen. Suddenly, the canoe rises up and flies as they row. As it covers distance, the men agree that they will not drink during the revels; if they remain sober, they will avoid all temptation and be safe. All goes as planned with five of them, but the sixth drinks, swears at home, and on the way back, he falls out of the canoe and curses. Thinking the Devil won’t have heard, the men manage to haul him back in, maybe they gag him (that part was unclear in the telling) but when they arrive back at their camp, the canoe dumps them all in the snow. Do they end up in Hell? My friend didn’t know. In fact, she didn’t remember ever actually hearing any other ending to the story, though she inferred that the men had been damned by the one’s indiscretion.</div>
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In contemplating why this story resonates with her, my friend told me she had trouble trying to create an image to express her feelings. It is a favourite story of hers, but all she could think of as a related emotion was fear. The story’s moral was clear to her: sin and be damned.</div>
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“Are you religious?” I asked.</div>
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“No,” she answered.</div>
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“Why fear then?”</div>
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“I’m supposed to fear; it’s an example.”</div>
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“To some maybe. But is that what keeps the story alive for you, its moral?”</div>
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“Well, no.”</div>
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“Anyway, you’re thinking about it through your intellect, not connecting with your feelings. What struck you when you first heard the story?” I asked.</div>
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“The flying canoe!” she answered.</div>
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“What about it?”</div>
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“What a wondrous thing!” she marvelled. “What a sight that would be to witness!”</div>
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“There you are!” </div>
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So her task, no simpler now but more true, is to somehow render an image that will convey her wonder. How much more compelling that expression will be than one programmed by other people’s interpretations of the story, by what it’s supposed to convey (perhaps only in that version)! However she chooses to render her image, it will be emotionally true to her experience of it. Now that will be a lesson well learned!</div>
Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-26545257839554612172016-02-11T08:09:00.000-08:002016-02-11T08:09:02.684-08:00Starring Role<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Starring Role</div>
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C. Ascher</div>
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For a number of years, I agreed as a special favour to an artist friend and fellow teacher to be a guest speaker in her class. Besides teaching at the art centre where I am also a curator and an administrator, she teaches at a local university in the art education department. The class in question is meant to prepare potential art teachers to enter the secondary or alternative adult art educational system. My contribution to the class was to address the students as a professional working in not-for-profit art centres. Despite being squeezed into a regular class, I usually spoke for far longer than my allotted time and answered many questions thereafter.</div>
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For my first couple of visits, I was paid $50.00 by the university. This is a ridiculous amount for a university to offer a guest speaker, but I was told my friend had obtained it to cover my gasoline and parking costs since her class didn’t qualify as a ‘lecture series’. Since she felt the exposure to professionals was an essential part of her students’ education, for my last appearance when the university didn’t even pay that amount, my friend bought me lunch.</div>
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Despite agreeing to speak to the class, I could not understand a university that puts teachers in a position where they must rely on volunteers to expose their students to professionals in their field, especially in education. Far from educating them to that profession, the message is disrespectful of both the profession and its practitioners. The teacher gets paid to teach but not the expert contributing to that teaching. The university is paid to provide a learning environment for all students equally, but not all guests are paid to help provide that learning.</div>
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I certainly understand that budgets are tight and volunteers and donors can add a dimension to the learning experience. Yet I have never known a guest from a university to volunteer to speak. At any rate, I would never expect it. As an educator, and despite working in a not-for-profit sector, I pay my guest professionals, They have invested time and money to achieve the level that makes them valuable as speakers, and it is my responsibility as a host to make sure that achievement is respected. In that regard, part of my responsibility as an educator is to make sure the students or audience to whom my guests present are aware of the value they are receiving. Also, if I am paid for my work, if the institution I work for charges for its work, then there is no excuse for us not to pay our guests for their work. </div>
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This year, the class has been taken over by another person who has requested that I return as a guest speaker, again for one hour of a regular class, with no mention of any kind of renumeration. I guess the assumption is that since I agreed before, I’ll agree again. Now, I also cannot understand a university-level educator who invites a speaker to her class without first taking the trouble to speak with the guest, explain the working conditions and ascertain that the guest will indeed be willing to donate his/her time. The students’ edification may not be motivation enough.</div>
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Why did I accept the invitation before as a volunteer but will not now? Whereas I at least knew the original teacher’s skills and teaching philosophy, I don’t know the new teacher, have no idea what she covers in the class, or her attitude to art education or to art itself. These details are important for my agreeing to address the class as well as to my preparation for the presentation and the method of its delivery, especially since the very means by which I was invited goes against all I believe about education, art and the respect of artists.</div>
