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BENONE OLARU
 In the world of artists, there are some who excel to an extent that it isn?t fair to allow them to work without mention. Benone Olaru is one of them.
Born in the heart of Transylvania, in a small city called Hunedoara, he has made the unusually high quality of his work known throughout Italy, making statues honoring among others, the bicyclist Marco Pantani after his tragic downfall and death. There is more to the work than just an incredibly high level of technique, as all of his sculptures speak from the spirit of Eastern Europe in an almost Byzantine way.
Rumania, where this artist comes from, is one of the most economically impoverished countries in Eastern Europe. Yet their government employs huge groups of Rumanian artists to realize public projects throughout their country. Our own country is at this moment in our history, one of the most culturally impoverished in the world relative to its per capita income.
The National Endowment for the Arts has no database of living American artists working in the United States, nor do they have any plans to establish one, according to Sarah Cook, executive assistant to the Chairman. Many countries with far fewer resources do, and in fact, it?s such an easy thing to put together. The NEA?s website might add a page where artists could enter their own information, or where museums or other organizations involved with living artists could. In a matter of months, with no involvement from staff other than set-up, a list could be close to completeness; with just the smallest amount of advance publicity to create awareness that this was being done. It would certainly better this organization?s abysmal standing with American artists, whether or not it actually had any effect on their careers.
Benone Olaru felt the need for other influences, so he went far and wide to other parts of the world to refine his already prodigious skills. He went to Korea to work in granite, and after a few years there, settled in Italy where he works today. His studio is full of every manner of hand made tool you can imagine, because apart from being a sculptor, he is skilled at working with a forge and at tempering steel. He works in wood as well as stone, and large figures dominate his studio. The style is almost archaic, with many religious references, and reveals a continuation of a tradition while still being influenced by the events and feelings of contemporary society.
Ever in motion, and as detached as he is from his origins, he has become a gatherer, collecting inspiration from the new things he sees while keeping and using everything he?s picked up in other places along the way. Many of his pieces portray motion, which in his own life is a constant because of his extensive travels, and in this way his message is completely sincere. He speaks of what he knows.
In our own efforts as artists, there is something we all can learn from this. We might find ourselves questioning what to devote our energies to, how to find a subject and a way of expression that others around us, our viewers, our patrons, and prospective new clients, will find persuasive and profound. Many artists try to create the image of themselves as a seer, a mystic, someone above the level of those viewing their work.
Expressiveness in art is mostly beyond the control of artists themselves. When an artist?s intent is to have a certain effect on their viewers, to amaze them and awe them, the formula works only until those viewers are able to understand what they are looking at, and what the intent was that produced it. At that point, it is diminished, like when you first see a magic trick, and then come to understand how it was done.
It is much better, therefore, to keep your secrets, and the best way to do this, is not to have any. A natural and sincere expression is already so complex that even the artists themselves don?t really understand how they came to have produced what they have made, or the millions of nuances that find their way into the work without them having made a conscious effort to place them there. These are the works you can look at time and time again, yet each different day, and mood, will produce new sensations.
In every work, and certainly included are those works that use tricks to grab the attention of viewers, there exist these millions of unintentional nuances. When a trick is used, however, for example the slashed canvasses of Fontana, those nuances are eclipsed by that one-dimensional, overpowering element that the artist has intentionally put there, and become impossible to see, as it is impossible to see the details of the cloud surfaces a few degrees to the left or right when you?re staring at the sun. This is the risk the artist takes when creating signature works that can be recognized simply because they?ve put a patent on one silly trick in order to get attention. One dimensional, simple, and incredibly easy to look at only once. The school of facile art.
Technique can?t produce a never ending flow of emotions either, for in effect it is just another trick. But if a balance is achieved between sincerity, spirituality, and beautiful workmanship, then the feeling it can produce is that of a concert, a harmonious gathering of a number of elements working together in synchronicity.
John the Baptist is the most developed of Benone?s work that I have ever seen. There is extraordinary detail in the curls descending from the head, and it is beyond my comprehension as a stone sculptor how these elements were made in granite! This is not a forgiving stone, it is one that destroys tools, blunts chisels, and tears the diamonds off stone saw blades. I have rarely seen this kind of three dimensionality given to marble works, let alone to granite. But as a professional, I see these tour de forces; I am sure someone who doesn?t carve stone would not. And that is something that makes this work strong. It looks as if it had been done effortlessly as much as I know it was not.
But it is the spirituality of the piece that paralyzes me in front of it. It is not an anatomical reproduction, rather it has the kind of exaggeration common to Michelangelo pieces like the Moses that tell a story and become theatre. The elements of design allow the viewer to associate freely with the biblical story, and make sense of the total picture. At this point Benone?s job is to tell the story and choose colors and shades to make it his own.
