THESE 9 TIPS WILL HELP YOU BUILD YOUR DREAM ART COLLECTION. ENJOY

Deeply honoured to be voted “2017 Artist of the Year” in recognition of excellence in international art by artistsinfo.co.uk and Daler Rowney in the UK on November 7, 2017. Thank you. This is my winning piece: " Watching the Young Ones"

"Watching the Young Ones" is personal about fertility and new additions to the family.

Mixed media on aluminum panel with acrylic resin, looks like glass.
47.5” by 47.5” with custom Espresso frame. Overall dimension 54" by 54"

Done in 2017.

Winner of Artist of the Year!

Presented by artistsinfo.co.uk and Daler Rowney. Thank You.

In recognition of excellence in international art.

In the fall of 2017 I worked on some new innovations in the studio. This painting and its sister painting are the results. 

Here are some insights from the creation of "Monica Dreaming with her Spirit Animals".


"Monica Dreaming with her Spirit Animals"

The time of slumber often calls for reclining on the couch. The animals that co-habit with Monica are immediately present and they assume their positions. As slumber slides into sleep the other group of animals, the spirit animals and the dream animals become visible to Monica. In this dream she is visited by the orange greyhound lying on the top of the couch with her hind leg extending down the backrest. The greyhound is back to back with a smiling blue whale and the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson. Moving left and down there is a man's head in profile looking towards the left, and below a snake charmer. There are many more smaller spirit animals in this state of slumber.


"Monica Dreaming with her Spirit Animals" and Sophie.


The greyhound.


Hunter S. Thompson character.


Bearded head and snake charmer.

This piece was done in a suspended horizontal position with the paint poured on to the canvas directly. The paint was manipulated by lifting and lowering the edge of the painting and allowing the paint to flow. This is a 40" by 72" piece so the amount of paint that needed to be managed was considerable.


Horizontal suspension rig.


Barn hayloft studio.


Drying piece in the suspension rig.

"Monica Dreaming with her Spirit Animals" is done in acrylic on canvas, 40" by 72" by 1.5", 2016. Unframed with black painted 1.5" thick sides. Ready for hanging or can be framed.

A sister piece, "The Man, the Shark, the Lady with the Large Hat, and the Green Boy" (sold) can be seen below:

"THE MAN, THE SHARK, THE LADY WITH THE LARGE HAT, AND THE GREEN BOY"

This is an abstract painting with some intertwined figures formed from negative/positive spaces. The most recognizable figure is the blue man looking right at the left bottom of the painting. Following the man's determined gaze one encounters the pink shark at the right of the painting. The shark is staring down the man. But wait, in between the gaze of the man and the shark is a lady with a very large white hat with full brim. And in between the lady with the white hat and the blue man on the left is a green boy. All in a warm water world.

This piece was done entirely with poured on and manipulated paint. The shapes were formed by manipulating the large canvas so the paint flows across it. No brushes were involved.

Acrylic on canvas 40" by 72" by 1.5". Done in 2016. In private collection.

“From time to time in our discussions we have reminded the reader that the first importance of a painting is not the accuracy with which it reproduces the look of the subject being painted,” wrote, in 1958, the acclaimed Art Director and Critic for the New York Times, John Canaday.

Andrew Warhola, better known as Andy Warhol would paint the Campbell’s Soup Cans four years later in 1962. Gerhard Richter was behind the iron curtain in East Berlin working on commissions for the then state of East Germany before escaping to west Germany in 1961. Henri Matisse died 4 years earlier in 1954 and Paul Jackson Pollock 2 years earlier in 1956. The art world was building history quickly. A lot of history quickly.

Canaday, in reference to Marin’s “Singer Building” continues, “By the time we reach a picture like Marin’s Singer Building we find abstract elements dominating realistic ones. In the lower half Marin expressed the noise, the movement, the excitement and confusion of the city by a composition of slashing angles, lines, and colors that only half resembled the actual objects involved. In this painting we must recognize and accept abstraction to enjoy the picture at all. The artist seems to say that if a subject can be expressed through angles, lines, shapes, colors, arrangement, and other abstract elements, there is no reason why he has to depend any longer on even semi-photographic reality. Is there then any reason to give us any recognizable images at all? Perhaps abstract elements alone can tell the story. To carry the argument to its logical conclusion, why is it necessary even to have a subject? Why not just have forms, colors, and arrangements by themselves, for their own sake?”

“Now let us say immediately that though this argument sounds logical, it does not necessarily hold true when applied at its extreme limit. It is quite possible that the modern abstract artist is defeating himself when he insists that recognizable images are of no importance in painting and should be left to the camera or (he might say) to those artists without enough creative imagination to get away from painting like a kind of camera. This is the basic dispute of “modern art”.

 

	Marin’s “Singer Building”	“The Studio” by Pablo Picasso	Vermeer’s “The Artist in His Studio”

In 1958 Steven Paul Jobs was 3 and living in San Francisco.

Photorealism was still a long, tedious and deliberate process done with film or artist materials. Digital photography was not yet imagined.