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At the very least, as a professional in a complex field of practice - does the university understand that teaching art is a complex field of practice? - I would expect that the class spend time preparing to receive me by doing research and agreeing on a series of key questions relevant to their learning. This was not proposed. Lastly, I was asked to cover a demanding, multi-faceted subject, with visual aids yet, in a mere hour squeezed into a business-as-usual class context. All this demonstrates an alarmingly casual, even dismissive attitude to me and to ‘our’ profession.</div>
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I have not accepted to speak in this new teacher’s class without renumeration. Instead, I have offered her and her students a free tour of the art centre where I work, a two-hour session during which I will answer the student’s prepared questions about adult art education in a so-called alternative context. It’s a test. Do they value what they ask of me enough to at least make the effort to adjust their schedule and gather where my talk will make most sense? We will see.</div>
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<br />Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-39358604923873094422015-12-27T10:13:00.002-08:002015-12-27T10:13:28.368-08:00I Want to Be An Artist<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Empty Promises</div>
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photo collage c.ascher</div>
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How many parents have reacted with restrained horror upon hearing their child announce “I want to be an artist”? You, reader, might well be one of them. Perhaps you stood there, or maybe you will soon stand there, momentarily regretting having asked your son or daughter, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>How many children who answered “I want to be an artist,” when asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” had their self-determination crushed by parents (or teachers) who re-directed them into other lives? Maybe you were one of these children. How did your parents react?</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Here are typical, self-identity destroying reactions to children's announcements that they “want to be an artist”:</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>1) No worries, you’ll grow out of it.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>2) You’ll starve! You need a real profession.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>3) Absolutely not. You must follow in MY footsteps!</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>4) Don’t be silly. You’ll need to be supporting us in our old age.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>5) You are going to be a … (fill in the profession) and I will have no argument!</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>6) And become a selfish, arrogant human being?</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>7) And maybe become a gay or lesbian homeless drug addict? Is that what you want?</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>8) No child of mine will be a sissy! Hockey, now that’s a real profession!</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>9) What will the family and friends think?</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>10) Well dear, talent is something you’re born with.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>11) You have to be rich to make it as an artist.</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>12) Not until you bring up your marks in all your other school subjects!</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>13) Only if you become an industrial designer or maybe a graphic artist. How about a game designer? An engineer! An architect! That pays well!</div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>14) Happiness and fulfillment don’t put a roof over your head. Believe me, I know!</div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>15) This life was good enough for me, it will be good enough for you!</div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>16) Your teachers haven’t noted a special talent. Aptitude tests point you to … (fill in an employable job)</div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>17) Oh dear. That doesn’t LOOK like a … (whatever the viewer thinks the artwork should portray)</div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>18) Well then I won’t pay for your education.</div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal; min-height: 11px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>What were you told? How did it affect you? Did you become an artist anyway? Do you regret following or not following your own ambition? </div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal; min-height: 11px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Don’t tell me, As an artist, an art teacher and a gallery curator, I hear the longing, the regret, the self-doubt every time I meet someone who believed, accepted or lived by any one of these or similar assertions.</div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Arial; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal; min-height: 11px;">
<br /></div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And the worst of it? These parents (teachers) convince themselves they’re acting in the children’s best interest!</div>
<div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
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Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-90105541777793399432015-10-18T07:35:00.000-07:002015-10-18T07:35:05.646-07:00Artists and Rebellion<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghxyaGVAx3BzUWp2f3nHzqAND41jueMwv9IxlDn4kiztmegvuyTetD_dwxPLROvzsoLjTwkuKxCDrTLTNCUpJtxx70lXQDujFqDcKvEHhiBJ9t9vXIv53_Z4ZTlIEROc7l-XcG31mTPrKD/s1600/_A180102.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghxyaGVAx3BzUWp2f3nHzqAND41jueMwv9IxlDn4kiztmegvuyTetD_dwxPLROvzsoLjTwkuKxCDrTLTNCUpJtxx70lXQDujFqDcKvEHhiBJ9t9vXIv53_Z4ZTlIEROc7l-XcG31mTPrKD/s320/_A180102.jpg" width="237" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
We're trying but...</div>
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photo collage</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Ah, artists. Wonderful and strange folks. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have been one of them for much of my life, but I’ve also
dealt with them in my roles as educator and gallery curator. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Artists are wonderful because they (most of the good ones anyway)
express truths as they experience and know them, often bravely, often going
against the expected grain. They don’t like to be told what to do, they in fact
often see themselves as exempt from the dictates of fashion, taste and expectation.They aim for insight, honesty, engagement (the good ones anyway).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Many artists see themselves as revolutionary: they see it as their duty
