Art And Money

Art and money.

I’m an artist by training, but a writer as well. Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of writing and editing for personal finance blogs.

If you’ve asked yourself why an artist should write a personal finance blog, ask yourself why not – why do we have to labour under the prevailing myth that artists don’t, can’t, or shouldn’t make money?

The Myth of Purity

Art for art’s sake is a lovely concept, but it doesn’t make sense to a working artist. Working artists apply for grants, submit proposals to make work and seek out commissions.

However, most people don’t know about how artists work, and fall back on received myths from novels and movies. Myths are easy to sell and repackage. That’s why we have clichés: they are shortcuts to shared mental imagery, and it’s easy to be lazy and take the shortcut. But ask yourself – how many artists have you ever heard of actually starving in a garret? Do you even know what a garret is, anyway?

Most artists I know (and of course I know quite a lot of them) are far from starving, because they do whatever they have to in order to feed themselves and their families, whilst making their work.

In art schools and universities, we get bombarded with the idea that capitalism is evil. Actually I believe that it is evil, and furthermore, I don’t believe we’ll have capitalism forever. However, we have it now, and we have to get around it, investigate it, show it up for what it is and most of all, not give in to it – whilst living in it.

That’s not easy, but it’s possible.

Fair trade

In this system, we trade goods we provide or services we undertake for money. Accountants do this and so do artists – selling art is not the same as selling out.

Artists, shockingly, are real people, a few of whom get rather wealthy, and the majority of whom don’t. Just like everyone else.

Most artists “on the ground” have the dilemma of wanting to sell their work but not wanting to appear focused on money; yet most successful artists are classified as successful as a result of the monetary value assigned to their back catalogues.

Assigning value

Tell me, how does a work of art get to the stage of “priceless” these days? It’s a fine combination of time, myth (or public relations, a post-modern short-cut to myth) and value. The thing is, value is subjective, and not a ‘fixed value’, and in our era value has become synonymous with potential future price.

It’s complicated.

As much as I’d like to carry on waffling about art, value, selling and selling out, I’ll have to leave that for my PhD thesis, after which I’ll make you call me Dr. Devonish and charge a hefty fee for my waffling (because you’ll then perceive my waffling as coming from an inherently more valuable source than some random blogger).

What I’ll get back to now is the fact that art is not a clean commodity and does not exist in a vacuum, sealed off from filthy money on the outside; the art world is as filthy as anywhere else.

If you want further proof, read the excellent Seven Days In The Art World by Sarah Thornton.

Therefore, struggling to reconcile my lofty ideals with the world’s financial requirements is as good a subject of inquiry as any for an artist such as myself. The fact that currency exists both in hard and abstract forms, material and conceptual, appeals to me greatly, as does the idea that its circulation is far reaching and in a sense, unifying.

This is not about getting rich, however.

There are some people who won’t ever get rich, and I’m one of them. Quite simply, being rich has never been important to me, so I’ll never get there. I work part-time, spend time with my family, and devote time to my spiritual life, and this makes me happy. So being a mother and a wife is no less important than being an artist, and as long as I have enough for essentials and the odd emergency, I’m content.

Origins

Whilst contentment was always the most important thing for me, what made me start thinking (theoretically and practically) about money was getting married to a quintessential working-class northerner who quickly declared his intention to follow the British hysteria for homebuying.

Loathe as I was to commit to the system, I promised to get him his house… on our small incomes. No extra jobs, just plugging the leaks and working smarter. The goal was set, and a project emerged.

The project spawned a blog, which became a blogging business.

Unsurprisingly, it spilled over into my artwork. I wanted to develop my practice so that it could incorporate my new interest in finance and economics. All of the data I’ve generated from tracking income and expenses over several years could be poured into new artworks, but where would they be displayed?

I’m not even sure that “display” is the correct mode to think in. So how am I going to tie my two concurrent interests together?

Simple:

I’m going to make my own money.

The project is called Foreign Exchange. Why exchange? Because I’ll exchange my currency for yours, but if you want to change your mind, I’ll take it back.

