Jessica Dawson picks Joel D'Orazio as her first finalist for the Washington Post's Real Art DC contest:
So how come D'Orazio doesn't have a gallery? When I asked him for a conceptual read on his artworks -- What's the thinking behind them? What are they about? -- I got an inkling of the problem. For D'Orazio, making chairs and making paintings (which he turns out in droves) is instinctual stuff; he considers them open-ended experiments in form and color. There's no big idea here.Read the whole piece here.
Joel, you can't be serious! To be relevant, art has got to have a conceptual underpinning, some reason why it exists. In particular, abstract painting is a minefield -- it can't be attempted in the 21st century without a plan of attack that positions the work against all that came before.
As Joel toured me around his home, basement studio and garage, I saw legions of his abstract paintings on panel, each with pigment pooled on their surfaces in chance patterns. The works were lined up one against the next, almost all without gallery interest or a collector awaiting them.
Questions for the masses: Does art have to have a conceptual underpinning? Or is that a fabricated aftershock of postmodernism or its predecessors? Or even worse, something that art critics and curators all believe in, but many artists choose to ignore?
Or is Joel right in essentially doing art for art sake's and enjoying creating droves of experiments in color and form?
I submit that only time, the only true art critic who wins all art debates, can tell. The most recent evidence of this is the spectacular sudden success of Carmen Herrera, who sold her first painting at age 89 and is now the new darling of the painting world at age 94.
I figure Joel has about 30-35 more years to go...
Well luckily I have already been selling paintings. I do not need to wait for that. Having a gallery is a whole different story. Most artists do not have that.
ReplyDeleteAnd having one is not necessarily nirvana.
It seems that the content Jessica was referring to relates to the awareness of the art which came before me. This is not where I thought she was coming from. Of course I have experienced the world of art through history. I have chosen my style of painting through experiencing the works of the many abstract artists from the 40s, 50s and 60s. I explained to her that I studied abstract expressionist painting in a college class and how I approach painting. What more can there be after that other than the artist and his unique approach
and development as a painter.
Joel D'Orazio
more from Joel D'Orazio
ReplyDeleteIn another response concerning my intuitive abstract expressionist approach to painting and my early influences in art back when I was studying and then practicing architecture, I need to say what my art is not about - or is it? I'm not sure of the meaning. My work does not "collapse the obsolescence and breakdown of new technology with the aesthetic formalism of utopian Modernist abstraction" .O.K. That quote was made in today's Post by a gallery owner in the Lower East Side of NYC explaining an artist's work.
I don't paint with WORDS but with emotion, intellect, subconscious........, color,
paint and panel. It may be old school but I'm not alone.
It seems so silly that anything of beauty needs explaination for it's existence. Sometimes the art world just seems like a big post modernist con- of you can give it meaning with words that substantiates it, rather than just the art speaking for itself. How many horrible pieces of art are "appreciated" because we now understand it. Viewers and critics should use the same gut instincts to view the art as the artist put into making it.
ReplyDeleteKeep doing what you're doing Joel!
Peter e Harper