to rebel against strictures, dogmas, and submission requirements. They expect
others to meet them and their imagery head-on, with open arms. They aim to have
AN EFFECT on those who gaze at their work, much like a bolt of lightning has,
or a Grand Canyon has: big, life-changing, important but most of all recognized
and appreciated. They expect to be respected.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This attitude is wonderful in their practice, when they are in their
studios struggling or collaborating with their media. They then are alone in their
universe, masters of their imagery and technique, free from influence and
constraint to express, explore, experiment, create and please themselves in the
process.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">Problem is, many don’t quite get exactly what it means to be
‘revolutionary’. They don’t quite understand the role of ‘the rebel’.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">Artists are strange because, for all
their creativity and courage, they don’t get it at all when those against whom
they rebel don’t appreciate their revolution. They expect respect, but they also crave indulgence They are surprised, even hurt
when their images succeed in provoking, when the reaction of those whose
expectations are challenged is dismissive or even hostile rather than
celebratory.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Rebellion is by definition provocative; revolution is in effect
disturbing and confrontational. It’s counterproductive to expect permission to
be rebellious or approval when one is revolutionary.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I teach artists or
curate their exhibitions I tell them this: I’ve discovered in my life that my
art evolves and grows when I strive to be rebellious and revolutionary in my
practice, permission and approval be damned. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, I’ve also learned that my profession stalls if I’m blindly
so in my dealings outside my studio. I will get neither recognition nor
appreciation if I all I achieve is to sabotage the efforts of those in the
business who would otherwise work with me to our mutual benefit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I hope artists get it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-26052981192737112452015-09-13T07:56:00.002-07:002015-09-13T07:56:43.262-07:00More Thoughts About Process<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6opH1tt4exIVLCV6CiV4J1p4D0GCvb2SITrFKun8BrdobpmdG996DkctSQY9wHwvj7SjUbCDf6Y4krxAxgz0uG_urVy0Qkfcxr0dq_hjGosm0_z-QrgtQolDjpDn22hylZEbimcu0MJYo/s1600/Five+Stories.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6opH1tt4exIVLCV6CiV4J1p4D0GCvb2SITrFKun8BrdobpmdG996DkctSQY9wHwvj7SjUbCDf6Y4krxAxgz0uG_urVy0Qkfcxr0dq_hjGosm0_z-QrgtQolDjpDn22hylZEbimcu0MJYo/s320/Five+Stories.JPG" width="238" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Five Stories</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
photo collage C. Ascher</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Art making isn’t just about sudden
ideas, immediate visual stimulation or pop-up images. It’s a process: it’s a
sequence of thoughts and a series of actions that explore the ways feelings,
ideas or inspiration can be married to medium through gesture to go extract the
deepest personal meaning they represent. The aim is expression, but it’s also
connection, it’s showing, but it’s also sharing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I recently invited member artists of
a local association to create work for an exhibition in response to the theme
‘Fire’. Many of the participants went with the first image that came to their
minds as they considered the theme. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They approached Fire as an object. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Among the works submitted were various versions of these
images: cats contemplating a fireplace, people sitting around campfires,
still-life images of objects illuminated by candlelight or lamplight.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Others, however, took the creation
process further to consider other possibilities. One painter showed a dragon
spewing fire, in another’s work a phoenix burst into flames, in a third,
candles burned as if for a religious ritual. There were numerous forests being consumed
by yellow and red flames (a propos given the forest fires that raged in western
Canadian provinces this summer), and volcanoes erupting. They rendered Fire as
a subject, broadening it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Then there were images that dug further
still not just to describe Fire as an objector or as an action but to capture sensation
or emotion. One painter rendered a flamenco dancer at the height of her passion.
Another represented hot peppers as they waited on plates or in a shopping
basket. A third captured the wisps of smoke from a dying – or igniting - oil
lamp wick. A fourth pictured Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire”. Another showed the
burning of a funeral pyre in India, a Sati (or Suttee, a banned practice where
a widow burns with her deceased husband).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Some abstracted their Fire. They
focused on the way that reds, yellows, blues and other colours interact as a
fire burns, on the movement of the flames and on the transparency of the smoke.
Neither on object nor subject, they rather focused on expressing the elements
of fire through their medium, oil, watercolour or acrylic for instance, and
through their usage. The painterly technique itself is what conveyed the
image’s meaning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">During a critique of their
exhibition, many of the artists revealed that they had little direct or current
experience with fire. Candles and fireplaces or memories of long-ago campfires
were about the limit of their contact. This led us to a discussion about the
levels of thinking involved in the interpretation of an idea in art. As seen
from the descriptions above, artists have many choices in considering how they
will approach a subject: form the common (or popular), to literal (or
descriptive), to representational (descriptive + subtly experiential) to
interpretative (personally and expressively experiential) to conceptual (or
philosophical and universal). Or all of them combined.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">It’s important for artists to
understand their relationship to their subjects, just as they understand their
relationships to their tools, media, techniques and styles. There is a difference
between the image, sensation or emotion that arises out of artists’ lived
experiences (being burned by a match as a child, or causing a fire or falling
in love before a fireplace for instance) to a subject suggested by observation,
contemplation or a call-for-submissions (watching a cat laze before a fire or my
imposing a fire theme on artists who have little current or personal experience