This challenges the idea of the sale of artwork as well as the concept of its value.

You can get one of my hand-printed cheques via my Etsy store (Patreon patrons can obtain them at a discount).

Please stick around to see how it develops – I’m sure we’ll all be surprised.

Foreign Exchange – Creating My Own Artist’s Currency

Foreign Exchange – an artist’s currency

I’ve been working on (ok, thinking about) my currency project, Foreign Exchange, for a few years now.

Foreign Exchange refers to my experience of living between currencies. As a Barbadian, my country’s currency was tied to the US dollar at a rate of 2:1 – so there was always a sense of being half as valuable, or having to work twice as hard for the same result.

After moving to the UK, I experienced an even greater shift in value, with one Barbados dollar roughly equating to one third of one British pound at one point.

Creating my own currency is an act of resetting value.

I’ve naturally settled on an exchange rate of 2:1, resetting my own personal valuation along the lines of the system I grew up under.

Money is a faith-based construct. Every physical piece of money is a token offered in exchange for something of actual value. You have to have faith in the value of the token offered in exchange for money to exist and be worth something, and you have to have faith in the value of a society to appraise its currency at twice that of another’s.

Every Barbados dollar was worth only half of one American dollar, and that bothered me when I thought about the labour it took to earn that single Bajan dollar. It wasn’t worth less than the equivalent, but the money was.

How the art currency project works:

Artwork created for the project takes the form of cheques, coins and notes.

Notes are created with specific denominations (in limited editions).

Cheques are an even more personal form of exchange, as they must be written out to one individual, and that individual is free to request the amount they want the cheque to be made out for. (The minimum amount that a cheque can be written for is £25.)

You can take your chances in paying them in to your bank… whether they will be honoured is a risk you would have to take, but then that would mean that the artwork and its value as an artwork above its base matter would be lost.

How to buy this artist’s currency

Visit my store to view all currency artworks.

Smoking Man

Smoking Man: Lime Wood Carving, 2015.

There’s something a bit haunting and lonely about this piece.

I purposefully meant for him to stand apart from everything I had been doing, as if he was the embodiment of the outsider. Unlike most of my figures, this is an allegorical figure, not an exact portrait of a individual subject.

I wanted to follow the face and see where it would lead me, but at the same time resist the urge to polish that I usually indulge in my sculpture. The result was someone I did not know appearing out of the wood; as I carved, I decided who I wanted him to be.

I saw a worn down company man, mostly there but not entirely, waiting to be filled with whatever you expect to see inside and taking up less space than he wants to.

It was a bit like telling myself a short story.

Smoking Man. Lime wood carving with paper and graphite by Lee Devonish, 2015 — Smoking Man. Lime wood carving with paper and graphite, 2015

Materials with their own truths

The thin slivers of coloured paper wedged between the raw wood blocks point to the shared origins of both materials and their differing end points, as well the level of refinement each material has received and its perceived importance in the structure.

I enjoy relating this lamination of materials to the seams of difference that run through us, whether in the form of feelings, ambitions or a sense of identity.

Planes, imperfections and crossed directions

We are all composites of parts that come from the same source but don’t quite fit, and our grain might not run in exactly the same directions within us. Cut us apart and we are cobbled together with pieces that are hopefully assembled, with the spaces between being sometimes as precious as the solid parts that surround and consume space.

Or perhaps we started whole, and lost something along the way?

This piece is available to buy direct or from Etsy.

Why Do I Paint?

Why do I paint?

When I was 14, one of my art teachers asked me fairly sharply why I wanted to paint in oils; was it because that was what I thought art had to be?

Actually, I thought that art had to be interesting.

After giving up two-dimensional work soon after starting university for a future career as a ceramic artist, I can honestly say that I didn’t hold any of the preconceptions that my teacher supposed I had. I just wanted to explore as many different kinds of media as I could fit in. I wanted to learn everything.

I still feel that way, and sometimes I think I could be happy with any branch of the creative arts, as long as there was a challenge involved, a skill to be learned, and a goal to be reached.

