2013 JANUARY BLOG HAPPY NEW YEAR
Have you ever had a really smashing idea only to find that there are literally worlds of people who had the same idea and most likely already had acted on it ? My first confirmation of this happened when I was still wearing high heels that I constantly ruined while driving my car. I envisioned a simple pad to put under the accelerator to protect the leather heel of my right shoe only to find that very thing for sale at the local car wash. My husband and children had even helped me dream up a name; it would be marketed as "Heel Protect"! Its only worth was a lot of laughs around our dining table, but I suppose the inventor didn't make a fortune on the idea either.
As a practicing artist I continue to discover other painters running with the same ideas that I have had when standing at my easel trying to solve a painting problem or when attempting to do something fresh and new. I believe the solution is to act on your ideas and attempt to execute them to the best of your ability. Then let the chips fall where they may.
The first step in generating ideas is learning to SEE. Seeing begets ideas and action begets solutions. What I mean by seeing is looking and understanding what you are seeing. How many times have you exclaimed, "Oh, I see", meaning "I understand"? Ideas and action working together will enable creative solutions. But remember it may take many, many tries before a truly satisfying solution is achieved. My recently deceased friend, painter Cassandra James, declared that one needed to make at least 100 paintings before calling themselves a painter.
I have spent a lifetime painting and looking at paintings while playing the game of SEEING. Last week we were in Forth Worth, Texas, to see 100 works from the Phillips Collection at the Amon Carter Museum. In fact the exhibition is entitled "TO SEE AS ARTISTS SEE: American Art from the Phillips Collection".
For his collection Duncan Phillips picked many of the giants of American art dating from 1850 until the 1960s when Abstract Expressionism made America the center of the art world. Familiar names in this abbreviated, traveling exhibition are Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis Arthur Dove, Thomas Eakins, Marsden Hartley, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Jacob Lawrence, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe and others.
The paintings are organized into 10 themes or periods from American art. Previous hosts for the exhibition were Madrid, Tokyo and Rovereto, Italy. The show closes in Ft. Worth on January 6th and travels to the Tampa Museum of Art in February before returning home to Washington D.C. Its "home" is an 1896 house built by Duncan Phillips' parents. It opened to the public in 1921 as the first museum of modern art in America. If you miss the Phillips Collection at the Amon Carter Museum in Ft. Worth, I recommend you include it with you next visit to our nation's capital. Make plenty of time because the collection in D.C. is very extensive. The catalog, entitled "THE EYE OF DUNCAN PHILLIPS", is two inches thick. I measured it! Or better yet, why not travel to Florida in February to get warm and to catch the traveling show there?
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