Isla Acribillada

Cuba: Isla Acribillada (Island Decimated by Stabs)
1980 Handcolored Monoprint with embedded broken blade pieces

 

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Paint It! Ellicott City 2020 – Open Paint-Out Artists Wanted!

 Paint-Out in Historic Ellicott City: October 15-18

Be a part of the Paint It! Ellicott City Open Paint-Out! Grab your painting gear and head to Historic Ellicott City to paint alongside our juried artists during our annual plein air event. In lieu of our temporary community exhibit, this year we will be hosting an online exhibit of Open Paint artwork as well as promoting photos of the event/artwork on social media. Artists will have the opportunity to submit their photos to be shared. For more details and to register for free, click here.

A new art fair model for the Post Covidian Age

I first proposed a version of this model about a decade ago, when there was (even then) a sense of art fatigue brewing in the art world. 

In a post Covidian world, I suspect that a lot of people will still be a little leery of large group gatherings, and art fairs based on pre-Covidian standards may be a bit antiquated in the Brave Chickenized New World.

Herewith a revised Campello Art Fair Model

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The important thing to remember, as I mull, chew, and refine a "new" art post-Covidian fair model to replace the existing pre-Covidian art fair model, which in its American incarnations seemed to work well only in Miami and New York, but not so well in the West coast (and as we DMV-based folks have seen with (e)merge and artDC, not at all in the capital region), is the marriage of a legitimate art entity (a museum) with an art-for-sale process as a means to raise funds. 

The seeds for this model already exist in the DC region with the Smithsonian Craft Show, now in its third decade. 

Considered by many to be the finest craft fair in the world -- and from the many artists that I have spoken to over the years -- one of the best places to sell fine crafts as well, this prestigious and highly competitive juried exhibition and sale of contemporary American craft usually takes place each April for four days. It takes place at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC and it includes one-of-a-kind and limited edition craft objects in 12 different media: basketry, ceramics, decorative fiber, furniture, glass, jewelry, leather, metal, mixed media, paper, wearable art and wood. 

There were 120 exhibitors in last year's show, including emerging artists and master craftsmen, over 30 of whom were first-time participants. Twelve of those selected were also first-time applicants to the show. All were chosen by a panel of expert jurors from a highly competitive field of close to 1,400 applicants.  

So we have a model for crafts in DC which has been working for over 30 years. 

See where I'm going? 

Can we envision the Smithsonian American Art Fair? 

Or... The Smithsonian American International Art Fair?

The SAIAF would dramatically expand the business model of the Smithsonian Craft Fair to a National Mall-wide - outdoors - or even a citywide art fair anchored and guided by the Smithsonian Institution, and possibly either:

(a) spread throughout the various accommodating outdoor spaces at the various SI locales around the National Mall or even

(b) in temporary art spaces, booth, or containers on the open spaces of the National Mall itself! 

The latter is not as big of a deal as it sounds. 

The National Mall already hosts a spectacular variety of outdoor events on the Mall spaces where complex display spaces are temporarily built, secured and just as quickly dismantled, grass re-seeded, and by Monday the Mall is back to normal. 

For art, all we need is protection from the weather and security. Perhaps even a combination of "free" (to the public) set of exhibitors (maybe out on the Mall) coupled with a paid admission set of exhibitors inside SI spaces -- or just make them all free to the public? 

Details... details... 

This new fair model would be open to both commercial art galleries and art dealers, as well as to art schools, and (and here's the key "and") to individual artists and cooperative artist-owned galleries. 

Size matters. 

Would 1200 galleries, dealers, schools and artists in a mega, new-model art fair raise some interests from art collectors to come to DC for a long weekend in May? 

It would if it attracted 100,000 visitors to the fair instead of 10,000 (like the long gone art fair artDC attracted). 

Are you aware that in May the Bethesda Fine Arts Festival in nearby Bethesda attracts 30-40,000 people to the streets of Bethesda for this artist-only street fine arts fair? or that also in May the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival attracts the same number of people to the streets of the Reston Town Center to buy art from individual artists? 

