The painter as conservationist, Stephen Hannock, installed a new work at Denver Art Museum. The painting entitled “Mt. Blanca with Ute Creek at Dawn” was installed on May 13, 2010 in the Hamilton building in the Contemporary Western Art Galleries outside the 2nd floor bridge. The 80” x 120” painting is on a two year loan courtesy of collector and patron Louis Bacon, owner of the Trinchera Ranch in Costilla County near the base of Mt. Blanca.

Read about my interview with Hannock on adobeairstream.com.

However, since many of you don’t read HuffPo (Why not?) I’m including the link here on my blog.

The article is an open letter to Kelcy Warren, the new owner of BootJack Ranch. It’s a heads up on the minutia that is Pagosa, something I wish someone would have told me before we came to town more than 8 years ago. It’s also an invitation to Mr. Warren to become a part of our community.

You’re an outsider, Mr. Warren. You cannot fix our community, and I’m not asking you to do so, I just want you to be aware. Please don’t be someone who flies in and out to spend time at their private retreat, merely passing through our community, closing the gate behind them. Bring your love of music and your philanthropic endeavors with you when you come.

Mr. Warren’s assistant contacted me when he first saw this post and perhaps I’ll even get a face-to-face meeting with our new neighbor. I’m still waiting for schedules to allow. But I’m not holding my breath.

adobeairstream.com

DENVER, June 2    Art is a business. On websites like 20×200 art aficionados can purchase limited editions for as little as $20. Between 2004 and 2005 Duane Keiser’s Painting a Day blog garnered huge media attention for the artists daily postcard size paintings that he sold via eBay auction. Etsy.com is a marketplace for all things made by hand, from clothing to sculpture. And sites from Artist Register to Saatchi online have proliferated over the years making it easier for designers, consultants, curators and collectors to view a lot of art quickly. But are people really buying art sight unseen?

Former banker Alan Kircher is selling art online. He founded Artwork Network in Denver in 2004. Artwork Network is a coop gallery, art rotation, art consulting firm that provides web-based marketing service for artists and art related businesses.

“We’re growing into our name,” Mr. Kircher said in a recent interview. “We are at a point where we are becoming a trusted advisor in the industry.”

A few hours trolling for art on the Internet and one needs more than a trusted advisor—more like a bottle of Patron and some lime wedges to wade through the millions of images of bad, mediocre and occasionally intriguing art. It’s no wonder Artwork Network has developed interactive software for viewing of art. An interior designer can upload the floor plan of a project, digitally select artwork, place it to scale in a 3-D model, which can then be shown to a client, saving time and money. They can see that the scale of a painting is wrong or try differing arrangements without actually having to haul art back and forth. And since hotels and hospitals are primarily the ones buying art in bulk, the more cost effective, the better.
Artwork Network appeals to artists with a catchy slogan. “You do the artwork. We’ll be your Network.”

“It’s Marketing 101,” Mr. Kircher said. “You can mail out a postcard and get 1% return or you can become a member and we’ll bring more eyeballs to your work.”

The service seems to be working for Daniel Bahn an abstract expressionist painter. A click on his Artwork Network gallery page reveals twelve thumbnails of paintings priced from $590 to $4,800.The website tells me how many times each painting has been viewed and shows me what it would look like hanging above a leather chair. I even learn that Bahn has sold 29 works from $430-$3,225, that his abstract works are drawn from nature, and that he studies under Dale Chisman.

Artwork Network helped make Bahn visible to Mike Alcott, Senior Vice President of Colorado Capital Bank. Four years ago Mr. Alcott worked with Bank of Choice and helped them open a new location on 17th Street in Denver. He hired  Lynda Schroer of Bechta Graphics Ltd. to plan the space and furnish it. When it came time to discuss art for the walls Ms. Schroer referred Mr. Alcott to Artwork Network and the bank became an art rotation client. For two years Artwork Network rotated art at the bank. With each rotation the bank purchased items for their permanent collection, 24 pieces in all, spending $25,000. Mr. Alcott became an avid collector and owns several of Mr. Bahn’s paintings.

“I spent a lot of time on the Internet before the economy changed and I stopped spending money,” Mr. Alcott said.

He would view the art online and then go to the Artwork Network studio and often take the work home and live with it for awhile.

“I never brought it back,” Mr. Alcott admitted.

Mr. Alcott thinks Artwork Network is creating a more efficient sort of market for art. Where before he had to go to a gallery to purchase art, the Internet provides a more universal marketplace. But he confesses that it also requires a relationship.

“You have to have someone you trust in these things, someone you can talk to about the work and a place to go and look at it. If you’re an expert it might be different,” he said.

