But is it art?

A few years ago a couple of friends invited me to a Wellington Art Society meeting to hear a lecture given by Gary Schwan, who was the art writer for the Palm Beach Post. Basically, he talked about his belief that most contemporary art was “crap.” Though it’s been a number of years since I heard him speak, I am fairly certain that my quote is correct, since his words made a huge impression.

At the time, I had just closed my psychotherapy practice and was beginning my new career as an artist. I hadn’t even started writing professionally. So being fairly ignorant about art world lingo, when he said “contemporary” I thought he was using the word literally, meaning present-day. And since the room was filled with current artists, I was shocked he was that forthright. As he talked, I did realize that he was referring to the most modern, cutting edge, avant-garde art about which I didn’t have strong feelings, and in part I agreed with him.

Recently, I have felt inundated by contemporary art exhibits, and like Gary Schwan my hackles have risen. First there was a “cutting edge” show at the Armory Art Center followed by Contempo at the Lighthouse Center for the Arts. The Gavlak gallery of Palm Beach had an opening, artpalmbeach at the Palm Beach Convention Center was a contemporary show, and then the Artists of Palm Beach County organized a tour of Whitespace, the Mordes Collection in West Palm Beach. By the time of the Whitespace tour, I was almost totally turned off and even angry about what was being put out there as art. The final straw was the Norton Museum exhibit Here Comes the Sun: Andy Warhol and the art after 1960 from the Norton Collection.

Seeing a circle of rocks being called art was just too much for me, and some of the Norton paintings made my blood pressure rise. I felt the need to verbalize my reactions to colleagues and found that a number of them agreed with me. One said that contemporary art is “novelty and interesting design, some of it very good, but not art.” Another said, “The old masters are rolling over in their graves. You know the saying ‘the emperor has no clothes,’ someone needs to say something. You should write about it.” I was pleased to hear their criticisms. It always feels good to know that you’re not alone, but what do I believe?

Over a year ago I wrote an Art Musings Blog for BestofArtists titled What is Art? in which I talked about my experience in college producing innovative sculptures for a professor who seemed only to appreciate Pop and Op art. To get an A, I gave him work I knew he would enjoy, but to this day I regret that I never learned traditional carving, casting, or modeling. Still when I wrote the article last year I came to the conclusion that my highly creative and amusing pieces were art, because art (which is defined as “the creation of beautiful or thought provoking works”) is subjective. I thought some of the pieces were beautiful, and they were definitely thought provoking.

My problem with a lot of what is currently called art is that it may be thought provoking and it may evoke emotions, but it’s rarely beautiful and a lot of it doesn’t require much skill. It's as if aesthetics are discounted. That’s not to say that all cutting edge art is ugly and unskilled. I recently admired Federico Uribe’s art installation in the new West Palm Beach Waterfront pavilion. He manages to use disposable objects like plastic utensils to create colorful, engaging, and meaningful pieces. Not all of contemporary art is crap, but an awful lot of it is. When I see works that require little skill or talent being lauded, while beautiful but traditional pieces are being overlooked, it makes me mad.

My photos: at top right a portion of Federico Uribe's art exhibit and on the left a view of Whitespace.

Fundraising and Haiti

Recently I have felt proud to be part of the arts community. This past week, I realized how many art events I attended or planned to attend that were making charitable donations to important programs or organizations. The first was the Lighthouse Center of the Arts' BraVo exhibition, which will benefit cancer research. It’s an exhibit of art bras created by local artists, and the bras will be auctioned off at a Pink Cocktail Party on February 11^th. The proceeds will benefit the American Cancer Society’s Making Strides Against Breast Cancer.

This Friday, January 29^th, is the opening reception and fundraiser Birds, Birds, Birds for the Audubon Society of the Everglades at Urs Art Studio Gallery at 805 N. Federal Highway in Boynton Beach. The event is free, but organizers are hoping attendees will make a donation at the door. In any event, 10% of the proceeds of sales will benefit the local Palm Beach County Audubon chapter in their endeavors to conserve our landscape and wildlife and in sponsoring events such as the upcoming Everglades Day on February 6th. My sister, Jan, inspired the event, and we are both pleased that six of our dad’s beautiful pastels of birds are a part of the exhibition.

Last week I attended a Neighborhood Art Stroll & Block Party presented by the Whitney, a residential and commercial property in downtown West Palm Beach, and Altima International which featured the work of a number of Cuban artists and the studios of Bruce Helander, Humberto Calzada, and Nathan Gallui Designs. A $10 admission was charged to benefit the Tri County Humane Society. By the time the event took place, however, the earthquake in Haiti had occurred so the organizers decided to divide the proceeds from admissions between the Humane Society and the Haiti Relief Fund.