with it). In other words, are artists approaching their images as an expression
of personal truth or as a contemplation of a more objective truth, or both? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The most successful images long-term
combine lived/felt experience with a broader, more profound understanding of
what that image might convey beyond the obvious or the expected.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-12220335013641491302015-08-30T12:07:00.000-07:002015-09-13T07:56:58.342-07:00Of Memory and Photographs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHvOVPe19l_Oo1lXi-pZsHBbnjYudpbiiTT1sB2j7vy6h1sCos9QuRSpXnRhkW3yqh8Ih0MOFNaAk3L6RVeeSoCvHtckzPLJHOSL-Ei_NN5dZ42TuJjRajEOUOU1-2znQcCVWg_RMrRzuE/s1600/IMG_2009-1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHvOVPe19l_Oo1lXi-pZsHBbnjYudpbiiTT1sB2j7vy6h1sCos9QuRSpXnRhkW3yqh8Ih0MOFNaAk3L6RVeeSoCvHtckzPLJHOSL-Ei_NN5dZ42TuJjRajEOUOU1-2znQcCVWg_RMrRzuE/s320/IMG_2009-1.JPG" width="229" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
The Landlord</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
photo collage C. Ascher</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">It’s a
funny thing about memory. There are different kinds. There is the pop-up memory
that surprises us as we’re living in the now. There is the lingering memory,
perhaps of something pleasant or someone for whom we cared, or the inescapable
memory of a trauma or conflict. There are those just-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue
teasers, or those deeply buried rotters that slowly poison our lives, those we
sense are there but that we cannot, or will not access. There are those we’ve
integrated so thoroughly into our skill or knowledge that they support – or
sabotage -everything we do. Or there are memories that hook into us like
fishing lures, their pull powered by the suction of our black holes, which we
are constantly trying to escape.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Even funnier are those memories contained in photographs. There you are
standing in a place or surrounded by people you don’t know. The photograph
remembers them, it remembers you there, smiling, or mugging, or holding
someone’s hand, but you look at it frowning, uncertain, surprised, with no
memory of it at all. Perhaps you don’t even recognize yourself, perhaps other
people have told you that baby is you there as they reminisce about how you
were this or when you did that as you sit there skeptically, mistrustful,
thinking they might be pulling your leg.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Well, that last is my experience of memory and of old photographs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A friend recently told me he’d been looking at photographs of himself
throughout his life. He remembers the places and the people clearly. The thing
is, a man of sixty-seven, he has an amazing memory that stretches vividly back
to when he was at least two. He remembers the houses and streets where he lived
in another country, he remembers the names of people gone from his life for
almost sixty years, he remembers objects he had and things he did and all
manner of experiences as if he lives them anew with each remembering.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What amazes me is that he doesn’t need photographs to remember these things.
All one has to do is encourage him with questions, one leading to another, and
his past opens up to a listener like a movie being replayed. I sometimes envy
him. There are too many things in my past that I only know about because of
what other people remember. They are stories that make the photographs they
show me seem vaguely familiar but that do little to trigger real memories of my
own.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In another way, I consider myself the luckier one. When he talks about
his past I hear in his voice such melancholy, such longing, such pain as he
remembers I sometimes wish the photographs didn’t exist to confirm his experiences.
It’s almost as if they help to transport him back physically:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>there he is standing on a dock about to
board a ship, an excited five-year old; now he’s standing and laughing beside a
best friend; there he is throwing balls for his favourite dog to catch; or he’s
staring proudly before the façade of the first house he bought.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">That is the problem: when he relives the past he does so as the person
he was then, as the child or the teen again; when he revisits it through
photographs all he sees is himself, even when he’s not pictured.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">For a while it worried me that he was becoming more and more consumed by
these memories, that his random perusal of the photographs was causing a kind
of emotional malfunction because it made him jump from event to portrait to
place without regard for when he experienced them in his life. He’d forget that
the child he saw smiling and holding a teddy bear was happily ignorant of what
would happen a year later, or that the girl with whom he held hands in the
picture would no longer love him shortly after the shutter released. He relived
the ‘then’ but suppressed the ‘now’. He was unaware that his backward gaze as
he ignored the present erased all his experiences in between, but also made him see colour where there was only black and white.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Now he’s taken to ordering his photographs in an effort to tame his
memories, thinking that placing them chronologically will have a reassuring
effect. He’s also taken the suggestion that, photo or no, he write his memories down with as
much detail as he can remember, one a day. He must set the scene of each
memory, describe the circumstances and the people and articulate the thoughts
and emotions he remembers feeling at the time. This is makes him externalize
them in a way that reverie, even when looking at the photographs, cannot.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">So I tell him this: As you do this work, think like an artist. Don’t be
sucked in by the emotion and don’t let the photograph help you disregard the
present. As you sort the pictures, be the photographer, the one who holds the
camera, not the unsuspecting subject in it being fixed in time. Imagine you,
the today you, are taking each photograph, not just looking at it. And as you
write, pay attention, let the memories inform you, note the hidden details or
the things those pictured could not see coming, link one photograph to the next
with the things the camera didn’t capture. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">See the past with the knowledge you didn’t have then, for instance that
your family was boarding a boat because it was being driven from its native
country by a hostile new national government, that you would never see your
friend again because he was left behind, that you had to abandon your dog.
