My New Gallery

Well, I've decided to take the plunge into gallery ownership. My new gallery is called LES FEMMES GALLERY and it features my iconic images of women. At the moment it is an online gallery only. Please take a look. Here's the link http://www.lesfemmesgallery.com

Yearning, oil on canvas, by Anthony Maulucci

San Miguel's "Art Mall" and the Cuban Phenomenon

A recent Saturday visit to Fabrica Aurora, the premier gallery space in San Miguel, prompted my thoughts on the question – Where are the art buyers? This visit followed closely on the heels of an article in the NYTimes about artists in Cuba. It seems that many international art collectors have been making art buying trips to Havana despite the fact that Cuban artists have no access to the internet and are unable to promote their work online. My speculation is that word of mouth is working for them on a very large scale. But back to the question of buyers in San Miguel. I spent an hour or so observing the people coming into Fabrica, and there were many on this particular Saturday. They were mostly young, middle-class Mexicans with one or two small children. They were well dressed and looked like they could afford the purchase of a $5000 (USD) painting. However, an interest in serious art did not appear to be the primary reason for their visit. Rather, they were gathered in the courtyard taking group photos of themselves before moving on to look at weathered doors, woven wall hangings, and antique pieces of furniture. “Perhaps one in a hundred people who come here are serious buyers,” I thought. And I am probably right. So artists who have set up shop in this very expensive, high-end “art mall” are struggling to pay the rent, and that is not the kind of struggle that fosters great art. In conclusion, I would say that the Cuban artists are far more fortunate. They have gone on quietly creating art without any help from the internet and now the buyers are showing up at their studios. Quite a remarkable development.

Caveat Artifex

There is universal agreement about the existence of art in San Miguel: Everybody wants it. But merely as a kind of pleasurable lifestyle accessory and not as a sacred creation to be approached with awe and regarded with reverence. Very few people, it seems, want serious art, art that challenges conformity and provokes thought, art that is soulful, symbolic, and deeply felt. Very few people here are interested in really looking at and contemplating serious art, art that peers through the cracks in our collective psyche. So, if you’re an artist whose work goes beyond “pretty pictures,” don’t be fooled by all the hype about art and the good life in San Miguel and think twice before you move here. 

The Women of San Miguel

Here's another example of the type of portraits I do, those inspired by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This is a painting I did of a woman in her 20s living in San Miguel. She was working at the public library, La Biblioteca, at the time. I first met her when I came to San Miguel in 2008, and we got to know each other from my visits to the library. She was working in the cultural affairs office and I was struck by her sensual beauty and delightful personality. She is bilingual, intelligent, and lovely in an angelic way but disarmingly down-to-earth. She came to my studio and I photographed her in seated under a flowering bush in my back yard.

Portrait of Julieta, A San Miguel Woman, by Anthony Maulucci

My Iconic Images of Women

Samples of some of my portraits of women.  I call them iconic because they portray representative moods and emotions. The global media bombards us with images of conventionally beautiful women, with polished, plasticized faces covered in make-up, but there's a natural beauty in every woman if you know how to look for it. This collection of portraits celebrates the natural, sensual, soulful beauty to be found in all women.

Portraits by Anthony Maulucci

Paying the Rent

An article in today’s LA Times announces the demise of yet another arts district (http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-arts-district-20140730-story.html#page=1). In this particular 52-block area east of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, warehouses are being converted into condominiums, trendy new restaurants are opening, and cafes are sprouting up on almost every block. It’s the same sad story of which SOHO in NYC is perhaps the prototype. Artists move into derelict neighborhoods because the rents are cheap and within a decade or so the curse of gentrification comes down upon them. Happily, however, this will probably never happen in San Miguel de Allende. The entire city might be considered an “arts district,” and although we have a full roster of trendy cafes and restaurants already in place, with new ones replacing the failed ones at a dizzying pace, it’s highly unlikely that rents will ever be an issue for most of the artists here. Rents in general are increasing little by little, like anywhere else, and at this time are averaging about $300-400 USD per month for a modest 2-3 bedroom house with a terrace and studio space, but I doubt they will ever reach the astronomical heights of major US cities. Of course there are lavish houses for the bourgeois artists who come here looking for creative resurrection or renewal, but thankfully we still have a community on a bohemian scale. I only hope that greed doesn’t gain a foothold in the future.   

Photo by Patricia Garcia Arreola

Where You Show Your Work Matters

Judging by the number of artists who are supplementing their income with teaching workshops, and by galleries that are taking on non-art merchandise such as furniture or clothes, I’d have to say that overall art sales have deeply declined. I’ve heard from several artists who haven’t sold a piece in many months. Some of them have lowered their prices and/or shifted their venues downward through various sales outlet tiers, meaning they are less fastidious about where they sell their work. A typical pattern of descent moves from a gallery to a restaurant or cafe to a bank or a retail store. Does it really matter where you show your work? I think it does. Remember the adage: “Presentation is everything”? That was instilled in me by both my elders and my experience over decades of pre-professional jobs as well as my long-term teaching career. Students are notoriously inattentive, and when you need to make sure they “get it,” the message you have to deliver must be presented in a manner that seizes their short attention span and compels them to focus on the information. In high school I was crushingly bored by the dry delivery of facts, but how my curious mind perked up whenever a teacher had a lively and imaginative way of explaining things! It's no different with art. Artists in San Miguel must display their work in a lively and imaginative manner in order to get the public to take note. Restaurants and retail stores are not only inappropriate places to hang serious art, they are dull and deadly, and a huge step downwards on the scale of seriousness. Sure there are and have always been exceptions, but those exceptions were usually unorthodox spots for bohemians and other intellectuals to meet and discuss. Sadly, that type of alternative venue, such as a bookstore run by book and art lovers, doesn't yet exist in San Miguel.