The result shows he is a master of his chosen media.
Created by Andrew Wielawski On 05/08/08 At 09:18 AM
FINALLY, Validation via Art Historian
 A satisfying feeling of validation has been bestowed to me. Ingrid Kamerbeek, art colleague on the other side of the planet, sent good news to me today by email. If not for her diligent monitoring of the infinite art cyberspace of the Internet, I would probably never have known what had occurred in February of this year. What could be so wonderful to make me feel like Clint Eastward, with someone who did ?make my day?? In Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas, at the 96th annual conference of the national College Art Association, was a formal presentation of my creative process! By association and examples to illustrate the speaker?s description of my art making methodology, my art had to have been displayed through electronic projection. This would also validate the artist?s works, as no creative process would get profiled at such a prestigious event without the art being judged to be great (or at least successful and original) as product. The audience was distinguished college art instructors and professors of American universities and colleges.
As one of five presentations on innovation in contemporary printmaking, Monica Kjellmann-Chapin, professor of art history, presented Reproduction on Reverse: The Paradoxical Production of Pygoya. I have not read the lecture notes, as it is not available on the Internet. But from the title, I gather that it is about my process of ?digital painting design.? It entails a shocking, for most traditionalists, reversal of values in regards to art medium and the intent of the artist. I work digitally to design and produce an original oil-on-canvas painting. But the painting is only an intermediary step to get to the final product, which is an edition of archival quality digital giclee prints-on-canvas. After the creation of the edition, the painting can be disposed or dumped as a collectible. Bottom line, the painting is a reproduction of the original digital image! Although the hand-crafted work is true to the original digital picture, now the print edition is a direct descendent of a medium accepted as "fine art." Mind games yes; strange if not weird but logical - for an art market still stuck in the past century.
It is marvelous to know I have made a dent in the ivory tower of art academia. After toiling, financially sacrificing, and being ignored for over two decades (including the local University of Hawaii art department and island art museums), it?s nice ? especially as a Rodney (as in Dangerfield)- to get some "respect." I feel like the load (of self doubt and art medium prejudice) to prove myself has been lifted from my shoulders this fine day in Paradise. To have a professor of art history proclaim one?s creative process and thoughts as significant to the culture-at-large, in front of a distinguished audience of college art professors, is so much more satisfying than selling the stuff. I always, however, did believe that if one rises to fame as explorer of the aesthetic process (Ph.D., Art Psychology), one?s output ? even the inferior works, would be coveted as collectibles. In other words, then even the inferior/failures/crap sells along with the masterpieces. What a wonderful ? and profitable- day that would be. The studio rent would always get paid!
From the perspective of economics, my art process is an aesthetic manifestation of the new global economy. It's cost effective for my digital creations to be outsourced for skilled human labor. Then the high quality oil imports are scanned, number crunched back into a data pool of 1's and 0's, as preparation to be rematerialized to complete their final destination - as digital prints. In essence, in this high tech-Internet cultural climate, the painting in my art process is sandwiched between digital means of personal expression.
Academic discovery and notice of my life's work in art is a win for all digital artists. It is an incremental contribution to the integration of digital art-making tools with the other more traditional means of visual human expression.
Reproductions or originals? Photo courtesy of Richard Gessler., collector
The lecture was one of five for the symposium session entitled ?
The Vernacular Print in Contemporary Art, chaired by Beauvais Lyons of the University of Tennessee
Thursday, February 21, 2008 2:30 PM?5:00 PM
Lone Star Ballroom A4, 2nd Floor, Adam's Mark Hotel
Archived sources from the Internet
COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATION
275 Seventh Avenue, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10001
T: 212-691-1051 | F: 212-627-2381
The College Art Association supports all practitioners and interpreters of visual art and culture, including artists and scholars, who join together to cultivate the ongoing understanding of art as a fundamental form of human expression. Representing its members? professional needs, CAA is committed to the highest professional and ethical standards of scholarship, creativity, connoisseurship, criticism, and teaching.
Austin Texas Website Design
An artist-friend?s response-
Rod,
Congratulations. I think I went to one of those but not to the lectures,
just the job hunting section where anybody could go. It happened to be
close to where I was at the time. It might still take a bit of time for
your recognition factor to filter down to art speculators buying your worst
works but who knows, you could have stepped onto that road.