Since Katrina took place in New Orleans, I can’t think of a natural disaster that has been more devastating than this earthquake. I found myself compelled to watch the news. If any nation was already suffering enough, certainly it was this one. Seeing the documentaries about women, who bake dirt cookies for a living was shocking, and the fact that for many it’s all they have to eat, is unconscionable. How do we manage to live in a world where people experience such impoverished conditions? And why does it take something as traumatizing as an earthquake to make us respond?

At least, we are taking action now. This past weekend there was a City Place Art Festival. The streets of City Place were packed with people viewing arts and crafts from a slew of artists from around the country. In addition to Publix and Muvico, and I imagine a number of other establishments which have been asking for donations, in the middle of the main street at the Arts Festival, there stood a Red Cross booth where attendees could make contributions for Haiti relief.

Local artists have also gotten into fundraising for Haiti. The Flamingo Clay Studio (at Clay Glass Metal Stone Gallery) has put out a Call for Artists for a Haitian Empty Vessel Event in downtown Lake Worth. They are asking artists to donate at least two handmade bowls to the gallery by Saturday, February 27^th. Each of the bowls will be sold for $25, and total proceeds will be going to the Haitian relief effort. They plan to work with local restaurants to set up samples of their food on the day of the event. Purchasers of bowls will be able to go from restaurant to restaurant or vender to vender to fill their bowls with food.

Now if only our creative abilities could come up with a way of ending world hunger.

Photo: City Place Art Festival by M. Schreiber

New Year's Resolutions

Happy Holidays! 2009 is almost over! Hard to believe that another year has come and in another week will be gone. It’s the end of the aughts and into the double digits of the 21^st century. I wrote about New Year’s Resolutions for the Examiner, Bring art into your life. It made me think about my own resolutions and the role art plays in my life. I suppose the end of the year naturally brings up introspective thoughts about what one has accomplished in the past year and what one hopes or plans for the upcoming year.

This past year has been an extraordinary one for me. Early last winter I spent a month in New Zealand and Australia. It was a trip of a lifetime. One I still haven’t quite digested. In a small art museum in the seacoast town of Napier, I discovered an artist named Felix Kelly. The Napier museum had a one-man show of his work, Felix Kelly: A Kiwi at Brideshead.

The New Zealand-born artist died in 1994 at age 80 in England where he lived most of his adult life. Though he was a middle class New Zealander, his paintings of courtly houses appealed to the royals who adopted him as their own. His house portraits and cartoons were delightful, and I treated myself to a small print of a mansion overlooking a beach, which is now hanging on my living room wall. I loved his work and wanted to write about him but haven’t until now.

The aboriginal art in Australia also had an impact on me. The Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney had a huge exhibit of Contemporary Traditional Aboriginal Art. Mostly done in reds, yellows, and browns, the paintings are extremely abstract, yet almost every one tells a story. I didn’t purchase anything, but I think subliminally they affected me because recently I have been thinking a lot about painting abstracts, something I never thought I would do.

And that thought brings me to my own resolutions for the New Year. I have not been enjoying painting for a couple of months. I am very self-disciplined so I have continued to paint in spite of my lack of enthusiasm. Unfortunately, those close to me have let me know that the paintings reflect my state of mind. So I have decided to quit painting until I am once again inspired. Hopefully that won’t take another twenty years as it did in the past. In the meantime, I have much writing to do, and I am thinking about working three dimensionally. I have visions of colorful dreamcatchers in my mind, and I want to get my crayons out to manifest the abstracts I’m envisioning.

For now, I am having the most fun creating bras for Bra-Vo an exhibition and auction of art bras to help support the fight against breast cancer which the Lighthouse Center for the Arts is hosting from January 7 to February 11, 2010. The photo above is “Pretty in Pink” made of yarn, ribbons, satin, and beads, which I am dedicating to my mom, Anne K. Schreiber.

On being an Artist

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. It's hard for me to believe that November is more than half over, and Christmas will be here before we know it. What a cliche! I mean that last sentence. Today, I'm feeling very judgmental towards myself. As I worked on my painting Kwan Yin at Sunset on Bandon Beach (above), I was worried that it looked amateurish or simply not well painted. And yet, I think I captured the mood of the place, the feeling I had when I was there.

For the past few months working for Examiner.com, I've been so busy looking at art and writing about it that I'm becoming more self-conscious about my own work. I'm not sure that's a good thing because I look at the work of other artists and feel defeated. What's the point, I ask myself. I'll never paint as well as Gary Erbe or John Baeder. But does that matter? The fact is I am compelled to paint, so painting I will continue to do. Buy why? What do I hope to accomplish?

