Andres Paabo - Currently Available Art

July 2011 - Subject: THE ONLY TRUE MEASURE OF THE WEALTH OF A SOCIETY IS ART
    Today we see people driving themselves to exhaustion earning money at jobs just to spend that money on those popular goods that supposedly signify wealth and status. I have observed neighbours that purchase the latest status symbols, whether boat, fancy TV, automobile, and whatnot - the manufactures are constantly enticing them. You have not reached any status, the promotions say, until you have obtained this latest fancy technology we are manufacturing. Well that is fine if you actually use it, but I observe people who rarely ever use what they purchase - they are too busy working and making money to buy MORE! - and it looks like they are doing nothing but working themselves birth to death for no other purpose than accumulate goods. Well if you buy those goods you enegize that sector of the economy, which now contains other people (say the makers of flat screen screens) who ALSO work all day and buy goods but hardly enjoy them. It results in a very buzzing economy - great masses of human flesh busy busy busy dawn to dusk stimulating even more business, and nobody is really enjoying life. We are all busy. So nobody is really wealthy. You think that having an great pile of expensive status symbol gadgets means you are wealthy? Well that brings me to the subject of this writing - what is wealth?
    If we go back into other time and place, into other human societies past and presence, what we find is that wealth appears to be reflected by not the amount of business it is doing, but the amount of leisure. When all the basic needs of a society are realized - food, shelter, health - there is leisure time. And that leisure time means people actually have time to spend on those interesting things they possess. They can become children again, explore and experience this condition and place we are in - living on planet earth. Where there is that free time, that NON-busy time, there is wealth. With the free time to explore and experience there are activities that are not needed to survive - time to dance, sing, be poetic, be artistic, be philosophical, write books, paint pictures, etc. If you cannot be a producer of such art, you can at least be an audience for it, a participant. THAT ability is wealth. I thought of a very good demonstration of this in Canadian aboriginal culture. When aboriginal culture is put on display today by museums, what art comes into the foreground - the art of the west coast Natives who lived in the cedar rain forests, carved giant seagoing canoes, built very sophisticated buildings out of split cedar planks, decorated it all with amazing graphics, and to top it off erected extraordinary totem poles. They were able to do that because the environment allowed them to procure the necessities for life very easily. When salmon were running up the rivers they could catch them by the hundreds, and dry them for use throughout the year., The seas and forests provided other foods too. They had the leisure, they had the freedom, to pursue art, not to mention performance, song, poetry, etc. By contrast the interior aboriginal people, to varying degrees had less freedom. Life was less easy and so the manifestations of their culture were less by comparison.
    Today the truly wealthy person is not hustling to make money so as to buy the status symbols. The truly wealthy is sitting back and enjoying the leisure he has achieved. He will be pursuing art not to simply collect it but to become involved in the culture of art. Speaking now in terms of fine art - paintings - this wealthy person learns about the tradition of art, and wishes to indulge in it, to spend his leisure time collecting pieces, looking at them, enjoying them. Yes a wealthy person CAN indulge in material possessions too. There are wealthy people who develop large collections of antique cars for example. But these people are not doing it to simply possess them, They are indulging them - taking them for drives, polishing them, indulging in them. The fact that they have the ability not simply to own them but to indulge in them signifies they are wealthy. But let us speak about fine art, because I am an artist. There are real collectors out there, who know the tradition of art and follow what is happening. They are the ones who make high bids for famous works at international art auctions - often having a representative do the bidding so they can remain anonymous.
    But in my expereince as an artist, very few buy my art for what it really represents - wealth. All too often they buy the famous artists work for the status of it, or even if not famous, for the status of have a real original of some note. They are the middle class who happen to have the flat screen TV and whatnot and maybe encountered a friend named Jones and they have to keep up with the Joneses. The poorer of this sort, will buy signed limited editions as a cheaper way of getting the status of having a house with art on the wall - something better than a cheap poster. Yes, they DO want to like the art, the image. That is a given. Even if your status symbol needs to be two cars in a garage, you still have the freedom to choose which brands to buy. I am not talking about buying art that you like, but I am talking about the premise of buying art in the first place - and that for most people it is driven by the pursuit of status as determined by marketing forces telling what they should do. They are NOT wealthy. Although they make lots of money, they are too busy making that money to have any leisure time to actually indulge in anything they buy.
    The irony of it all is that you do not have to be monetarily rich to be wealthy. You only have to realize when you have the basic necessities of life - food shelter health - that you do not need to struggle for more than that, and that instead of working more and more to buy more and more status symbols, take that leisure and use it to expand your horizons - to smell the cofffee so to speak.
