dear diary

OK, so I´ve got to produce a show by jan 22. And send them a picture for PR by, like, yesterday. A quick glance at the studio tells me I´m in trouble.

Oh my, a new one man show in the calendar. Jan 22 on the glorius Galleri Vända Sida, a 25 something meter wall at the public library. Strange thing, this Linköping habit of turning walls into galleries. Maybe the proverbial white cube is on it´s way out, but a white sheet isn´t much of an improvement. My last show, at Galleri ALKA, also in Linköping, was also a wall. Just a wall.

Hooray for galleries that dare to emphasize the flatness of true art (i.e. painting).

My website revamped, finally

After a lot of tedious editing, I finally got the ugly duckling off the ground. Please visit http://www.orat.se, make a lonely webpage happy. Other than that, nothing much (still trying to treat this blog as a studio diary, but my propensity for procrastination makes this a very slow reader experience).

My entry to that f-ing Salon

Forgot to show the painting I sent into the gap of the local art world

More on the Salon

So, the party´s over and my poor darling picture hangs there, surrounded by the offal of local art. The guy next to me boasts having renewed art by utilizing something he calls "vegetable oil colour". Further away glows tepees of the American Indian persuasion, adorned with the glow of escaping spirits.

In front of my painting hangs two tinted photographs depicting a man in various stages of constipation, although the titles suggest that he is either Hamlet or communing with some deity. A good thing with painting is that if you´re really, really bad, chances are that your shitty content drowns in your shitty craftsmanship. Photography, alas, does not have that benevolent hiding power.

When doing jury work myself at salons, I often noticed that there is a correspondence between the seriousness of the works subject matter and the quality, or should I say, a negative correspondence. The crappiest works tend to deal with things like man´s eternal spirit, the profound qualities found in undisturbed nature and power seeping down from the Universe, while worthy works of art is more about ephemeral entities like shoes, dirt and cigarette butts. Is this a shortcoming in Art, this inability to cover the Grand Themes without belly flops? Memo to self: produce a Profound Painting over a Really Grand Subject next week.

The lesser aesthetically fine tuned might interject that my art inhabits Crappyland already when fiddling with little things in life, but I forgive you. Without means to kill you, I choose to forgive you.

Salon de Refusés

Today a letter reached me, telling me that two of the paintings i submitted to the regional Salon was rejected. I sort of hoped that all three of them should be thrown out, thus adding to my self-inflation by defining me as truly avant-garde. But alas, one shitty little painting managed to penetrate the impenetrable, rendering me a middle of the road, bland little hack of a painter.

Then again, I´m now officialy invited to the show opening mingle party. Might mean free booze, i.e. a microscopic plastic glass of plastic wine. Might also mean close encounters with the Linköping Art Groupies, unless they get competely soaked from all that wine and stumble on their Zimmer Frames.

Anyway, I feel I should share my rejected little darlings with the world, before they fade away into oblivion.

 The first one is from my Uppsala series and not really a favourite, probably because it has got better siblings in the suite. 

 

The second one is called Boom Box and is, to me, a seminal work of extreme beauty.

so...

...this is a blog. My, am I updated.