The Storyteller by Andy Thomas, Oil, 30 x 36

"...is there anything better than a campfire
on a moonlit evening and a good story?"


 I originally penned the following commentary as the forward to Andy's Book The Artful Journey.

“What kind of painter is Andy Thomas?”

I asked myself this perplexing question the first time I saw the artwork of Andy Thomas.  Indeed, most people viewing Andy’s artwork for the first time wonder the same thing.  In answering this question, I’ve found that many people try to mentally categorize artists into discrete little classifications.  Think about some of the terms you may have heard to describe artists: “Western” painters, “landscape” painters, “portraitists”, “plein-air” painters, “wildlife” artists, and “impressionists.”  An indefinite number of such categories exists.  However, Andy is an artist who defies classification and as such, some people find it difficult to answer the question, “What kind of painter is Andy Thomas?”  I have unraveled the mystery and I will give you the deceptively simple answer to this question.

The first time I viewed Andy’s artwork, I had never heard of him.  Andy has sent a slide portfolio for my business partners and I to review for possible inclusion of his paintings in an invitational exhibition that our gallery was hosting.  As we projected the images of his artworks, I became more and more excited because each painting was so interesting and beautifully executed.  From composition and brushwork to content and color, Andy obviously “had the chops.”  He was one of the most technically proficient artists I had ever seen.  But what really struck me most about Andy’s paintings was the extreme variety – each one was so unique.  No two were alike, one was a western, and another was a historical maritime battle.  Some were tightly rendered, while others were beautiful, loose impressionism.  It didn’t appear that Andy’s paintings had any common themes.  I found this quite unusual; after all, most artists I’d encountered had some commonality joining their paintings – most artists fit into a neat classification.  But as I said, Andy seemed to defy classification.  Nevertheless, as we came to the last slide, I didn’t want it to end.  I wanted to see more.  Andy definitely had my attention and my interest, and I knew that we had discovered a very special artist.  Needless to say, we accepted Andy into the invitational exhibition and within five minutes of viewing his slides, I called Andy to find out more about him and his enticing artwork.

It’s very rare that I get as excited about an artist’s work as I did about Andy’s that day.  As I reflected upon my excitement, I began to wonder why was I so excited about Andy’s work?  After all, I’d seen a lot of great artwork over the years.  In considering this question, I realized that the extreme variety of Andy’s artwork was one of the most exciting aspects.  Here was an artist who seemingly could paint nearly all subjects and all styles.  But again I wondered, “What kind of painter is Andy Thomas?”  I knew that there must be some common thread; I just wanted to figure out what that common thread was.

I went back and projected the slides again, and I found that I kept stopping to view a painting titled Storyteller.  It was my favorite painting in the group.  It depicted a gathering of cowboys around a campfire at dusk.  One of the cowboys (obviously the title character) was telling a story to the others.  As I viewed this painting, I realized that it held the answer to understanding the enigma of Andy Thomas!  I had found the common thread…Andy Thomas is a Storyteller.

All of the paintings told a story.  Now the wide diversity of subjects made sense!  One was a story of a pirate enjoying his treasures, another was the story of ballerinas preparing for a performance, and of course, the maritime battle was Andy’s depiction of a true historical story.  After all, what kind of storyteller would tell the same story over and over?  Andy employed varied styles of painting to enhance the emotion of each particular story.  He painted the ballerinas in a soft and impressionistic manner thereby imparting a feeling of spontaneity and movement.  By contrast, he rendered the maritime battle in a tight and detailed style, giving the viewer the feeling of military precision. 

The more I thought about Andy’s works, I began to realize that their storytelling or narrative quality is exactly what made them so exciting.  In fact, I have come to believe that the ability to paint with this narrative quality is what separates mere painters from true artists.  I feel that a painter is someone who can render a subject and make it look realistic to the viewer, but a true artist can say something with the same scene.  In other words, the true artist, like Andy, can tell a story with his artwork.  To put it simply, the work of a painter shows the viewer what he painted, but the work of an artist shows the viewer why he painted. 

After realizing that, visually through his paintings, Andy is a storyteller, it didn’t surprise me to learn that Andy also composes written stories, some fictional and some historical, to accompany most of his paintings.  People viewing Andy’s artwork find these written stories extremely interesting and they help viewers gain a deeper understanding of Andy’s artwork.  In talking with Andy, I also learned that his story….the story of his life…is also quite interesting, but I’ll save that topic for another time.