    Fine artists, and other creators of art, are often very very poor people, who have decided that their purpose in life is to "smell the coffee" so to speak - to look at how trees sway in the wind, how animals prepare for winter, how wildflowers smell,.... - to contemplate what it is all about - to put it down in words, poetry, paint, music, etc. The ability to do that - to have the leisure to do that - is wealth. From the point of view of the audience, similarly, the ability to indulge in what the artists have done signifies their wealth - even if in fact their annual earnings are only a tenth of the earnings of all those middle class people who pursue money and accumulate possessions and never have the time to enjoy anything for more than a few moments here and there.
    Even though I make a fraction of people who are defined as the middle class, I feel very very wealthy because I can do what I describe. I do not drive around in a slick car, nor strut around in well tailored suits, nor show my neighbours my fancy new status symbol gadgets. I know that this does not make you wealthy. Wealthy is not in the material appearances of purchased goods you can never use. Wealth is in having very little, but having leisure time to pursue the many tangents of human experience there are, of which getting to know the 10,000 year old tradition of art (beginning from cave paintings) is a very good one.
    Because of the status-symbol, materialistic, society we live in, we tend to spend money only on those objects that society (ie the manufacturer advertising) deems status things. We are trapped. We can only buy art that these promoters tell us are status symbols. We buy what THEY tell us to. The New York art dealers for example that have the contemporary art, the weird installations and abstracts, convince the people with money they are the status symbol to buy, and so the rich people who need status in terms of art, spend many thousands of dollars to buy crap that can be produced by gorillas squeezing tubes of paint from a ladder. On the other hand, the truly wealthy person says "Screw the art dealers! I myself will decide what I like", and if they study art history, they will find their joy in purchasing some rare 18th century painting or something like that, NOT the latest crazy fad artist that the art dealers want to push on them. The whole idea is to "Smell the coffee" or in this case - visit art museums, study all activty in the art world and not just the faddish contemporary flashes in pans, learn about the history of art, SMELL it all, indulge in it all, and THEN what you eventually buy will be very meaningful. And THAT is what art is all about.
    But you do not have to be super wealthy - you simply have to reorganize your life so that you are working to produce leisure time to 'smell the coffee' and not to produce a pile of status objects you barely have time to use on your treadmill of life from birth to death.

July 2011 - Subject:CHANGING MODES OF ART SELLING
    In creating this webpage, I was very conscious how this very page has departed from the original art gallery which was typical of the Victorian Age. It was only as recently as around 1985 when I became an artist full time (after pursuing it part time since childhood) that I began to notice the disappearance of traditional art galleries. To be specific there was for the longest time a significant gallery of art in the Eaton's department store. I imagine it had been there since the early 1900's. But at that time, the Eaton's gallery was located in Eaton's College Street (at College and Yonge in Toronto). They had tried to modernize the gallery from what it had been. It had always been oriented to art that people actually liked - realism in all its forms. And I had some art on consignment there. But only a few years later it closed, and was no longer there. What had happened? I think at that time, almost a decade before the internet, there had been so much development in printing of reproductions - from posters to limited editions (like Bateman wildlife art) - that the general public, who now could obtain their attractive images in very faithfully reproduced printed form from everywhere, no longer needed to obtain actual original paintings from a handful of actual galleries of original paintings - regardless of quality. You see Victorian Age public really had no choice. Yes there were prints, but the prints LOOKED like prints. For genuine realistic images they had to buy art. But by the 1980's even photographic reproductions in magazines were amazing. And then there was color television. The attraction of images that looked real was spread over many media and decentralized.
    In terms of artistically created images, the 1980's used modern offset lithographic methods that reproduced full colour full tonal paintings absolutely faithfully (other than the bumps of actual paint). As an artist who had always painted realistically - I always found abstract or nonrepresentational are to seem unfinished like rough sketches - I was very aware of the dramatic changes in the art market. Having grown up very much oriented to artists putting art in galleries, I now saw galleries closing left and right. I can name dozens which I dealt with now gone. The attractive landscape sold in a gallery dedicated to originals were gone. What I saw, in terms of outlets for popular art, were framing shops who sold the limited edition lithographic prints published and distributed in those days, and an original was more of a decoration. The public was more interested in the image than whether they possessed the actual painting. Of course everyone would like the original, but the original cost then times or more the price of the limited edition. The limited edition in being signed and numbered by the artist SEEMED sort of like art - compared to cheap runofthemill posters.
