p.a.n. Etching

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Comment by Dorin Macovei on September 12, 2009 at 10:20am

Comment by Dorin Macovei on September 11, 2009 at 6:53pm

Hello!
I admire what you do and are happy as can be with you!
Dorin Macovei

Comment by steve fraser on September 11, 2009 at 6:35am

Thanks for the invite.

SlainTe!!!

Comment by Barry Smylie on July 16, 2009 at 12:31pm

Home interior design is one of the expressions of family. The home is a place disconnected from society and, idealistically, safe from survalence and unwanted and unwarrented criticism.

Landscape archetecture forms the boundry between private residence and the surrounding polis. The garden has three distinct points of view. The the view from the outside and the view from the inside and the views from the passage in or out and at those at rest on a patio or deck.

Comment by Mirza Rais on July 16, 2009 at 4:15am

Home Interior Design - Many people have said that interior design is the process by which we connect with people, and connect with the world while staying safely within our own space. It is safe to say that through interior design, we connect with some energy, some force, and some thing that expresses who we are and how we want to live.

Comment by Barry Smylie on July 6, 2009 at 5:42pm

Comment by Barry Smylie on June 23, 2009 at 4:13pm

This is, of course, an acrylic painting but, it is a painting about printmaking. When I began the painting I began a process to do a polymer transfer and "lift" the litho ink from the rag paper of the print which is the subject of the painting. I wished to overlay the transparent litho transfer on the right hand side of the painting. Rag paper fibers came of in the polymer making the image slightly cloudy. It was a failure. I learned that the polymer transfer process works only with commercial paper that has a clay coating.

I laminated the lithograph to the back of the painting.

The paper fibers are not obvious on the reverse. The weave of the canvas is visible. The graphite signature, edition number, and title of the lithograph transfered well. That surprised me.

This is certainly a graphic technique but, is it graphics?

Comment by Barry Smylie on June 8, 2009 at 4:17am

oops, the title of the print is "Joseph and His Brothers" not "Conceptualism".

Comment by Barry Smylie on June 8, 2009 at 4:07am

"Conceptualism Lithograph 1990 edition of 20.
It is a tragic story. The (hand) print revival began in provincial Canada in the early 1950’s and continued until the early 1970’s. I was lucky, I caught the tail end of it and managed to pay my tuitions, rent, and food with the help of print sales out of my studio at Sir George Williams University in Montreal.

I saw my first conceptual piece in 1970. A neighbour in Montreal’s student ghetto had proudly dragged boulders into a compositional form in a city park and declared it to be art.

About the same time public gallery curators began to envision a new public art of the people. This new art would be chosen by the art elite governing the national, provincial, civic, and regional art galleries. It would be an art which could not be “consumed” by the rich. It was funded by tax dollars and commissioned or chosen by curatorial staff. It was gallery installation of conceptual art and quasi theatrical “performances”. The bolder composition entered the public art gallery and was placed in a performance ritual before an audience. The public galleries choose to ignore the graphic arts and the lower costs of editions allowing middle class and working class to possess art of their own choosing probably because it placed the art intellectual, curator, and critic in their traditional role of recording the tastes of the patronage. The new chosen role of the art intellectuals was as super conceptualists who used conceptual artists as players in a cycle of gallery installations and performances. The curator was becoming a social and art engineer.

The private “commercial galleries” at around the same time were chaffing from the raw rubbing effects of the lower prices of graphic art and the reduced commissions of graphics. They were either unwilling or unable to raise the frequency and broaden the market to reflect the consumer “mass age” as all other cultural objects from automobiles to clothing to fast food and industrialized farming. Consequently they drove the prices of prints up (with the artists willing consent – eg. the pop prints of Andy Warhol and Robert Lichtenstein) to nearly the same prices as paintings generating a consumer move away from graphics towards one of a kind artworks.

Parallel to that the government began taxing the sale of art federally and provincially through sales taxes and taxing the second sale of art through capital gains tax. The government created another tax, the inheritance tax based upon on estimated market value of artworks being passed from one generation to another.

This is how the art trade became isolated from the rest of the mass culture and how it became isolated in a phantasmagoria of snobbish elitism, revolutionary paper tiger zeal, and social engineering.

The boom of the art trade in prints collapsed. During the 1950’s and 1960’s the trading of prints resembled the trade of sports cards or, later, the trade in “Beanie Babies”. It resembled stock market investment. By 1975 the boom was bust and, in Canada, art became a government sponsored invalid. The only reason that consumers had for art was to decorate their walls with paltry paintings and photo reproductions of the same type of backward imagery called “limited edition lithographs”. Even then in the face of massive sales by the Neo-Victorian painters in reproduction the public galleries refused to admit that the course of art was beyond their control. Even the Venice Biennial which began as a trade show of national artists promoted by galleries became like a cultural Olympics sponsored by nation states.

The limited edition photolithograph confused the consumer and what was earlier obvious… the hand printed graphic on rag paper vs. the machine printed photograph of a painting on commercial stock could not be defined easily. It became impossible to support hand printed, artist/printmaker editions. Eventually to further confuse the phrase “art graphics”, drawings, photo prints, and computer prints became recognized as art graphics by exhibition and expert opinion groups such as The American Print Alliance.

So, nearly 40 years later, here we are. Where do we go from here?

Comment by Mukesh Parth on June 6, 2009 at 9:31am

After loing time I feel fresh
Thanks for inviting me.

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