Shouldn’t every serious artist have a secret studio, one where
no one else is allowed entrance except for models, intimate friends, and a
loved one? Yes, I emphatically believe this to be so. For me, creating art is a
very private affair, and I certainly wouldn’t like having just anyone think
they could enter into that process or are being invited to scrutinize works in
progress. Helpful feedback in the form of sincere criticism might be what other
artists are looking for when they throw open their space, but for me my studio
is my sanctuary and only those with a special connection to me or my work are
welcome here. I haven’t embraced the open studio concept, mostly because I
don’t care to have members of the general art-loving public traipsing through
my personal space. Here in San Miguel, the San Antonio art community is
actively seeking artists who are interested in joining their group. I imagine
membership entails paying fees to support advertising and other forms of
promotion for their open studio tours. This smacks too much of commercialism and
makes me uncomfortable. I am not a resident of the San Antonio neighborhood,
but even if I were I would be very reluctant to join this group. By nature, I
happen to be a very private person, and the idea of opening up my creative life
to whomever wishes to come inside is anathema to me. If an art collector
happens to be interested in my work a private meeting can always be arranged. I
have no problem with welcoming someone who enjoys my work into my studio for a
private viewing, a one-on-one discussion, and a glass of wine. Today’s fashion
is to display everything in public. I’m not a total recluse, but I do guard my
privacy fiercely, especially when it involves my creative life.
A blog by Anthony S. Maulucci --- Now read by thousands of people across the globe
December 28, 2013
December 6, 2013
Dolce Far Niente
San Miguel is a very lovely and vibrant place for an artist
to live. Voted as the world’s best city by the readers of Conde Nast Traveler, it is indeed one of the most livable cities on
the planet. All hype aside, it has many amenities – historic buildings, cobblestone
streets, great restaurants, a cosmopolitan culture, old world charm, Mexican
hospitality, balmy weather, and a minimum of urban blight. Artists like me love
it here, and with good reason. There’s tremendous creative energy, an abundance
of clear light, inexpensive studio space, many support groups, ample places for
exhibiting, relative freedom from commercialism and competition, and a general
sense of joie de vivre. It’s a great
place to do one’s creative work. But one can also sit in the principal plaza, el jardin,
soak up the ambience, watch the tourists, listen to music, sketch, or just sit
back contentedly for a while and think, “dolce
far niente,” how sweet to do nothing.
November 20, 2013
Artists Who Advertise
Several San Miguel artists have been following the
promotional route of local businesses by placing advertisements in local
publications such as Atencion, our
bilingual newspaper, and The San Miguel
Walking and Shopping Guide. Many of these same artists as well as others
use web sites geared to tourists that list their studios/galleries in a
directory and feature them for a hefty fee. It is a world-wide trend. Artists everywhere
are using whatever outlet they can afford to promote their work to the general
public in the hope that the exposure will bring them clients and ultimately lead
to more sales. In today’s competitive climate, the conventional wisdom is that
artists must brand themselves. Okay, fine, if they have a style that’s brand-able,
but if the work looks pretty similar to most of the other work out there it doesn’t
really make much sense to try to “brand” it. Branding should mean establishing
the uniqueness of a product or service. And therein lies another issue for me:
Style is style, and if you have your own then you don’t need to brand it
because it’s obviously yours. Why treat art like any other mundane product on
the marketplace? Fine art is above all this marketing gimmickry, or at least it
should be. Am I being too high minded? I don’t think so. And what makes even
less sense to me, and strikes me as a cheap tactic, is for artists to use a
photo of themselves rather than their work, which is what some San Miguel
artists are doing.
November 12, 2013
An Art Museum for San Miguel
San Miguel needs a serious art museum in order to enhance
its standing in the international art world. How can the global art community
look at this city with any respect without one? Until we have a credible art museum
we will remain merely a gathering place for bohemian artists. Exciting enough,
I admit, and I don’t see any problem with continuing just as we are. However,
if the intensified emphasis on tourism by the current mayor’s administration is
a reliable indication of the direction in which this city wishes to go, then we
will always have gaping hole in our cultural life. The recently opened Europa
House on Calle San Francisco, while wonderful in itself, is no substutute for a
museum. No urban center that is serious about becoming a cultural destination
can afford to be lacking in a city-supported museum of the visual arts.
October 31, 2013
Dead Art for the Day of the Dead
Art works in honor of Dia de Los Muertos should emphaaize
the spiritual over the commercial. Much of the art work I’m seeing around town
is much more commercial than it should be. It is dead art. Caterinas, painted skulls, and
skeletons abound. Is this respectful to the sacred tradition of the holiday?
Families get together to make flowers and use them to adorn altars, they gather
at home or at el cementerio to
remember their departed loved ones, they DO NOT dance around with someone
dressed up as a Catrina, and to multiply these Catrina figures (a skeleton
dolled up as a tawdry female, for those who don’t know) does a terrible disservice
to the spiritual beliefs of the occasion. You might even go as far as to call
it sacrilegious. As art in honor of the day, it is all rather tasteless.
