The Visual Artist

Members: Darlene Kraft

2011-12-03T08:10:00.001-08:00

Darlene Kraft is a gentle dynamo member of Mountain Arts Network and she along with her husband Arbe ( a retired Veterinarian, an active choral singer) have offered their home for our board meetings, our Christmas party and really anything we might need a gathering space for. She is also a great cook and the most gracious hostess. But her biggest accomplishment to MAN is her watercolor work. She is the epitome of a still water that runs deep. She works at her art I believe everyday. She studies with a local icon, Donal Jolley, and teaches. She runs our events committee, and took over for me when I had to step away for work issues as President. If we need to rely on one person to fill in - anywhere - it would be Darlene Kraft. Her work has steadily improved as has her confidence.
I am glad to call her and Arbe friends.

MEMBERS: Lou Marek

2011-11-30T12:16:00.001-08:00

I joined Mountain Arts Network January 2010. The gallery was located on Hwy 18 in Skyforest. A sweet little cabin overlooking the mountains of San Bernardino. At that time the membership was small but a close knit group. I moved up here to concentrate on my painting career and quickly realized there as a vacuum for visual artists - no collective, no group. My new neighbors were very friendly and some quickly found out I was a fine artist and they were eagar to share their artwork with me.

I was thrilled that there seemed to be a lot of very talented people up here. But there was no cohesion and no outlet for these local artists to gather and learn and share. My wife and I entertained the thought of opening a gallery to showcase the local talent. Then my wife found a small group that was trying to do just that, promote their talents and offer other local artists a chance to share. We went to look at the gallery in Skyforest first and met a few of the members and they encouraged me to join. I did and 6 months later was voted in on the board as President. We subsequently moved to a much more visable site for the gallery in the village of Lake Arrowhead, a neighboring community that is all about tourism. This boosted our membership and our bottom line.

Now we have a thriving retail business with 48 members in the gallery and that many more as members on our web site and as benefactors. Our web site is becoming more interactive and as of last July we opened a community art center. I continue to be an active board member and spend a lot of my time developing the art center and focusing on community involvement and fundraising.

I am working to develop programs for after-school and art classes for groups like Doves, a battered women's shelter and Hearts & Lives, a disaster relief organization and soon a summer camp specifically for the visual arts.
All the while still working as a painter with commissions and shows. Next post highlights another member. Darlene Kraft. A watercolorist, Event director and our new President.

HISTORY OF A CO-OP: Mountain Arts Network

2011-11-27T08:40:00.000-08:00

Mountain Arts Network started as Crestline Arts Network here in the mountains of San Bernardino. It became a loose collection of local artists who wanted to have a place to showcase their work and become a gallery where they could provide other local artists a venue and a resource to learn, teach and enjoy their talents with the talents of others. But they also created a non-profit whose intent was to reach out to our mountain communities and have a greater impact on our local residents. Little did they know that the organization would grow from 12 members to over 145 members and still growing. Our new gallery consists of 48 members, is situated in the village of Lake Arrowhead and sees over 100 people daily come through. Our membership outside the gallery consists of individuals who want to be apart of our group and organizations that also support our efforts. AND just last July Mountain Arts Network opened the very first Art Center in Crestline right near where we first started. Now Mountain Arts Network is able to fulfill the initial promise of our Mission Statement to help our local communities by offering after school program, classes continuing adult courses and art programs for other organizations like Doves, a battered women's shelter, Hearts&Lives and resource for disaster relief, the Boys& Girls Club and more soon. We also want to create the very first "Visual Arts Camp" and are actively working towards this end, too. So if you are interested in joining Mountain Arts Network please consider the annual membership ($20 -$30 a year) or as a Patron/Donor. We also give out money to deserving students every year that want to further their art education, so your donation dollars have a number of great ways to help us help our kids, and local artists. Contact Lou Marek at 909-280-2821 or email info@mountainartsnetwork.org.
Lou

The Tired Artist

2011-11-26T21:20:00.000-08:00

My son and daughter in law left about two hours ago (still got the pre grandkids, Bella and Tiberius (rescue terriers) my other step son and daughter in law left with us). We had a nice visit and this one falls into the new position we have taken in having just a few at a time and not the 10 member crew we would struggle to get over here from time to time. Not that that too isn't fun but we found with the dynamics of eight kids and their own relationships it was leaving us no quality time with any of them, and I think we are having a better relationship now with all of them. We will see. Tomorrow I will get more serious about this blog and start to talk about art and a co-op gallery. Good Night.
Lou