Technique and challenge

The technical aspect of the arts, whether navigating a four or six string fretboard, creating stoneware glazes, or getting perfecting registration for prints, is to me extremely addictive. Finding the links between these apparently disparate branches is in itself potentially compulsive, and I have to restrict myself for my own sake – although at times my projects do choose me, not the other way around.

Just knowing that there is so much more to be learned is terrifying and terrific at the same time.

Since I started seriously exploring painting as a teenager, my internal question was, just how do I want to paint? It’s taken quite a bit of time and experimenting to acknowledge my style.

It came down to what felt natural, and what felt like a departure. Not that the departures are any less important – they may be more important due to their very nature, and they have all embedded themselves in my working vocabulary.

The memory in the medium.

I knock about with all sorts of media but I’ve found a great relief in admitting what a love I have for oil paint. Just the smell of it alone conjures up decades of memories and a different mindset.

I went through an early phase of exclusively using a palette knife, then returning to smooth brushwork, experimenting with bold colour, all the while questioning what it was I really wanted to do with paint. I didn’t have a clue, really.

Analysis paralysis

The blank canvas – used metaphorically – can become a terribly frustrating thing in very little time.

Stopping for several years, working in clay and fabric was, perhaps, the best thing I could have done after all. When I came back to painting, the excitement of revisiting an old friend far outweighed any worry about the results. Somehow my memory took over and I found there was very little anxiety, as if I’d never put the brush down.

Despite this, I still prefer to think of myself as an artist makes paintings, prints, drawings and other works, rather than a painter.

Why paint at all?

This is the perennial question to the painter in the age of conceptualism and the dominance of photography and video. Its answer is simple, though – painting is its own purpose.

Filtering the image through the medium is the goal in itself: the physicality of paint and painting, with its smell, movement, texture, colour and its history takes it beyond pure imagery. In the end, what we paint now lives in the realm of the relic.

Visual Research & Working Methodologies – An Essay

Visual Research and Working Methodologies: An Essay

The following text has been adapted from my student essay for the “Visual Research and Working Methodologies” module of my BA (Hons) top-up course undertaken in 2011.

Looking back over student work is a curious exercise; it feels strange to have communicated so earnestly, and so formally at the same time. Here it goes…

Visual Research and Working Methodologies

The intention for the work this year is to investigate the depiction of the male figure in contemporary art through the creation of a larger body of work, to be realised in the form of paintings and carved wood sculpture.

Several artists whose practices have been referenced are Ricky Swallow, Ana Maria Pacheco, Clive Head, Ellen Altfest, Patrick Hughes, Tomoaki Suzuki, Gehard Demetz and Willy Verginer.

The depiction of the male figure in contemporary fine art arose as a theme in the middle of the previous academic year, after the completion of several paintings and drawings of the artistʼs male friends. The attention they attracted, particularly from female viewers, posed the question of why in the post-feminist age the nude was still almost exclusively female, and why both male and female artists and viewers expected or preferred to see females as objects of art.

The paintings completed at the end of the year were meant to explore the reaction of the viewer to male subjects, presented as objects of beauty, and to question the assumed gender of the gaze.

The combination of two and three dimensional mediums is an important part of the development of the practice. Spanish devotional sculpture from the middle ages has recently come to the fore in terms of an historical precedent in bridging the gap between painting and sculpture, and in researching contemporary polychromed wood sculpture, the work of Ana Maria Pacheco and Tomoaki Suzuki has been of particular interest.

Ana Maria Pacheco is an artist who moves fluidly between various mediums, finding solutions to problems in one medium through working in another. (MacGregor, 1999. p.5) Pachecoʼs painted wooden figures are relevant to this research, as her aesthetic philosophy is found to be very appealing and sympathetic. She reflects that her colonial background may be the cause of her preference for her work to be well finished; she says,

“there is this thing about spontaneity, very closely connected with modernism, I find it impossible.” (Wiggins, 1999. p. 47)

Patrick Hughesʼs work as viewed in his retrospective exhibitions at the Flowers galleries in London was provocative, not in the direct way of manipulating perspective, but in his combination of highly realistic painting and 3-dimensional support. Reflecting on Hughesʼs work in the light of the recent interest in combining sculpture and painting, the synthesis seems entirely natural and very exciting. One method of working towards this combination is to utilise supports in circular and oval shapes instead of the traditional rectangular format, as have artists such as Frank Stella. Exploiting the cultural references of the circular and oval format will be a key aspect of the work within painting.

