Hand-made tile entranceway, Tammy Vitale, Tam’s Originals
You may have noticed that I have not been posting. I have been in California visiting my friend, Linda. It was my intent to prepost for this site before I left, but the week before I left I was downed pretty good with a bad attack of vertigo, landed in the hospital overnight, and then couldn’t focus on reading or internet. You make plans and then life happens. I am learning at this late stage not to fight it. No point, it will happen anyway. My job is to frame it in a positive fashion. In this instance, I framed it as a good rest, since rest on your back in bed with your eyes closed is about all you can do with vertigo!
Linda lives in California and I live in Maryland; consequently, I am now on West Coast time living in the East Coast area. I am hoping to get back to "normal" soon and begin posting in the early morning within the next week or so. Since posting is entirely up to me, however, it occurs to me that any timetable is of my own making. So why make myself crazy? Which is what I was doing with the house cleaning (for potential sale/move), stressing over Linda’s ovarian cancer, getting ready for shows that I load into this week and next, etc, when vertigo came knocking to remind me that one is only capable of so much and if one won’t rest, why here comes the body to be helpful about that! As I said, I am coming to understand these things, even at this late date.
Sine I am not quite in the swing of things yet, I went looking for something interesting to post this morning and found this article on the artist as rebel in Artdaily.com news. Since I have always fancied myself somewhat of an outsider (mainly as self-protection at being the one on the outside of cliques growing up and especially in high school, where I was smart but most assuredly not in the in-crowd), I found it fascinating. It made me wonder if in every genre there are "insiders" and "outsiders" – we know that in politics these days it is good to be an "outsider" (whatever that means in politics) – and whether or not that is just another way of saying "old school which is actually fading away" and "new school which is trying to take its place by presenting itself as somehow better and different but in reality only being a new face in the same paradigm." (If you followed that, kudos!)
So here’s a good bit of the article, NG [National Gallery, London, England] Opens Rebels and Martyrs: The Image of the Artist . You can find the rest at ArtDaily.com:
"LONDON, ENGLAND.- The myth of the artist as heroic and rebellious, often misunderstood and suffering, is extremely potent and finds its echoes in many aspects of contemporary culture – from the rebellious poses of rock stars to the deliberate non-conformity of some of today’s artists, such as Tracey Emin. But when and how did this popular perception of the artist originate?
"The evolution of this archetype is the subject of the National Gallery’s forthcoming exhibition – Rebels and Martyrs: The Artist in the Nineteenth Century.
"The idea emerged in the late eighteenth century as part of the Romantic movement, and arguably achieved its most influential embodiment a century later in the life and work of Van Gogh and Gauguin. During the intervening years its influence was felt in the way people thought and wrote about artists and, more importantly, in the way artists thought about, and depicted, themselves.
"Rebels and Martyrs: The Artist in the Nineteenth Century is the first exhibition on this important and fascinating subject. It will trace the development of the ‘myth of the artist’ from the birth of Romanticism through to the early twentieth century and the avant-garde – examining how artists, and those around them, responded to and exploited Romantic ideas of the artist, and how artists deliberately cast themselves, or fellow artists, as outsiders and visionaries.
‘The burning need to create for oneself a personal originality, bounded only by the limits of the proprieties. It is a kind of cult of the self.’ (Baudelaire)
"The bohemian, the flâneur, the dandy, the artist as priest, seer or suffering martyr were all roles adopted by, or imposed upon, artists in the nineteenth century. Many of these roles still colour popular conceptions of the creative genius today. Rebels and Martyrs will bring together a wide variety of works by the key figures and groups who self-consciously forged these distinctive personas in this period – Friedrich and the Nazarenes, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Whistler, Van Gogh, Gauguin, the Nabis, Ensor, Munch and Schiele.
"Groups such as the Nazarenes and Nabis and individuals such as Courbet, Whistler, Gauguin and Ensor assiduously developed and promoted their ‘outsider’ credentials through their works. Other key figures of the period, such as Delacroix and Van Gogh, responded more ambivalently to their own developing and powerful myths.
‘The more I am spent, ill, a broken pitcher; by so much more am I an artist – a creative artist.’ (Van Gogh) "
It’s worth visiting the actual page of the article to see Gauguin’s "Agony in the Garden" with himself as Christ, a picture I have never seen before. While Van Gogh has always been my favorite of all artists, I find Gauguin gaining as I get older – more different artists you cannot find but their works speak to the same place in me – the place that loves color and movement. I find Gauguin’s works, even those with large areas of flat color, full of movement – perhaps the juxtaposition of colors?
So what do you think about all of this "artist as outsider" rhetoric? Where do you fit yourself as artist? Do you consciously think about that at all or do you just know you have to make art and don’t care where it fits? Or do you make art specifically to fit and sell? Do you feel there is any difference between art made to sell and art made for self? Love to hear from you!
Linda update: Linda has ovarian cancer stage IIIb. She will be receiving the latest treatment for this type of cancer, a treatment just written up in the New England Journal of Medicine this past January, paclitaxil (Taxol) and cisplatin. Linda will have shunts placed in her chest (intravenous) and in her stomach (directly to the pelvic area). The chemo will be delivered directly. Many people cannot finish this particular round of chemo because it is very rough. The reports note that even one or two treatments like this, however, can make a difference in survival rate. As always, keep Linda in your prayers.
While I was making it my practice to refer readers to myspace for Linda updates, it appears myspace has made some changes and now you have to be a member to actually get in and read blogs there. [or not – before I left, I could not refer to myspace. I just checked, and this one went right through. Blogging and referring is such an adventure!] I think what I am learning with Linda’s cancer is important enough to bear repeating in both posts, so I will put it here too. The most important thing I have learned: if you have a lump somewhere that doesn’t belong there, go have it checked out. Do not make excuses that you don’t have time, your life is too full, you are too busy. Be paranoid. Have it looked at. The life you save may be your own.
Thought for the day: "Today many spiritual seekers are trying to infuse their daily lives with a heightened consciousness of the sacred, striving to act as if each of their attitudes expressed their spiritual essence. Such conscious living is an invocation, a request for personal spiritual authority. It represents a dismantling of the old religions’ classic parent-child relationship to [a] God and a move into spiritual adulthood. ..As we become more conscious and recognize the impact of our thoughts and attitudes – our internal life – upon our physical bodies and external lives, we no longer need to conceive of an external parent-God that creates for us and on whom we are fully dependent. As spiritual adults we accept responsibility for co-creating our lives and our health. Co-creation is in fact the essence of spiritual adulthood; it is the exercise of choice and the acceptance of our responsibility for those choices. Caroline Myss, Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stags of Power and Healing