Flesh in the environment, the history, the politics, and the other external
things you now know influenced the “then” in ways you could maybe neither avoid
nor control.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The thing is, he needn’t be a victim of the emotions the memory triggers;
he needn’t fear or wallow in them. He knows much more than he did then, he is
much more than he was then. If he can let that knowledge lead him to new insights
and discoveries about the person all those experiences made him today, good and
bad, how much richer will the remembering make him!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-20456132420202906412015-08-21T09:30:00.001-07:002015-09-13T07:57:11.710-07:00The Artist's Donation Conundrum<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiybQj7XMlgHfRAgSdjnnhmKSMnVAN77yXdUr2Gfi6ZQzRLZgBUE3WsAPX8yqQ8UAOzBYi-wRZeiwQqHdywerrfyEPer9DqqhduLygJkEYT4-niHvcIfSLYCp5saX0V3xrevVD5JgxU8zmX/s1600/55.+Time+Out.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiybQj7XMlgHfRAgSdjnnhmKSMnVAN77yXdUr2Gfi6ZQzRLZgBUE3WsAPX8yqQ8UAOzBYi-wRZeiwQqHdywerrfyEPer9DqqhduLygJkEYT4-niHvcIfSLYCp5saX0V3xrevVD5JgxU8zmX/s320/55.+Time+Out.jpg" width="241" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Time Out</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
photo collage C. Ascher</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Well. I have been invited yet again to donate one of
my artworks for a fundraising event. I’m always told it’s a great honour I am
being given, the opportunity to have my name beside tens of others’ associated
with a good cause. I am reminded of said good cause, the implication being that
I am to gain as I support, if only the satisfaction of knowing I’m not a
self-interested, greedy person. However, I’m told the real pay-off is that I
get to attend the event itself as a guest of honour, which lets me expand my
network of contacts while also helping to promote and sell the art.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
have donated to such events for well over thirty years. There have been
exhibitions, auctions, special recognition gifts, and numerous other ways that
I’ve supported good causes, from breast cancer research to under-funded,
not-for-profit art centres. It did warm my heart to know that I could put my
own interests aside to rise to the call. There is, after all, more and more
desperate need for already heavily taxed individuals to help fund social
programs and services once understood to be the governments’ responsibility in
my country (don’t get me started!).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Did
I benefit by association? Satisfaction aside, not one whit. Few who bid on or
buy the art at such events seem to be aware that there could be further contact with the
artists. And many seem to believe that it is somehow unreasonable or
distasteful for artists to expect to gain by their own work.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> Often, I didn’t even benefit from a
tax receipt for my donation, a tax receipt for the sale price, not for the
actual value of the work donated. See, while artists are again and again asked
to donate, unless they are famous their work has no value until someone
actually pays for it, at auction often way below the fair market value of the
work, or in another kind of fundraiser only the percentage the artist gets
after any commission or donation is deducted. That’s if the charity or
organization has official status as a not-for-profit AND the right to issue tax
receipts.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> Over the years, any pride or
satisfaction I felt as a donor was undrmined by a nagging feeling that I was
being used.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People usually go to
auctions to underbid for works on which they’d have to pay commissions if they
went to a gallery or for which they’d bargain if they dealt with the artist
directly. They feel great about it because, while the artist loses the work and
gets it undervalued, the buyer is still supporting a ‘good cause’. Many feel
this is just because after all, artists donated work which they love doing, should
be grateful to be encouraged to do it and happy for the opportunity to act in a
highly moral way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> For years, I still felt good about
participating despite any doubts. True, my work didn’t always sell, but I was
there: I leant my name to the event, I helped advertise, I sent out
invitations, I was present to interact with guests, I encouraged any sales at
any price, But.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> There’s an added twist this year to
one of these fundraisers, an exhibition and sale. In previous years, I was
automatically invited to the event for which I donated my work. This was
usually a grand reception presented with much hoopla and attended by big crowds
of artists and ticket-buying public. Buyers of works were often family,
friends, students or collectors of the artists themselves. It was an ok event: where
artists got 30% of the sold work. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> This year, however, to get a ticket
for the grand opening of the event, we the donating artists have to either buy
it for $40 like anyone else or waive our commissions if our work sells, no
matter what the value or price. It’s not clear whether tax receipts for any amount
will be issued. The idea is that we get to donate our work and help pay for the
opening reception, wine, hors-d’oeuvres and all (even if these are also
donated).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> To many, that offer may seem reasonable. Artists
are given the canvases on which to create by a local sponsor so is it really
all their donation? The event is after all for the venue’s or cause’s benefit, the
organizers want a crowd of paying customers who’ll buy art, not a bunch of
artists milling about drinking wine, eating hors d’oeuvres and hoping for
attention. If I don’t want to be at the opening, well, they might not sell my
work. No one will be out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> To me, that’s not only unfair, it’s
disrespectful.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> Do I or don’t I donate anyway? It’s
a fundraiser for an art centre, a place that supports the visual arts. It has always
been my policy to support such places in any way I can.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> Hmmm. No. I’m thinking it’s time I
let others who might not feel insulted participate. As a practicing,
professional artist, I am statistically among the lowest earning, least
supported individuals in this society, no matter how much education and
training I have, no matter how much work I do, and no matter how much I donate.
