Abstract Art

The Art of Investing in Art

It's a great topic, investing in art, or at least it used to be.  Now the news is bad for wealthy art collectors just as it is for the rest of us.  Do even modest art investors need to be worried that their collections will lose value?

Not if they've purchased art they love.  The true reward of investing in art is that it enriches your life every day. Your 401K may tank, but the art will still be there for you.

I've invested a lot of my money in art supplies so that I could make art.  I don't believe in skimping on canvas, paint and brushes, no matter what the economy is doing.  But I'll be drinking less champagne and eating eggplant parmigiana instead of Maryland crab cakes for awhile.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the USA, and I'll be cooking for eight.  If you're celebrating this holiday, have a good one and be safe on the roads!

Another Art Trail Weekend:

Because our October art trail open studio weekends were so successful, about fifteen of us will be having our studios open this last weekend in November as well.  We have no idea if we'll get a crowd or not, but maybe we'll make it an annual event.  A lot of visitors come to Ithaca at this time to visit their children at Cornell or Ithaca College.  

It's another chance to clean up the studio and offer some special prices on selected pieces.  If you're in the neighborhood and think you can make it, find a map to studios at the Greater Ithaca Art Trail Website.

Visiting California

This week Adrian and I are in California "baby-sitting" two of our grandkids while their parents are on vacation in Hawaii.  On Tuesday, we all went to the Triton Museum in Santa Clara.  The exhibit we liked best was Ann Weber's WONDERLAND, a collection of large sculptural pieces made of woven cardboard stapled together and shellacked.  Some of the pieces were over 16 feet high, so it indeed felt like walking through a wonderland of organic, whimsical, always-interesting shapes. 

We saw another piece by Ann Weber later in the week at an "all cardboard" exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art.  This was a group exhibit with a huge variety of approches to making art out of cardboard.  One piece which summed up my feelings about a lot of conceptual art was a stack of cardboard boxes reaching to the ceiling with the word "BLAH" stenciled on each one, as in "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah . . ." 

Too many of the pieces in this exhibit were simply reproductions of ordinary objects, such as a lounge chair, or clothing on a clothesline.  It may have taken some craftsmanship to make these items out of cardboard, but what makes them art?  Only the theory-filled verbiage written on the wall next to them. 

My favorite exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art was a small room filled with works by San Francisco abstract expressionists from the 1950s and 60s:  Elmer Bischoff, Ernest Briggs, Edward Corbett, Edward Dugmore, James Kelly, Frank Lobdell, Deborah Remington, John Saccaro, and Hassel Smith.  Since my greatest influences were the NY abstract expressionists, it was fun to see the connections between them and their west-coast counterparts. 

Art Trail Drawings

When my studio was open to the public during Art Trail weekends in October, I did some drawing in between talking to visitors:

   Art Trail Drawing #1

   Art Trail Drawing #2

Art Trail Drawing #3

  Art Trail Drawing #4

I find it relaxes me to draw while people are looking around the studio, and that way I'm not hovering over them.  Yet I'm in the middle of things and can easily stop to talk when necessary.  The second open-studio weekend was pretty busy, so I didn't get that much time to draw.  Which is fine by me.