Evidently, there is a lot of new thinking going on about how to engage audiences by offering art in unusual spaces. I’ve just read a report by the James Irvine Foundation (irvine.org) on this subject, and they cite a group in Philadelphia that has pop-up gallerys. Engaging audiences for art is of course vital; however, I still have serious doubts that the way to do this is to put art into public venues without the right kind of preparation, by which I mean education. The old adage, “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink,” applies here. 

"Spring" oil painting by Anthony Maulucci

Art on a Mission

If San Miguel is to become a true presence on the international art scene, it must back away from commercialism. One studious look at Saatchi Art online -- the gigantic art site for artists selling their work to internet buyers the world over -- will show you that the global art scene is becoming increasingly commercial. Let me explain what I mean by “commercial.” Edgar Degas railed against the presence of commerce in the Paris art world of his time, so much so that he withdrew from the active pursuit of a career as an artist, buying back as many of early works as he could, and retiring into seclusion in his “sacred” studio. I wouldn’t recommend that artists in San Miguel go quite that far. I understand why many of us have chosen to turn art into a business, that is, to work at making a living as a professional artist. Fine. But if the work being produced here is predominantly commercial in the sense that it looks more and more like “commercial art” – the art that is produced for magazines, advertising, movie posters, fashion spreads, web sites, music videos, etc. – then it is no different in style and sensibility from the work I’m seeing on Saatchi. Work that lacks depth, work that has the high-gloss finish of fashion magazines without any emotional-psychological dimension. Isn't that why we came here in the first place -- to get away from the consumerism and materialism of US mainstream culture? If we've really left all that behind it should not reappear in our art work. I believe the artists of San Miguel should have the courage to produce work that is not of that type, work that has emotional depth, work that has many layers of meaning, work that resonates with soul, spirit, and individuality.  To my way of thinking, that is what true art is all about, and the rest is just eye-candy. Yes, there is a market for eye-candy, but if the artists if San Miguel want to distinguish themselves, if we want to be not only a presence but a force in the global art world, then let’s give the art world something greater, stronger, and more passionate than high-gloss pop art. 

Artists Who Teach

Is every professional or semi-professional artist a good teacher? No, of course not. Teaching art requires a different sort of talent from creating art. But here in San Miguel we have teaching artists who may or may not hold a BFA or an MFA and who may not have any solid teaching experience. It’s relatively simple for an unscrupulous artist to take advantage of a starry-eyed, gullible student whose guard has been lowered in advance by all the hype associated with San Miguel.

How does the serious art student who comes here on vacation with the hope of learning techniques figure out who is qualified to teach and who is not? These are murky waters. The fact is that it is much easier to fake or exaggerate credentials when your putative degree is from an art school outside Mexico. What should make the prospective student even more skeptical is the realization that many of the teaching artists here are driven to make money from the tourists who want to try their hand at painting in “magical” San Miguel – as if the place alone will confer a special gift upon them. You can put the talentless or mediocre student in Florence, Italy for a thousand years and Florence would not make them a great artist, although it might give them a better perspective and help them discern good art from bad (and perhaps help them shed their self-delusions).

I think this is an unfortunate situation for everyone concerned. Even under the best scrutiny it is difficult for the student to know if independent art teachers have any skill for it. If you’ve read the introduction to this blog then you know that I taught at the Lyme Academy College of Art in Connecticut, that I went to the Yale Art School by osmosis when I lived in New Haven, and that I was a college professor for 20 years. In addition, I have garnered other experiences that make me a fairly good judge of who is a good/qualified teacher of art and who isn’t. In other words, I’ve known real art teachers, seen them up close, the ones who had the gift of enlightening and inspiring their students. And, yes, they are rare beings, but not as rare as you might think. And certainly the artists who come to San Miguel wanting to elevate the standards of both art and the teaching of art in this city should be those who have received the calling. But instead we have artists who by hype and by skillful marketing are getting students willing to pay fairly high fees in order to be able to say they studied art in San Miguel. They are being hoodwinked by the hype. When I see an artist in San Miguel advertising a class without disclosing their credentials or giving their teaching experience my alarm bell goes off.

Jejune Art

I’ve noticed that a lot of the art work on display recently in San Miguel is being described as “whimisical,” which strikes me as a euphemism for “unaccomplished.” That’s right, it’s frighteningly JEJUNE, a word that I’ve always liked and that Webster’s dictionary defines as puerile, dull, and lacking significance. So jejune seems like the perfect word to describe a lot of the art being exhibited right now, art that is dull, uninteresting, and unaccomplished. You might want to call me old fashioned, but I have a strong desire for art that has GRAVITAS, another favorite word of mine, which according to Webster’s means “high seriousness.” Give me gravitas or give me death!  Sure, I can enjoy whimsical art, such as the paintings of Joan Miró or the cut outs of Henri Matisse, which I believe has both whimsy and high seriousness. But whimsy without gravitas is like the Wonder bread of my youth, light, airy, and lacking in substance.