Sunday, February 05, 2006

Tuffy P & "Anthony's Candy"


Sheila & Anthony's Candy, originally uploaded by mister anchovy.

Here's Tuffy P with her new painting Anthony's Candy from the Promised Land series, soon to be exhibited in beautiful Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the Anna Leonowens gallery.

Posted by mister anchovy at 12:06 p.m.

9 comments:

Wandering Coyote said...

OK. After seeing this several times now, I'll comment.

I know absolutely NOTHING about art, and I never have "gotten" it.

What is this? What does it mean? Please help me understand, because I really do want to understand it.

10:00 p.m.
mister anchovy said...

It is a big question you ask, not a little one, so I won't try to give you a trivialized answer. It is like asking what a novel means....even harder than asking what calculus means. I'll ask Tuffy for her comment as well, since it is her painting. In my view, the best way to understand art is to look at a lot of it, but that takes some dedication and a lot of time, and it can be really challenging. What you shouldn't expect is a translation, because if painting is anything, it is idiomatic. It would be really unfair to the painter to try to do that. On meaning, let me refer to Paul Valery, who, talking about poetry, said something like...a bad poem is one that disappears into meaning. Let me think about a way to talk about painting with you that will help...... but this doesn't make it any easier. I'll get back to you.

6:09 a.m.
Wandering Coyote said...

Well, thank you for taking the time.

I have visited art galleries here and there because my in-laws were big into art (Georgia O'Keefe, Chagal) and my husband loved art. My best friend is a bit of an artist. But I just never understood it.

Actually, Anita, in trying to explain why a lot of what we call art today isn't really art (in reference to an exhibit here at the centre of local painters' pictures of the lake, rivers, mountains)said that the paintings didn't contain any emotion - they were just pictures, like what a camera might shoot. Art should contain and convey emotion not just reproduce an image. This made sense to me. And I perceive emotion in Tuffy's piece here, but I cannot quite see what it is, other than it's dark.

But I'd go the the National Gallery in Ottawa every so often and look at the Worhals and think anyone could have done that. What's the point of all these tide boxes/that painting of a red cube?

So, whatever insights you have, I'd appreciate it. Every little tidbit turns another light on for me.

10:26 p.m.
mister anchovy said...

Dear Wandering Coyote,
Tuffy P. has some comments about her painting that she would like to share with you....she doesn't want to post them, though....so I went over to your blog to email them to you, but couldn't find an email address. Soooo, if you'd like to email me, I'll email you back with her comments,
cheers.

11:31 p.m.
Candy Minx said...

Hi Wandering Coyote,

I think you have asked some valuable questions. You asked "What is this? and "What does it mean?" When it comes to art...almost no one has the answers. You can read endless anthropology books and science studiesor political theory...and very very few "experts' are able to explain What is art and what does it mean.

So you are not alone, that's the good news.

I see on your profile that you enjoy reading. So do I. And that is why I like looking at movies and looking at art.

I remember reading a book about poetry and the autho r said the first reading that people did was on tracks....to track animals for food. You've seen those western movies where there is some mysterious tracker, often a native canadian or american who can "read the trail".

Well, reading novels and looking at art and watching movies are in the same arena. It's being given a narrative, or finding a narative. Humans have a compulsion (out of several compulsions ha ha) to layer meaning. It's one of the things we do. A writer and a painter work by adding or taking away layers of meaning. A viewer hunts for meaning.

This is not the sole act of art making or reading or viewing but it is a basic function.

When we read a novel we are following clues the writer has carefully given us to help us enter an emotional state to bond with characters and to care about the plot. As readers we each have personal tastes that draw us to prefer mystery novels, adventure novels or non-fiction etc etc. Some readers are more genenral and like exploring all kinds of books and genres. I guess it depends on ones enviromnet and upbringing and how open minded we each are or are not...?

When we look at art our mind wants to find a narrative too. Some of us may also prefer certain kinds of images over others, like choosing genres. I know many people who only like a few particular artists...the rest they think are bunk! But all art work has a narrative and a story. It reaches the viewer through colours, shapes, symbology or size or any of the millions of forms that art has taken.

So...back to your valuable questions...what is art? Art is a narrative. It is a story in visual form a cousin to a novel, a movie or a classical Myth.

What does it mean? It means what you want it to mean, and what you read and what the artist clues have been left for you. It works on a level of the emotions like misteranchovy suggested...and it may also work on other levels. Many rich people like art to work and mean they are well..."rich and cultured". For corporations art may mean they gave to a charity, they want people to feel at rest with a colourful image and probably most importantly for a corporation art "means" that they are powerful and able to buy art, have so-called good taste and are at the helm of both finacial and cultural economics.

For other viewers art may be a spiritual opportunity to look at things differently, the trendy idea of "outside the box". For many people art is a challenge and an adventure to open themselves up to see the world and our narratives in a new light or through the eyes of a fellow human.

Art began as a storytelling device for our survival and for communication. I believe that is stil it's primary function and attraction.

It can be endless the meaning and pleasure or...discord! each of us takes for being an audience. I am from the camp that hopes and believes an audience is an active part of narratives. Can a movie inspire you to look at your life differently? Can a novel? Can a painting? These are all mental and spiritual pathways to thinking about what it is to be human.

What it means to be human is what it means in the art!

Well, this is all off the top of my head Wandering Coyote...and really only the beginning of a dialogue for me about art and storytelling.