Other subjects related to the holiday are more imaginative
and meaningful. Take, for example, my painting “Making Flowers for the Day of
the Dead” (see below). I painted this while I was still living in Zacatecas, a
city, I am happy to say, that has eschewed or at least avoided the
commercialism of San Miguel in this regard. The image is of three women, an old
woman and her grandaughters, making flowers to be used on an altar. The old
woman looks directly at the viewer because she is prepared for and willing to
face Death, who is not in the picture but should be understood to be standing
before the group. The two younger women look askance, over their shoulders
because they sense the presence of Death but are not ready or willing to face
him – it is not their time.
“Making
Flowers for the Day of the Dead”
October 26, 2013
Catrinas, Catrinas Everywhere
Catrinas, Catrinas everywhere. It’s that time of the year
again, folks. The Catrina image is another one (see my piece on Frida Khalo) I’ve
grown tired of seeing around the city. Must we have another, larger Day of the
Dead Festival featuring oversized Catrinas? We are going to be treated to a
parade of Catrinas! Wow! Now we will have skulls and skeletons and Catrinas on
murals in the Guadalpe neighborhood. Oh boy! How imaginative! Pretty soon we’ll
have them popping up all over the damn place. Help! there’s a Catrina in my
backyard! Waiter, there’s a Catrina in my soup! I was riding on the bus and who
should get on? A contigent of Catrinas! I was driving along Ancha San Antonio
when the traffic came to an abrupt halt and we had to wait until all the
Catrinas crossed, a whole herd of them! I understand the city is going to put
up new signs reading CATRINA CROSSING. Isn’t
that just delightful?
September 17, 2013
An Epiphany in a Courtyard
Sitting in the courtyard inside the Hotel Sautto on Calle
Hernandez-Macias I experienced a revelation, the shock of a door opening where
I didn’t expect one. I was resting peacefully in this beautiful outdoor space,
enjoying the warm sunshine of one of those perfect days in San Miguel,
meditating on my good fortune. Suddenly, the objects around me -- trees,
plants, arches, archways, tables, chairs, windows, doors – seemed to be bathed in an ethereal light and became transfigured
as if by a celestial illumination. They lost their everyday ordinariness and
took on a new meaning, a metaphysical meaning, and were transformed into a mystery
that I am still contemplating, but without any hope of understanding.
It was like the sensation of a dream, a waking dream, when portals open into the subconscious.
In his poem, Drunken Song, Nietzsche has Zarathustra say, “The world is deep, And deeper than the day could read.”
Dionysus would have agreed, and it is that experience of going out of one’s rational mind that I am trying to describe, when you see the world with the freshness and wonder of a child.
September 8, 2013
Artist Couples
There must be well in excess of a dozen artists couples in
San Miguel. I know four of them personally. Is this kind of marriage a good
partnership for creating art? I wonder. I’m sure it has its ups and downs, like
any other collaborative relationship. On the positive side, there is help with
motivation, the support of someone who can understand the creative process, and
the immediate critiques from another artist whose opinion can be valued and
trusted. On the negative side, there is the competition. Competition in a
marriage is a definite killer. And when one partner is more successful than the
other it is often a sure-fire home wrecker. A wife who sacrifices her own
creative work, as so many have done, in order to raise children or give her
husband total support will become resentful and embittered over time.
The most recent example of this poisonous effect came to my
attention with a documentary called Cutie
and the Boxer about Ushio and Noriko Shinohara, a Brooklyn-based Japanese
American artist couple who have been married for over 40 years. Ushio received
some success with his boxer paintings in the 1960’s, but he is now in his 80’s and
still struggling financially. Noriko’s work is having a second flowering, now
that she is able to give it more time. But her bitterness remains. Watch the
trailer on Youtube and you will hear Noriko’s resentment for her sacrifices come
through loud and clear.
Many of the great 19th and 20th century artists
did not marry other artists, most notably Renoir, Rodin, Pissarro, Monet, De Chirico, Picasso,
Matisse, and Dali. Perhaps they knew instinctively that it would be a mistake.
Better to marry their model or muse than another artist, they might have
thought.
The artist couples I know in San Miguel seem to be getting
along just fine, but . . . who knows? I hope their partnerships are mostly fruitful.
August 29, 2013
Ubiquitous Frida
The city of San Miguel has become over-saturated with tourist art by artists who cater to the tourist trade. Many of centro’s galleries are overflowing with impressionistic views of city streets and landmarks, so much so that my walks are often spoiled by the unchecked proliferation of these works. The eyes grow tired of them, and it’s gotten to the point where I can’t look into a shop window or read a restaurant menu without being confronted by them. I can hardly tell them apart – they all look so tediously the same. Sometimes they strike me as having been produced by the same artists, and often I muse that they have been cranked out by gnomes with over-active hormones working at a conveyer belt in a secret factory-like studio driven on by a demonic overseer wielding a cat-o’-nine-tails.
