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https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/12/susanna-bauer-stitched-leaves-rock-paper-scissors/?utm_source=colossalnews&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Thu+Dec+04+2025&utm_campaign=What+the+Hands+Remember+to+Hear I just love this artist. 
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I don't often find videos to be very contemplative, but this video is an exception.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1N_TOAXq-M&t=9s It's called, Paper Study. I recommend it. Not long ago a friend asked me why I make art. “Wouldn’t you rather do something worthwhile?” she enquired in all sincerity. Now this is a woman who is very practical, and contributes to our world in many beautiful ways. But to me her question sounded a little like Judas Iscariot, the disciple who ultimately betrayed Jesus, when he saw Jesus’s friend, Mary, pouring expensive ointment on the Master’s feet and drying them with her hair. He said, “Shouldn’t this ointment have been sold and the money given to the poor?” In other words, he thought Mary should have been doing something more “worthwhile.” Very understandable, isn’t it? Yet Jesus took Mary’s side. I do too. For me, making art is an act of worship, a pouring of ointment on the feet of Jesus.
AND THE FULLNESS THEREOF
The Biomorphic World When I was eight years old I memorized Psalm 24, which begins, “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof…” In my mind, the fact that the earth belongs to God was a given, what caught my attention was the additional fullness that also belongs to Him. It is this fullness that draws my contemplative attention to this day. The earth is changing now, slowly and quickly. This earth, the biomorphic world, and the fullness thereof. Am I a folk artist? I don't know. Maybe. A friend of my wife recently made the association, and I've been contemplating it. When I see folk art I see honesty, integrity, and earnestness. I can identify with that. And often a whimsical lightness. Hmm. Maybe in places. There is a regularity of mark making that is at odds with the "expressive" mark making of my education. And that correlates. I am quite a way away by now from my education by abstract expressionists. My mark making is quite regular... What else? Humble subject matter. Still life and animal forms. Bucolic scenes such as Grandma Moses favored... Well, the still life matches up... There is a naïveté in folk art that I've always admired, the anti-academic attitude of raw and unfiltered observation that I've always admired. But it's a little late to claim that in my work, isn't it? I've always liked the art of Polish artist Morris Hirshfield. Of course. Who wouldn't? But he was self taught and very brave. I can no longer claim to be self taught. Nor very brave, really. I haven't taken a lot of chances in my art life... His work is very stylized, something my teachers always said was wrong. Very wrong. I have been inclined towards it, mostly for its graphic strength, but school steered me away from it. So I have avoided it over the years. But is it coming back to my work? Maybe. Maybe. Just thinking out loud this morning...  I just finished The Blue Guitar, by John Banville. Great book. The narrator is a painter who has given up painting. I identified with both of these:
One of the phenomena I sorely miss from the days when I was still painting, is the stillness which used to generate itself around me when I was at work, and into which I was able to make some sort of temporary escape from myself. That kind of peace and quiet you don’t get by any other means, or I don’t, anyway… At the easel, the silence that fell upon everything was like the silence I imagine spreading over the world after I am dead. P. 102 I am… an enthusiastic advocate of the ordinary. P. 113 https://www.blurb.com/b/11618702-the-biomorphic-world-vol-1  Another artist shared by Colossal, who I admire greatly. Unbelievably perfect. https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2019/06/susanna-bauer-new/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Thu+Jun+15+2023&utm_campaign=Byte-Sized+Bits     I'm excited to read this new book, called, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artiface, by J.F. Martel. It is described in the blurb at bookshop.org: "Part treatise, part critique, part call to action, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice is a journey into the uncanny realities revealed to us in the great works of art of the past and present."
For anyone who believes that art really can reveal "uncanny realities" I would think this book would be exciting. We are all tired of "art" that is mere artiface, art that is considered to be "culturally-determined and relative" (as the blurb goes on to say), and that is all it is or can be. The true power of the spiritual depth of art has been readily dismissed in our culture. "Martel argues that art is an inborn human phenomenon that precedes the formation of culture and even society." I grew up holding this truth to be self-evident, however the older I've grown the more I've felt the burden of the weight of cultural dismissal. Art is seldom considered as anything more than visual noise in an overwhelmed world. When it is considered at all it seems people either like it or don't like it, and that's it, a mere decoration that either contributes to, in some small way, or is is bothersome -- annoying -- to a given space, It is exhausting to live here, and I'm weary of the battle. But it appears Martel has energy yet for this war. He holds that art is "a force of liberation wherever it breaks through the trance of humdrum existence." The blurb goes on to say that authentic art "is a gift from beyond the field of the human, and it connects us with realities that, though normally unseen, are crucial components of a living world." It sounds like a breath of fresh air to me. Here's the link to the book, with the rest of the blurb. I hope to read it soon! https://bookshop.org/p/books/reclaiming-art-in-the-age-of-artifice-a-treatise-critique-and-call-to-action-j-f-martel/580317?ean=9781583945780 |
AuthorI am an artist. I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Categories |
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