So the answer to the question, “What kind of artist is Andy Thomas?” is simple.  Andy Thomas is a storyteller and as such, he is in excellent company.  I pose the question, “Isn’t all great art narrative?”  Think about great operas, the Bible, great literature, classical music, and the works of the old masters.  They all tell stories.  In telling stories, Andy is the greatest kind of artist, and he depicts the most important kinds of subjects: the struggles and achievements of humanity.

Although The Artful Journey is about the artwork of Andy Thomas, it’s also about the stories of Andy Thomas.  In my opinion, Andy is one of the master artists and master storytellers of our time.  So as you enjoy his artwork or his book, sit back in your favorite chair, get relaxed and enjoy the artwork of Andy Thomas…the Storyteller.

Sincerely,

Clint Watson
Software Craftsman and Art Fanatic

PS:  We have a special $10 discount on Andy's book for FineArtViews.com members, visit the following link if you are interested in ordering it:
http://www.fineartviews.com/4/lp_116/skin_/pg_productdetail.html/sr_2

Race Horse by Andy Thoms	Cowboy Jig by Andy Thomas

This essay is re-published in it's original form from The Daily Reckoning Web site.  It is re-published according to the guidlines presented on their web site.  To visit their web site and learn more about Bill Bonner or The Daily Reckoning, please visit:

http://www.thedailyreckoning.com

The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS: Remember when the role of artists was to draw out the beautiful and noble from contemporary life? Well, times have changed - recently, so-called 'rock star' Pete Doherty announced he would charge $1,750 for paintings he created - out of his own blood. Bill Bonner explores...

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A SCALAWAG
by Bill Bonner

Today's artist has a special status, somewhere between a grand dragon in the Ku Klux Klan and a circus carney for Barnum and Bailey. He is a rebel who gets invited to all the best parties. He is a bit-actor on the margins taken seriously by the rich and the powerful. He is an icon-buster, who peddles his own shoddy images for worship and glorification. And, he is a born genius, with no visible talent, except for self-promotion.

In short, he is a humbug.

Artists have always been critics of the times and conventions they lived in. When Dante drew his picture of Hell, he made sure to put into it all the leading citizens of his day. Shakespeare made almost all his Englishmen either pathetic or comic. The artist has his task cut out for him, for no time and no race is ever perfect. It is he who has to draw out the beautiful and noble from the dross and bilge of contemporary life.

But cometh the 20th century, and now the 21st - the artist has taken on a new role. He has greased himself into the job of Arbiter of Cool. He is the bouncer at the local hot spot who gets to tell the customers if they're hip enough to enter or not.

The humbug has a whole platoon of partakers - museum curators, critics and most importantly, the art promoters. It is, after all, they who make the crucial decisions. They are in cahoots. One stumbles across some no-account brush-wielder and promotes him to his friends in the museums. The friends bring in the critics early, so that the shysters can then claim to have discovered the great one before he became great. And at the end of the assembly line, weak-minded collectors and greedy investors are lured into forking over enormous prices.

Meanwhile, the whole concatenation of grand larceny and petty indecency creates such a buzz that it convinces the rest of the world that it has a real talent on its hands. What else does the rest of the world have to go on? The artwork itself may be as empty and meaningless as a state of the union address, but it is hanging in an important gallery! Van Der Loon said it was "original" Some chump paid big money for it!

We marvel at the elegant symmetry of it all: Things with no value are bought by people with no sense. Money flows from weak hands to stronger ones. Make believe art flows from scalawags and hustlers to dimwits and social climbers. Life goes on.

Andy Warhol was not a great artist, but he was no fool. When he died, it was discovered that with his own money, he bought traditional, representational paintings - not post-modern blotches. He was a great promoter. His Portrait of Nelson A. Rockfeller #3 sold for $401, 750 just six years ago. Last week, it brought $1,136,000. Mark Rothko's White, Orange, and Yellow, an amazingly dull painting, brought about $300,000 from some sad-sack investor 12 years ago. Last week, it was expected to go for as much as $3 million. Instead, a much greater fool came along and paid $4,160,000. And the big winner was a silly painting by Roy Lichtenstein entitled Sinking Sun, which brought $15,696,000 - about 150 times more than it sold for in 1974.

Why the high prices? A study published in the Feb. 10, 2006, issue of Science magazine, helps to explain it. The authors, Matthew J. Salganik and Peter Sheridan Dodds of Columbia University, and Duncan J. Watts of the Santa Fe Institute, looked at how people judged music on their own...compared to their reactions when they knew how popular the music was among their peers. The results were hardly surprising. People appreciated the songs in a fairly random way when they were left to their own devices, but as soon as they had "social influence" to guide them, they tended to focus on just one or two popular songs, while ignoring those that were judged by the group to be unpopular.