Both Bethesda and Reston have two of the highest median household incomes in the US. And I am told that the Greater Washington, DC region has the second highest concentration of multi-millionaires in the world. 

The money is here - the key is to get the disposable income crowd in touch with the art. 

Both Bethesda and Reston manage to accomplish this one weekend each year. Do not, under any circumstances assume that these are "street fairs" where teddy bears, country crafts, and dried flowers are sold. These are both highly competitive fine arts outdoor fairs where artists from all over the nation come to and compete for spots because artwork sells well. 

I have seen $80,000 worth of sculptures sell to one collector in Bethesda and a painter with a price point of $17,000 sell out in Reston. 

Do not let the snobby attitude of the high art world affect your preconception of what these two street art fairs are like; go visit one this coming (and hopefully post Covidian) May and open your eyes. 

And because of them, and because of the success of Art Basel Miami Beach, we know that given a certain critical mass, people will come out to an art fair. The primary key for art dealers to have interest in an art fair is sales (and also exposure to new collectors, museum curators, etc.), but mainly sales. 

If you are a British gallery, by the time you get yourself and your artwork to Miami Beach, you're in the hole a whole bunch of Euros and British pounds; if you don't sell anything (like it happened to a British gallery in artDC and an Israeli gallery at another fair), chances are that you won't return to that fair. 

But increase the public attendance numbers exponentially, and Economics 101 tells you that sales will also increase exponentially. And unlike the hotel-deprived artDC location at the Convention Center, I am told by DC's tourist gurus that the National Mall is already a magnet location where visitors, regardless of where they are staying around the Greater DC region, flock to during their visits to the capital. 

Since two major Greater DC area street art fairs already exist in May in the Greater DC area, we can even consider aligning the weekends so that both Reston, Bethesda, and the The Smithsonian American International Art Fair all take place on the same weekend! 

Offer free bus service between Reston and Bethesda and the National Mall for collectors to hop around during the fair weekend, and a public buzz alignment will begin to happen. The Smithsonian American International Art Fair starts on a Thursday through Sunday and both Reston and Bethesda continue to run on Saturday and Sunday. And the Smithsonian American International Art Fair is focused as a major fundraiser for the cash-hungry SI. 

A formula of booth prices + perhaps a 5% commission on all sales (both tax deductible for American galleries) would take care of temporary Mall booth construction, re-seeding of grass, and booth construction inside SI venues and still yield a nice chunk of cash for the SI. 

If there's commercial success and high public attendance, soon we'd see some satellite hotel fairs popping up all over DC and its easy-to-get-to suburbs; the Phillips will jump on the bandwagon right away. 

ABMB had 26 fairs all over Greater Miami last December.  Another DC-unique element to the above model, and an important element that only a Washington art fair weekend can add: include the Embassies! 

In addition to all the above events taking place, the fair could also align with shows at 15-20 embassy galleries around DC. The embassies would showcase one (or a group) of their national artists, and then the fair would really have an international flavor, and the beginning seeds of an American Venice in the DMV. 

DC is a small city; it's fairly easy to set up transportation between the embassies and the Mall. In fact, some embassies could probably set that up themselves.

I think that this "new" super model could (and eventually when someone delivers and implements it -- it will) challenge Miami Beach -- and yes, I am aware that DC in May is not Miami in December -- but I also think that the District's own museums and public attractions trump Miami's anytime, so the DMV has something different to offer the potential collector who may be considering attending a new art fair in a city (like DC) that also offers him/her some other cultural and visual attractions besides good weather and nice beaches and sexy Cubans. 

DC art commisioners... Smithsonianos... DC city fathers and mothers.... call me! 

Portrait of Rodin

This is an etching of Rodin (after Rodin) that I did in the late 1970s at the University of Washington School of Art.

