Conánn FitzPatrick

I found this through Ma.gnolia's art group. I love Ron Mueck's work. We walk past interesting people everyday with out paying much attention and when we do find something or someone who catches our eye we are afraid of being caught or even worse told off. Hyper-realism and the play on scale gives the viewer the opportunity to stare and examine the forbidden fruit of the human animal and I don't mean scrota. (finally an opportunity to use scrota)

Talking of Magnolia, I have been an avid user of Delicious for a long time and love the simplicity of the service and the ease with which I can use and display my bookmarks. Delicious is a great way of finding bookmarks from like minded people, or in many cases very different people who skid across my long tail. Ma.gnolia is pretty much the same social bookmarking malarky as Delicious, Furl and Blinklist, though was late arival. It's definitely prettier and has the nod of the mighty Zeldman but what has begun to set it apart from the others from me is the users are just more arty (ugh hate that word), not to say the people who use the other services are not amazingly creative it's just a different feel, less slashdotty and I have slowly grown to like it more.

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No matter how hard you try and prevent it life always gets in the way of making your own art, in fact it feels so long since I have painted that I am almost ashamed to call it art. I look forward threw my to-do lists in my basecamp account and I can see the halo of painting time ahead. I have enough experience to know that finding the time to paint is much easier then figuring out what it is I want to paint.

I am not sure I will ever be the type of artist who will want to explore the land of multiples. I don’t envy the artist who decides to sit and paint twenty canvases of sunflowers. I tried it when I did a series of clouds paintings, and still feel the first three were the strongest. The other ten were an exercise in confirmation of that feeling. Whether I am painting or designing digitally, so much time has gone into the thought process before the work has begun that the other iterations of the work have already been explored.

The exception to this is drawing, I can sit and sketch the same person for hours and then go off and do a100 sketches based on what I have learned. I wonder if there is something I am missing about working in color that makes me have a different frame of mind.

Drupal test logo 1, there is still alot of work to be done but it is at a stage for comment. I was thinking about doing this for a theme but I have not had the time to finish it, the rendering is also not the best yet.

Sometimes it's hard to remember to have fun, experiment with your work and just let yourself go with it. I tend to always approach painting with a very open mind but there is usually a plan and a decided method of working. A couple of days ago I set out to start a landscape, cottage, hill, water, traditional composition and traditional method of working.

I had been feeling very blocked with my own work, though my commercial work has been going well. I have no idea what other artists do to get out of their funk, because they always tend to only talk about when things are going right. The funk is probably why artists spend most of their time sitting in cafes smoking cigarettes and doing anything other then sit in their studios facing reality. The nervous energy that all that caffeine and nicotine generates, is often confused by onlookers for the frenetic energy of the creative mind. This energy builds up to a crescendo forcing the artist into his studio like a flatulent traveller at a service station toilet. The paints are laid out, brushes taken in hand and the pristine new white canvas is laid gently upon the easel like a new born baby in his fathers hands for the first time. The palm of the hand rubs the canvas getting to know it, loving it. Then like a bolt of lightning it strikes. Pure unadulterated fear, all the ideas you had in your head are gone and again you face the reality that starting a painting scares the pants off you. Well it does to me.

Either it's the control or it's the lack of it that makes it hard but the other day I just let go and painted whatever happened. Starting with a basic form, turpentine drenched burnt umber scribbling out the skyline, the hills when shapes started making sense in a different direction and lead to a different subject in a very different style. Very quickly I stopped working and started having fun, experimenting and because what I was doing was so different from my normal work it no longer mattered what I did.

It's the lack of importance that made the work so much fun, and for the life of me I can not understand why when faced with a blank canvas I place so much importance on it. I don't know if what I did is any good or if it's finished, I don't even know if I like it, but it really was a lot of fun.

Some images keep coming back to you, walking around galleries is an amazing way to pass time and the more the more art you see the more you appreciate the really good stuff. One of the nicest galleries I have been to is the Norton Simon in Pasadena California, walking in past the garden of Rodin's “The Burghers of Calais” is an experience in itself. There is a room filled with Degas’ bronze dancers and other great works like Van Gogh's “The Mulberry Tree” which when viewed in person answers any questions about why his work is brilliant. I hope never to be mad enough to able to apply paint in this way though I would love to be smart enough to understand the technique. Walking down the hall past some of the Rembrandt’s and Picasso’s, Manet’s and Monet’s, the whole gallery is a fantastic living history of art, but there is one painting that keeps coming back to me.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s “The Triumph of Virtue and Nobility Over Ignorance” is so dominating, in part because of its size which at 126”x155” is massive with a big thick over the top guilt frame, but the subject matter; The Triumph of Virtue and Nobility over Ignorance, this is arrogant stuff. There is no point in going into all of the compositional niceties as they are flawless, the same goes for the draftsman ship and painting which are just breath taking. I love how the painting is created for the viewer and not for the artist, when looked at from the ground, up the twenty or so feet to the base of the frame the painting feels as if you are looking through and window into another world. The perspective is your own and there is a world beyond hidden by the frame, a perspective which is repeated throughout Tiepolo’s work. This is lofty stuff and just stinks of upper class indulgence I can’t imagine the patron as much of a laugh on a night out. Even the artist is quoted as saying;

"...Painters should aspire to succeed in great works, those in which they may be able to please noble Lords and rich men, because these make the fortune of professors; and not [to please] other people, who cannot buy Paintings of much value. Therefore the mind of the Painter should always aim at the Sublime, at the Heroic, at Perfection."

Not something you would expect to hear from a modern artist who creates representations of deeply emotive subjects and social commentary, for example Tracy Emin’s “ Everyone I have Ever Slept With”. Art from the heart, keeping it real, but it is all still for the pleasure and fortune of rich men; and while the perfection of great work and heroic subject has become kitsch, modern art is definitely not for the other people who cannot buy works of much value.

The only way to judge the importance of and artist like Tiepolo is to look at the effect their work has had on the world of art that came after them. When you are confronted with work like this, where the painting and the narrative is in your face, boldly and aggressively it becomes obvious that art is still recovering.

Cliff Dwellers 1913 Oil on canvas 40 1/4 x 42 1/8 in. (102.2 x 107 cm) Los Angeles County Museum of Art

There are so many great artists both alive and dead whose work has only been seen by relatively few people. I have loved art since I was a kid and like to think that I have a pretty good grasp on what is out there, but I am always comming across new stuff by people I have never heard of.

I love to spend ages looking through the shelves of the art section of big book shops, though recently I have been spending this time browsing other shelves for books on XHTML, CSS and PHP. Go into any large bookshop and there will be thousands of books about hundreds of different artists, but it does not take long to realise that 90% of the books are about 5% of the artists, Picasso, Monet, Matisse, O'keeffe, Rembrant etc. I love them all but it makes it realy hard to find new influences, bookshops and publishers are in the business of making money and catering to the lowest common denominator is the safest road. The democratic nature of the internet leads to the same problem. Search for anything on the internet using google, msn or any search tool and they will promptly return the highest ranked results. All of this makes it very hard to find fresh inspiration.

Mark Harden has managed to put together an amazingly diverse range of artists and give concise and informative information about each of them, along with a very cool way of displaying the reproductions. There are such a broad number of artists listed on this site, that there will probably be someone new for even the most versed art lover.