I happen to be one who has many, many ways to contribute to my society in
general and to the arts and artists in particular. Constantly being asked to
donate my artwork should not be one of them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> So, what are my thoughts when
artists ask me in my teacher or curator role if they should donate work? These:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 108.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -36.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Don’t be
tempted by possibilities</span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 108.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -36.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Make sure
the venue, event or cause is one you believe in and can honestly support.</span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 108.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -36.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Expect to be present
and visible, don’t abandon your claim to your work.</span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 108.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -36.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Remember
that exposure, contacts, recognition, established sales prices, fair commissions, and tax receipts are reasonable things to expect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 108.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -36.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">-<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Most
importantly, evaluate just how much respect you and your work will be accorded.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> You are NOT being indulged, favoured
or privileged. YOU are doing the good deed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-57789986822078712642015-08-16T08:33:00.001-07:002015-09-13T07:57:31.320-07:00Ten Steps to Help Save Our Culture<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB2ill5Y6aDGSUUOHYiPX2ar8J68R0XEbn28Tfvuj-uYbtkRzjMLmezcUtgda4-i3MFxGtIfMtpicGIoI_C24NRUpG3v8_te8D6Ft8Bxgmz-impnLeT4etwegkt1fsCVDAejFxObotQb61/s1600/54.+Unpacking.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiB2ill5Y6aDGSUUOHYiPX2ar8J68R0XEbn28Tfvuj-uYbtkRzjMLmezcUtgda4-i3MFxGtIfMtpicGIoI_C24NRUpG3v8_te8D6Ft8Bxgmz-impnLeT4etwegkt1fsCVDAejFxObotQb61/s320/54.+Unpacking.jpg" width="237" /></a></div>
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Unpacking</div>
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photo collage C. Ascher</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> I was recently part of two
exhibition events in the suburbs of Montreal, one for which I was the invited
curator, and one where I helped an artist friend set up her booth. Each event
involved many member artists of local associations and a large variety of compelling,
affordable works. Both were meant primarily as sales events. In both cases,
there were no gallery or other commissions. Despite all that, and as far as I
know hardly any works sold out of both events, and neither event was heavily
attended by the public despite beautiful locations, good parking, great
weather, and good advertising and promotion campaigns by all involved.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What is wrong with the audience? It’s
a question that has long bothered me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">We live in a city, Montreal, and in
a province, Quebec, that tout themselves as cultural, even multi-cultural, but ‘the
culture’ has in large part to be accessible free of charge. People will turn out
to look and be entertained, but very few will support by buying. Summer
festivals with their large, temporary crowds may include sidelines of visual
arts displays, but the focus is on free outdoor performances and on massive
ticket sales for indoor events. Art exhibitions, whether in established
galleries, alternative spaces or art fairs, may draw viewers, but too few, and
too few of those walk away with a work of art.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">There are many excuses. As a gallery
curator, I have heard them all, from works not matching people’s furniture to
the uncertain economy They are all lame. People are still buying electronics,
cars, going on expensive vacations, throwing or recycling tons of stuff, even
indebting themselves to do so. They have been conditioned by ‘the marketplace’
to want, even to need mass-appeal or mass-produced things, which need to
constantly be updated.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The fact is that people are not
brought to understand, appreciate or really value visual languages; they are neither
nurtured as practitioners nor encouraged as real consumers of the visual arts.
This is not accidental. Education in the arts has been systematically
eliminated from the public school system by government after government. The
excuse there is that the born artists will find a way to learn and create, they
will even manage to thrive if they are chameleons and can multitask naturally,
or they can go earn a living in other countries. But the reality is that professionally,
those who stay will have culturally undereducated, under-appreciative,
entertainment-hungry audiences who blather on about ‘creativity’ and ‘culture’
but who are blinkered, intimidated or cheap when they actually encounter either
without a huge crowd around them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I have been observing this growing
phenomenon for more than twenty-five years. I blame both provincial and federal
governments, and all species of politicians. This is especially blatant with
the current Conservative government that has taken the elimination of the arts and
therefore the undermining of our culture to new heights.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> This Conservative
engine runs on oil and other exploitable natural resources. It has meant the
worship of money, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10pt; text-indent: 36pt;">and the conservation of the power status quo through fear
mongering, gagging new attitudes, eliminating any threat of change, and now
with bribing for votes. For this to be effective, there must be a population focused
on self-preservation that is not too informed. People who know this are leaders
in countries we consider ‘enemy’, but they also seem to be serving as models
for our leader. This is clearly why artists, scientists, reporters, First
Nations, and many other possibly dissenting people are being gagged, discredited
or treated condescendingly.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This is why, without their realizing
it, people’s ‘culture’ is becoming devoid of individuality, of personality, of
a national identity and of real choice. It’s why people’s homes are being
stuffed with the same quick-assembly, replaceable, increasingly imported stuff
from coast to coast. The economy this supports is about making political
parties through their supporters rich so the arts, especially if people live
with them, are out because they encourage people to slow down, to think, to
feel, to really plunge into an experience without needing to be ‘extreme’ about
it, and to be fully engaged. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Politicians know you gotta get them
young to stop real engagement from happening. Without culture through the arts, without
art education, people become unimaginative, uncritical, superficially judgemental,
indecisive and complacent, in the end not wanting to be bothered. They come to
believe ethnicity is the sum total of culture and become defensive of theirs.