Aloha,
Harvey, MFA, San Diego, CA
Created by Pygoya On 05/05/08 At 09:45 AM
3 Men in a Boat
 There, I?ve done it again. I said I wouldn?t but I?ve fallen for it one more time: wrapped two paintings up last week and drove them south of the river for the Montijo International biennial that is scheduled for August. You?re thinking that I?m not a man of my word and you are right ? in one of my last videos [and a blog] you do hear me and fellow studio-buddy Fernando Vidal saying ?Never Again?. He?s to blame; not so much for the ?never again? but for luring me into the trap when he walked in to the studio with a devious grin on his face and the application forms in his hand. The prize is too good to ignore: 15000 euros for first prize in painting ? and, as Fernando keeps reminding me, the worst that can happen is for the jury to say no and we?ve both accumulated sufficient anti-bodies to rejection to come out of it with any significant bruises.
In a last-minute outburst of bravado I concocted a short video out of old bits and pieces I found in scattered DV tapes and entered for video as well ? 3000 euros first prize. I figured that if the worst that can happen is a ?No? I might as well attack on as many fronts as they let me.
No doubt this is attributable to a sudden bout of latent survival instinct kicking-in as I reach the final lap. It?s hard to believe I?ve actually been here three years and that one year from now I?ll be packing my stuff to move on once again. I?ve concentrated almost exclusively on the studio work in the past three years here in Portugal - painting and, most recently, toying increasingly with video - and I haven?t worried too much about showing. But as departure date gets closer I guess there are a few things I would like to leave in place, and getting into a major show at national level wouldn?t be a bad way to start the ball rolling. In a way it is already rolling because Fernando, Rui and I have a project approved for December at the Cascais Cultural Centre just outside Lisbon, but finding ourselves in a biennial in August could attract some ?more serious? interest in what we are doing. Seems like good strategy at any rate.
We?ve been given the uppermost room of the Arts Centre for the greater part of December and all of January, just right for the three of us, and our show will run concurrently with [yet another] Picasso exhibition which starts a week before ours. Instead of aiming for a simple group show of individual works we have decided to intervene in the space and create a project that will include painting/installation/video. I suggested we pick up on the theme I launched in Brunei in 2005 ? [3] Artists/One Boat - and so we?ve been getting together for regular brainstorming sessions which I sometimes capture on video to include in a projection on the 4th wall of the main exhibition room. Although our individual paintings will form the basis of the exhibition the idea is to transform the actual space into a vessel that will carry the viewer into whatever world we come up with by then. We are currently toying with the idea of using black light to enhance whites, and inscriptions and drawings in chalk on the ground ? perhaps blueprints and technical data of boats and things that carry things. We?ll be transforming the space into the vessel itself, a nave or a uterus ? the threshold of a new world. Eventually, to my mind, the show itself will yield yet another video.
Apart from this specific and recent project, and looking back at the days at the studio, this is the first time that I have worked without an individual show in mind [not necessarily in the sense of there not being a fixed date, but even more profoundly of not holding the thought in the back of my mind whilst painting that each individual work must necessarily become a part of something]. I?m just painting and working for the sheer joy of it. I don?t recall ever having gone about things this way. Of course this presents certain other obstacles such as when is enough, enough? At times I feel I?m moving in circles or overworking the themes I undertake. When I had a date or a place in mind to show the work I was doing the numbers and the ideas organized themselves and the odd painting could be left out in the end, and I never felt I overdid it. Once the show was over, that was the end of it and I?d move on to something else. But now I sometimes feel I?m overdoing it. I can barely move around at the studio and the presence of all that stuff isn?t helping me move away from the world I?m surrounding myself with. I?ve thought about bringing a few home but visitors to the studio and the students at [OD] come in to take a peek sometimes and like things the way they are, so I keep delaying ? how the ego so loves the little pats on the back. I?m eager to leave the ?trees? and the ?longboats? behind and start researching old Portuguese tiles for my next project [the blues, the yellows, the umbers, abstract on an off-white background, yet still retaining their portugueseness]? but I still haven?t felt that click.
On a final note in these scattered considerations that sprang to mind while thinking about how time flies and things change, one of the things I never thought I would truly adapt to was working with others. You may remember that I resisted leaving my old studio and moving in to [OD] at the end of 2006, and that one of the main reasons I mentioned was loosing my aloneness ? my space to think and feel whatever it was I wanted to think and feel without interference and without having to constantly explain or justify myself ? why the sudden red there? Why another tree when the painting looked great ten minutes ago? without it? I kept a safety buffer between the studio and the World? Now, the buffer has somehow dissolved and outside questioning and explaining helps to detect the pitfalls and the new paths that open up, it?s become a good thing.