I don't want to chew your ear off heh heh. You've asked soem BIG questions and it is stuff I love thinking about, so thank you very much!

Candy

10:21 a.m.
Wandering Coyote said...

Candy:

Thanks so much for spending the time to write that out for me. I found it quite interesting because I am a trained writer and hold a degree in creative writing. Well do I know the craft involved in putting any novel or short story together, regardless of genre (many people turn their noses up at "genre fiction" but anyone who's written both, like me, knows they are equally as challenging to do well).

I have never thought of looking at art as narrative, though, and this intrigues me and next time I look at something, I'll try to find narrative in it. I guess what I find challenging is figuring out what the artist intends with a painting. I can look at a piece of work and find it pleasing or not pleasing to my eye, or pleasing to my aesthetic tastes. In writing workshops, I found it so frustrating when people didn't "get" what I was trying to do with a piece, and often was told that if the reader doesn't get it, I haven't done my job as a writer correctly or well enough. I've moved beyond that - I had to.

Perhaps the painter/artist has greater license to leave the work up to interpretation than the writer, which I think would free me therefore to interpret art as I am compelled to. This seems to be what you're suggesting, correct?

But if I look at Tuffy's piece above and see nothing in it, is that OK? She has imbued it with her own meaning and created that piece out of something deeply personal. Yet when I look at it, I really don't see anthing sybolic to me personally or anything that has meaning for me personally. Is that OK? (BTW, Tuffy has emailed me and given me the background & personal symbolism of this painting for her.) If I were to look at that painting and see, say, chaos, the end of the world, demons, or any number of things the artist didn't intend at all, is that OK, too?

Fascinating! I'm enjoying this very much, Candy, Mr. A, & Tuffy! Thanks for being so openminded with me!

6:08 p.m.
mister anchovy said...

There is also the issue of cultural context to consider. When that brilliant bastard Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, he did it in the context of early 20th century Europe. Freud was in the air. Einstein too was in the air. If old Pic had painted it in 1968 instead, the same painting would have been a whole different trip.

6:50 p.m.
Candy Minx said...

Hi Wandering Coyote,

Good stuff. It is totally "ok" for a viewer to interpret art any way they like...and the viewer will. It is almost completely out of the control of the maker.

This became especially evident over twenty years ago when literary criticsm started taking apart novels and reading them in a new way through history, geneder studies, marxism, holocaust awareness, gay rights and any number of other social trends. Some of the same treatment occured looking back on art work. People started questioning "is this politically correct" "does the art represent all aspects of roles within culture?" "does art or novel confine stereotypes and keep them intact?".

Whether one began looking at literature or art this way was personal and probably depended on whether you attended a university or not, ha ha. The university system was cranking out this new critic and new viewer. Viewers who demanded art reflect them and their values for the new times.

I am not against this style of criticsm completely...there was a theme that "the writer is dead" once a novel is written. And it's true once something is made it goes out into the world and an audience brings their own associations and memories to viewing art.

A good writer and painter knows this, is emotional and thoughtful and often works within various motifs of our culture and other cultures too.

Since you've studied writing I bet yopu have encountered a situation where people have discussed a piece in question and if it is sensitive to gays or politics or womens' issues. Francis Bacon, Picasso, William De Kooning...even the movie maker Hitchcock was tested to see if he treated women as equals in our culture through their art.

Then...is a writer or artist talking about the symptoms in culture or participating in them? Is it descriptive or prescriptive?

These are some of the major questions of the last 50 years of writing about novels and painting.

The mood has gone all over the place. The answers depend on each individual.

I think this kind of criticism is valid up to a point and have enjoyed reading many treatments of these ideas. But in the end, I am not psychic...and can not read the mind of a painter or writer.

I measure a books success for me by whether it has emotional and spiritual truths within it. But that's just me. I do have an interest in questioning authority though...even the authority of the notion of "historically correct art and literature".

Below is an excerpt form a man who wrote a Marxist reading of Wulthering Heights! His name is Terry Eagleton the following is an intro into his book "Literary Theory" which I recommend for literature lovers.



The role of the contemporary critic, then, is a traditional one.
The point of the present essay is to recall criticism to it's traditional role, not to invent some fashionable new function for it. For a new generation of critics in western society english literature is now an inherited label for a field within which many diverse preoccupations congregate: semiotics, psychoanalysis, film studies, cultural theory, the representation of gender, popular writing, and of course the conventionally valued writings of the past. These pursuits have no obvious unity beyond a concern with the symbolic processes of social life, and the social production of forms of subjectivity. Critics who find such pursuits modish and distastefully new-fangled are, as a matter of cultural history, mistaken. They represent a contemporary version of the most venerable topicsof criticism, before it was narrowed and impoverished to the so called literary canon. Moreover, it is possible to argue that such an enquiry
might contribute in a modest way to our very survival. For it is surely becoming apparent that without a more profound understanding of such symbolic processes, through which political power is deployed, reinforced, resisted, at times subverted, we shall be incapable of unlocking the most lethal power-struggles now confronting us. Modern criticism was born of a struggle against the absolutist state; unless it's future is now defined as a struggle against the bourgeois state, it might have no future at all. Eagleton1984.

And believe it or not ha ha, I actually have more to say on this subject so I'll be back ina bit.

Cheers,
Candy

2:57 p.m.
Candy Minx said...

Here is a different perspective on "what is art?". It takes a minute to work through this site, but it's worth it.


http://web.utk.edu/~blyons/arenot.html

10:08 p.m.

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