A few decades ago, a man who made some money would buy his way into a higher status society by getting Gainsborough to paint his wife or buying a Chippendale dining room set. Now, it is cool that counts, and a man desperate for social status has to hang framed trash on his walls. Or put pickled sheep on his mantelpiece.

In 1997, a show of contemporary art in London called "Sensation," broke all records for attendance and bad taste. It was so lewd and repulsive the papers couldn't stop talking about it, which, of course, only brought in bigger mobs of gawkers. But there were also howls of complaint, too. For, included was a giant painting of Myra Hindley composed from a child's handprints. Americans may not recognize the name, but they will recognize the modus operandi. Hindley is infamous, and behind bars, for murdering children and recording their screams as she tortured them. Outraged viewers - including the parents of the murdered children - begged the Royal Academy not to exhibit the painting. When officials refused (they risked being un-cool!), protesters attacked the painting with eggs and ink. Thereafter, it had to be restored and protected by plastic. One of the mysteries of contemporary art is why anyone bothered to restore it; the painting was no less attractive, and no less shocking, after its amending by the protestors.

"Sensation" was sensational. It gave a boost to contemporary "art" that was felt across the pond, when Mayor Giuliani threatened to withdraw funding from the Brooklyn Museum for hosting the show. But Giuliani eventually backed down. He didn't want to risk being too "uncool" either - not when the U.S. Senate beckoned. The show went on...and the prices went on to rise.

Since then, "art" has gotten even more repulsive and ridiculous. Ex-stripper Stella Vine, promoted by Charles Saatchi, pandered to celebrity culture with a painting of Princess Diana with blood dripping from her lips. More recently, an artist invited to exhibit at a Swiss art center, proposed a bit of performance art - bulldozing down the center!

Even a jackass could see that this doctrine leads nowhere. "Artists" are already fornicating on stage. We wait for the day when they will be shooting each other, drenching the bodies in anti-freeze and putting them on display. Then, perhaps a bout of mass-murder, nun-raping and, even worse, cigarette smoking! Sooner or later, they will run smack into the residual decency of the public, if there is any left. And then, of course, their oeuvre will really soar in value!

Works of "art" have turned crude and hideous. The artists are divided between charlatans and cretins, and the promoters are Hell-bound perverts. But it is the buyers, the investors, and the collectors for whom nature reserves her hardest kick and her heartiest laugh.

Critics of contemporary art, on the other hand, are so indignant they can barely chuckle, worrying over how it undermines high taste and presses down on popular culture like a container full of Che T-shirts. Of course, they are right. The modern artist is no artist but a swindler who cannot do the job of distinguishing between the beautiful and the ugly - or the sordid and the noble. He cannot really draw out beauty, because he lacks the skill. Nor can he even criticize, because he lacks an aesthetic reference. All he can be is a provocateur, shocking the bourgeoisie.

The critics take the whole thing too seriously and miss the elegant comedy of it. No sooner do people get their hands on money, than nature comes up with absurd ways to take it from them. Who would have believed that any man declared compos mentis - able to drive a car or serve on a jury - would pay $95 million for one of Pablo Picasso's oeuvres from his "I hate my girlfriend" period? Who would pay $598,000 for Elizabeth Peyton's wretched painting of David Hockney? Who would pay $100,000 for Damien Hirst's bottled fish? But didn't Damien Hirst entitle one of his paintings, Kiss My F**king A**? What could be cooler than that? And isn't the whole idea of art to break taboos? No one held a gun to the buyers' heads. No court order required them to do it. They just did it, driven by some natural urge to part with their wealth.

And then what do you suppose happened? Even greater fools (where do they get these people?) came and paid even more. If a bull market can turn a moron into a genius, the art market deserves federal funding. It has done for the elite what the housing boom has done for the lumpen. They all think they deserve a Nobel Prize. What a delight for the art mongers! The buyers' pockets are full, their heads are empty, and the coast is clear.

Recently, Chinese "artist" Zhou Tiehai decided to test the art establishment's pretensions. At first, he tried various combinations of avant-garde collages. At one point, so to speak, he even stuck fellow "performance artists" with a needle...prefiguring his later jabs at the art community. When none of that took off, he must have asked himself what taboo could be left. Art itself, of course, the idea of the artist, busting through the icons of bourgeois society...liberating the masses from their subservience to the money gods and the sanctions of everyday convention. What better icon to hit with a sledgehammer? In short, Mr. Zhou decided to pull the art world's leg.