Fernando and Rui are old friends, open and passionate about their differing views, and as such they are entitled to have their squabbles on and off, but I get along with both of them just fine ? there is such a great deal to learn just from being around these guys. And whenever the students are in they are very respectful of my need for space and quiet and don?t pose a problem: if I have time I wave them in and we chat for a while, if I don?t, I just make a gesture with my hand in the air to acknowledge their being there and they know to watch from a distance before going back to their own tasks. At other times I?ll walk past to get water or wash my brushes and I stop here and there to comment on the progress they are making in their own work and whatever difficulties they may be experiencing. It all works out much better than I had anticipated and I know that this is one of the things I will surely miss when the time comes to step off this boat.
Created by Jose Freitas Cruz On 05/01/08 At 08:00 AM
Drawing and Painting
 In my last blog I was talking about my very early drawings, some of them dating back as far as the 1940s (and please forgive me for not having been able to replay to all the comments!). Today in this prolonged, enjoyable, common effort of ours to make this blog also a place where we share our thoughts and impressions on our work so to understand it better, I will try to say something about another group of drawings, this time a very recent one. It is a group of three drawings I made in 2007, a group that, if I am right, I have already had a chance to bring to the pages of our Absolutearts blog when they were not finished yet. Though this is the very first time I am talking about them here.
They are large format drawings on inverted canvas, prepared on the reverse side, so they are made on the rough, unprepared, side of the canvas, because it is then easier to draw with charcoal and tempera colours. Using this technique the colour doesn't run, as on the prepared side, so there is a different way of erasing, drawing, and working on them. This method gives results that, in my opinion, are more suited to my technique. I also find it hard to call them drawings, even though I have found no other way of defining them. However, they are, in fact, large images that are the equivalent of painted images, both in their expressive strength and inner tension. I have always found that there is a strong connection between drawings and painting. They are not two separate techniques in my work, so much so that in many of my paintings you can find charcoal and pencilled lines, both under and above the colour. I have always mixed the two. I believe that a painter is interested in the expression, and is less concerned about the technique he uses to obtain it.
But let us go back to the drawings, starting from Drawing no. 3, the first one I made. During the war in Iraq there was a bloodbath of civilians in Mossul. I had this tragedy in mind, as perhaps many people did, but I didn?t want to paint or to draw that particular butchery, even if, as an emotional basis for these paintings, the sense of tragedy that we are seeing in that war is certainly present. So I portray a pile of bodies, massacred, and a woman with a child gripping onto her, who is perhaps covering her eyes so that the child cannot see. The painting has become rich in references, because the woman is drawn in an almost classical style, as a distant memory of the sketches used by Italian 16th century artists. The tangle of bodies is perhaps more reminiscent, although I could be mistaken, of something going from Goya up to certain drawings or paintings of the concentration camps by Music.
Drawing no. 2 is more sketchy, but no less powerful in expressiveness. There is a woman, defending herself from a man, who is trying to rape her at home, and there are, on the left of the canvas, two children watching, gripping onto each other and covering their faces. This is very indicative of my way of starting a work, and since I think that a painting has to be beautiful from the initial stages until the moment it is finished, I have actually left this drawing in its first stage because, to me, it seemed very powerful, and also to leave a trace of my way of setting up a painting.
Drawing no. 1, which is the largest and is made not on inverted canvas but on white canvas, even though it is still a drawing, also has the feel of a finished work. it is not, in fact, a drawing that can be painted over. There is a man on a crucifix, a woman with a child going away, a man asking for charity, and a strong and powerful chiaroscuro. It is a very moving image, which also touches on the idea of where we are, and perhaps also points to how we could get out of this tragic situation. There is the idea of truth, of Christ, of a mother protecting her child. There are all the elements that, even when appearing at the height of tragedy, can point to a way of escape.
Only recently my friend and art critic Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, commenting on this group of drawings, wrote that there is a deep and constant dialogue between me and the tradition of painting. I have to admit that this is possibly true, because I believe that painting is like conversing with past or present art.
Alberto Sughi, Rome 2008
(translated by Joelle Crowle)
For more info on Alberto Sughi see. www.albertosughi.com
Created by Alberto Sughi On 04/28/08 At 10:18 AM
LET?S DO AWAY WITH ?ART? -- Or I?ve got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts.
 ART:
1: skill acquired by experience, study, or observation 2 a: a branch of learning: (1): one of the humanities (2)plural : liberal arts b archaic : learning, scholarship3: an occupation requiring knowledge or skill 4 a: the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects; also : works so produced b (1): fine arts (2): one of the fine arts (3): a graphic art 5 a archaic : a skillful plan b: the quality or state of being artful 6: decorative or illustrative elements in printed matter
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