Friday

Review of Blick Art Supplies: I'll use Blick again but not because I'm happy.

 I'll use Blick again but not because I'm happy.

If I could Blick to do some things differently, it would be to package things better, stop using Fedex since they are the ones who seem to literally throw stuff on their box corners out of the trucks, check the quality of the goods before they are packaged.

Credentials: I'm a professional artist who paints full time for a living and sells around 70K worth of art a year. (I'm a former tenured professor of art and art history.) I by all my supplies through Blick but, I still am annoyed by them.

I feel about Blick the way the I feel about Amazon, they don't care about how you feel: provide poor customer service but they have the monopoly.

I order almost all my supplies from Blick, canvas panels, stretched canvas, Winsor Newton paints, brushes, the whole shebang.  I have ordered the same products and amounts from other sites and the prices are comparable but often the quality, delivery time, and customer service are worse.  So Blick is able to beat grade "C" companies with a "B-" although at times I've had an "A" level experience too.

I always expect things to arrive damaged or poorly packed. How things are shipped sucks, and often things are damaged. Paint tubes are poorly packed and busted open or cut by the other items in the boxes and corners of canvas panels are sometimes damaged, and stretched canvas is often loose due to poor warehouse conditions or poor packing, but Blick always replaces them if you get in touch. 

For example, I just got a shipment of 18x18x1.5 inch stretched canvases and the boxes were really messed up (the canvases were okay to use just loose or dented) easily fixed, I have had to spray canvas retentioner on every canvas to tighten them back up. I've actually got in touch with the owners by figuring out their emails and they have offered me coupons and discounts.






 

This week's WOOF Report is a 5 minute read.

Welcome to the WOOF Report: September 30th, 2022


Your weekly round-up of everything bear from Bear World Magazine

Bear of the Week: 


This week's Bear of the Week is Billy from Buffalo, New York - Click here to find out more about him. 

Read:

World Bear Weekend welcomes three new members to The Royal Family

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Provincetown Heats Up as We Head into Fall

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A gay Senator went to Folsom, sends the GOP into a complete meltdown 

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AIMM study shows Hispanic people feel underrepresented and stereotyped in the media

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Grindr appoints new openly gay CEO, George Arison

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Kylie Minogue to Headline Opening Concert for Sydney WorldPride 2023

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Watch:


Our pick of the best beary video to watch this week! 
Queer Electronic/Hip-Hop artist Wreckno makes having this much swagger, style and confidence look easy, in his new video "EZ!" 

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Wednesday

Young Dudes, oil on canvas 18x18x1.2" by Kenney Mencher

 Young Dudes, oil on canvas 18x18x1.2" by Kenney Mencher

This is being auctioned on Ebay. Bidding starts at $700 and the bidding ends 9/29/2022 https://www.ebay.com/itm/275479515808


Tuesday

If my art is good enough, is there any way for me to have it displayed in some art gallery in New York, without having to actually go there? It's all digital at this point.

I was sent this question this morning and I thought it might be nice to share it with you here.

If my art is good enough, is there any way for me to have it displayed in some art gallery in New York, without having to actually go there? It's all digital at this point. 

I don’t think it would work. (Of course there are exceptions to every rule.) I think that you could self represent. I’ll explain first why you should self represent then I’ll explain why and how galleries might not be a good fit.

I want to start by saying that if your work is as good as you say it is you could probably make money through the print on demand business using Etsy.com combined with Printful.com to sell your prints and it would be a “passive income” model. You would have to do marketing and if you need help with that I offer a free course.

https://www.udemy.com/user/kenneymencher/

Art galleries have a set of logical and also emotional rules around who they choose to be in their galleries and often this revolves more around the established reputation of an artist rather than the qualities of the work itself. It’s really hard to get a gallery to even open up a package or an email and look at your work without being “connected” or socially active within the community. Even then it’s super hard for artists to get considered.