    And so, to make a living, I created some images for reproduction, and self published a handful of impressive limited edition prints. Since I did them myself, without borrowing money, I did not have any pressure to sell them out within a couple of years, and after selling well to those limited edition outlets and frame shops, I drew back from all that distributing activity, and have sold them casually. Yes I have them and they are still desirable to the public that I meet - that is off the regular market, and directly from me. The same is true of small popular original paintings - the public still likes them and when they see me presenting them they certainly wouldn't mind purchasing as long as the price is not out of line. And that is the reality - prices cannot be out of line. But those original art galleries who are still holding on against this new decentralized world of art, in their deparation to make an income, are downloading more and more on the artist, and upping their commission. It used to be (the Golden Age of Art Galleries of 50 plus years ago) that the artist only painted his paintings, and the art gallery did everything else for at most 40% commision - or even some purchased the art wholesale speculatively. But now, exploiting people with dillusions of being artists, there are "galleries" that want 50% and then on top of that charge the artist for all the promotions etc, and I learned that one artist who eventually sold a painting, after all the bills were added up made maybe only 10% of retail. But that is the extreme. More common is the art gallery who expects the artist to do all the legwork - promoting themselves to the public in their shows, websites, etc - so the dealer only hangs the art and grabs 40% for doing very little for the artist that the traditional artist did. And no gallery these days has the boldness to actually BUY quantities of art from the artist, and thereby assume the risks it might not sell. The original art gallery would committ themselves to an artist and even put an new artist on salary and that artist would become an essential part of the business. Relationships were close and the artist was not seen as just another supplier to try to screw. But today, I have art in galleries where in one, they have not done anything to promote me but exploit my own efforts to give myself a presence. I mean, when did it become the artist's responsibility to promote himself, and then the gallery was no more than a place to hang the art on show, and for the gallery to take an undeserveed high commission. Another gallery treats me like a wholesale supplier and appears to want me to get after them month after month like the salesman for a wholesale supplier. In my opinion the gallery world we saw strong as little as 50 years ago is very dead (And by the way, the Church too has suffered the effects of change - in the Victorian Age the Church was also a social circle for the community.)
    And add to this two other developments - fast highways, long distance telephone, and the internet. These developments eliminate the need for businesses to be concentrated in cities. When the print technology allowed fantastic reproductions of art, and framing shops everywhere became outlets for them, artists too spread themselves out, with studios in the countryside, and they even created associated studio galleries and invited travelers and tourists to visit them. A tourist found great attraction in taking drives in rural countryside to visit artists studios. One manifestation of that were the "studio tours" phenomena. The internet at the same time made it possible for artists to promote themselves for low cost.
    It is a very changed world for the art collector. But let us not think that the public has lost an interest in art. What we are dealing with is the marketing of art. The marketing is greatly changed. Those upscale art collectors who understand the intrinsic value of actual original paintings, and would not purchase reproductions, still want to find that art, and today they cannot get satisfaction from any art dealer or broker, IF they can even find any legitimate, skilled ones!! They have need to FIND those artists and go to them directly. Except for some artists who DO have talented agents working for them, the art collector has to use the modern technologies to find the artist - doing internet surfing, contacting the artist with questions, arranging to see the art, visiting the artist personally. Some such people, who visit me, understand how desparate art galleries are and that the artist is getting screwed by them and that if they purchased from the gallery, they would be essentially handing over money to a chronically failing busines for minimal benefit. The artist at least, if paid what he or she deserves is inspired to paint more - and to be more adventurous, painting images that have been unproven, and which further the frontiers of art.
    So that is what this page is about. I am trying to make it easier for art collectors who value the universality of realism, but who are not happy with reproductions and can afford originals, to get a view of my new work that I have available or that I have hanging around because I have more to do on it. I can sometimes be carrying a dozen paintings at a time, which I am still not ready to leave my environment. I hope you like what I am doing here.

June 2011 - Subject: DENSITY OF DETAIL IN ART RELATIVE TO TIME COST
     Traditional realism - representational art - is something like building a house in that the basic frame and enclosure goes up within weeks, and then months go by as carpenters finish all the details - and the sky's the limit in the details. If the prices given of my art seem not to relate to size, the truth is that the higher priced painting relative to size has more density of detail. The density of detail is related to where it is hung - how close the viewer is. A detailed painting is designed that it can be viewed very close without turning into brush stroke. It depends on the location. A large painting for a hall, viewed never from more than 6 ft can be loosely done. Price thus relates to detail density.

