Machine Politick

This photo is from a show I attended recently. Because I have been busy working on the Patriot Pony Project, it got shuffled to the back of my list. I thought, however, that it might have been fitting to post it in honor of the Fourth of July.

My friend Alvaro, pictured here talking to his son, is a very patriotic artist. He has several series of American flags modeled after the work of Jasper Johns. The ones in this photo are a collection of 32 that hang as an installation. It is quite impressive to see, least of all for the impact it has on the Liberal patrons of the gallery. It’s a shame Alvaro doesn’t get more exposure, but that is a consequence of wearing one’s Conservatism openly in the Liberal art community of Atlanta.

I am proud to say I own two flags from a different series, titled “Hope” and “Honor”. They hag below the flag my husband received at his father’s Marine Corps funeral. This Fourth of July, think about the freedoms we still have and thank the people who make it possible. Continue to be active in your pursuit of Liberty, and consider becoming an active member in the Conservative art movement we are building.

This article was written for Liberatchik.com

I read this blog post back in June when it was already a couple years old. I left a comment anyway because I was so happy to see someone else writing about the significance of art’s impact on the rest of culture. There were some good comments and it made me realize that there are people out there who get it. I left a couple links to MachinePolitick and Liberatchik hoping to hear back from the author. This week, a musician contacted me because of my comments and is now considering joining Liberatchik. Here is the full article. I hope you will go to the page and look at some more writing to get a little perspective on what it means to be Conservative outside the US.

From the blog: Oz Conservative

Why artists should be conservative

Since the end of WWII artists have been overwhelmingly liberal modernists. Where has this got them?

They have become irrelevant. As a reward for their role in transgressing the traditional order, artists have been given a few state grants and then ignored.

A liberal modernist society doesn’t need artists. It’s run by a managerial class on a technocratic basis. There simply isn’t an important social function in such a system for art.

Serious artists, therefore, have been shunted out of the public square. How many people today know or care about an important contemporary poet or painter or playwright or composer?

It wasn’t always so. Traditional societies ultimately found a basis for order on the transcendent (on the recognition of a “good” existing beyond our own immediate individual preferences or desires). It wasn’t functionaries who were best able to express and communicate the transcendent to the public. This was a role for high art, a role which gave artists an important place within society and culture.

Consider the case of poetry. Wordsworth had a tremendous influence in the early 1800s. If you read his most famous poems, they express the transcendent in Wordsworth’s response to nature. By the 1920s and 30s, you get poets like E.E. Cummings, who is a modernist in some regards, but who still expresses the transcendent in his love poetry.

And today? In Australia the only really well-known poet (known to the general public) is Les Murray, and it’s probably no coincidence that he is unusually anti-modernist in his world view.

People once cared about art because they cared about the “transcendent moment” that artists might communicate in their work. They also cared about art because art had a role in sustaining a civilisation: in giving finer expression to what was both good and necessary to the existence of a people and culture.

Artists might, for instance, represent to the public a higher ideal of fatherhood, or of national feeling, or of the masculine virtues, or of romantic love.

What is there for artists to do in alliance with liberal modernism? For a while, they could assist modernists in trashing the remnants of a traditional culture. There was a moment, too, when they tried to align art with the goals of technocratic efficiency (think of the principle of the architect Le Corbusier that a house is a “machine for living in”).

But none of this has a future. Eventually there is no more tradition to set yourself against, and there is no reason for an art based on efficient, abstract function to resonate with the public (most people do their best to ignore it).

It’s difficult to see how the situation for artists can improve; the further we descend into liberal modernism the more irrelevant that artists become to the processes of society.

So let me repeat: it makes sense for artists to decouple themselves from the forces of liberal modernism, as it is through these very forces that they are being relegated to insignificance. The hope for artists is that liberal modernity will falter and that this will allow a reassertion of the traditional within Western culture.

Please check out the comments as well. Some of them are as insightful as the article. I am also cross posting the article at Liberatchik.

The following is an article by a new member of Liberatchik. His name is Robert Jones, and he is a spectacular photographer. His writing is great as well, and not only because he likes my work. Check it out, and leave a comment. I’m already looking forward to the next article.

Leaving the Conservative Closet

I hate political art. Political art is not for me. I am uncomfortable with it mainly because its foremost practitioners’ politics are way stronger than their art – and their politics suck.

Yet, if you are like I, you know viscerally what it feels like to be a conservative artist, especially if you’re one who takes his art seriously.  It feels lonely as hell.

Especially if you won’t sell out.  It has not been news that the art world is peopled with flaneurs, shockers, and other assorted pretentious dilettantes who pose at being outcasts.  But, you know who the real outcast is: It’s you.

It’s not just that you don’t fit in – you even feel as though you’d have been exiled from the Island of Misfit Toys.  It’s not that you are lacking in a certain social DNA – it’s that you’re completely bereft of it. Kind of like that scene in Taxi Driver when Robert DeNiro, woefully inept at dating prowess, takes an uptight Cybill Shepherd to a porno theater on a first date.

