"The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements." Robert Hughes
The Mona Lisa Curse: Part 1
Art critic Robert Hughes exposes the vulgar world of contemporary art collectors -some of whom don't have a clue about the art they collect- just the work's value as a commodity. The film goes a long way in answering the question why all the major shows and galleries offer the same art year after year after year.
It's an excellent, well paced documentary that'll make you laugh in between grimaces.
Art Student
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| Posing near the school in 1974 |
I couldn't afford to attend either without a roommate. And the roomie would also have to provide transportation as the closest thing I had to a car at the time was a bicycle.
Several of my fellow art students at Jupiter High picked the AIFL over Ringling so my choice was made.
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| The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale ca. 1974. This impressive looking building was actually a Holiday Inn. The school occupied the bottom two floors in the foreground. The brochures offered an early lesson in the deceptive art of advertising.caption |
The school was very small when we arrived and had been open for just five years. There were some excellent teachers from the Pittsburg school there; namely Michael Angelo DiVincenzo, the life drawing teacher who started teaching at the Art Institute of Pittsburg in 1947.
After running through my savings and in spite of holding two part-time jobs I had to leave the AIFL just short of the halfway mark for Palm Beach Junior (now State) College where I majored in English Literature. From then on I took art classes wherever I could get them - from the Armory in West Palm Beach to the Corcoran in Washington.
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| Painting at the studio of a friend, sculptor Luis Montoya. |
I spent the next three decades working in print media as a political cartoonist (Palm Beach Post, Copley News Service syndicate, The Hill in Washington,) illustrator (Palm Beach Life and The New York Times) and Art Director.
I started more serious studio work in 1988 with a series of minimalist paintings in oil paint and plaster on wood and branched out to large scale painting and sculpture.
The minimalist works (1988-1994) are still among my personal favorites. But I get bored (or anxious) easily and move on to other ideas and mediums. As disparate as my work appears to be, there's a common thread through it all from which I've never wavered.
The minimalist works (1988-1994) are still among my personal favorites. But I get bored (or anxious) easily and move on to other ideas and mediums. As disparate as my work appears to be, there's a common thread through it all from which I've never wavered.
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