They don’t share or exchange or respect. It’s just what the government ordered.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Some people may like this state of
affairs. After all, governments in this country are elected. If others don’t
like it, however, they might wonder if there is an immediate counter-measure. There
are numerous ones. Here’s a ten-step one: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 72.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -36.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Frequent a
couple of galleries regularly alone, with friends or if you have one, with your
family. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 72.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -36.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Look at
work you like and compare it with work you don’t like.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 72.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -36.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Talk to
the curators or to the artists if possible and ask questions – here are no
‘dumb’ questions but avoid assumptions. Good galleries or dealers will be happy
to engage, it’s their job.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 72.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -36.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Encourage kids, even if they're not yours, to do ask questions. LISTEN. Make sure they get some kind of answer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 72.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -36.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">5.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Voice and
share your opinion, let the kids voice theirs so that there can be a
conversation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 72.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -36.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">6.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Get to
know the artists’ body of work.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 72.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -36.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">7.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Identify
those works that mean something to you or that make you feel (anything goes). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 72.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -36.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">8.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Forget
your décor and buy original art pieces by actual, living artists. Pay the
money.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 72.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -36.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">9.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Install
the art you buy prominently in your home.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 72.0pt; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -36.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">10.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Live
consciously with it – tell yourself it’s not decoration. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">People who follow these ten steps
this will be amazed at the effect they will have, even short-term, even one
person, one family at a time. Then they might well understand how they have
been deprived, how generations are being limited. Maybe they’ll be inspired to
do something about it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-2499790197250832622015-08-11T06:21:00.001-07:002015-09-13T07:57:43.740-07:00An Artist at a Crossroads<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2hyLL62DBolowWSrnb9I01qKsQ7qBiocjYOV7Gp6eFXQX9sHeP689bNi-xlC9OcHiTcoTvzXxp2AmygU9BJ8u7TZiHINyA2wil6LI-jSd88Dc_Mua1CHa_LnhUbCpcZfL4qSh1cLtLI56/s1600/Lovers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2hyLL62DBolowWSrnb9I01qKsQ7qBiocjYOV7Gp6eFXQX9sHeP689bNi-xlC9OcHiTcoTvzXxp2AmygU9BJ8u7TZiHINyA2wil6LI-jSd88Dc_Mua1CHa_LnhUbCpcZfL4qSh1cLtLI56/s320/Lovers.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Lovers</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
photo collage C. Ascher</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I recently had a conversation with
an artist who finds he is at a difficult crossroads. As if being an artist
weren’t demanding enough, he is a sculptor, and one who works to human, not
environmental scale. What’s more he is an immigrant. He is European trained
within a strict classical tradition in which technical skill acquisition is the
focus. He was taught that art making is an end in itself, a profession, and an
essential expression of the national identity. Technique is taught and personal
expression is left for artists to develop once they graduate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">He is also a full-time teacher in
the Quebec educational system. Teaching has been his main source of income
since his immigration, though he has continued creating his own work throughout
that time. As a secondary art teacher, he has followed and taught his European
artistic philosophy for twenty years. This has apparently put him at odds with
others in his department who view art not as a viable career choice, but as a
vehicle for individual expression and socializing their students. The fact that
many who teach are not also practicing artists is a source of intense frustration
for him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">With cuts to his teaching schedule
pending, he is faced with having to replace the lost income. In Europe, it was
possible for him to make a living from his art. However, the Quebec art public is
generally a complacent art public, used to having access to art without having
to buy it. In fact, the ‘average person’ is convinced that being an artist
can’t possibly be profitable, and therefore believes that artists who aren’t
commissioned or who don’t get grants don’t really work unless they have ‘real
jobs’: he must be a teacher who paints, not a painter who teaches; a construction
worker who sculpts, not a sculptor who also works in construction. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">That is the reality for those artists
who choose not to leave Quebec for places with a more complex art history and a
population that respects the artist as a professional, who choose to
participate in their society directly, ever hopeful that the quality of their
art will result in the same success other professions enjoy. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This has been known to happen to others
in time; by all rights, it should happen to him, in time, with some
re-programming.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">First: he will need to use the newly
free-up time to minimize his ‘teacher’ thinking and give priority to his
‘artist’ thinking. This is difficult. Teacher thinking is out-side-in thinking.
