I did not have time on Friday night to write up the private opening I stumbled upon at Kinz, tillou+Feigen of Kim Keever, Graham Parks and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s works.  Too bad I had dinner, they were serving food and wine at the opening.

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein was a self taught Milwaukee artist who died unknown and was discovered by a collector (that’s a collector’s dream -  buy low, sell high).

 

These paintings, similar to the one pictured above, were always done in one sitting, something I can totally relate to, and in fact, Picasso often did his later work in one sitting and dated it, much as Von Bruenchenhein did.   For me, however, as much as these works of Eugene Von Bruenchenhein look impressive - they lacked the “spark” of creativity that I look for. 

I’m not saying Burenchenhein’s work is bad, it’s certainly collectible and deserves to be, but the man was not discovered, partly because he was not attracting attention with is art, and that tells you something, right there.  it’s hard to find an artist who can really be that invisible in their life as Bruenchenhein appears to have been.  Sad, but, that’s how it is.  I’m glad, at least, he had a wife and did not die, entirely, alone.  Perhaps his life was more than his art.

“…In 1939 Von Bruenchenhein met Eveline Kalke, “Marie,” at a state fair in Wisconsin, and they were married in 1943. Marie was his muse, and they collaborated in staging hundreds of passionate and provocative, yet playful and loving, pinup-like photographs and slides of Marie. Costumed in drapery, bikinis, stockings and heavy heels, and adorned in swags of multiple pearl necklaces and homemade tin crowns, she posed seminude in front of chenille bedspreads and floral patterned backdrops. Von Bruenchenhein’s resourcefulness played a central part in both the assembling and the effect: a luxurious setting fashioned from five-and-dime supplies. Their relationship found a sort of sideshow glamour in his carefully considered, and often erotic photographs. These intimate vignettes exemplify a subject/object dynamic, where Marie is immortalized while he occupied the part of voyeur. When seen together as a series, her response to his approach becomes a visual narrative. Acting as a model, and taking on the roles of goddess, queen, star, seductress and ingénue, she explores her own place in this work, often defining the look of an image through a glance or a smile.”

So the man had a life, a wife, and it sounds like, obscurity, which might have been a blessing, actually.

Graham Parks print like paintings are pretty interesting - I spent a couple of minutes studying them while enjoying the red wine I was served after coming out of the cold, windy January night.   Parks has another problem, potentially, a great artist - but he does not push his work as far as it could go. Park’s work is based on Photography but ends up being more like printmaking and painting.

I found that in work after work, something interesting - I wanted to see him carry it (his vision) futher - to “realize the vision” - but he does not go there.  Will he?  Only time will tell.

Kim Keever’s large photographs were probably the most satisfying works I saw in the Kinz, tillou+Feigen gallery that night.  Right now, Keever’s work is both the most successful artistically and from a marketing standpoint, of the three artists. The process of Kim Keever is fascinating.

“… He creates his panoramic universes and controls their fictitious environments by constructing miniature topographies out of materials such as plaster and reflective Mylar in a 100-gallon aquarium, which is then filled with water. The desolate dream-like dioramas are brought to life with colored lights and the dispersal of pigment, producing ephemeral atmospheres that he must quickly capture with his large-format camera.

…….he symbolic qualities he achieves result from his understanding of the dynamics of landscape, including the manipulation of its effects and the limits of spectacle based on our assumptions of what landscape means to us. Rather than presenting a factual reality, Keever fabricates an illusion to conjure the realms of our imagination.”

This is pretty cool stuff - and it reminds me of my conversation with David Spivak of Focus Magazine on Friday.  David reminded me of just powerful Photography is now, and I realized how ignorant I am of most of the major Photographers, where great prints are more marketable, in a way, than great paintings. 

I’ll be covering Focus Magazine in another post - but I just wanted to mention David’s magazine is one of the foremost Photography Magazines, and is hosting an event I’ll be attending later on this year called NYFOCUS, on October 18-21st at Pier 94 in NYC. 

NYFOCUS, from what David described, is going to be a big, big event - one you’ll not want to miss, if your in NYC, or coming to NYC at the time of the opening.

 

I was invited to attend Spot’s talk at the Entheocentic Salon last night at the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors by Allyson Grey, artist wife of the visionary artist Alex Gray. Actually, Allyson is an artist and I found her technique interesting - in fact I can’t imagine how much detailed work most go into it. 

Alex Gray’s work has had a good deal of media coverage although I got the impression it’s not really been accepted in the main stream art world (is that any surprise?  the mainstream art world is much the same as the mainstream music world - you have to fit into a “slot”).  Actually, I’m not sure that’s entirely true any longer - it seems like “Visionary Artists” like Joe Colemen and Paul Laffoley are beginning to get some mainstream acceptance - if they can do it, why not Alex Grey? 

