Canadian Anti-Spam Flow Chart

Click here to view the chart on the Canada Council website.
This version is impossible to read.

This is from the Canada Council. I have no clue what "7" is. 

I assume step 7 is to "send it."

Visual Clichés

In the Atlantic magazine, Michael Silverberg writes:

I asked Peter Mendelsund—who is an associate art director of Knopf, a gifted cover designer, and the author of a forthcoming book on the complex alliances between image and text—to help me understand how the publishing industry got to a place where these crude visual stereotypes are recycled ad nauseam. He points first to “laziness, both individual or institutionalized.” Like most Americans, book designers tend not to know all that much about the rest of the world, and since they don’t always have the time to respond to a book on its own terms, they resort to visual cliches. Meanwhile, editors sometimes forget what made a manuscript unique to begin with. In the case of non-Western novels, they often fall back on framing it with “a vague, Orientalist sense of place,” Mendelsund says, and they’re enabled by risk-averse marketing departments.

Artists RULE!!!

Visual artists had a big victory today at the Supreme Court in the fight for minimum artist fees at the National Gallery of Canada. In a unanimous decision from the bench, the court allowed an appeal on behalf of artist restoring an earlier decision that found in their favour.

At issue was a perceived conflict between the Status of the Artist Act and the Copyright Act. The associations that represent artists, CARFAC and RAAV, had been trying to negotiate binding minimum fees for the payment of artists at the gallery, similar to a minimum wage. The gallery essentially argued CARFAC and RAAV, were taking away the right of artists to be paid less if they chose. In allowing the appeal, the court rejected this argument and, in an unusual move, ruled immediately after oral arguments.

Artists from across Canada in attendance were delighted with the results. “It’s a good day for artists,” said Grant McConnell, president of CARFAC. “This is a major victory for all artists in Canada and Quebec.”

CARFAC Fights the National Gallery in the Supreme Court

CARFAC is fighting to get Canada's National Gallery (CNG) to pay artist fees. How can the CNG be against so fair and right a practice. Without knowing why they object, it is hard not to be disgusted.

Endings

My last column for Opus, after 28 years and 300 editorials, came out this week.  Here it is (I really like the quotes at the end):

“And how do people perform that ceremony of parting, Jane?” Mr. Rochester asks Jayne in Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre. Saying a permanent goodbye, like other major life changes, is a dynamic renewal to some and anathema to others.

Creative people are good at adapting to change and optimists are also good with transitions. And so, as a creative optimist, I am embracing the change that this last column in the Opus Visual Arts Newsletter brings.

This is column number three hundred in Issue #300. More than twenty-eight years of writing this column has been a highlight of my life, as has been receiving the one thousand-plus inspiring emails and letters you have sent me. (The two pieces of hate mail I could have done without, though.) Writing to you each month has been a remarkable experience that cumulated in the writing of two books and an offer of a teaching position at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

I have some very vivid memories as a result of past columns that I will never forget:

• Writing about a Shell Oil supply boat touring in the Arctic that had a free stateroom for an artist and later hearing from an artist who that took that life-changing trip.
• Getting almost two hundred letters and calls when I wrote about finding my birth mother at age forty-five and her turning out to be a revered and accomplished artist.
• Introducing the Gorilla Girls to Vancouver artists on two occasions by bringing them to speak and perform at the Stanley Theatre.
• Presenting the Opus Series, a series of presentations by feminist curators Whitney Chadwick and Marcia Tucker.
• Commissioning and presenting short plays about Emily Carr, Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keeffe. I had the courage to undertake this only because I knew you would buy tickets to attend.
• Making a success of Artropolis 2001, thanks largely to the ability to “spread the word” through this newsletter.

And then there is my most unique memory. I had gone to the cashier to pay for some clothes at The Bay whilst a sale was occurring that had a contest component. When I handed my credit card to the salesperson and she saw my name, she kept scratching and throwing away the contest discount scratch cards until she found one with the maximum percentage off for me because she enjoyed these newsletter columns so much.

I look forward to whatever lies ahead, but I will always look back at the writing of this column as the most remarkable professional experience of my life. And for that, I am forever grateful to David van Berckel, Scott Cronshaw and Opus for providing me with the privilege of this platform.

This is how I describe myself on my website: “I research, teach, write and publish about professional development for visual artists, seeking to maximize the pleasure, productivity and success of the creative practitioners I deeply respect and admire.”  I mention this because of that last part about you.

Making art was only a hobby for me. I have only modest skills; hence my reverence for the truly talented. My admiration and respect for creators of visual art led to a determination to serve artists. Founding and running Presentation House Gallery and the Alliance for Arts and Culture, founding this newsletter in 1986, teaching, writing books and leading workshops — all these activities have been ways to serve you.

During my tenure writing this column I got a devastating diagnosis of HIV. I faced a path of challenging treatments that could not cure and that would end in the ultimate ceremony of parting. But a medical miracle led to a very positive and unexpected outcome. On the day I was given back a future, I went for a walk along the Stanley Park seawall. I will never forget that walk in the sunshine.

I felt like the luckiest person in the world to have escaped death and to have lived the creative path I chose. I may not have found wealth or glory, but I reveled in the joys of colour, composition and texture. And my supreme moments of consciousness were those of majestic pleasure in the presence of great work by great artists. (Brian Jungen, you are my God.)

I am envious of all of you who are blessed with true talent. I hope you never take it for granted and that your talent and your process will forever truly fulfill you, because looking at your work is the most valued thing that I and many others do.

So to make celebratory this parting, here are some famous words for you:

• “If you hear a voice within you say, ‘You cannot paint,’ then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”  (Vincent van Gogh)
• “Every artist was first an amateur.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
• “Painting is easy when you don’t know how and very difficult when you do.” (Edgar Degas)
• “Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes; work never begun.”
• (Christina Rosetti)
• “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes; art is knowing which ones to keep.” (Ansel Adams)
• “[Making] art is the only way to run away without leaving home.” (Twyla Tharp)
• “Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.” (Stella Adler)
• “An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.” (Charles Horton Cooley)
• "I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don't, in fact, know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do." (Francis Bacon)
• “As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward." (Vincent van Gogh)
• “People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it’s simply necessary to love.” (Claude Monet)
• “No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist.” (Salvador Dali)
• “Damn! And just when I was starting to get it!” (Edgar Degas on his deathbed)

And so, goodbye and good luck.

Art Explained to a Child

The Ladybird Book line still exists, but in the traditional sense, the name refers to a line of British children’s books that were published from the 1940s through 1970s. The had a standardized format including a listing of key vocabulary words on each page.

Miriam Elia, a writer and artist, has released the book We Go to the Gallery. It's a satire on modern art that in the form of a fake Ladybird book:

“I thought it would be humorous to see Mummy, Peter and Jane going to a really nihilistic modern art exhibition”, she says. Among the works confronted by the trio on their cultural outing are pastiches of Emin, Creed and Koons, through which they learn about sex, death, nothingness “and all of the debilitating, middle-class self-hatred contained in the artworks.”

You can see more a few more pages at The Independent.

Moving Masterpieces

I have posted a video of this technique before (on another blog), but here it is applied to classical visual art.