His priority when he teaches is the student, and he modifies his relationship
to his own work in terms of demonstrating how he does ‘it’. He uses his own
imagery, technique, style and ideas to draw the students’ out. The students’
achievement in terms of finished projects and marks are what determine their
engagement with art, and his constant struggle to get them to think as artists
distracts him from his own evolution as an artist.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Even though he maintained a personal
practice as he taught, and even though it was already solidly established
before he came to Quebec, it is reduced. The divided attention and the focus on
finished product within a constrained time frame, if not the exhaustion that
comes with teaching compromise his process in the studio. For an artist, less
or limited teaching is better than more: part-time is better than full-time so
a reduction in his teaching schedule should mean good things for his art
production.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Second: he will have to at first
avoid expecting his art to provide him his living. This is also difficult,
especially if he keeps reminding himself that it would have been doable ‘back
home’. As well, his responsibilities as a provider will be more difficult for
him to meet. If he must replace the lost income a reduction in teaching time
represents, he has many choices of compatible jobs, jobs that depend on
superior skills with dimensional media and its equipment as well as a strong
visual thinking ability. With his skills and flexibility there is no reason why
he can’t find work in art-related or art-dependant fields despite ‘his age’.
These, however, are still out-side-in activities, and replacing teaching with
other jobs gains him no time for his sculpture.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Other second, or third: he will have
to secure his family’s support. His children are at an age when they can begin
contributing to their own needs, and his wife, a fellow artist, is established
in her imagery and can be professionally independent. As well, perhaps a family
council can find ways that members of can act as assistants or help handle
on-line promotional activities and exhibition demands to market the art he
produces internationally. Perhaps the family can pool its considerable creative
talent and find ways to manage with a reduced collective income for a while.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">However, by far the most important
work he must do is in his studio. He is not the person he was during his
artistic training. He has been changed by his life in Canada, and in Quebec. He
must ask himself if his work reflects this change. Perhaps the requirements of
teaching on his attention and the rushed nature of his practice have acted like
a time capsule on his imagery, freezing it in the past. Familiarity with it may
be what has allowed him to continue working part-time on his sculpture, but it
may also be the thing that constrains it. If that is the case, he has catch-up
work to do. He has to reconcile the disconnection between his European
technique-based approach and the North American idea (or concept) based
approach. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This artist must find a way to
reconcile and merge these supposedly conflicting approaches without
compromising his style or fundamental beliefs about his own sculpture. That
takes time. And that time has to be dedicated, better now that it’s less part-time
than it was. That will be his huge challenge.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6156929565045125696.post-83305792223229607072015-07-26T18:49:00.000-07:002015-09-13T07:57:55.523-07:00Academics and Art<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt8xZcBMr0qSQJp5gN2rYzjy8BbeaiCF0FUNguyoqvkrO26a5bR4vZUaWp0fT_a_U5Yyyg30d5GE150oq1ZXhPFDmD0gCDFgmVHzhCZdYCPGfiwNs9DzXX_lYlJBuUELDpN_qwM1U1cZoB/s1600/IMG_1975.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt8xZcBMr0qSQJp5gN2rYzjy8BbeaiCF0FUNguyoqvkrO26a5bR4vZUaWp0fT_a_U5Yyyg30d5GE150oq1ZXhPFDmD0gCDFgmVHzhCZdYCPGfiwNs9DzXX_lYlJBuUELDpN_qwM1U1cZoB/s320/IMG_1975.JPG" width="237" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Escape</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
photo collage C. Ascher</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Academics are killing the arts!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Most recently, I heard this complaint from an artist who is suddenly
being refused admission to exhibitions in a gallery that up to now has eagerly represented
her art. Why was she refused, she asked? She was told that her artist’s
statement was too vague. “But I’m a painter,” she complained, “everything I
have to say is in the painting!” This concept seemed to stymie the curator.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I read the exhibition requirements. The gallery’s request for submission
documents seems to expect the artists to articulate the exhibition’s concept
through their statements about their work. It’s as if the curators come up with
impressive-sounding catch phrases for their exhibitions but then rely on the
artists to flesh these out convincingly. I suspect more and more that many
so-called curators can’t ‘read’ the art they see at all unless words decipher
it for them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I see this as a symptom of a widespread problem: in Quebec anyway,
people who run galleries in the public sector compete for grants or status
based on their curatorial concepts (or on their academic alliances). The
concepts are so specialized that only the artists who’ve mastered the specific
‘art-speak’ being used are admitted, regardless of the qualities of their art.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">So I say:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">J’accuse! I accuse curators running grant-dependant exhibitions of dog
paddling in the art waters, relying on fancy words to provide them with a life
jacket.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">J’accuse! I accuse granting agencies of reducing dependant galleries and
their curators to circus performers, forcing them to greater and greater feats
of word-based contortionism to continue operating. The ones that survive do so
on a very narrow, conceptual tight rope.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">J’accuse! I accuse art education post-secondary degrees of miring the
image in words, as if images aren’t ‘conceptual’ by their very nature, and
simultaneously creating a quagmire so extensive only those who can operate in
the virtual realm can now venture in safely.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I say:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Of course there have to be standards, of course there has to be a high
level of ‘discourse’ but tone the language down and open your eyes gallery
people! <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Be clear but flexible not
fortified and defended. You run art galleries, not forts or universities.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
Claudine Ascherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11310334063191090665noreply@blogger.com0