Oh, how I hate those parasites.

In case you’re not aware, comment spam is valuable because Google and other search engines rank sites based on how many other sites link to them. Google tends to filter out any site that’s just a bunch of crappy links, so just making sites solely for that purpose is a waste of time. But a link in a comment from a site Google considers legitimate (this site has a Google page rank of 4 out of 10, which is not too bad for a blog with a limited audience) does count. Enough such links, spread out over the internet, gets a site onto the first page of Google search rankings and decreases the cost of purchasing ads.

That’s worth money, so scumbags write programs to scour the internet, finding sites where automated comments can be entered. They are often written to look kind of like a generic nice comment, such as “Excellent points. Keep up the good work!” with hidden links. If you write a real comment that looks generic like that, it’s likely to end up in the spam filter.

Sigh. Sorry for the non-art post, but it’s kind of frustrating.

This is a commissioned piece. The customer wants a painting of this pair of jeans (supplied by him) against a black background. We went back and forth on the composition, eventually settling on making it look as if they were being worn by an invisible person. That entailed hiring a model to wear the jeans as I paint, since I’m pretty bad at working from photos.

As you can see, I’m working my way down. I mixed and tubed a base color and applied that as an initial dead coloring layer. I am working on top of that. Right now, the jeans are hung in midair so that I can paint the inside parts. The customer wanted to capture the iconic nature of Levis 501’s, so the inside tags—especially the one that will have a bright red 501 on it&mdahs;are important.

I’ll try to post better pictures later on.

I like how it’s coming at the moment. In some ways this is an interesting and exciting project, and in others it will be really good to get this done, as it also represents a block on my other work.

The art world responded by repeating the same joke, with slight variations, over and over, while pretending to take itself seriously in the process. Much money was made by selling random objects to rich suckers. Now the whole joke may finally be starting to fall a bit flat.

The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art, on the other hand, depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist. That’s why looking through the history of conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons. Jokes about Cadillac tailfins and early fax machines were once amusing, and the same can be said of conceptual works like Piero Manzoni’s 1962 declaration that Earth was his art work, Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 “One and Three Chairs” (a chair, a photo of the chair and a definition of “chair”) or Mr. Hirst’s medicine cabinets. Future generations, no longer engaged by our art “concepts” and unable to divine any special skill or emotional expression in the work, may lose interest in it as a medium for financial speculation and relegate it to the realm of historical curiosity.

In this respect, I can’t help regarding medicine cabinets, vacuum cleaners and dead sharks as reckless investments. Somewhere out there in collectorland is the unlucky guy who will be the last one holding the vacuum cleaner, and wondering why.

But that doesn’t mean we need to worry about the future of art. There are plenty of prodigious artists at work in every medium, ready to wow us with surprising skills. And yes, now and again I walk past a jewelry shop window and stop, transfixed by a sparkling, teardrop-shaped precious stone. Our distant ancestors loved that shape, and found beauty in the skill needed to make it —even before they could put their love into words.

It’s crap. Your heart will never have any idea how to paint.

Of course, there are a few artists out there who could benefit from some loosening up. For every one of them, there are a hundred others who need to learn how to actually paint. This entails the acquisition of difficult skills and the mindset to use those skills to achieve specific goals. Some of those skills are:

• How to draw
• How to draw exactly what you see
• How to draw the figure
• How to draw the portrait
• Proportion
• Perspective
• Foreshortening
• Color theory
• Color mixing
• Composition
• Brush handling
• Rendering
• Art history
• And lots more

That is the case even if you want to paint loosely. Read Richard Schmid’s book on painting (he paints in a loose alla prima style that is wondrous to behold) and you’ll see how hard it is to learn how to paint that way, too.

Heck, it’s a lot of work learning to paint abstractly, if you want to do it well.

Painting from the heart is for lazy people who just want to schmear paint around, feel artistic, and find people to tell them how wonderful it must be to paint.

Instead, learn to paint with your mind and your soul. That’s a lot harder, but will take you much further toward making paintings that belong on a stranger’s wall.

Key

Key refers, of course, the the range of colors in the painting. The most important key is the value key. If the degree of light and dark on one object doesn’t fit that of other objects in the painting, then they won’t look like they belong together. It’s easy to get so involved in one particular passage that its value key doesn’t fit that of other parts of the painting. Another possible look, besides that of being pasted-on, is that some passages fade out inexplicably.

It is, of course, possible to similarly mess up the chroma key or the hue key of the painting. Value is a more common and noticeable problem, however.

The best way to avoid inconsistencies in key is to frequently step way back from the painting and either squint or throw your eyes slightly out of focus. Inconsistencies tend to stand out.

Edges

Another way to inadvertently achieve a pasted-on look is to make all your edges equally hard. If all of the edges are the same, then all of the objects appear to come forward equally and the painting fails the verisimilitude test. Some otherwise excellent academic realists make this mistake. So do many beginners who have begun to develop the ability to render.

Softer edges recede, harder edges advance. Control edges and you control the dimensionality of each object in the painting. Do that consistently and the painting looks like each passage is part of a whole.

This one has kind of a story to it. For the last 50 or so years, my wife’s family (on her mother’s side) has used this conch shell as a joke gift. It’s been passed back and forth many times. The real gift is hidden in the shell, or the shell is included as a part of the gift. Big laffs. Right now the shell is in my wife’s possession, but who knows how long that will last?

• The easiest way to stretch a large canvas evenly seems to be to put it on the stretcher unprimed, somewhat loosely. How loose? Put the canvas on the floor flat under the stretcher. Tack the edges of the canvas to the back of the stretcher without pulling. You then size it with a thin layer of hide glue. The glue tightens the canvas. If you do it right, the canvas is taut with no wrinkles. This is easier than trying to get it right using canvas pliers and trying to make the tension even across the whole canvas.
• I like using regular office thumb tacks initially, followed by staples or copper tacks when you know you’ve got the tension exactly right.
• The lead oil primer made by Natural Pigments is very easy to apply. It is much less viscous than other oil primers I’ve tried. That means you don’t have to thin it and it’s less likely to get all over the place. It dries to the touch very fast. A potential downside is that it doesn’t tend to fill the weave of the canvas like thicker primers do.
• It’s good practice to rub the surface of the canvas lightly with a pumice stone before sizing in order to open the fibers up somewhat to accept the glue. If you do this, however, you will create small blobs of fabric in places. After priming, you’ll need to wet sand or use a knife to cut these away.
• Upper Canada Stretchers makes really good stretchers. Check out the discounts for good deals.