The work of Northern Renaissance artists including Holbein the younger has long provided an inspiration to attempt a similar effect of smoothness of surface, with the removal of the evidence of the artist.

The latest oil paintings, [redact]Tobi[/redact] (fig. 1) and [redact]Phil[/redact] (fig. 2) have shown an inclination towards this surface quality, but there is some way left to go in deciding how much of the brushstroke should remain, and how much mimetic illusion is aspired to. The effect of the artistʼs touch, the sensual effects of the paint surface and how much this affects the reception of the image in the mind of the viewer, is of great importance. On reflection, these last paintings produced have appeared static and overly slick in comparison to previous work, in particular [redact]Cill[/redact] (fig. 3)

A consolidation of style is therefore a key aim in production of this new work.

Since seeing the work of Clive Head at the National Gallery in London, the ambition has been to move the work towards a more detailed, photorealistic style. Some progress towards this was made in the last paintings, but there is much more progress to be made in terms of technique.

The hyperrealist work of Ellen Altfest at her exhibition “The Bent Leg” at White Cube, Hoxton, was a later discovery, and thematically is closely aligned to the current investigation of masculinity. Altfest similarly cites Sylvia Sleigh as an influence, and although in terms of painterly technique, her works are more thickly layered and heavily encrusted, the focus on detail is an essential link. (Storr, 2011)

Referring to Ricky Swallowʼs hyperrealistic sculpture Paton writes:

“we tend to associate detail with clarity, and conversely to think of blur and vagueness as the outward signs of mystery. In Swallowʼs art, however, detail is not an antidote to mystery but a form of it – a way to delay recognition, to make strange, to enlarge an object in a viewerʼs mind.” (Paton, 2004. p.10)

This view of detail as a form of mystery is a striking concept which encourages an interest in smaller sized, more detailed objects –

“Swallow is less interested in how loud an artwork can speak than how closely it can make you listen.” (Paton, 2004. p.64)

The intention is to expand further into a wider range of sizes, and produce a greater number of smaller paintings as a way of pushing the working methods. Since starting to exhibit and to enter work into competitions and open calls, the presentation of this current work has become a prime concern.

The impact that something as simple as framing has on the perception of a piece is a key area of interest and influences the choices made for the presentation of the work. Its usefulness as a method of contextualising images of men lies in how framing creates importance around an artwork, and how framing could create an artwork in itself. The frames will be used to present the images of men as works of art, to validate them as art by placing them in a very traditional sphere by presenting them as women traditionally have been.

The treatment of the frame as an integral part of the artwork incorporates the element of form within the 2-dimensional discipline, once more providing a link between the pictorial and sculptural.

Suzukiʼs use of scale, presenting his sculptures 1/3 life size, is something that sets him apart from other artists working in wood, and confers a very engaging quality to the pieces. Gehardt Demetz and Willy Verginer are both Italian artists carving naturalistic figures in limewood, and like Suzuki and Swallow they utilize virtuoso carving techniques which inspire emulation.

Suzukiʼs method of carving and painting is very interesting; he works towards a high level of detail, using photographs taken from 360º and carves very close likenesses. Yet his figures are not smoothed to the extent that Swallowʼs are; there remain traces of the tools, slight angular planes on the surfaces. He uses acrylic paint on limewood, but does not seem to use gesso to prime the wood. Perhaps because of this the skin colours can appear to be flat – especially when the subject is black. The paint appears chalky, and some of the wood grain remains visible through the paint, which hints to the process in the same way that the carving does. In contrast, the highly refined process of gesso application in traditional Spanish devotional sculpture lends a more naturalistic ground, and produces effects which are closer to the desired result for the artwork.

