New Drawing

While I was away in Colorado hiking in Littleton, one night I did a few drawings in my hotel room at night. Below is "Y Chromosome Nude About to Face an Unexpected Light" which is a charcoal on paper with a little conte crayon, about 13 x 9 inches. Drop me a note if you want it.

"Y Chromosome Nude About to Face an Unexpected Light"
by F. Lennox Campello, Charcoal and Conte on Paper, 13 x 9 inches c. 2007

Another St. Sebastian

A pretty well-known DC area art collector saw my recent St. Sebastian drawing, and he emailed me and reminded me that a few years ago he bought the below pen and ink wash drawing on the same subject. As I recall I think that he bought it at a Sotheby's auction, or maybe at a late 90s gallery show in DC.

Anyway... it's a pretty large drawing, maybe 40 inches long. It is titled "Saint Sebastian in a Desintegrating Gene Davis Landscape." I had forgotten all about it, and had even lost the image (thanks to a close-by lighting strike a few years ago that nuked my computer and with it a few hundred digital images of my work). Click on the image for a larger view.

Transform/Nation

There's something magnetic about the artwork of nations and people who are just beyond the reach of the average gallery and collector - thus the hot interest in Cuban and Iranian art for example.

Transform/Nation: Contemporary Art of Iran and Its Disapora opens June 21st, 2007 at the Ellipse Arts Center in Arlington, Virginia while a simultaneous, sister exhibition will be held at the Nikzad Gallery in Tehran, Iran, which implies (I assume) that the exhibitions have been blessed (no pun intended) by the heavy handed nutcase who rules that amazing and beautiful country.

Curated by Narges Bajoghli, Nikoo Paydar, Maryam Ovissi, and Leyla Pope, the exhibition runs through August 4, 2007 and the exhibiting artists are: Samira Abbassy, USA, Haleh Anvari, Iran, Kaya Behkalam, Germany, Mina Ghaziani, Iran, Pantea Karimi, USA, Bani Khoshnoudi, France, Haleh Niazmand, USA, Amir Rad, Iran, Afarin Rahmanifar, USA, Jairan Sadeghi, USA, Samineh Sarvghad, Iran, Farideh Shahsavarani, Iran, Samira Yamin, USA and Siamak Nasiri Ziba, Iran.

WalMarting a museum for Arkansas

Lately, with a rare exception here and there, it has become very fashionable among art writers, bloggers and critics to demonize the efforts of Alice Walton’s no nonsense, robber-baroness approach to give the people of Bentonville, Arkansas a world class collection of art.

Regardless of how one feels about Ms. Walton’s wealth (she's the 20th richest person on the planet) and approach to buying art, Bentonville (population: 29,538) is not a place in which many people live, much less visit, and practically no one in the art world cares about.

But needless to say, flyover states deserve a look at America's art historical tradition, too.

But other than an infectious and personal dislike by these writers for Ms. Walton’s approach, the barely hidden implication in their written words is that metropolitan areas like Seattle, Washington, Forth Worth, Texas, and St. Louis, Missouri - places that people will visit - are more natural and deserving destinations for high art for our public American masses outside of New York.

This is elitist nonsense on a major scale.

There are very few places left in this nation where the reach of internationalism doesn’t touch. Early last year I was gallivanting all around the nation, and one of the places that I visited (for the first time in my case) was Arkansas. It’s rural OK, but it’s not what urbanites visualize.

Bentonville's next door neighbor, Fayetteville (population around 67,000) is the home to the 420-acre campus of the University of Arkansas (the only comprehensive, doctoral degree-granting institution in the state). Their enrollment has more than 14,600 students (more than 12,000 in undergraduate programs) and a diverse student population with 650 international students representing 86 countries.

And this place is rated by Money magazine as one of the top ten most desirable places in the nation in which to live or work.

There are several other towns in the area. Springdale is one where the impact of Wal Mart is amazing to see — luxury retailers and gargantuan homes; a real population and cultural explosion is happening there.

It doesn’t take a futurist to predict that this area will see a major urban growth in the next few decades, and when it does, it will be grateful to the vision of Alice Walton, which is perhaps a throwback to that of the moneyed folks who a century earlier built the collections that she now shops from.

And so I think that I will step aside from the rest of the art lemmings and applaud Ms. Walton’s Soviet-style approach to art politics in her effort to give the folks of Arkansas a world class collection of art.

Not only because she has billions of dollars to do so, but also because I think that she sees the location of this museum as something positive for an America that although politicians (and both leftwing and rightwing nuts) are often quoting as underserved Americans, they all perceive as a backwater populated by people who don’t care about art.

And yet, I hope that no one will disagree in that this coming exposure of the fine arts to this hard-working, modest segment of our population, who haven't generally had the opportunity to have it so close at hand, will be a good thing.

This is something to be applauded.

You go Alice Walton!

Update: Nikolas Schiller reacts to my thoughts with some really good points of his own. Read them here.

The Power of the web

Sunday I wrote about ARCO's "Expanded Box" project being curated by Claudia Giannetti, and asked for some of DC's illuminati to contact Ms. Gianetti in order to bring to her attention some of the area artists who are working with technology as part of their art.

Last night, amongst the hundreds of emails that I am still trying to read, there was a new one from Ms. Giannetti, and she's very interested!

I will discuss with her about the area artists that I am familiar with and who work with technology, but if there's other artists out there, from Philly down to Richmond, who are working with technology to deliver works of art, please contact me (hurry!).

Somebody pinch me

Will the aliens who kidnapped WaPo art critic Blake Gopnik and replaced him with an art critic who all of a sudden likes painting, please return him accept our thanks!

Writing from the Venice Biennale, Blake is shocked and surprised to discover that he likes the paintings of Mustafa Hulusi.

Together with other "painting is dead" acolytes, the Gopnikmeister suddenly discovers that disliking an entire form of the fine arts is never a good thing.

Barbara and Aaron Levine, Renée Van Halm and Blake Gopnik: welcome to the real world where minds are open to all art forms, rather than only to slogans and agendas and ideas.

Read his report here.

Airborne again today and heading to Denver. More later...