My Favorite Questions and Answers From Twitter's Ask A Curator Day

 

Wednesday was Twitter's Ask a Curator Day. Once a year, museums of all kinds around the world make their curators accessible to the general public. Anyone with a Twitter account can ask questions by using the #askacurator hashtag. More than 500 museums registered officially to answer questions. This global online event took place over a 24 hour period and due to the time zones it looks like New South Wales got to go first.

Here are just a few of my favorite questions and answers from the day:

Bluemooie, "Regarding your collections, how do you ensure that you're not purchasing stolen works?"
ArtGalleryofNSW,‏  "Great question! The gallery has a rigorous process for researching provenance. Read more here http://bit.ly/150OWIu "

All About Art, "How do you come up with new exhibition themes? Market research, a curator's vision or...?"
Tyler Collection, "Great question! We look carefully at our collection & think about new ways of interpreting it."

Jessica Cham, "What has been the most outlandish request from an artist involving the installation process of their work?"
ArtGalleryofNSW,  "The relationship between artist & curator is sacrosanct! Often the most outlandish ideas are the best!"

Steve Puttrich, "As a Curator, what's your #1 pet peeve?"
Museum of Inuit Art, "Seeing "the Inuit people" anywhere. Honestly. Inuit means "the people" so it's redundant but so prevalent."
Orphan Train Depot, "People getting offended when we decline an object that has nothing to do with our collection."
Alberta Sports Hall of Fame and Museum Stop,‏ "When people leave objects for the museum with no information about the history of the artifact."

CaFE, "What advice do you have for an art student (both undergrad/grad) just starting their career?"
Boca Museum of Art, "Best advice for art students: have good quality images of your work for submitting to museums, galleries, etc."

Steve Kahn, "What is the best advice you would give an artist?"
Whitney Museum, "Don’t judge your success as an artist by success in the market—it’s not the same thing."

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Guggenheim Museum, and The Museum of Fine Arts Houston all got together to answer questions directed to their JAmes TUrrell exhibitions. You can find the conversation here: http://storify.com/LACMA/2013-askacurator-day-turrell-trifecta .

It was as much fun as last year. Just as it ended I realized that I neglected to ask a lighting question that's been on my mind. I guess it'll be first on my list for next year....

Is It Done Yet?

Marsh House 2013 Katherine Kean
oil on linen 6 x 6 inches

How do you decide when a painting is done?

 For me this has always been something that's mostly intuitive, but as I go along I realize that these days I spend a lot more time thinking about it - especially as I'm approaching the end. Lately it seems to be a matter of whether I feel 've reached clarity on what I think the painting is about.

What do other artists say? Here are some quotes on the subject:

"To put it as simply as possible - and this is a simple answer, not a total answer - I know when a painting's finished when I understand why I wanted to do it in the first place." James Elkins

"The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared." Georges Braque

"One always has to spoil a picture a little bit in order to finish it." Eugene Delacroix

"That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it." Alberto Giacometti

"When a painting is done I feel it actually recedes from me. Everything coalesces and moves away, and I can no longer focus on a single part of it. It suddenly does this gestalt." April Gornik

"It can be difficult to assess when a painting is complete. For this reason, I often set aside the painting to prevent overworking it. When I am unsure, I ask myself if doing more would add or take away from the purpose of the painting." Mary French

"I paint until I become the audience staring at the painting staring back at me. It’s how I know the painting is done." Eric Fischl

"When nothing is wrong anymore, then I stop." Gerhard Richter

Watching Clouds Float By

 Clouds Sailing Over Tweed River Valley ©2013 Katherine Kean
oil on linen 6 x 6 inches

"Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time."

John Lubbock

"Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability." Sam Keen

Cloud watching is high on my list of ways to not waste time, along with reading, bird watching and gardening. What are your favorite ways to not waste time?

Smooth, Dark, and Fast

I wrote previously about the end of the original Blackwing pencils and how disappointed I was when Eberhard Faber stopped making them. At the time I didn’t know that I was far from alone in my admiration for this particular pencil, and it seems to be a particular obsession here in LA.

My pencil supply has been dwindling, so knowing that other than the name, and a reputation and quality to live up to, and that the Palomino Blackwing and the Pearl have no connection to the original, I went ahead and ordered and have tried out both.

From top to bottom: the original Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602, Ebony,
Palomino HB, Palomino Blackwing, and Palomino Pearl

After working with them, I’m starting to lean towards liking the Pearl the most. It seems a little smoother and blacker. They both live up to the slogan, are smooth on the paper, dark, hold a point a bit longer than most, and they smudge and erase well. For now I’m happy to have the familiar shape (not round, so they don’t roll away) and the removable, replaceable (and customizable) eraser. These are made by the Palomino Company, the same company whose pencils I turned to when I first ran out of the original Eberhard Faber Blackwings. The tagline printed on the original and new pencil is “Half the pressure, twice the speed” – clearly the choice for anyone with a light touch.

Another plus in my estimation is hearing back from Customer Service at Pencils.com that "No animal tallow is used in the manufacture of our pencils. Some lead suppliers used to dip their graphite leads in the fat from whales, but this practice ceased a long time ago. Pencil leads are now dipped in a petroleum-based liquid."

Will it live up to its predecessor? Seems promising. I guess we'll see.

A Tree Against the Sky

Tree, Sky Sketch Katherine Kean 2013
graphite approximately 9 x 9 inches

 Georges Rouault said, "A tree against the sky possesses the same interest, the same character, the same expression as the figure of a human."

I've always thought so, and think the same of mountains, plains, rivers, and oceans.

"Here is the deepest secret nobody knows.
Here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
And the sky of the sky of a tree called life;
Which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide.
And this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart.
I carry your heart.
I carry it in my heart."
E E Cummings 

"One brief moment caught from fleeting time..."

Clouds, Valley Sketch Katherine Kean
graphite 8 x 10 inches

"There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact."
Milan Kundera The Art of the Novel

But must the moment elude us? John Constable's artwork sought to give "one brief moment caught from fleeting time a lasting and sober existence." Can the making of marks blend the present, future and past, connect the moment with the memory, and bring the past to a new present?

Or in the words of William Wordsworth: "Praised be the Art whose subtle power could stay, Yon cloud, and fix it in that glorious shape."

Reading The Art Forger

I found "The Art Forger" another fun and entertaining read, and almost as obsessed with surfaces, brush strokes, layers of luminous color, and compositional strategies as many how-to books on painting. The plot weaves art history with the contemporary, and references the mystery surrounding the Gardner Museum heist, in which two men disguised as ­police officers conned their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, tied the guards up with duct tape, and made off with 13 artworks, including three Rembrandts, a Vermeer, and a Manet, altogether valued at $500 million. 

Pondering reproductions, copying, and forgeries tends to make one ponder basic questions about the value of art, doesn't it? If experts can not tell an authentic painting from a forgery, then what exactly are art buyers paying for? Is it status? Authenticity? Is it a look or a signature or a name? Or is it the participation in a unique and original vision that ownership provides?

Written in a first person narrative, the protagonist delves into details about forgery techniques, as she employs the famous art forger Han van Meegeren’s methods of painting. Van Meegeren used synthetic phenol formaldehyde resin dissolved in a spirit such as turpentine and/or an essential oil which would then be mixed with hand-ground powder pigments. This was then baked to change its chemical composition permanently, becoming insoluble in alcohol, or other common solvents. The results are described as so beautiful that I'm almost tempted to try it.