Black Friday

2011-11-25T16:40:00.000-08:00

Not much to post today, except I have been hosting three of our kids for the Thanksgiving Holiday and trying to be sociable yet having to feel anxious about not being able to work. So today I have put in some quality time on my work. I have to state now that I don't have enough time in my life to accomplish all I want. This is because it has become clearer to me the more I work on a project the better it actually becomes. I have been struggling with this problem ( it is a problem I am too well aware of) since I was old enough to draw bugs I had collected and carried in my pocket home to the kitchen table to sketch. I have been told by relatives then actual art teachers that I had a blinding talent and I would be a huge success if I could only actually work on a project beyond the initial effort. I guess I tended to do an assignment once and that was it. Any rework meant (to me) that I didn't get it and reworking was to struggle towards the finish that I thought to myself should have been accomplished the first time!!!! So I am now at the ripe old age of 60 demanding of myself that I work on a project well beyond my initial efftort, and I am finding (finally!) that it helps, or this could be the effect of just getting slower.

Art&Money

2011-11-23T19:42:00.000-08:00

The twin figures of the art impresario and the art star, performing for a large audience, have been with us since the eighteenth century. It was in Georgian times that dealers started to matter - emerging as people who exerted a real force on taste, as distinct from mere antiquarians serving the existing taste of patrons. At the same time, English and American artists, envying the huge entrepreneurial success of men like Rubens, craving status, longing to be set free from the condition of mere craftsmen, began organizing themselves and their market: their instrument was the Royal Academy, led first by an Englishman, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and second by an American, Benjamin West. Today's relationships between art and money wind back to the time of Burlington House, and the north and south poles of an artist's attitude to the market were summed up in two eighteenth-century utterances. "Where any view of money exists," wrote William Blake, Sir Joshua's dogged but powerless enemy, "art cannot be carried on." On the other side, Samuel Johnson was just as categorical. "No man but a blockhead," he said, "ever wrote except for money."

ART & MONEY
By Robert Hughes

© Robert Hushes 1984

(First published in The New York Review of Books)

(Published in the New Art Examiner, October & November 1984)

Hardie Gramatky

2011-11-22T20:19:00.000-08:00

Hardie Gramatky, N.A. (1907-1979) Born: Dallas, TX; Studied: Stanford University, Chouinard Art Institute (Los Angeles); Member: National Academy of Design, New York Water Color Club, American Watercolor Society, California Water Color Society. Hardie Gramatky was raised in Southern California. He studied art with F. Tolles Chamberlin, Clarence Hinkle, Pruett Carter and Barse Miller. A dedicated student of watercolor painting, he produced an average of five small watercolors per day. By 1929, he had become a proficient watercolorist and was recognized as one of the true innovators in the development of California Style watercolor painting. These skills helped him to get a job as a head animator at the Walt Disney Studios.

In the early 1930s, he became active on the board of the California Water Color Society and it was largely through his aggressive moves that the California School of watercolorists was able to take control of the Society and expand it into a nationally recognized organization. In 1937 the Ferargil gallery became his art agent in New York City and began selling his watercolors. He also exhibited works in other cities in America and established a reputation as one of California’s premier watercolorists.

By the 1940s, he was producing commercial art to be used for magazine illustrations and began writing and illustrating a series of children’s books. Hercules, Loopy, Creeper’s Jeep and Sparky were all books he created, but Little Toot was the one that would become an all-time best seller. During World War II, he worked in Hollywood producing training films for the United States Air Force and after the war moved back to the East Coast.

Settling in Connecticut he pushed a career as a commercial illustrator producing art for Fortune, Collier’s, Woman’s Day, True, American and Readers Digest. From the 50’s on, he concentrated exclusively on fine art painting and writing and illustrating children’s books. His last book was published posthumously in 1989.

Three fictional books using art as their structure

2011-11-22T17:58:00.000-08:00

I have read many books that were pseudo biographies, or historical tales about artists and these three I highly recommend. By necessity art history of an artist has to be fictional in every way but what facts are known. And there are some terrific novelists who are also excellent historians. Another great book is Rembrandt's Eyes... no, I know of no book titled Van Gogh's Ear.

Fiction about art reveals a parallel extra-academy, extra-museum art history. This essay examines how three novels, all published in 1999, fictionalize early modern Netherlandish painters and paintings. Tracey Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring is ‘art-historical fiction’ that uses real paintings to craft a fictional Vermeer; Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue is ‘provenance fiction’ that brings to life the history of ownership of a fictional painting by Vermeer; and Michael Frayn's Headlong, a tale of a modern-day amateur art historian's quixotic quest for a long lost picture by Pieter Bruegel, is ‘art-history fiction’. These novels rely on strategies of Dutch and Flemish genre painting to craft stories of ordinary lives that are made extraordinary by art. Held up as mirrors to our scholarly practices, they confront us with the popular ramifications of recent approaches to works of art and their makers.