Canaday goes on to examine some modern abstractions, “The Studio” by Pablo Picasso, and compare them to old masters, Vermeer’s “The Artist in His Studio”, or “traditional painters who at first glance appear to be working almost photographically.” His comparison argues that every great painting has a great abstract design. For anyone that has seen Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” in person and up lose that argument is very true.

The paintings in this Artist Method collection reach to a much different source than imagination and photographic abstraction. Each painting rests on the shoulders of past masters and history. To repeat history is pointless. To innovate and create something new and original based on history; that is the job.
The paintings break new ground in the methodology by pulling the work from the subconscious and then giving it representational imagination. So in reversing the process of abstracting forms from a pre-determined subject the burden of form and subject is assumed only when the painting starts to have meaning simultaneously in the imagination and on canvas.

From that point the imagination guides the completion of the painting.

This artist method is almost like the Zen instruction of “not thinking” and having form and subject emerge. It becomes something of meaning when it is consciously recognized.


“Spirits” by Maciek Peter Kozlowski, 2011.

The early piece representing this method is called “Spirits”, 48” by 72”, acrylic on canvas, done in 2011 depicting “Spirits” in the forest and marshes of the Dunrobin farm where it was painted. The spirits cannot be seen by the unaware mind, yet like in an X-ray image, they are revealed to always be there. Where did they come from? To say they came from the rational imagination would assume an image was formed in the conscious imagination and then transferred to canvas. That would be very limiting and was not the case. By allowing the subject to emerge on canvas and simultaneously in the imagination, a much more interesting subject is revealed. Where did it come from? Obviously from the mind of the artist, but a mind where the conscious rigour of logical and linear thinking was momentarily pried open and the sub-conscious allowed to flow out.

Now this method does not work every time. Believe me.

The two newer landscape pieces, “Coming Storm”, 30” by 40”, oil on canvas, 2016, and “Coming Storm on the Lake”, 30” by 40”, oil on canvas, 2016 are realizations of the Canadian landscape with an extra dimension. As the Impressionists, and the Group of 7 interpreted the land that was before them, these paintings also interpret the land but with an emotional dimension of how the land is being perceived.
Today the land is not what the Group of 7 saw and the Impressionists saw. In many places the land, water, and air is under siege from irresponsible economic development of the resources it contains. This is the land screaming at us.
 

“Coming Storm on the Lake" Private collection in Chicago, USA.	“Coming Storm"

In 1958 Steven Paul Jobs was 3 and living in San Francisco.

There are four more pieces in this collection. They are called: “Red Dragon”, “Greed”, “Monica Dreaming with her Spirit Animals” and "The Man, the Shark, the Lady with the Large Hat, and the Green Boy".

"Greed" was overpainted 

More Large Abstracts here.

The ABCs of Isms

 "Living in Today's Complex Society and Portrait". mixed media on aluminum panel, private collection of the artist.

“Isms” have almost always been in vogue. In art, these isms (a.k.a. artistic movements) have taken many form — a veritable alphabet of isms.

To help ground the discussion, here are a few definitions of movements or isms from the Oxford English Dictionary:

• Realism: “An artistic or literary movement or style characterized by the representation of people or things as they actually are.”
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• Surrealism: “A 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature which sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.”
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• Postmodernism: “A late 20th-century style and concept in the arts, architecture, and criticism, which represents a departure from modernism and is characterized by the self-conscious use of earlier styles and conventions, a mixing of different artistic styles and media, and a general distrust of theories."

Post-Impressionism: “The work or style of a varied group of late 19th-century and early 20th-century artists including Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne. They reacted against the naturalism of the impressionists to explore colour, line, and form, and the emotional response of the artist, a concern which led to the development of expressionism.”

These definitions are fairly rudimentary and gloss over much of the nuance associated with each term. However, the fact that I felt inclined to offer this caveat is telling. It shows that defining “isms” is a tricky beast. Artists and art appreciators, especially those passionate about certain movements, often spend a great deal of time splitting hairs over how their favourite period or isms get defined — which artists are included, the implications of the period, precursors, highlights, and so on.

Why Do We Create “Isms” and What Do We Lose?

When you looked at the image in this post, (Living in Today's Complex Society and Portrait), did you feel an immediate inclination to put a label on it? Looks quite abstract... maybe a bit futurist... what is it?

This inclination towards labelling is understandable. The human mind loves to create schemas, driven by a desire to impose structure on life’s chaos. We notice patterns and begin lumping them into similar groups rather than attempting to process a sea of disjointed and disparate pieces of information. Isms make things easier. They are a shortcut, a means of abbreviating large and complex issues into a few syllables. As an artist who sells my work, labelling is also a marketing strategy -- sometimes it's much easier to advertise a "futuristic abstract mixed media piece" than a "mixed media piece".

But I think we stand to lose a lot when attempting to force a label where it might not fit. Summing up decades of artistic development and cultural evolution can create an overly narrow and exclusionary definition. What’s more, it seems that proponents of one ism or another can often lose sight of the fact that isms do not naturally exist. The parameters of an ism are created and imposed by humans.

If you find an ism that you are drawn to, embrace it. However, don’t limit your artistic explorations to a handful of isms at the exclusion of everything else. Broaden your range of focus, discover new things, and above all make your own definitions.

Do you feel that “isms” have helped or hindered your explorations of art?