Recently I met John Elliot. His wife, Sheila, volunteers her time to do publicity for the Everglades Chapter of the Audubon Society. My sister, Jan, who's the treasurer introduced us, and Sheila was kind enough to publicize my father and daughter show at Urs Art Studio Gallery. I ended up receiving a full-page article with my picture in the Boynton Beach Forum of the Sun Sentinel. Anyway, to thank Sheila who refused payment except in the form of a donation to the Audubon, Jan and I invited the Elliots to our house for happy hour.

It turns out that John Elliot is a master painter whose works are in a number of collections, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art in N.Y., the Smithsonian, and the Fogg Museum of Harvard University. His book Oil Pastel for the Serious Beginner: Basic Lessons in Becoming a Good Painter was published in 2002. He is a very humble man who admitted to being an artist when we met at the Urs gallery opening, but he never even alluded to his spectacular accomplishments. On our second meeting after I studied his web site, he did recount stories about his friendships with Norman Rockwell and Salvador Dali. I'm hoping to write an article about him for the Examiner. I have so much to learn from him.

So what does he have to do with my art and what I hope to accomplish by painting? I don't know. It's just a reminder to myself that no matter what, I'm enjoying this path that I'm taking. If not for my painting, I might not have met the Elliots.

Above to the left is my photo taken in the early morning on Bandon Beach in Oregon. Not the best photo. It was a drizzly, overcast day. We had been at this very same spot the night before at sunset, but I didn't have my camera with me. Jan, my cousin, Ed, and his partner, Alan, all saw Kwan Yin as we wandered the beach. The sky was pink and purple, and I felt like I was on another planet.

Vacation in Oregon

Two weeks ago I returned from a fabulous trip to Oregon and northern California. I had no idea that the Oregon coast was so gorgeous. It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever visited, and it was wonderful being on vacation there. No painting. No writing. Just being.

My days were spent hiking on cliffs overlooking a fierce ocean and rustic beaches with huge rocks, monoliths like the ones in Monument Valley - the kind of beaches where you would expect to see wild horses running. I didn’t see any horses, but we did see a deer one day on a hike in Manzanita, and on several occasions we were entertained by the barking of sea lions and seals. When we weren’t hiking by the ocean, we were walking trails in the redwoods, which were equally amazing, powerful, and beautiful. I felt so small in every sense.

But vacations end. Since my return home, life has been busy. I did a Q & A with Gary Erbe for the Examiner. He is an unbelievably talented and skilled artist, and also a lovely man. Both he and his wife were warm, down to earth, and very generous with their time and knowledge. Gary even shared with me his formula for the medium he created using linseed oil, stand oil, copal varnish and turpentine. If you haven’t been to his solo exhibit at the Boca Raton Museum of Art yet, you have until November 8 to see it. Or go to my Examiner page to read the article and see a slideshow of ten of his paintings.

The evening of October 9 was the opening reception of Women In The Visual Arts’ exhibit at the Armory Art Center. My painting, Cruising the Caribbean, is part of the large show which includes the work of 154 artists. The show ends on October 29.

Last weekend I enjoyed a Sunday afternoon at the Norton Museum. I went to see New York, New York: The 20^th Century exhibition. I missed the Press Preview, which took place when I was away, and I was eager to see the show as well as revisit the George Segal: Street Scenes exhibit. Both shows are there until the end of December and both are worth seeing. On that Sunday afternoon, the Klezmer East Trio performed a concert in the auditorium adding to the pleasure of a museum visit.

Then this past Friday, October 23, was the opening reception at Urs Art Studio Gallery at 802 N. Federal Hwy. in Boynton Beach where five of my oil paintings and four of my dad’s pastels are on display until January 10. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they will sell. In the meantime, I’ve started painting a landscape of an Oregon beach. It’s one way of keeping the vacation alive.

Photos above by M. Schreiber: On the left, a view on a hike in Yachats, Oregon. And on the right, a view from the house in Trinidad, California

On being an Examiner

For the past couple of months, I have been the West Palm Beach Fine Arts Examiner for Examiner.com, “the to go place for what’s happening in America.” Writing three articles a week, albeit brief ones, is much more time consuming than I imagined when I took the job. As a result, I’m not doing my other writing – no novels or non-fiction books, not even query letters to agents or publishers. And though I continue to paint, time at the computer competes dramatically with time spent at the easel.

In spite of all that, I am thoroughly enjoying the endeavor and would recommend becoming an Examiner to any aspiring writers. Don’t do it for the money, because earnings for now are a joke. To quote a friend, “It’s slave labor.” So why is it so compelling and fulfilling?