ART FICTION

H. PERRY CHAPMAN

Article first published online: 10 AUG 2009

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2009.00702.x

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2009.00702.x/abstract

Life, death and meaning.

2011-11-21T23:07:00.000-08:00

I gave a morning a few months ago to be apart of "Career Day" at a local high school here in Crestline. It was a modern newer looking building and I assumed I would have a few lonely minutes in the auditorium up on stage staring down at all those dull faces waiting to go home. The night before I worried how I was going to convince high school seniors that I am smart, funny and successful. It turned out to be nothing like this at all. Life? I was going to hold forth on a career in the visual arts in a small classroom in the back of the building on the second floor 7 times that day, each time was 20 minutes long to no more than 8 or 9 youngsters. Okay I can do it. They walked in and sat down with disinterest smeared all over their unexpected hardened expressions. I took on my best used car salesman demeanor and the first thing I said was the obvious, no one here is interested in having a career in the visual arts, right? And they all said in the best Greek Chorus, NO!

I asked them if any of them even gave it a thought, and a few said yes, I asked them to name some careers they thought would involve visual arts, TATTOOS!, ANIMATORS! I got back.
I said how about package goods designers, hair stylists, book designer, architects, interior designers, dress designers, make-up artists, and off we went in a funny and spirited 20 minutes, I noticed as the second period then the third then the fourth period came up more kids showed up and by the fifth a lot were kids from earlier periods. I ended up telling stories of my career as an artist, and they were all interested. Did I wake a sleeping giant, crack the shell of a budding genius, probably not but I got what any good teacher will tell you they get from teaching, they get, a sense of connection, of turning on a light, of opening up a world of possibilities to children that for whatever reason were sick in their own complacency and resigned to a predictable future.
Life? It is overwhelming from day one. Life? It appears more so as we get older! But I have been fortunate to have lived my desires I wanted to go to a special art high school in Manhattan, I did. I wanted to go to the prestigious Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, I did. I wanted to be a creative director on Madison Avenue and I ended up a creative director in Los Angeles. I wanted to be a commercial film director and I did. I have achieved all I wanted to achieve and yet I still feel like what Woody Allen said "Why do I still feel like I am fucked! Death?
Is there meaning as an artist? Is this what being an artist is about, meaning. For the moment, for the future? For posterity? Michelangelo said at 93 "I have nothing else to say?" And died.

Arts Education in California

2011-11-21T09:59:00.000-08:00

As Congress and the US Department of Education wrestle with how to fix No Child Left Behind, arts education advocates are hoping that the acknowledged failures of “bubble testing” and blaming teachers will reveal a path to a more robust public education program that includes the arts. Malissa Feruzzi Shriver, Chair of the California Arts Council, has a passionate concern that arts education has been “privatized,” available only in private schools and wealthier public schools where parents can afford funds for enrichment “extras.”

California was one of five states that participated in the 2011 Education Leaders Institute funded by the NEA to develop arts education strategies. In addition to Malissa, California's team included Craig Cheslog, representing State School Superintendent Tom Torlakson, and Larry Powell, the Fresno County School Superintendent who became a media star when he voluntarily reduced his annual salary to $31,000 for the next three years in order to save more than $800,000 for programs in his District.

To read more....

http://www.calawyersforthearts.org/california_arts_blog?mode=PostView&bmi=735054

First Day

2011-11-20T17:46:00.000-08:00

First Day or shall I say first evening as I will more than likely be posting in the evening. The point of this blog is to talk about the visual arts. I will include all my rants and raves along with news and opinions and hopefully some guest artists and maybe an occasional critic or two. I am brave. There will be no judgements no religious comments or favoritism and hopefully no religious comments at all unless the comments deal with art and religion because there is a lot of that even today. The Mountain Arts Network here in Lake Arrowhead and now in Lake Gregory (Crestline) will be featured prominently as I was the president and still am on the board of directors as chief fundraiser and promotional advisor. I also have spearheaded our new art center in Crestline and I am fundamentally running this center along with a new member and a man who has years of terrific experience as a facilities manger and developer and he also makes great, beautiful and functional wooden boxes. Yes he is a member of MAN too.

My name is Lou Marek and my work can be seen on the MAN web site ( I also manage the site) and two others, www.prokofolio.com/lou and www.theartofloumarek.com. I am a representational and traditional painter primarily working in oil and acrylic but my fondness in watercolor is also a favorite medium.
This is my first blog and as I get further aquainted with this media I will improve on it's presentation, so please be patient, if you find yourself reading what I have to say along with others that come on this journey with me. So for tonight I am signing off. See you tomorrow.
Lou