June 2011 - Subject: MY VIEW ON MODERN/CONTEMPORARY ABSTRACT NON-REPRESENTATIONAL ART.
    Modern/contemporary art, or "abstract art" is something like the framing of a house in that it can be created within hours. Since I proceed, like some other realists, from an impressionistic beginning, with a thick brush blocking in the forms and establishing the emotionality from colors and textures, at about hour three, I can easily offer the painting as contemporary art, but then it can take a hundred more hours to take it to completion, the time depending on the detail. The problem is that the art dealers fool the art collectors about the actual value of much contemporary art, and worst of all diminish the value of realistic art, making the latter seem of less value even if it took many times more time, and demanded greater skill from the artist. I agree that some "modern art" is interesting and there is a place for it, but I think the valuing of it compared to the valuing of quality realism is completely out of wack.
    The reality is that placing realism on top of the basic abstract foundations takes a great deal of skill and it is very rare. A fraction of a percent of all artists have mastered it (and even more if we bring apes and children into the picture - see below).
    The reason I pursue realism is because there is so little of it. It seems that the skill and quality of realism has died since the Victorian era. That tradition died with the scare caused by the invention of photography, and the reactions to it in impressionism and other divergence from reality.

June 2011 - Subject: DETAIL IN REALISTIC ART COMPARES TO HOUSE BUILDING
    Realism requires some decision about the level of detail. It depends on what the artist intends to achieve. If the artist wishes to explore fine textures and details, as part of the experience, the artist must put it there. But if the level of detail increases the time taken increases exponentionally.
    Another way of viewing it is that carrying art towards high levels of detail - when it is necessary - is that it is analogous to building a house - how much detailing is needed throughout - wall colors, cabinet details, plumbing fixtures, flooring, etc.

June 2011 - Subject: GENERAL DISCUSSION -INTRINSIC AND FADDISH JUDGING OF ART - THE APE ART PHENOMENON
    There have been some commentators who have compared contemporary art to fads in design such as in the fashion world. The art really does not take its cues from the intrinsic purposes and valuing of art, but of whatever fad is current. And that fad can last decades. Where is "Pop art" today. How much longer will it be that a Jackson Pollock will be celebrated as an artist, and then forgotten as a faddish squeezer of paint tubes onto canvas surfaces to achieve "effects". Was he even capable of drawing anything? We all know from the news that artists appear with some gimmic - meat art, paintings consisting only of paint roller lines, crazy installations. They have created static theatre. Should be allow the term "art" be applied to them and thus taint the traditional meaning of "art'" - invariably about human perception and celebration of reality as the human actually experiences it.
    And now we have "REAL ART" the art that is about reality and dates back to the realistic depictions of bison in cave paintings, very accomplished paintings that even humans today can understand and appreciate despite the passing of some 10,000 years.
    In all the last 10,000 years until the last century, art was about reality. And the human, having intelligence and imagination did not see reality only in direct emotional ways like animals but processed it intellectually, finding symbolism and narrative in it.
    So why should we go backward and reverse art to a form that subtracts the intellectual component? So let me explain why the more I pursue realism the more excited I get about it. Note, as I say above, it is possible to be universal and produce images that will still be understood by humans 10,000 years in the future, while all the fashion fad installations and experiments will not even register - archeologists will not even understand what it is - accidents?
    Ultimately, realistic representational art is about the total of human experience. Of course there has to be powerful abstracts underneath. There has to be the powerful, emotional structure underneath for the human emotional reactions to color, shape, line, texture, etc'; and then there has to be the material the mind processes from symbolic associations and finally if we want the viewer to get intellectual, we develop narrative.
    Contemporary art establishments, when seeing narrative realism proclaim it to be "illustration", but frankly "illustration" is the universal form of art that everyone understands and is timeless. If cave men created abstract impressionism, archeologists would NOT have identified it. How do you distinguish something deliberately made from an accident of human action or a natural design in nature?
    That is why it is imperative we do not lose sight of the fact that the pursuit of total realism in art - which was the ideal from the cave man until well....only decades ago...is the ultimate enduring form of art not only in terms of longevity and universality, but also in demand on artist talent. It is VERY hard to create because it draws on all human skills.

May 2011 - Subject: CONTEMPORARY ABSTRACT ART VERSUS APE AND CHILD ART
    What is contemporary,. modern, no representational or abstract art? That is a question the general public has been asking ever since art dealers created it to con the world.