For one thing, my work is being read. Though painting and writing are rewarding in themselves, like most “artists,” I crave an audience. For me, there’s nothing more frustrating than having my work remain unnoticed. Knowing that on a daily basis hundreds of people are seeing, and hopefully enjoying, the fruits of my labor is extremely satisfying.

But beyond that, I am also now in the position to do something positive for the people I care about and for the art world. I get to laud local artists, museums, and galleries. Praising the Norton Museum, a place which has given me a great deal of pleasure for many years, and the Vero Beach Museum, a wonderful new discovery for me, does my heart good. I can let the world know about the excellent art and art related activities coming out of southeast Florida, particularly Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast.

And by posting my paintings and photographs in my articles, I get to blow my own horn. Accordingly, after writing an article about her, I was invited by Suzette Urs, a fantastic local artist and gallery owner, to show both my work and my dad’s in her gallery. Mark your calendars for the Opening Reception the evening of Friday, October 23 at the Urs Art Studio Gallery located at 802 N. Federal Highway in Boynton Beach.

Being an artist can be very isolating. After all, both painting and writing are very introverted undertakings, and I spend hours alone at the computer or with a canvas. But as The Fine Arts Examiner I’ve been forced to get out into the world much more than I would have to review the local art events taking place each week. Consequently, I’ve discovered some new and wonderful galleries like the Clay-Glass-Metal-Stone Cooperative Gallery in Lake Worth, the Craft Gallery in West Palm Beach, and the Village Art Studios in Tequesta. Plus being considered a journalist and getting invited to the Press Preview for the George Segal exhibit at the Norton was a blast.

So if you are an aspiring writer and open to a venue that pays very little but offers you the opportunity to build a brand name for yourself, you could do worse than Examiner.com. And if you decide to apply to the Examiner, when you fill out your application, please write that Maxine Schreiber referred you. Examiners earn $50. for each referral who becomes an examiner. If you don’t want to write for the Examiner but have ideas about fine art articles you would like to read, please let me know by commenting below. And when you have a chance, please read my articles, or even better subscribe to my page. It won’t cost you anything, and you will receive the most current art info.

Above Photos:

Maxine and Mag at the Wellington Art Society opening, photo by David Frye.

Maxine, Susan, and Jan at the Craft Gallery opening, photo by George Louis Wells.

Art In Florida: Summing up the summer

Though summer is not “the season” in Florida, and the art scene doesn’t usually gear up until late fall or early winter when the snowbirds return, this summer has been a potpourri of wonderful art experiences for me.  It began in June with the Norton Museum’s exhibit Disney: The Music Behind the Magic 1928 – Today which I wrote about in my June blog.  The exhibit runs until  September 6, so if you haven’t seen it yet, make sure to get there before it closes.  In fact the Off the Wall: Human Form in Sculpture exhibit is also still on until Sept. 6.  So you could see two wonderful exhibits with one visit.

Talking about museum exhibits, this summer I discovered the Vero Beach Museum of Art.  Although Vero is not that far from West Palm Beach, I don’t get up there very often, and when I do I’m usually too busy visiting with friends to take time for museums.  On my recent trip up, however, my friend Kim thought I would really enjoy the current exhibit, so in the heat of the afternoon we took refuge in the air conditioned building. 

Those of you who live in Indian River County are probably already aware of the cultural gem in your midst.  But for some who are not, the museum which is situated on the east bank of the Indian River lagoon, was expanded and renovated in 1988-89 and now features five galleries, a sculpture garden, sculpture park, and an educational wing with seven studio classrooms as well as an elegant auditorium and a museum store.  The current exhibit Rooted In Tradition: Art Quilts from the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum continues through October 25, and it is not to be missed.  The fabulous exhibit of 64 quilts is a feast for the eyes.

This summer I also discovered a new gallery in downtown Lake Worth. From cloisonné jewelry to clay sculptures, The Clay-Glass-Metal-Stone Cooperative Gallery is filled with art of the finest quality.  Flamingo Clay Studio, a non-profit arts organization whose mission is to provide affordable studio and gallery space for three-dimensional artists, is sponsoring the gallery of 25 artists who are collectively exhibiting their work.  Opening receptions featuring three of the artists are held on the first and third Fridays of each month.  This summer I attended two of the openings and enjoyed wine and refreshments while I viewed the marvelous art.

In addition to the Norton, in West Palm Beach, The Whitney a condominium and business complex offered a summer stroll of their first floor lofts, an evening of fine food and libation which I wrote about in my last blog.  Since the event, my sister, Jan, and I have been thinking about opening up our very own gallery, a fantasy we’ve had for nearly a decade.  Though we can’t afford the rent alone, we’re hoping an artists’ cooperative similar to the one in Lake Worth may be a happening thing in West Palm in the future.