By day, you’re just some guy or girl with a workaday job.  You save up enough loose change and singles to finance what your family regards as your “eccentric hobby.”   The earmarks of your passion are the oil paint you can’t fully scrape out from under your fingernails or the smell of photo fixer you can’t get out of your skin and clothes no matter how often you wash them.

You hide your political beliefs.  You know you’re not a liberal, a progressive, one of those mindless lemmings who’ve “gone green.”  But, you’re struggling in your art career, and your position in the gallery scene is too precarious to let people know the “real you.”

So, you adopt a bifurcated self, hoping to avoid a confrontation with the movers and shakers, those oh-so insouciant curators in black turtlenecks, whose opinions you secretly despise whilst simultaneously craving their imprimatur.

You swell with a strange kind of “half” pride when you finally see your work hanging in one of those trendy galleries.  You’re “half” elated when a collector buys one of your pieces.  You convince yourself that you’ve kept your art “pure,” because you’ve kept politics out of your art – while hiding your personal political beliefs from the majority who automatically assume that because you’re an artist that you’re also a leftist.

You make yourself believe that you’ve kept yourself “above it all” by not stooping to the same level as the rest of the art community. Yet, deep down, you also know the very minute your secret political self is unmasked, that you will be blackballed, that so-called “friends” will drop you like a hot potato, and that in the art world you’ll be persona non grata.

You’ve censored who you are in order to stay safe, fit in, and pass by unnoticed.  But your real self looks upon your artist self with nothing but scorn and shame, because deep down, you fear that you have sold out in some more insidious way than by prostituting your art.

You tell yourself it’s not your fault, because you know that the selfsame “tolerant” lefties have stacked the deck against Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians.  They get away with it because of Political Correctness, you tell yourself.

But then, from out of the past comes the stinging rebuke that maybe they are not the only ones culpable for this bad scene.  The admonition that, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,” echoing in your mind comes not from Edmund Burke, but your own conscience.

Yes, when the intolerant left finds out about your clandestine conservatism, of course your art career will be ruined:  You have already abdicated the sanctity of your conscience by prostrating yourself before people who hate what you stand for.  Why should they suddenly respect you when they already know you’re lacking in spine and stomach?

Or, you can take some schooling from Don Vito Corleone: “You can act like a man! What’s the matter with you?”  I have never had the problems so many conservative artists have with liberals because I have never played this self-defeating charade of hiding my political beliefs.  I don’t bash people over the head with them, but at gallery openings and such I don’t let an insult go by without at least offering an “I disagree with that.”  If you are forthright about who you fully and truly are from the start, then you set the terms by which others deal with you, not they.

Do you see the Tea Party movements the past year, filled with people who found the courage to stand up and defend their cherished beliefs and the Constitution of the United States of America?  These are regular guys and gals who finally realized that being consoled by their membership in the “silent majority” was a fool’s bargain – their liberal opposition was only too happy to oblige their silence.

What am I asking of my fellow artists?  To join Liberatchik?  Sure, but Liberatchik is merely a symptom of the problem, not the solution.  True solutions to the ills that plague society seldom rest in collective action.

The solution rests in being true to yourself, and standing up for your beliefs as an artist, as a citizen, as an individual.  What is needed, now more than ever, are individuals whose purpose in life is to fully engage in the pursuit of their happiness, not in wanting to be liked by everybody.

Take a look at Frances Byrd’s example.  This Jeanne d’Arc of the conservative art movement is out there, standing on her own two feet, facing the fire, but succeeding.  She’s succeeding because she’s true to her art, true to herself, and her soul is not for sale.

(And, if I may add, she has raised the editorial cartoon to the level of high art — here is some political art I actually admire).

Take an assessment of your own life as an artist, your own soul.  You will be welcome by us at Liberatchik, should you so wish, not because you’re “one of us,” but because you’re true to yourself.

Then, half the battle will be won already.

This article will be cross posted at Conservative Punk.

In this article, I am going to be speaking entirely about the merits of the art. Unlike most of my work, there will be no political agenda. I don’t know the painter in question or his politics, but the work is an example of what could be coming out of the art community rather than what is widely accepted as ‘art’.

The artist I am highlighting today is James McLaughlin Way, who is a phenomenal painter living here in Atlanta. I stumbled across his work on Sunday at the Mason Murer Gallery where I was dropping off a piece for the Art Papers Auction this weekend. Here is the story.

Upon entering the gallery, I was immediately impressed by the sheer size of the building. Most galleries in Atlanta are seedy little back alley joints, or cramped spaces in high-end art districts where everything is about status and nothing is about the art. I didn’t get that impression at Mason Murer, which is in a huge converted warehouse. The only things they have added to the interior are a reception desk and display walls. It is a vast and awe inspiring space. All of this from walking in the door on a Sunday afternoon, when most of the lights were off.

The experience with my work will be part of a future article after the auction this weekend. All of this is lead-in however, to impress on you the magnificence of the painting in question. Upon leaving, my friend Alvaro said to me “Let’s go over so you can see my friend James’ work”. Upon stepping around the reception area, I was struck nearly numb by this painting, which loomed over me like a monumental placard of personal anguish and strife. Before you take this as criticism, please bear me out. It is meant to be a compliment.