One of the best complete explanations or how the art world works and how to get connected to a gallery are provided in an eight part series by an organization called the Contemporary Art Issue. Here’s one of the most important videos to answer your question. (You should watch the eight part series because I think that it is fairly accurate although I also think that they believe in the established gallery system and I think it’s defunct.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxWBdkI2WV0&t=538s

I am unhappy with how galleries work and the money I’ve made with galleries. Keep in mind I’ve even had museum shows and shown in commercial galleries. Here’s a link to a blog post that explains why I now mainly sell work just on the web rather than using galleries.

https://www.kenneymencher.com/2022/09/why-i-havent-been-working-with.html

Monday

You Should Take a Personal Day, oil on canvas 18x18x1.5" by Kenney Mencher

You Should Take a Personal Day, oil on canvas 18x18x1.5" by Kenney Mencher is on Ebay one day auction. Starting bid is $700 ends Tuesday 9/27/2022

 

Friday

 



Meshed Realism: Extended thru Fri Oct 7th 2022
Raul Baltazar
Rachid Bouhamidi, 
Nilay Lawson
Aaron Norfolk 


Join us for an Artist Talk: Sunday Oct 2, 3pm

Closing Fri Oct 7, 7-10 pm.



Curated by Rachid Bouhamidi

August 26th through Oct 7th 2022


gallery hours Sat + Sun 2 to 6 pm and by appt.

Nilay Lawson, Left On Read 6x7ft, ink and gesso on canvas 2022 $2000 , Ink and gesso on canvas 2022
Aaron Norfolk, Untitled – oil on panel, 20”x 16” – 2021
Raul Baltazar, Stations of the Cross, acrylic on canvas16x20" 2022
Rachid Bouhamidi, The Quartz Egg , oil on canvas 48x48" 2022
"LAST Projects is pleased to present "Meshed Realism", an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Raul Baltazar, Aaron Norfolk, Nilay Lawson and Rachid Bouhamidi opening Friday, August 26th.

The German art critic Franz Roh identified a tendency away from free form expressionism in the works of artists who had lived through the mass slaughter of the first world war, notably of artists Otto Dix and Max Beckmann of the 1920s Weimar Republic. The sense that some powerful, poetic quality emanated from a probing investigation of mundane reality was a driving force that motivated the creative output of a large, disparate group of artists in the years before the Nazi dictatorship abruptly ended it. For the Verists of the Neue Sachlickheit (New Objectivity as it was called), the turmoil and incalculable suffering in the years following the conclusion of the war and a shifting ontological disposition necessitated a more deeply penetrating and heightened rendering of objective forms which meant for artists such as Dix and Georg Grosz an often satirical and caricatural hyperrealism.
This "Magischer Realismus" (magical realism) resonated in works of literature and the plastic arts for generations and is now finding new breath in the works of contemporary artists.

As with those artists from one hundred years before, the works of these four artists propose a kind of magical realism, obsessive in character, steeped in mythical symbols and rooted in but departing from the verisimilitude of ordinary physical reality."

Rachid Bouhamidi

Los Angeles artist Nilay Lawson's (b. 1980) paintings take shape with an intensive studio practice using only ink on canvas. Deeply psychological in content, Lawson bridges together imagination, observation, cultural ties and socio/political themes past and present.

Boston based painter Aaron Norfolk (b. 1973) creates works derived from perception and imagination whose portraits push pictorial possibilities as he searches for a singular, personal geometry.
Rachid Bouhamidi (b. 1981) meshes an essentially representational language of painting with the aesthetic design elements from Morocco such as Islamic zellige (mosaic tile) patterns as well as a formalism related to early 20th century modern painting.

Raul Baltazar (b.1972, Los Angeles) is an artist who works through aesthetic notions given in Mesoamerican and Western culture. Baltazar often mixes performance, video, photography, drawing, painting, murals, and community-based projects, to create new relations for the decolonial art object.
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