Rodin (after Rodin)
by F. Lennox Campello, c. 1978

The curious case of predicting a juror's choice

As mentioned here, the McLean Center for the Arts sponsors a very good painting competition every couple of years called "Strictly Painting." 

A few years ago, around 1999 or 2000, the juror for that year's version of "Strictly Painting" was Terrie Sultan, who back then was the Curator for Contemporary Art at the Corcoran. 

I thought that this choice was a little odd, as Ms. Sultan, in my opinion then, was not "painting-friendly." 

In fact, with all due respect, back then I even blamed her for diminishing the great Corcoran Biennials, which used to be known at one point as the Corcoran Biennial of Painting. As such, they were essentially the only well-known Biennial left in the nation that was strictly designed to get a look at the state of contemporary painting, which was somehow surviving its so called "death." 

It was Ms. Sultan who decided to "expand" the Biennial and make it just like all other Biennials: Jack of all trades (genres) Biennials. In the process, depending on what side of this argument you're on, she (a) did a great service to the Corcoran by moving it into the center of the "genre of the moment" scene - like all other Biennials, or (b) gave away the uniqueness of the nation's top painting Biennial title. 

Even decades later, and with the Corcoran all but a memory, I'm aligned with the minority who supports camp (b) but understand those who defend her decision to become just another player in camp (a). 

Most people think that her decision and drive were the right thing to do in order to bring the Corcoran to a world stage, but clearly it didn't work, since the Corcoran has since folded.

But I digress. 

When she was announced as the juror, I decided to see if I could predict her painting selectivity, sensitivity, process, and agenda. It was my thesis that I could predict what Ms. Sultan would pick. So I made a bet, and decided to enter the exhibition with work created specifically to fit what I deduced would be agreeable to Ms. Sultan's tastes. 

I felt that I could guarantee that I would get into the show because of the transparency of the juror's personal artistic agenda. It is her right to have one; I have them, in fact, we all have them. 

I was trained as a painter at the University of Washington School of Art, but around 1992 or so, I stopped painting and decided to devote myself strictly to my love for drawing. 

So I had not picked up a brush in several years when I decided to enter this 1999 competition, designed to survey the state of painting in our region. It was my theory that Ms. Sultan would not be in the representational side of painting. It was also clear that she (like many curators) was seduced by technology in the form of videos, digital stuff, and such trendy things in the then novel Internet era. 

And so I decided to see if I could marry digital stuff with painting. 

And what I did was the following: I took some of my old Navy ribbons, and scanned them in to get a digital file. I then blew them up so that the final image was quite pixilated. I then printed about five of them and took slides of the printed sheets of paper. I then submitted these slides to the competition, but identified them as oil on canvas paintings. My plan was that if accepted, how hard could it be to whip up a couple of paintings after the fact? 

I titled them with such titles as Digitalism: National Defense and Digitalism: Expeditionary Medal and so on. 

From what I was later told, several hundred painters submitted work. 

And Ms. Sultan selected about only about seven or eight painters in total. And not only was I one of them, but she picked two of my entries. 

I was elated! I had hit the nail right on the head! 

I felt so superior in having such an insight into this intelligent woman's intellect that I (a painter no more) could create competition-specific work to get accepted into this highly regarded show. And then I began the task of creating the two paintings, using the pixilated images as the guide. 

And it turned out to be a lot harder than I thought. For one thing, I had submitted the "paintings" in quite a large size; each painting was supposed to be six feet long. And it didn't take me long to discover that there are a lot of color nuances and hues in an average pixilated image. And I went through dozens and dozens of rolls of tape as I pulled off the old Washington Color School trick of taping stripes (in my case small one inch square boxes of individual colors - hundreds upon hundreds of them) in a precise sequence to prevent smudging and color peeling, etc. 

I painted for at least six hours every day, switching off between paintings to allow the previous day's work to dry off enough to allow a new layer of tape to be applied. I did all the varnishing outside, which usually attracted all the small neighborhood ruffians. It was incredibly hard work, and I was ever so sorry that I had even gotten this crazy idea. All my nights were consumed. 

