SANDY GARNETT ART BLOG

This is a wedding gift for Chris and Elizabeth. 

I spent a month renovating and building my infrastructure, which is the tricky thing artists must do to grow, although infrastructure by definition is often unseen yet indirectly enhances collector meetings and experiences.  My two studios have been improved dramatically, I have a place to show my works in a gallery like presentation setting that doubles as my home and place of work, and I am getting back to the easel and sculpture.  I am tooling around with a myriad of elements that will present me better, and these all come with diligent fits and spurts of energy, time, vision, money.  I am prepping to cast sidewalls on new paintings, which is more interesting and involved than it reads, and I am finishing some new paintings.

 One of the hardest things to achieve in the art game is one’s short game with long ball vision… balancing the now with tomorrow in all aspects of studio maintenance and development.  This requires astute focus and gut reaction, passages of monastic meditation on art, infrastructural moves that noone will see, and extroverted friendly public relations development all timed in such a way that the studio builds and there maintains a cash flow in the coffers and energy in the tanks of the creator.  Artists build engines of creativity, and each artist creates a delicate and fairly original system to keep the engine running.  Running an art studio engine is a complex character affair that generally requires self-confidence, self-motivation and good vision.  Like any discipline, the art field is littered with plenty of talents who cannot mesh together enough of these elements in space time to maintain for long, let alone a lifetime.

Renovated Loft kitchen level.

There is an ebb and flow to the art making process which dances or clunks with the rhythm of the creator’s life.  I try to keep my life simple and fluid in order to get my complexities out in the art.  I often refer to my existence lightly as quasi-monastic, as I spend 90% of my time alone working.  I have many friends and a close family, I love people, but I’m here in this life to make art and people around mean that I’m not making anything.  Back to the ebb and flow… I went to Ireland for a week a month ago on the heels of my largest sale, relaxed, returned and spent two weeks into finishing up the renovations in my loft.  I bumped up a number of elements and stations in my studio, as now my loft is done for the most part, a perfect meeting place for collectors to show my paintings and sculptures and a comfortable home that I’ve never quite had.  I got some music equipment for sketches, some sculpture equipment for my next paintings, and a new lense for my camera, a 17-35mm beauty that finally allows me to shoot a room without pasting images together.  In short I made some rapid improvements to my operation and this week got back to art making, which felt really good.

Painting rhythm is like any rhythm, and builds over hours and days and years.  Painting is second nature to me, the way I have survived for 15 years as a professional artist, my everything.  So it’s a little like slipping back into my skin, getting back to the easel… it makes me say, ‘Hey? Where were you for those two weeks?’  There is such a well spring of inspiration in these passages, the flow of the paint as life moves on.  I couldn’t turn off last night, a problem many creators have.  I was fired up and couldn’t get to sleep because the light switch was stuck on, building creative momentum… this is the fun part, never gets old, what we artists toil away for, the hunt, the search, the buzzing of creativity in the ears.

Pictured is my friend Annie’s new pad, a beautiful Chelsea apartment.  Here is a triptych of mine hanging in her bedroom.  I made several versions of these three or four years ago, and they in essence are studies for my Field of Figures, although at the time this was not clear to me.  Annie is going on tour with Mama Mia again, so get out to see her as she’s very talented.

I went Tuesday to the Compleat Sculptor on Van Damme downtown to get casting material and relief material for my next Twister paintings.  This place is cool albeit expensive, they have all the cool bells and whistles, lots of eye candy sculpting tools to check out, and the staff is friendly and technically proficient to respond to the strangest questions.  Welcome to the mind of a sculptor.  I want to create a thematic relief pattern on the sidewalls of my next paintings so I have determined to cast sidewall pieces, which will be in white plastic.  This will give my series a unique look and feel, unify the series of course, and once the mold is made apparently I can make a 6 foot sidewall piece every 15 minutes.  This means I can make 60 feet of sidewall in a couple hours, 10 six foot pieces.  From here I can cut pieces down and miter them into frames.  Since I am going relief on these next Twister paintings my surface support needs to be stronger than canvas, so I will make a board or aluminum surface to affix on the plastic cast frame.  Then I will sculpt the reliefs in styrofoam, afix to the board or aluminum, prime the whole surface and proceed to paint these pictures as I do all my paintings, but I will be painting on figure reliefs.  I’ve been wanting for my figures to come out of the canvas for awhile so here is my chance.