Whether the painting or sculpture is concerned with image or form, a predominant theme is that of “re-skilling”, connecting to traditional aspects of production and increasing technical fluency. The aspiration towards technical mastery that wood carving as a craft instills is obvious at amateur levels, as contemporary carversʼ societies show; this is a legacy of artists such as Grinling Gibbons.

The V&Aʼs Power of Making exhibition highlighted the debt that oneʼs attitude to working owes to oneʼs experience in design and craft. The exhibition focused on craft, on “objects that relate not to the quick invention of conceptual art, but to the slow perfection of skill”. (Miller, 2011. p.20) The line at which craft meets fine art is perennially an interesting one to define, especially within the discipline of wood carving.

“ʻCraftʼ is still a charged, even scandalous, term in the end of the professional art world that Swallow inhabits… There arose “a view of craft-skill as a kind of excess in artʼs economy of ideas – something ʻgratuitousʼ.” (Paton, 2004. p.95).

One of the ideas behind a traditional, skill-centric approach is an attempt to elicit a feeling of trust from the viewer.

“The care that we take in making something properly is cousin to the care that we retain for other people and their labour…selecting depth at the expense of breadth” (Miller, 2001. p.22)

It is important that the viewer feels able to trust the artist and thereafter become immersed in the discourse started by the artwork. In addressing the gender of the gaze, the viewer-subject connection and relationship becomes an essential aspect of the work, and this is established by the formal methods of production.

Figures 1, 2 & 3 are studen works, all now destroyed.

Bibliography

Adler, K. (7-24) 1999. in: Ana Maria Pacheco In The National Gallery. ed. Jervis, J. National Gallery Publications. UK

Bray, X. 2009. The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting And Sculpture 1600-1700. National Gallery Company Ltd. UK

Jopek, N. and Marqués, S. 2007. in: The Making of Sculpture: The Materials And Techniques of European Sculpture. ed. Trusted, M. V&A Publications

Langland, T. 1999. From Clay To Bronze: A Studio Guide To Figurative Sculpture. WatsonGuptill Publications. NY USA

MacGregor, N. [ps2id id=’MacGregor’ target=”/]1999. in: Ana Maria Pacheco In The National Gallery. ed. Jervis, J. National Gallery Publications. UK

Miller, D. [ps2id id=’Miller’ target=”/]2011. The Power Of Making. in: Power of Making: The Importance Of Being Skilled. ed. Charney. V&A Publishing

Paraskos, M. 2010. Clive Head. Lund Humphries. UK

Paton, J. [ps2id id=’Paton’ target=”/]2004. Ricky Swallow: Field Recordings. Craftsman House. Australia

Storr, R. [ps2id id=’Storr’ target=”/]2011. Ellen Altfest: The Bent Leg. White Cube. UK

Slyce, J. & Hughes, P. 2005. Perverspective. Momentum. UK

Wiggins, C[ps2id id=’Wiggins, C’ target=”/]. 1999. in: Ana Maria Pacheco In The National Gallery. ed. Jervis, J. National Gallery Publications. UK

Williamson, P (ed). 1996. European Sculpture At The Victoria And Albert Museum. The Victoria And Albert Museum. UK

Web references.

Corvi-Mora. accessed Nov. 2011. http://www.corvi-mora.com/tomoakisuzuki.php

Demetz Website. accessed Oct. 2011. http://www.geharddemetz.com/

Hada Contemporary. Cha Jong Rye. accessed Oct. 2011. http://hadacontemporary.com/cha-jongrye/

Leo Koenig Inc. accessed Oct. 2011 http://www.leokoenig.com/exhibition/view/694

Meneghelli, L. accessed Oct. 2011 http://www.whiteroompositano.com/english/willyverginer-text-by-l-meneghelli/

Moore, S. 2009. “Open Frequency: Tomoaki Suzuki”. Axis. accessed Oct. 2011 http://www.axisweb.org/ofSARF.aspx?SELECTIONID=20469

Pratt Contemporary Art. Ana Maria Pacheco. accessed Oct. 2011. http://www.prattcontemporaryart.co.uk/ana-maria-pacheco-2/