A frame from one of Spot’s Electronic Paintings

The main part of last night’s event at the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, for me, was Spot’s demonstration of his new Electronic Paintings - which I wrote up in Smartmobs.com.  I put a lot of work and thought in that post.

Yesterday I was painting at Brooklyn Artist Gym but I could not get anything much done - it seems like time for a change in my approach, technique, planning what I’m going to do before I arrive, things like that.  Anyway, that’s the backdrop from which I came to view Spot’s work yesterday.

Spot just moved to New York, and is trying to get gallery representation for his large Electronic Paintings - I wish him success in this.   One problem I see is in how Spot’s paintings are marketed.  Presently, Spot has, maybe a dozen works that are packaged with 100GB disks and processor (as one unit) - I think with a large LCD screen (but I’m not sure about the screen part) for prices starting at 30,000 dollars USD.

For me, I’m seeing Spot’s paintings as being much more marketable at a lower price by just selling the software with an High Definition Screen, but that’s me.   I see a problem with trying to go after a niche audience of art collectors based on a technology that’s also open-sourced.   Doubt is created in the mind of a collector that what they’re spending 30K on might also be something they’ll be able to buy later for next to nothing as a more advanced screen saver program.   

In a way, this is the same problem that HitWise has, as a web analytic platform; their main program, fully loaded, is about 60K and they have maybe 1200 customers, mostly corporate.  But they’re not Omniture, not Visual Sciences - platforms that can sell for up to one million dollars a pop (you don’t need that many one million dollar installations to make it).  I wrote about this in WebMetricsGuru recently Was HitWise sold yet?

Can Spot sell enough paintings at 30K and above ….. I don’t know.  I hope he’s successful - but I do think the technology makes it somewhat problematic - are you selling the artist or are you selling the technology?   If your selling the technology, your going to have a problem selling the individuality of your creation, that’s my take.

If Spot wants to be an Artist, in the same line as Kandinsky …… he needs to sell his idea past the technology that houses it - and right now I don’t see that.   His talk was great last night, but I felt the star is not spot, it’s his Electronic Paintings - paintings that anyone can recreate with 100GB hard drive and a nice shiny laptop screen, just like the one I have now with my new HP Pavilion dv6000.

It gets back to what Seth Godin said at Google Unbound, earlier this week - to be successful you need to know that business your really in.  The House Designers, my former client for SEO, thought that buying architectural house plans from a consortium of known architects, rather than from a brokerage house like globalhouseplans.com or eplans.com, would be a competitive advantage - but it was not. 

THD totally misunderstood their true opportunity - as a larger consortium of Architects and knowledge base and tools - something they entire missed the boat on - and now that site struggles to break even.

While I’m am artist, first and foremost, I’m also a web analyst and a marketer - and I have to call things the way I see them - people expect no less from a blogger with an audience.   What Spot is trying to do, as an artist, is great, but he needs to sell his vision, not the technology - to gain broader acceptance that he wants. 

I tried the same thing with using Iron On Art 15 years ago - but what I ended up doing is paralyzing my own creativity, and could not separate the technology - Amiga PC scanned images of faces, from painting techniques - and now, anyone can make tea-shirt art - so technology has taken a technique and made it common, almost banal - yet it seemed like a great idea when I first happened onto it around 1990.

How he does that - I don’t know, but one hint - focus beyond the technology - because technology is copyable - artistic genius, on the other hand, is unique.  Be unique.

When I saw a listing in Artcards.cc today for Mark Grotjahn, the name seemed very familiar.  Turns out that I saw Mark Grotjahn’s recent solo show at the Whitney Museum, ground floor, last month.  Here’s what I wrote then:

“..The Mark Grotjahn show in the Anne & Joel Eheenkranz Gallery on the first floor was interesting - I passed it on the way out and I see that picture represented on the Whitney’s site is the one I liked the best.

“…on view September 15, 2006 - January 7, 2007
Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Gallery, floor 1
Conceived for this exhibition, Mark Grotjahn’s cycle of “perspective drawings” pulls the viewer into a dynamic interplay between the large-scale works and the gallery space. A sense of space is evoked by the drawings’ multiple vanishing points, a convention used since the Renaissance to create the illusion of depth and volume. These perspectival referents both create the structure for and become the subject of Grotjahn’s art. The works’ formal organization finds a counterpoint in the modulations of color that play against the vanishing points to create vibrant, three-dimensional surfaces.”

I wish I could say the same thing for the Blue Grotjahn paintings at Anton Kern - but I can’t.  I liked the textures of all the paintings and the reflected light from the canvasses.  The main problem I had with the show - most of Mark Grotjahn’s paintings are repeats - he’s doing what appears to be the same exact painting, over and over again.  That part, I don’t like.

All the Grotjahn paintings are handsome, but they feel shallow too - I’m sure the artist  can tell one painting apart from another - but I can only tell a couple of Grotjahn’s paintings apart.

For me, I’d like to see that each painting is a unique experience; I did not get that awareness from this show.