The Bow by James McLaughlin Way

The first thing out of my mouth was “Why don’t I know who this guy is?” Which was answered by “You know why. It’s realism.” My opinion on that will have to wait for another article as well, but I assure you it is one of my greatest criticisms of the art community. I spent the next several minutes examining the work; getting up close to enjoy the detail and richness of the painting; stepping back to admire the composition and mood. I was continually surprised by details I had previously missed, as if the glazing of the oils were a soupy fog that was twisting and turning about the piece to reveal or obscure the intricacies within.

This painting is of a monumental horse, called The Bow. For you to fully understand the imposing nature of the piece, you must know that it is 11 feet tall and 16 feet wide, hanging up on a wall as if some giant was running the gallery. The base of the painting is about a foot off the ground, so no matter where you stand, this larger-than-life horse is towering over you in his misery. Perhaps the dim lighting in the gallery played a role in the mood, because on going to the web page, I noticed it was very white. Regardless, pictures never do art justice and this is my take on the piece. The great horse is standing in this thick fog, with head bowed and a white cloth draped across his back. He looks beaten down by the world in which he lives, exhausted and stopping to catch his breath. Maybe I’m projecting here, but it is a very moody piece.

I was shocked when I tore myself away from the details long enough to step back. (You see, as a painter, I have this habit of getting right up on a piece to examine the brushstrokes and glazing. I learn something from every painting I look at.) In the depths of that vast and heavy fog is a city that begs the question of where the horse has come from. What is going on back there and how does it relate to the horse, or me, the viewer. I strongly encourage you to take a few minutes to look over Mr. Way’s work because this is what artists need to be doing with their talents. Art for the sake of shocking people is absurd, but art for the sake of beauty speaks to people. It tells a story and conveys an emotion or personal connection. It moves people.

This article will be cross posted at Liberatchik

These beautiful paintings are by a good friend of mine named Ashley. We met in college, which now seems like ages ago. Though both of us majored in Illustration, we have a fondness for the fine art of painting. Although I would currently consider myself to be a painter, Ashley is a lady of many talents. Aside from being a mom, she is the full-time marketing genius for a local company. In her spare time she not only does free-lance graphic and web design, but she somehow finds time to paint in oils. These three paintings are my current favorites.

All three paintings are fairly large and, as a group,  would dominate a single wall in your living room. Although these photos are beautiful, they do not do the actual paintings justice. The scale of the paintings alone sets a very dramatic mood. The intricacies of the layering and the glazing of the oil paints add a luminescence that is only appreciated fully in person. The masterful use of color, particularly the successful use of a complementary scheme, creates a dynamic composition within each painting. The drama and interest of the paintings is further enhanced by the use of strong shadows and bright whites throughout the paintings.

In an art community over-run by mediocre and untalented artists, Ashley is a fine example of what  a good artist can accomplish. I may be biased as her friend, but I am confident that her work stands well on its own. I am also happy to say that she is having some success showing her work the last few months, which is no small feat in Atlanta. Although my review of her last show was not glowing, it was not because of her work. The show was surprisingly good for a group show with my only complaints being the weather on the night of the opening and my own difficulty navigating downtown Atlanta. I am looking forward to many more shows of Ashley’s work as well as the opportunity to share it here with you.

This article will be cross posted at Liberatchik.

onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outbound/article/www.youtube.com');">MachinePolitick Conservative Artists

This is a new video by my friends at SecularStupidest.com The film is from  A Patriot’s Christmas at the Georgia World Congress Center. Footage includes shots of me painting on stage for the event, as well as speaking to interested patrons about my art.

Here is a hodge podge of things I have been reading, writing, or working on the last week:

The Day Racism Died, by Jay @ The Break Room This is an editorial on President Obama’s recent comments, which he later retracted to a degree, regarding the actions of a police officer doinghis job. Most of you here know how I feel about Obam, so I will leave you with the article.

A series of work @ Big Hollywood by Scott Graves: Warhol, Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 Let me say this: “I can’t stand Warhol’s work”. However, this series of articles raises some good questions about art. marketing, philosophy, and our future as Conservatives (those of us who are) in the creative industries. If you have time, read the whole series and chip in on the comments. I found it worth the time.

A Contradictory Exhibit of Art in Search of Dialogue an article about an art show I attended recently. Those of you who are artists or members of the larger art community should be fore warned: I have very strict guidelines for what I consider art, particularly good art. You may be offended by my opinions. Keep in mind that art is subjective, and opinion is opinion. I definitely have a bias, given my treatment by the art community. When people start telling you to tone it down a bit so you can sell your work, you tend to get a little offensive.
To the rest of you, enjoy. This article is particularly appropriate in conjunction with the Warhol series.

My friend Alvaro has a new post at Big Hollywood. He is a very talented, and often misunderstood artist. Please show him support by reading the article, and commenting on his work. He works very hard.

This is my new article at Modern Conservative. The basic idea is that pretentious Liberals feel superior to anyone remotely conservative in the art community. I decided to put down some of my experiences and reactions over the years to give a little better perspective on my art and personal philosophy.
http://www.modernconservative.com/metablog_single.php?p=2881