Good Beginnings and Good Endings

Convergence, Jackson Pollock, 1952

When I start a painting, I want to lay down a great base to work from but when I finish a painting, I want to recognize the perfect moment when I should walk away from the canvas. It is similar to a love affair – in the beginning; you are on your perfect behavior, trying to create a great impression for your lover. As the affair starts to lose steam, you still remember when everything was a beautiful event making it difficult to recognize the moment to say enough and walk away. You don’t want to destroy the gorgeous memories you have already made with one bad memory of the end. Beautiful beginnings leading to graceful endings are the ideal.

The start and the finish are the big moments in life and in art – everything else is just getting to or from one of those points. The ability to see these two moments is what separates the experienced artist from the student. Looking at the Jackson Pollock painting above, you have to ask yourself how he knew when to stop. How did he know when he had the perfect amount of paint on the canvas? Yet some artists never see an ending - Claude Monet was rumored to travel to museums with a small paint set in his coat and when visiting one of his paintings, he would pull out the set and touch up his work. I suppose you could call that a series of revised small endings.

There is energy in life and art imitates it through process. Embarking upon the journey starts with the first step (to paraphrase the famous Chinese proverb.) Ending the journey requires either knowing where you are headed or at the very least, recognizing it when you arrive.

So here is to the journey, which starts with the energetic and hopeful first step but ends with an elegant final step and a look backward to view the progress that was made.

Venice is Becoming Beige

BEFORE AND AFTER

The Laughing Buddha is gone.

The loss of this mural is emblematic of a greater wrong being done to the community of Venice. 

People move here because we have a rich street culture, infused with creativity and bubbling with anarchistic energy. Venice was once home to a cultural revolution, dog town, street performers and famous the world over for it's unique artistic inspiration. We had live jazz, amazing chalk art on Abbot Kinney, nude poetry readings at a local coffee shop, bikers and surfers side by side... and artists. 

The artists made this community – they defined it with their murals, their clothes, their music. People were attracted to their world and wanted to feel a part of the rare, incandescent creative climate – they moved here in droves hoping it would rub off on them. 

Many of the newly transplanted "investors" were not comfortable living with the slightly unpolished and unpredictable nature of Venice and decided to change it into something more palatable and less discomforting. In the process, they impacted the visual culture of the city. Similar to when an animal goes extinct in an environment and that ecosystem is changed forever - changing the landscape and not encouraging our urban artists is forever changing our "artistic ecosystem."

We are becoming beige - witnessed by the "after" photo above. Venice has never been beige!

Other cities hold their street art in high esteem – London, Paris, Buenos Aires, San Paolo to name a few. The art can exist side by side with great buildings of other eras. The streets are a fertile ground to grow the next generation of artists and history has shown that many make the jump from street to museum – Toulouse Lautrec or Banksy, just two examples.

Artists are the "cultural caribou" of the world – wandering from site to site – creating a community were there was none – and moving on when the environment no longer feeds their needs. Venice was that place but judging by how easily the Buddha was wiped from the world, with the stroke of a beige paintbrush, artists can easily be disrespected and forgotten. Venice is a fragile artistic ecosystem.

I wonder what the world would be like, if someone thought the Sistine Chapel would be cleaner and more modern with a coat of beige paint and they got rid of that busy and outdated ceiling mural?