I finished and delivered this Fingerprint Totem to my friend Jenn today.  My shot of this little ash sculpture isn’t very clean unfortunately, which makes me want to run out and buy a proper lighting setup.  This totem is made of carved ash with a steel base.

Once upon a time for thirteen years I read the New York Times every day, the paper in the know, the paper of record, a paper my parents, grandparents, great grandparents, great great grandparents read… New Yorkers after all.  Post 911 I found their editorial page to be shameful so I do not read it any longer, and I have found that the NYT front page is another editorial, which led me to drop the purchase and support of this paper.  My scanning of the Times is an online affair to check in on what they are selling editorially and to see who they are covering in technology and art.  Technology is always fun as I’m a bit of a Mac wonk and I like David Pogue’s brain, but the NYT arts section has fallen off precipitously and they barely cover fine art any longer.  Their big online story today is PDiddy, which I can see plastered on the front page of the Sunday Arts section.  I can’t stand this guy they’re selling.  Then you can read about some classical music, movie reviews galore, and the very occasional Kimmelman or Roberta Smith fine article.  The last article close was a strange one by Mr. Kimmelman who asks his audience if two Walker Evans photographs stitched together in photoshop and presented as final art products are art.  Mr. Kimmelman is a strong photography as art proponent and I disagree with this perspective, namely as the final product of photography is about multiplicity.  There is no longer some sacred concept of a photographer in a darkroom producing a one of a kind print, therefore to answer Mr. Kimmelman’s question about paintings and photographs there is nothing similar to the two.  Original paintings and sculptures require the artist’s hand, body and eye, which cannot be matched by a photographic print.  Mr. Kimmelman several years ago heralded the Andreas Gursky retrospective before the Moma closed for renovations, reinforcing  to the market in essence the absurd notion that a print ought to sell for 300,000. USD.  Let me be clear now to say that no print, no multiple in any form should ever hold a price tag like this.  The art world has built a market for photography on the false premise that photographic prints are ‘originals’ of sorts and therefore ought to be priced like paintings.  This fallacy only hurts the art market for false advertising.  Photography is an important medium, its primal power in photojournalistic historical record or in many media cases to distort or misinform the public, as with daily newspaper photographs or propoganda campaigns.  The argument that photography is like painting is an annoying one as the differences are deep.  Painting a strong picture is so much more complex than taking a nice photograph my editorial on this subject will last days.  The best photographs are about capturing moments, and this is where photography is strongest, where it exists as a break front, a pillar of civilization, an unshakable collective visual memory that is alarming and disarming in its remarkable power.  But everyone has a camera and I argue simply that just as Warhol talks about everyone having 15 minutes of fame, everyone with a camera will take 15 remarkable photographs in his or her lifetime.  This dilutes the argument that there are really only a handful of top photographers.  We are all photographers like much of the world speaks language in order to communicate.  Last week I spent an hour with William, who I took 350 photographs of from which to paint a single portrait painting.  Which do you think I would prefer in the end hanging on my wall?  A painter takes a blank canvas and creates an image in some genre.  This makes painting something that photography can never approach.  The two are crucial in their own respective ways, but the art market has made a dangerous habit out of selling photographic prints as ‘original art objects’.  Photographs are meant for multiplication as recorded song, the written word and the magic of film.  On that note, the apex of fine art film would be a film like ‘The Godfather’, so the story of fine art film like Bill Viola and Matthew Barney is a short minefield that I’ve always found nonsensical.

A self-described long time ‘fan’ of my art recently told me she saw a large fingerprint painting of mine hanging in the MOMA.  I told her she was mistaken and she was taken aback.  She read the name plate and saw that I was born in 1976 and was from Norwalk, CT.  I was born in 1970 and this was not my work, so I would be interested to know who in my area is painting large fingerprints and showing at the MOMA, as I have been painting and sculpting fingerprint portraits and totems with my Fingerprint Project for 16 years.  This leads me to believe that I have inspired a knock off artist in my region.  Please email me if you can help me in this department.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I got back from Ireland and with my recent large sale set to work on the final renovations of my South Norwalk, CT loft.  I put a floor in, trimmed the place out, put cabinets in, finished the island I built, made some pedestals, built a closet, put a new bookshelf in, and yesterday I built this couch.  I was thinking about buying a couch and decided to make a couch by using the extra futon I already had.  The couch cost me 0 dollars and it looks like it’s floating, which I had the most fun with.  I’ve put hundreds of hours in, and now the space contains my life and work in a way I’ve never felt before.  My home sets a good stage for the next round of art making this year.  I’m playing with styrofoam, bondo, casting, all this with my Twister paintings, two of which are pictured above.