    Remember a couple years ago when Late Night host David Letterman had the feature "ape or artist" in which he presented a painting and they were to decide whether it was painted by an ape or an abstract artist. There are apes in zoos who splash paint around and come up with interesting effects, and the zoos frame them and sell them as fundraisers. Well after a while Letterman revealed art curators and dealers were upset, saying that the apes just created a mess and the art lay in the human who chose the best ones to single out. But that only shows that it is possible for a human, whether child and adult to similarly "experiment" and then have the art dealer select the best ones to sell for $3000 each.        Frankly creating realism on par with the Norman Rockwells, Andrew Wyeths, or Robert Batemans of world, not to mention traditional masters like Leonardo Da Vinci, Victorian era Waterhouse, and all the others celebrated by art historians, ...that kind of art is VERY difficult and time consuming. And it is in the art dealers and brokers interest to diminish this reality and elevate the 'abstract', 'modern', 'contemporary', 'nonrepresentational' art they get and promote as amazing to get high prices. I mean, Jackson Pollock's paint tube squeezing could have been done by a gorilla. I mean, I would have had more respect for it had Pollock trained a gorilla - kudos for training the gorilla!! Have the gorilla spend all day squeezing paint from a ladder, and then the art dealer or trainer with an ability to make good choices for the art customers, can select the ones that have an interesting emotional effect on the human viewer.
    The reason ape art does often appeal emotionally to humans is that humans and apes are related. We both relate to colors and textures in similar ways on the emotional and abstract level because we originate from the same jungle landscape a million years ago. We both appreciate the emotions of the same colors, probably the same responses to tree-like, foliage-like, fruit-like designs. And the ape artist uses feedback to get his effects just like a 5 year old fingerpainting.
  Let us not diminish ape art. A human abstract artist who is able to paint from an ape's perception is to be respected just as much as the actor who put on a suit and played King Kong in the movie.
    The other animal that David Letterman's prank demonstrated was the Indian elephant. But it can be shown that elephant art is NOT really art. The human trains the elephant to create something the trainer decides will appeal to customrs, and the elephant repeats it over and over. The elephant skill is the dexterity of its trunk and its ability to very delicately repeat actions over and over, remembering the actions in detail. So forget about elephant art. Let us not go beyond ape art. If contemporary art should pursue an ideal it is to get into the head of an ape.
    But note, insofar as humans originate from apelike origins, and human babies learn from those foundations, we can bring child art into our discussion. Ape art is in essence similar to the art of human babies and young children in its creation. Is there any difference between a child's fingerpainting and the fingerpainting of a chimpanzee?
  And insofar as adults can reexperience childhood simplemindedness, adults remain capable of "experimenting" and creating effects just like fingerpainting children do. And from that point of view contemporary artists can also be viewed as adults reverting to childhood states, becoming children again, splashing around paint, combining pieces of things and sticking them on paper, and so on.
    Of course many such experiments turn out terrible, and it is important to produce many, and to select the best and throw the bad stuff in the garbage.
    Yes it is possible to get a gorilla trained to produce paintings, and with careful selection, come up as interesting as the show of contemporary art in New York and at the AGO. Yes it is possible even for ape art to be fantastic. The more paintings they produce the greater that chance of great images to arise from among them. But that is the same with human abstract art. How much crap does such an artist put out compared to the ones chosen, and multiply that by all the "artists" doing the same, and the total numbers of paintings are enormous, far far greater than the number of dedicated ape artists in zoos around the world. So we have to judge the works of contemporary art statistically. And if you ask such artists whether they achieved what they envisioned, they will invariably demonstrate that their initial vision was only a starting point - the final result was still a chance result arising from the process.
    And so, it is possible to find contemporary art that is "powerful", "colourful", "interesting" and all the rest. But it is also possible for us to find Nature herself producing interesting designs by chance? Surely real art has to be based on a human having a vision, setting out to turn that vision into reality, and achieving it. If an interesting result arises from the process, and it is not what was envisioned, then that would represent failure as an artist, even if the effect by chance looks interesting.
    Evolutionary and psychological considerations loudly confirm that artists who create such art have not grown up. They are as I say above, operating with random chance, luck and at the limited level of ape or child perception - which is mostly emotional not intellectual.
     I am perfectly capable of churning out several abstracts per day, but I haven't been able to because I look at it and I miss the symbolic and intellectual component that defines the human being.   Why regress as a species? Let our ape brothers and undeveloped children play with abstracts. A mature artist should aspire to portray reality in its fullest way, as the human experiences it on every level including that which defines the human compared to other animals - the intellectual level.

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