But it isn’t different for the experienced collector. Nancy Tucker has an extensive art collection. She confesses that she doesn’t normally buy art online, but recently wanted to change something out from her collection with something compatible to fill the spot. She ended up on the Artwork Network website after a Google search and saw a number of pieces she liked by Dimitri Kourouniotis. She contacted Artwork Network because she wanted to be sure the color was indeed a blue-red and not an orange-red. She got a quick response and even received an email from the artist. Ms. Tucker picked up the painting at Artwork Network studios in Denver.

“It was exactly what I thought I was buying and looked good color wise,” Ms. Tucker said. “It was a good experience. I wouldn’t be afraid to buy that way again.”

Ms. Tucker said she felt comfortable because she knew she was under no obligation to keep the piece if it hadn’t met her expectations. But she also says she knows her own taste and has a fair amount of art. Yet, she’s not sure she would have looked online for a signature piece for her living room.

Consultants often begin their search for new artwork on websites like Artist File and Artist Register. Curators search for emerging artists on White Columns because of it’s rigid selection process. Having work on sites like Artwork Network or Art Rent and Lease are ways for artist to get their work hung on a wall somewhere and out of their studio. Along with individual artist websites the Internet does allow more eyes to see an artist’s work. But for Greg Cortopassi, that wasn’t enough. He listed his work with Artwork Network and they placed his art in rotation at three luxury hotels and a winery, but he never sold anything.

“They placed my art, but nobody has to do anything, nobody has to invest in the art, there’s no reason for them to buy because they can rent it,” Cortopassi said. And while Artwork Network charges for the service of placing art, that rental fee doesn’t go to the artist and not every client will buy like Bank of Choice.

Cortopassi felt that he was competing for attention on the Internet asking: “How do you look at hundreds of pieces online and get excited about it?”

More importantly, who will buy all of this art?

“There seems to be a new paradigm,” Mr. Alcott said. “I think people, unless they absolutely need it are not buying. They are scaling down how they eat and dress.”

The primary buyers of art seem to be hotels, hospital and blue-chip billionaires hedging their funds in Warhols and Picasso’s. Collectors like Ms. Tucker and Mr. Alcott are not spending their discretionary income because their walls are already filled. Artwork Network doesn’t claim to be an art expert and they are not representing artists. For them, art is a product and they are a tool to help sell that product. Perhaps websites like Artwork Network can build their brand around a new kind of art buyer, one that doesn’t have to know the difference between acrylic and oil, whose willing to spend $500 for something because they like it and it matches the furniture, and for whom art is not a luxury but a necessity.

Art Ltd. Magazine

“How can I fuck this up?” That’s the question Jenny Morgan asks herself as she begins a portrait. Starting with 50 to 100 snapshots of friends, often women, but not always, Morgan selects one that reflects no smile or emotion: the person is relaxed, with their guard down and a deadpan stare. A breakthrough came when she painted her first self-portrait, exposing herself nude to the camera and then on canvas. It was brave act on her part, inspired by the fearlessness she sees in the work of Jenny Saville. Morgan then attempted to paint porn stars and prostitutes, but she didn’t feel connected to those women. “The work was insincere,” she says. Since focusing on people she knows, as Francis Bacon did, her painting has become more genuine. But the emotional states she portrays are not necessarily those of the sitter. “I’m seeing the person as a structure to put my own emotions on,” she observes.

Morgan’s art career began in Denver, as a student at the Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design; after getting her BFA, she moved to New York in 2006 to earn her MFA at the School of Visual Arts. Her portraits are as much about painting as about a person. “I love to see the paint build and get luminous,” she says. Morgan prefers oils, mixing colors with a knife. Her palette is primarily white with ochers and reds. She’s now sanding away the luster to reveal the red undercoat on her #10 grit canvas, giving her portraits a sunburned quality. Often the distortions look like bruises and the sitter can appear beaten, but in essence they are coming to life through the layering of pigment on canvas, the sanding, the mark-making. Just as a body is made of layers of muscle, epidermis and skin, we see that a portrait is made that same way. The blood flowing through the veins, the red layers beneath the skin contrasts with the hyper-realism of a lopsided breast, the non-expression of a face, a finger gently tugging a lip, a drooping eye.