Without a doubt, the chief icons of the city are the Parroquia (the cathedral made of pink granite in the principal square and looking like a Gaudi gone a little conservative), and Frida Kahlo.
Painted and photographed images of the Parroquia show up everywhere, and although the cathedral is an amazingly complex and beautiful work of architecture deserving our reverence, it is and should remain a cherished symbol that should not be overly reproduced. As Mark Twain said, familiarity breeds contempt.
Frida Kahlo is the undisputed queen of this town. Her image is exploited endlessly and nauseatingly by artists of every stripe. Her portraits appear in the lowliest places among the most vulgar of venues, on handbags, tote bags, shopping bags, and bagatelles. And now -- most deplorably -- on a six pack of beer! Commercialism gone mad! What next, Frida Fries at McDonald's? ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! THIS FRIDA FRENZY MUST STOP!
It’s high time for the artists of San Miguel to place a moratorium on the production of these images. Do so voluntarily, dear artists, before the forces of good taste rise up and destroy them!
FRIDA
by A. S. Maulucci
She suffered greatly,
there is no doubt,
and out of this suffering
came her art.
Much of it gruesome,
some of it grotesque,
but in the best,
a beauty of a brutal kind.
Perhaps we’ll find no word for it
except to say she endured.
Somehow, making portraits of herself
helped her soul grow wings.
Painting with blood knit her spirit,
nurtured it like a tree,
and gave her a handhold
as she crawled through days of pain.
In her pictures we can hear a voice that sings,
not like an angel but a wounded child,
a voice that often cracks, gasps, croaks
with agony but never wails or whines,
endures each hammer stroke
with head held high.
Her soul is tremulous like a violin,
and each brush stroke plays a note
with dignity and with terrible force
as if suffering were the natural course
for every woman
who still has the keeping of her heart.
Nothing strangled in her jangled pain,
nothing tangled, nothing mangled,
it is simple pain, pure and plain,
splattered with grace upon a canvas
for all who have the courage
to look upon her nakedness
without shame.
August 23, 2013
San Miguel and the Global Art Market
According to a story in the New York Times (22 August 2013), the art market is being globalized. Dealers must now travel to far-flung art fairs in cities such as Hong Kong, Miami, and Basel, Switzerland in order to compete and sell art work to the richest collectors. Expenses for this approach to selling art can add up to the hundreds of thousands. Cost of most booths begins at $15,000 and can go as high as $100,000 for a large space. Mid-sized galleries are being forced to ante-up or close up shop, which many have done already, and the rate of attrition is alarmingly high. The Times article states that “the number of galleries in the big art districts has declined in the past few years — galleries in West Chelsea have fallen to 282 from a peak of 364 in 2007; those in SoHo have dropped to 87 from 337 in 1995.”
I wonder, will San Miguel be seen globally as an art fair destination? Perhaps it will, but not in the strictest sense. With most of our galleries located in centro and with Fabrica Aurora as an anchor, the city itself might be perceived as a kind of open art fair if promoted in the right way.
On the other hand, San Miguel might be overlooked by high-end collectors for the simple reason that we are not cutting edge enough, that is, we do not offer the glamour and excitement of big-city art fairs.
I’m not advocating for a gliztier approach to selling art in San Miguel, as I prefer the more relaxed method of individual gallery sales. However, if the future of selling art to high-end buyers is indeed the art fair model, then we must make adjustsments to our city’s image in order to put ourselves on the global art map and attract more affluent collectors.
Here’s a link to the NYT article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/arts/for-art-dealers-a-new-life-on-the-fair-circuit.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hp
August 8, 2013
EXPOSED
In general terms, the art of San Miguel can be categorized as either professional or non-professional, and a good deal of the art that is shown in San Miguel by non-professional artists is simply not ready to be exhibited in public. The quality is sorely lacking. It does not meet the standards of what any reasonable person would consider acceptable. When I walk about town and see inferior work I ask myself, as would anyone, why is this person putting their art work on public display? What motivates them? Sheer egotism? An overwhelming need to see their name in print? Exposure? Indeed, this is not the right kind of exposure. I feel for them, for making themselves so vulnerable. They’ve exposed themselves to ridicule. People wouldn’t say it out loud, because no one wants to say anything negative, but you can bet that people are thinking it. And like a rotten apple it leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and in a far-reaching way it damages the person’s name and reputation, and it ever-so-slightly tarnishes the reputation of San Miguel as a center for art of the hightest calibre. And when enough people add just a little to the negative, it grows and gathers momentum. After all, we do want San Miguel to be known as a world-class home for great art. So, dear non-professional artist, please think twice and make sure your work is ready before you hang it up on the walls of a cafe, store, or any other venue. It’s commendable that you are opening up your creativity, but you need to work harder to make your art better before you give it a public showing.
August 5, 2013
By Way of an Introduction
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