But eventually they were finished and delivered to MPA and Ms. Sultan even wrote some very nice things about them in the exhibition's catalog. 

Me? 

I was in a mix of both vindication and guilt; exhausted but fired up with the often wrong sense of righteousness of the self-righteous. After the show, I had no idea what to do with them, and they didn't fit my "body of works," but I ended up selling both of them through Sotheby's. 

And today, some art collector in South Carolina and another one in Canada, each have one very large, exhausting and handsome oil painting of pixilated naval ribbons hanging in their home, in happy ignorance of the interesting story behind them. 

I mentioned the adjective handsome in describing them, because a few years ago I was telling this story to Prof. John Winslow, who asked to see the images of the real paintings. When I showed him, he said that they were actually "quite handsome paintings." 

I had never had my work described as "handsome" (although the Washington Post once described it as "irritating"), so it stuck in my head. So there you have it: The story of a former painter with a point to prove about a local curator, the subsequent hard-labor punishment of the process, and a hidden story behind two handsome paintings.

Lessons for artists

An artist has a show and someone steals a piece of art. What happens next? With a signed contract, the artist would know ahead of time that either (a) the gallery has no insurance, in which case the theft is a full loss, or (b), the gallery has art insurance, in which case (a) the gallery puts a claim in with the insurance company, or (c) the artist deals directly with the insurance company. And, by the way, in the event that there’s insurance, don’t expect to get the full value of the stolen work, but in most cases (and policies) only the 50% commission that you’d have received in the event that the work had sold instead of being stolen.

Talking about commissions; how do you know, other than a handshake, what the gallery’s commission is? Let’s say that you are told that the commission is 50% (the general standard for independent commercial fine arts galleries around here). Is that 50% of the price of the piece or 50% of the final sales price? I know of at least one (now closed) major DC area art gallery that has a record of really screwing artists by giving them 50% of an agreed price for a piece; however, the gallery also often sells the piece for a lot more money to its out of town collectors and keeps the difference. Here’s how it works. The artist agrees to sell the photographs for $500 each and thus expects a commission of $250. The unethical gallerist sells some for $500, and some to its out-of-town clientele for $1000, but gives the artist the same $250 commission on those sales.

But let’s say that you have approached a gallery, and show them the works, and discuss representation, and the gallerist agrees to hang some of your work in his next group show. You are not sure if you are “represented” in the sense of the word as you understand it, but shake on it and prepare for your first appearance in a well-known gallery and invite all of your family and friends. At the packed opening, your second cousin-once-removed is admiring one of your huge watercolors, which are tacked onto the wall in a really cool post-post-post-modernist style. He leans forward to admire your brushwork and accidentally spills his white wine onto your watercolor, immediately making your representational work of art into a messy abstraction. What happens next? Does insurance cover damage? Is there insurance? Is that the guy who spilled the wine making a dash for the door?

Having learned your lesson, at your next opening you resign yourself to getting your new work framed and spend a ton of money getting them framed at the most affordable (in other words cheapest) possible way, but still spend a considerable amount of shekels -- because as everyone knows, framing is very expensive (unless you attend the Campello Boot Camp for Artists Seminar and learn how to cut framing expenses by 80%). When you deliver the works to the gallery, the gallerist goes into fits about your gold leaf rococo frames from Target and silver acidic mats and refuses to hang the work. A good contract would have specified ahead of time all issues dealing with framing and presentation standards.

Having calmed down, the gallerist then offers to re-frame all the work for you. You accept with a sigh of relief, and at the opening your 20 newly framed watercolors look great in the 8-ply pH-balanced, acid free mat board, under UV glass and Nielsen mouldings and backed by half-inch, acid free, pH-balanced foam core. You sell four pieces and are happy that things worked out in the end. A few weeks later you get a huge bill in the mail from the gallery; it is what remains of the framing bill after the gallery applied all of your commission to the total framing bill. A good contract should also specify the economic who’s and what’s of any framing done by the gallery.