What could be more commercial, more artistically shallow, more intellectually démodé and more culturally mal vue than that symbol of cigarette advertising - Joe Camel? Zhou hired some local hack artists (he saw no reason to get his own hands dirty) and drew out a few images - putting Joe Camel's head into well-known, classic European paintings - and let his crew turn it into a work of art. Perfect, he thought, an icon of modern predatory commercialism grafted onto the work of a great master. They will see that I am mixing together the great and the crass. They will see that I am mocking the whole idea of icon-busting art.

"It's really not that hard to create art," he says.

Not the way Mr. Zhou does it. But in making fun of art, Mr. Zhou managed to put himself in the forefront of the taboo-bashing league of mediocre clowns who make up today's art world. Instead of being shunned by the elite art collectors, critics and buyers whose legs he pulled, he was embraced by them.

Instead of slipping his paintings in their closets and admitting that they'd been had, they proudly put them on the wall...and paid as much as $100,000 for them.

But contemporary art is still going up in price. Vox populi, vox dei. Collectors and investors are making money, but pity them anyway. The "art" may be worth a fortune, but they have to live with it. No amount of money could be worth that.

Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning

Editor's Note: Bill Bonner is the founder and editor of The Daily Reckoning. He is also the author, with Addison Wiggin, of The Wall Street Journal best seller Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century (John Wiley & Sons).

In Bonner and Wiggin's follow-up book, Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis, they wield their sardonic brand of humor to expose the nation for what it really is - an empire built on delusions.

I disclose that I'm not neutral on this one.  I built the web site for RayMar that manages the competion.  However, they are funding $26,500 in awards, so it might be worth your time to enter it.

If you're an oil or acrylic painter, you may enter as many paintings as you like in RayMar's monthly competitions.  If you painting is selected as a finalist, your artwork will be displayed on their site.  In addition, if you become one of the annual winners, you could win from $1,000 - $10,000.

For details go to:

http://www.raymarart.com/ac

Author: Clint Watson | 0 Comments | Post a comment | Topic: Competitions | Permalink

I've been thinking about what things should be essential to every artist's web site.  I'm still pondering the question and the list may change over time, but as it stands today, here are my top 10 recommendations:

Essential Elements of the Artist’s Web Site

1.      A Domain Name containing your own name
a)      A .com name essential
b)      More than one domain OK
c)      No hyphens or numbers in domain

2.      Clean and Consistent Design
a)      Navigation links should appear in same place on every page
b)      Page design should be consistent across the site
c)      Design colors should be neutral or complimentary to artwork.
d)      Large image on home page – not much text
e)      No long paragraphs of instructions or too much wording – people don’t read online

3.      Easy, Text-Based Navigation
a)  Image based Buttons tend to compete with the artwork
b)  Text is picked up and followed by search engines better
c)  It should always be clear what page the visitor is on
      i) Navigation should be obvious links, underline, and change color
     ii) Title of page should be prominent on each page
     iii)  Title of page should be properly displayed in title bar of browser

4.      Contact Information on Every Single Page
a)      Preferably a phone number for those who prefer to call
b)      At least an email address

5.      A “Join Email List” link that handles subscriptions automatically
a)  Easy and essential way to build a marketing mailing list

6.      Divide large portfolios into collections
a)      Try to keep each collection to about 20 pieces no more than 50
b)      Too many pieces can be overwhelming, so subdividing lets visitors narrow down the types of pieces they want to see without wading through too many images

7.      Make it easy to buy
a)      Display Prices - People don’t want to track you down to find out your prices…and many would be buyers won’t.
b)      Include a good shopping cart if you sell direct from your site
c)      Gallery / Contact information under each piece if you sell through galleries
d)      Have a complete list of your galleries/dealers on your site

8.      High-Quality Photographs
a)      Large enough to see painting detail
b)      Good color
c)      Not too large (don’t take up bandwidth, download time and disk space unnecessarily)
d)      Properly Cropped
e)      If doing e-commerce, include Framed and Unframed for paintings, At least two sides for sculpture

9.      Easy to Update / Site always Current
a)  Preferably you can easily update the site yourself
b)  If it’s not easy you won’t do it
c)  Update site as soon as you finish new works
d)  Don’t leave sold works on site for too long

10.  Your current biography

Any feedback on this list is welcome from artists and/or collectors.  I would like to know what works for others and what site visitors would like to see when visiting an artist's web site.

Sincerely,

Clint Watson
Software Craftsman and Art Fanatic