What is art?

What do you think? Is this art?

Feisty

If you're anything like me then you are always searching for great music that is not over played but fantastic and unique to the ear. And if you have not had the extreme pleasure of familiarizing yourself with the sensational Leslie Feist how very sad your musical experience must be. I have a great love of many genres of music but Feist is by far the most talented, unique, rock out with your cock out, walking piece of fabulous you will ever come across. Ok, yes, that is completely based on my very biased opinion but regardless of that silly small fact, she's untouchable.

I had the honour of meeting Leslie at the premier showing of her documentary Look At What the Light Did now. I was SO inspired at one point that tears were streaming down my face. This woman makes me want to be better. No, better then better, amazing. She makes me believe that I can be a startlingly good artist. I love that someone can make me so sure of myself.

Complex Simplicity = Jim Houser

Tonight I'm lacking inspiration. Here I sit, at my cluttered desk, dinning on lemon gelato thinking... damn I wish I had something to paint. The truth is I have plenty to paint. I just don't want to paint them. I'm fairly certain I would be the worst commission artist ever. Or maybe not. If I were commissioned I'd have money as a motivation wouldn't I? If I'm painting for free I may as well paint what I want to paint... right?

Getting to my point, I went surfing for some visual stimuli and I found Jim Houser. Normally if I were to look at Jim's work on an individual basis my immediate response to it would be, nice use of colour, great composition, belongs in a child's bedroom, would never buy it. However what Jim's paintings lack in complexity he makes up for in presentation. The trick to his art work is owning 5 or more pieces and displaying them exactly how Jim intended them on being displayed.

I would pay a lot of money to see a gallery set up by Mr. Houser. His compositions are nothing short of genius. As he states himself "It's not just a place to come see a bunch of little objects. It's a place to come see one big object" Well said. His gallery is composed of a million little simple images that create a giant work of art. Watch the video and see what I mean. Stimulation accomplished.

Art Gossip

I've never been one to fancy the history of art much. I enjoy looking at the art, fantasizing over it, analyzing it, and finding inspiration in it but knowing why it was painted and the life of the person whom created it was never of great importance to me. All that mattered to me was that I enjoyed looking at it, why should it matter to me if it was painted by a crazy man who ate his paint, slept with too many women and contracted syphilis and inevitably went coo coo?

It's only recently that I realized that the history is what created the art. If not for the conditions surrounding it, economically, socially and geographically that art would have turned out very differently. Maybe my art history teacher was too bland of a story teller. Had she taken a different spin on the history of it, and turned it into art gossip I may have been able to gather up a tid bit of interest.

I recently purchased a book called The Secret Lives of Great Artists. It's a trash mag of a book dedicated to the telling of famous artists and their sometimes overly dramatic life styles.

Did you know that Picasso was a disgusting slob of a man whom his friends described as "living among towering piles of papers, receipts, canvases, empty bottles, and crusts of bread through which tiny paths gave access to the bathroom and easel"? He also kept a menagerie of dogs, cats, mice, and a small ape!

Hmmmm... I wonder if he ever let the ape paint? I know if I had an ape hanging out on my pile of canvases and eating my bread crusts, I would most certainly put it to work.

Illustration: Mario Zucca