Your relationship with the gallery is now seriously on the rocks, but then you are told that a review in DC Art News will come out soon. Three months after your show has closed the review finally comes out in DC Art News and it’s a good one. A young computer geek in Bala Cynwood, Pennsylvania, who is waiting to see his doctor for his annual physical reads that DC Art News review in his phone while waiting in the doc’s office, sees the nice reproduction of your work and after he goes home, looks you up on the Internet and contacts you directly and tells you that he read the review of your gallery show in DC Art News and wants to buy the painting reproduced in the magazine. You sell him the painting and put all your money in the bank. Sixteen minutes after the painting is delivered to Bala Cynwood, the gallery gets a call from a collector in Spokane, Washington who has also read the DC Art News review and wants to buy that painting. The gallerist calls you and tells you the good news. You are ecstatic that two people want your painting, but then you tell the gallerist that someone else in Bala Cynwood read the review and that you sold the painting to that person. The gallerist congratulates you on the sale and then asks you to make sure that you send him the gallery’s commission. You are confused because you had no idea that you owed the gallery a commission.

Your review in DC Art News has opened a few doors for your artwork and you are invited by a non-profit art venue to have a solo show at their space in a year. You are pleased and tell everyone, including the gallerist, who informs you that because his gallery represents your work, you are not allowed to exhibit anywhere else in the city, or maybe the area, or maybe the state, or maybe the US, or maybe the world.

Then your alma matter, impressed with your artistic prowess, invites you to a group show of alumni artwork in the school’s gallery. Since you attended art school in another state, you are pretty sure that it will be OK to show there, because after the last confusion, you discovered that the gallery had exclusive representation for your work only in DC, MD and VA (known to locals as the DMV -  an acronym that I invented decades ago), and your art school is in Brownsville, Texas. You tell your gallerist, and because he has never heard of Brownsville, Texas, he looks it up in the Internet and then he informs you that if you exhibit your artwork in “certain places” it will bring the reputation of the gallery down and thus the gallerist doesn’t want you to exhibit in Brownsville, Texas – or anywhere in Texas, Arkansas, and Nebraska for that matter... or any state that voted for Trump!

You beg and plead because you really want to impress your ex-girlfriend in Texas, and the gallerist allows you to include one piece in that alumni show, but makes it clear that he needs to be consulted on any and all exhibitions of your work. And so you exhibit your best piece in Brownsville and a New York gallerist, who happens to be a Robert Ervin Howard admirer, visits Brownsville to pay homage to REH's birthplace and decides to check the local yokels show at the art school. Because your immense watercolors are the largest works in the show, they catch his attention and he jots down your name. Weeks later his intern calls you and tells you that they want to show some of your work in their next group show. This is really hitting the big time, and you announce to your gallerist that a big shot New York gallerist is including you in his next group show. He congratulates you and reminds you that you owe him 10% of any sales made in New York, or in Brownsville, Texas, or anywhere for that matter. You rant and rave and ask why, and he tells you that the reasons for your recent success all lead back to the exposure that he has given you. You demand to know why none of this stuff was made clear from the beginning. The gallerist answers that “everyone knows this,” and that he “likes to operate on a handshake and without a contract.” You then realize that you have him by the balls, since you have no signed contract with him or his gallery, and tell him that you are leaving. He says some threatening stuff about verbal contracts, but you walk away anyway, wondering how you are going to get back the six paintings of yours that your soon-to-be-former gallerist still has in storage.

Nonetheless, New York is New York, and you go visit the big shot New York gallerist and meet with him, and over a handshake he agrees to put you in a group show and tells you that his commission is 60% - You are not sure if you are “represented” in the sense of the word as you understand it, but shake on it and prepare for your first appearance in a New York City gallery and invite all of your family and friends...

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