Here’s my father in his prime time enjoying a Guinness.  I went for a week to play golf with my father, my brother Matt, and my cousin Steve.  This was my first break from the art career in 2006.  My annual ski trip with best friends was stymied as my best boy Bill popped his Achilles during the Turkey Bowl of his girlfriend Shiela’s family Thursday, so all bets were off on that front.  My father went to Scotland with his dad when Gunny was 60, so this was a trip my Dad has been talking about for years as he is now 60.  We flew into Shannon, stayed in Doolen and Ballybunion.  We played Doonbeg, Lahinch, Cashen, Tralee, Dook, and Bally bunion.  It was all golf all the time.  We saw the Cliffs of Moher, took a seeweed bath, and experienced some remarkable Irish folk music.  The people of Ireland are downright friendly, polite and their prism is an enchanting take on good living in an interesting way for this type A New Englander.  Pub culture is paramount and seems to establish in the Irish a family way of engaging with community that the United States in its disparate nature does not offer as a national whole, as Americans enjoy their rugged individualism and pocket themselves off in their respective cultures while generally respecting and meshing with other subcultures to varying degrees.  There is a good natured element to the Irish that explains their fame stateside and accounts for my best friendships with a number of Irish descended Americans.  I read somewhere that in our time the Irish populus is 4 million and Irish Americans in some blood form constitute 30 million or 10% of the American populus.  Ireland has more beautiful shades of green than any place I’ve ever been before.  The cloud cover is mesmerizing, although thankfully we weren’t soaked with the exception of one rainy round.  In a family of athletes I am the one artist, so when I go to the family we do sports.  I find many parallels between art and sports that a lot of artists and athletes don’t seem to get or care much about.  A nice golf shot is like a solid period on the easel.  Both disciplines chase perfection in space, although in art one starts with a blank slate and in sport one has a course or a team to measure oneself against that defines itself in a number at the end of a given time frame.  Both disciplines require intensities of health, vision, and focus.  My best art is made in my best state of physical and mental focus. I have to step up to the plate with my best game face and bring to my canvas a statement of clarity and strength.  Good paintings can go bad quickly as with any sporting affair, although paintings and sculpture can remain open for years whereas sport, as with other art forms like music or theater, are confined to the time space of a given performance.  A resonant sporting performance occurs in an instant, whereas many resonant creative products by painters, sculptors, writers, composers, directors take years to wring through the mills of a particularly powerful and stubborn vision.

I’m going away for a much needed vacation.  The blog is an interesting experiment and I hope to improve upon it.  I may have sold another painting this week.  I just sold an entire series of work from 1995, and this has put wind in the sails.  One never knows as an artist where the winds will be, so the prudent artist must create his or her own world and stay at work.  One of the tricky things about art making is that art is often a solitary sport, yet work needs to get to the world and creators have to assume this responsibility.  I have always believed that a great working environment is the most important element for me, as I am comfortable to explore in my space and I am not overly burdened with the outside world to hinder my riffs.  The artist lives a which comes first the chicken or the egg life often.  One must master one’s art form and bring it to market forever, and one must survive in the process.  In order to survive by painting one must have space and find the zone and find collectors.  In order for one to find the zone one must have space supported by collectors that one might not have.  In order to make art for a living one must paint constantly in order to achieve fluency in one’s medium and hopefully original art statements will emerge which one can bring to market.  In order for one to build one’s career one must find one’s way into a major marketplace where this sort of life work is respected by brokers in the art profession.  But as it all starts with one’s own vibe, which reflects in one’s own space, the best thing I ever did was to find space that I could afford to survive in, live simply and be prolific.  This is my story in a nutshell.

I sold this painting to my collectors and friends this week.  I found this sketch in one of my recent sketch books and painted it.  It was fast and easy, like the work had already been done before.  The strange thing about art making is that each day is a clean slate.  When one is an explorer one must discard the old for the new as fast as a fashion model; an artist designs, makes the work and must discard it in order to find the new things teaming in his or her soul.  This is a tricky sport as in our era everything looks like something else.  But I argue that if one cares to look at an artist’s skin or output, a patchwork emerges that can in the best cases provide an inspirational geographical map of evolutional originality.  Each artist has his own story, and the storytelling capacity within each creator is key.  One’s output is one’s journal of life.  Painting is an old art form and this makes painting so palpable, although a reassuring and quiet sort in these digital times where creators in other mediums have to adapt to new forms for their survival.