In From The Valley To The Stars, Morgan has painted one hand and forearm black, creating a negative space. The other hand is glazed yellow, yet features all the fine detail of her style. In We Are All Setting Suns, one hand is red and outlined in white, incorporating printmaking and drawing techniques. The other hand is missing its skin, and has been sanded away to appear blotchy red, while the face appears as if under water, or refracted by a lens: blurry eyes with long, dark, vertical shadows. The hair in a Morgan portrait is disheveled, somewhat fly-away. She reveals the loose ends that are never seen in a magazine ad, the awkward curl standing out from the head. It could be interpreted as bedroom hair. But there is a disengaged element to her nude portraits. One does not sense sex or narrative when looking at a Morgan painting. And though she chooses a photograph in which the sitter “is extremely uncomfortable” the paintings are not difficult. Other emotions rise to the surface. No matter how stripped away or bruised a Morgan portrait is, the luminescence remains: that, and the eyes, powerful, real, gazing out from the canvas. It is through the eyes that we see Morgan’s emotion and her powerful fight to prove that painting is not dead and that portraiture can indeed be challenging, cool, and now.

Jenny Morgan’s work was featured in two solo exhibitions in 2009, “This Too Shall Pass” at Plus Gallery in Denver, and “Abrasions” at Like the Spice Gallery in Brooklyn. Her work can currently be seen in the group show, “Mirror, Mirror” at Postmasters Gallery in New York, through May 8, 2010.

Shane Bootenhoff’s “Lift” and “Typical System Schematic”

I recently learned of several small art movements that are relatively new to the list of “isms” that make up art history. Along with post-modernism and conceptual art we can add funism, thinkism and stuckism. Funism proponents believe that art should be as much fun to look at as it is to think about and that art should be intellectually engaging without being intellectually elitist. Thinkism claims to be the first art movement of the 21st century and suggests that art shed light on various social, philosophical, political, environmental, psychological and religious issues. Stuckism is an international art movement for contemporary figurative painting with ideas. Proponents claim it’s anti- the pretensions of conceptual art, and anti- the notion of anti-art (rooted in Fluxus). One website claims there are 206 stuckist groups in 48 countries.

And what does this have to do with the senior art majors’ exhibition at Fort Lewis College, you might be asking?

Well, as it turns out, just about everything.

In Durango, art students are not always exposed to the newest, most avant-garde work from the finest galleries and museums in New York, London and around the world. They are likely not familiar with Ryan Trecartin, the twenty-something art phenom from Philadelphia known for his disjointed videos or Cao Fei, the Beijing artist who explores the rapid evolution of Chinese society and cultural trends through photography, video and new media. They can identify the work of über artists Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami because well, frankly, those images are everywhere – you’ve probably seen the giant shiny balloon puppies, diamond encrusted skulls and neon flower and eyeball patterns, too.

Viewing the exhibit in the FLC gallery, I am reminded that there is a purity of purpose to the art these students create, based in the traditional mediums of painting, sculpture, photography and design. One will not find a fine art video or audio installation at FLC. (That may be problematic for students who want to pursue their MFAs, as new media art is everywhere.) What one will find is strong, elemental and basic design skills from the graphic students who show an eye for color, negative space and typesetting. I was particularly fond of the “Prairie Thunder” music festival posters by Ian Doig for their simplicity and powerful use of color to attract my attention. Deana King produces something of a hybrid between graphic design and drawing in her white on black “Velvet Acid Christ Posters” a work that might qualify for the thinkism movement for its apocalyptic symbolism and imagery.

Drawing also stands out in this exhibit, particularly mark-making with charcoal and watercolor and graphite. Traditional figurative works, like “Growing” by Arline Yazzie Paul of two twin toddlers, show mastery of skill and technique. Same with “Cold Case” by Alan
Miller, a close up of a face featuring intense turquoise eyes. Shellie Douglass shows two nudes created by drawing on Mylar that is then exposed to sunlight to create solar plate etchings. She also shows “Libby” a charcoal drawing of a pre-teen girl bent at the waist looking sadly, angrily or disinterestedly at the viewer, hands clasped between her knees. Douglass and Slater Bootenhoff share a collaborative drawing that results in an image with tension between the figurative and the organic that may qualify as a stuckist work.

Bootenhoff’s paintings were my favorite pieces from the show, though both are very different. “Typical System Schematic” is mixed media featuring layers of what might be drawing, sumi-e ink, printmaking, painting and etching in rusty colors and black. His oil painting, “Lift,” employs a similar orange color with blue and white resulting in a sophisticated work of abstraction.

In the category of funism, I would situate Araina Marsden’s “Tetris” sculpture, a wooden drawing of a doll playing video games on TV, and Shannan Cruise’s “Literature Alive,” a playful yet dark octopus-like creature emerging from a stack of opened books.

So when it comes to the distinction between the latest art movements and what is happening in art programs like the one at Fort Lewis, we see that the line is malleable, and a foundation in the basic elements of art making is likely to stand the test of time.