I have always held that there are two rather huge divisions in the general field of art - at least from the artist’s point of view. There are those who create for themselves - driven by an inner need to create, to give form to personal urges and perceptions. Then there are those who create to meet the perceptions of what another - an audience - wants or needs. The first is a kind of “art as personal therapy” perspective, which can, as in the Bob Ross school, extend to others - but remains primarily “of the self,” a “not for profit” slice of the art world - again with Ross as an almost accidental exception. Even those who hang out their shingle as “art therapists” generate revenue not from the art created, but, hopefully, from the increased well-being of their clients.
The interesting division occurs when you try to distinguish between “inner need” artists, and artists who make a career from meeting the needs of clients. Obviously “commercial artists” live in the “for profit” world - creating the cute and cuddly or the sleek and sexy images designed to entice us to buy the physical products represented by the images they create. But, to stretch the notion a bit, what about Michaelanglo? Nobody is going to compare the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with the “toucan artwork” on a box of Fruit Loops. Nobody except perhaps Michaelanglo himself, who always self-identified as a sculptor, not a painter. Painting the chapel ceiling was the “commercial arrangement” Michaelanglo reached with Pope Sixtus IV to buy his freedom to do the sculpture that addressed Michaelanglo’s inner needs as reflected in The David and The Pieta.
Which sort of brings me around to the works of Pollock and Rothko, two artists whose works I have a tendency to belittle. Mia culpa. I now realize that I have been making the same mistake that many scholars and art critics have made about the works of these two men. They are not commercial artists. They are inner driven. Rothko would eventually turn down lucrative commissions as being at odds with the pure intentions of his works. Pollock might well have gone unknown commercially except for the efforts of his wife, and fellow artist, Lee Krasner and the art world’s dominant king maker of the time, Peggy Guggenheim. Both women felt there was something worth saving in the works of this alcoholic “bad boy.”
What I have just now stumbled across is the realization that I have been looking at Pollock and Rothko as commercial artists, though more toward the Sistine chapel than the Fruit Loops end of the spectrum. But their commercial success in the art world seems to have occurred almost by accident, certainly in Pollock’s case by the efforts of Krasner and Guggenheim. And in Rothko’s by catching the eye of a cluster of avant garde critics. I think I will now better understand them as “inner driven” artists. And there is an inner driven reason for this shift in my own perception. The last image I shared with you - Sisters - was a real pain in the - well, choose the place you would least prefer to encounter pain. Point is, the product of the image took me deep into the foibles of digital technology and far from the far more appealing realm of “drawing.” It was personally, and creatively exhausting.
And with the clarity that that the rear view mirror often provides, that exhaustion may have contributed to the fierce head cold that wiped me out for a few days. I confronted said cold with my father’s preferred remedy: “When you feel poorly go to bed and sleep until you feel better.” I know, that perspective will never make it to JAMA, but the guy did live to be 100! Anyhow, I am back, not 100 percent, but somewhere north of 85.
But “pre-cold,” I started a new “drawing,” one far afield from an image that had to look “right,” or even capture the feeling of a related, or “seed” photo, as in the PPP images. I created the “healing drawing” by taking a large, 17 x 14, sheet of drawing paper and a couple of dark markers and letting the markers just wander over the paper until I had a nice, sort of balanced, scribble. Then I just let my other color markers decide what colors should go where. I got about 30% of the page close to what I considered “done” when the cold arrived and I went to bed. I have now completed the “healing drawing” which accompanies this post. Yet, It was while playing - literally - with that drawing that I came to the foregoing thoughts on Pollock and Rothko. They were not “fine artists” as we usually think of folks who works grace the halls of the “musey rooms.” They were seeking some sort of inner clarity with their work. And if we ask “How are you doing with that?” We get an alcoholic and a suicide.
But we also find Bob Ross in this category of artists who sort of found fame by accident, and whose struggles with life led him to a conscious effort to, professionally, share the joy of painting with anyone interested to listen in and watch, and personally to never raise his voice to others. A much better outcome. And one that encourages us to pursue our own drawings for the joy of it, and when any part of it leads anywhere else, we need to step back and hit the restart button.
So here my restart button - again my apologies for the poor image quality, but to fight for better quality here in blogger drags me away from drawing and back to digital image processing which is not my objective here. Remember the original is 17x14 😁
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