I'm at Providence Hospital being prepared to go home tomorrow after hip replacement surgery yesterday. Every single person on the staff has been fantastic – caring, competent, and warmly friendly. I felt I had a whole new group of friends. I didn't talk a lot about work, but something moved me to share our Guild with one of my nurses. To my delight...

While exploring advice from professional bloggers about blogging, I ran across this piece by writer, Jeff Goins, about his personal transformation as a writer. As I read it, I substituted “artist” for “writer” and “create” for “write”. Other similar substitutions along the way made this into what for me is an inspiring reminder about creativity. It’s a quick read. You will find it at https://goinswriter.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/The-Writers-Manifesto.pdf Let me know what you think. Joyce

As you know, Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings most of them in the last two years of his life in France, where he died. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterized by bold colors and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. His suicide at 37 followed years of mental illness and poverty.

How many paintings did Vincent Van Gogh sell during his lifetime? Do you think it was 

1. Thirty-two
2. Three hundred twelve
3. One
4. Over four hundred

Tune in May 12 for the answer :-)

What American artist is known for working with popular culture subjects and his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces?

His works have sold for substantial sums, including at least one world record auction price for a work by a living artist. On November 12, 2013, this artist's Balloon Dog (Orange) sold at Christie's Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale in New York City for US $58.4 million, becoming the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction.

A. Jasper Johns

B. Christopher Wool

C Andy Warhol

D. Jeff Koons

See the answer on August 11!

 

And the answer is Jeff Koons who rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a media-saturated era. He gained recognition in the 1980s and subsequently set up a factory-like studio (Andy Warhol did this too) in a SoHo in New York. It was staffed with over 30 assistants, each assigned to a different aspect of producing his work. Today, he has a huge factory and employs 90 to 120 assistants. Koons developed a color-by-numbers system, so that each of his assistants could execute his canvases and sculptures as if they had been done "by a single hand". Koons feels art takes you outside yourself, takes you past yourself. and that his artwork has been a journey to remove his own anxiety. He believes the more anxiety you can remove, the more free you are to make that gesture, whatever the gesture is. That anxiety removal is first within the artist, but then it goes outward, and is shared with other people. And if the anxiety is removed everything is close,and available, and it's just this little bit of confidence, or trust, that people have to delve into. [from Wikipedia]

So how would you rate your artist confidence level?