Over on our Art NYC site, Marshall Sponder sort of interviews himself. At least he ruminates about art and his main profession, Web analyst with IBM, as he paints a model at the Brooklyn Artists Gym.

It’s interesting stuff, so here’s a little taster and a link to the post:

“My path is synthesis and seems to have come to me, or I realised it, only recently — but I was doing it all along. I feel empthy when I look at work I can identify with, mostly paintings — it’s as if I can feel an artist’s feelings in paint — I probably had it all along did not know what to do with it, or what it was.”

“This is what came into my mind, it was the memory of a saying from Paul Cezanne, my favorite artist (but my sensability is much different than his — it took me many years to sort that out). I can’t find the actual quote but it goes something like this: ‘art is a way of organizing sensations’.”

Read the whole piece.

The Life and Films of John Wayne, a weekly feature by Steve Newman

John Wayne’s first starring feature, The Big Trail, made in 1929-30 and released in 1930 is, on the surface, a simple tail of a wagon train heading West in the 1850s, but, after about ten minutes - when the 22 year old Wayne first appears - it becomes obvious that it’s so much more, and not just in terms of the story, but how that story is going to be told, and, not least, how the movie industry had at last taken on the challenge of scope and depth which had been thrown down in 1915 by D.W. Griffith, when his masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation, went on general release. But there is something else in The Big Trail that marks it as different. And at first I couldn’t put my finger on it, but then it dawned on me that I was sort of watching the real thing. It wasn’t a film anymore, I was a witness to a ‘reality’.

And the reality is firstly in the look of the film: the slightly overexposed washed-out look - which is the kind of light that often inhabits dreams - and in the extraordinary depth of the film, and by depth I mean that in virtually every shot, whether external or internal (and most of the internal shots will have a view through an open window or door of the exterior) there is constant movement in the background, movement that is not just the photographed comings and goings of an unaware public - as was and is the case with many films - but a choreographed, deliberate movement, that builds upon the story being told in the foreground. This is not a film being made on a back lot, but, as director Raoul Walsh always preferred, shot wholly on location. That is the one reality. The other is that the film was made within living memory of the actual events, with many of the extras (and some of the main actors) ex cowboys who had as youngsters driven cattle in the latter days of the Chisholm Trail. So, this mix of perceived reality, and the actual reality of time and memory, make The Big Trail an extremely moving and important cinematic event.

What also happened is that the young Wayne came into contact with these old ranch hands and cowboys and took on board their mannerisms, and their experiences, and made them his own. Therefore what we see in this film, and in many of his subsequent films is that same reality, which sadly is a reality that many can never understand.

In this glorious film we see an industry coming of age, we also see a young artist of genius at peace with the medium he has chosen. Wayne is becoming the mouthpiece of a lost generation.

The film was also the launching pad for the careers of Tyrone Power and Ward Bond, who would become a life long friend of Wayne, and a member of his ‘repertory’ company.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over at our art site, Art NYC, Marshall sponder has been reviewing and interviewing the artist Joe Coleman. Here are some extracts :

Coleman mentioned he does what he does because he has to - people can call it all kinds of things, he does not care, he still feels he does what he has to, and he has mentioned he did some crazy things as he had feelings he had to express. One of those “crazy” thing in was working on a corpse in Budapest, under the supervision of a doctor, to look for the soul in the corpse. He did not find the soul. Joe also talked about his movies and performances as being outreach work (and having done some crazy things on screen as well) while his paintings are more private, something you must enter into. …

I asked a question near the end of the talk, one that I also asked Amy Crehore, when I interviewed her, about how the Internet has influenced Joe Coleman’s art. I asked the one question he probably had not been asked before - most of the other stuff he talked about today you could have found in someone else’s write up if you searched on it. His answer: he is not affected much by the internet - it’s not part of his process (at this time). He does wonder if some of his work shows up on EBay, but he does not seek to use the internet, in a more active role. …

I don’t think Joe Coleman is alone in this, as many artists have not yet realized the potential of the internet has unlocked and that everything has changed in the last 5-10 years.

It’s almost as if Joe Coleman is operating in a world where the Internet does not exist - even though he has a website (which loads very slowly, by the way). Tina Shafer, a well known songwriter who I took an Art of Living course along with earlier this year, and many of the well known (in their own circles) songwriters had next to no internet visibility - nor any understanding of how much they could have had.

Fortunately for Coleman, he creates enough controversy to get written quite a bit - and that serves as his promotion. A search on Joe Coleman in Google produces 217,000 results. … That’s a lot of pages, the man is famous. Still, he left a lot on the table with the internet. Yet, at the end of the day, the internet is just a means to an end and it does not look like Joe needs any promotion - he’s already famous.

Read the whole two-part interview and review.