1 January 2021

How to start your art collection

“Pleasure is the root of all art appreciation” – Baudelaire

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW

Most of the bourgeoisie in 19th century France admired and bought Salon art. The Impressionists and the other artists who made the art that we now value and remember were often ignored in their lifetimes. Artists that are now revered, like Van Gogh and Munch, were hardly known and lived lives of hardship and struggle. There are exceptions though, Whistler and Sargent, for example were successful and their work is still respected.

Those who set out to cause shock and sensation are not always remembered either. For every Tracy Emin or Damian Hirst there are hundreds who do not get that recognition. Humans generally want what’s familiar and comforting – or think they do. The real “buzz “of art is in the unexpected – the message we need to hear is not the one we think we want to hear (or see).

At any time there are always innovators – those who make art from a deeply felt need – not for a market. These creators are unable, even if they try, to merely please the preconceptions of the public. Their truest expression comes from somewhere deep inside, and is not purely individual. It’s as if they tap into some more profound collective consciousness.

WARNING : ‘SAFE’ ART WILL NOT FULFIL YOU.

Of course much art will merely be a status symbol, or a safe haven for wealth. In the case of the most valuable works from the greatest masters of the past they can be both artistically fulfilling and a sound investment. It’s a really good idea to look beyond your preconceptions of ‘beauty’ and try to find art that ‘speaks’ to you at a deeper level. This will deliver a much more lasting pleasure and can continually reveal more of itself over time. As you go on in the course of developing your taste your own individual personality starts to emerge and manifest.

However much we can today admire, say, Renaissance art or impressionism, those who work in those styles now do not have much of value to give us. The insipid and kitschy depiction of a pink rose with a realistic drop of water on it lacks, to me, the real thrill that art can deliver. Somewhere there’s a balance to be struck, for all of us, between purely sensational & shocking and that soothing beauty that lulls us back to what we know. As with all things aesthetic, what pulls us and ignites our enthusiasm plays a large part.

AS a buyer of art you must always follow your own taste and your heart. If you like something that’s a great place to start. Many people keen to start collecting go to the degree shows of art colleges or follow advice from critics and dealers or ‘gallerists’ ,(a word I detest). I would not advise following trends in a copycat way, far better to be BRAVE and follow your own instincts ! !

SO WHERE DO I START ?

First; how do you find art in these times? Unless you know artists in your area, look online, on platforms like Pinterest or Instagram or Facebook or even Tumblr. After exploring these for the last few years, I find Instagram is the best but all of them can be good. It really depends which one you like best. I have had to dive deep into a few platforms before finding other artists that were anywhere close to my niche.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR :

You will know when you see it. Because you have been unconsciously forming your tastes since childhood, YOU WILL ALWAYS BE DRAWN TO WHAT YOU LIKE.

Find an individual, someone who stands out, to you. Any age or background, if you like their work, that’s what’s important.

There are many so-called artists in the world, and unfortunately there is much really bad art. For now, let’s focus on the positive.

You need to find an artist with the necessary skill – depending on the type of art.

Find an artist with their own individual voice and something to say.

GETTING STARTED : Some Ideas

§ It’s a good idea to start small. Obviously you will be making a smaller investment, and works that are not so big are easier to display.

§ Look for online shows like “Incognito”- google it; it’s an annual Charity exhibition in aid of The Jack & Jill Children’s Foundation with all works priced at €50. There are small paintings by many well known artists as well as thousands of amateurs.

§ Be brave ! Believe in your own taste and judgement.

§ Educate yourself.

§ Following your instincts will lead you along the road to learning more and growing your passion. There’s so much out there for you to find!

Art is a language

Art is a form of communication, a language. An artist can convey feelings and a message. The truest art forms can bring us into the soul of their creator. That can be a painting or sculpture or a piece of music. For example, I have found deep and unexplainable feelings when I stood in front of the large paintings of Mark Rothko. I have had similar feelings with sculpture, music and architecture. Because there is limited space in one article I hope to write more about this in future.

It may be too ambitious to think that you can acquire and own great works of art like this yourself, except for a reproduction of some museum masterpiece – unless you are extremely wealthy!

The many and the few

Some art communicates universally , and some to only a few. But the pathways are often opened up by several passionate enthusiasts without whom the many might never get to know them. Iconic masterpieces become world famous- (Van Gogh Sunflowers , Leonardo Mona Lisa). However, many of the thousands who congregate and take selfies in front of a famous work may not get a very meaningful communication with the mind of the artist. So you may need more time and some solitude to get a full experience.

And Finally …

I encourage you to just get started, if that’s what you want to do. As I finish this I’m listening to one of Beethoven’s last great string quartets – to me a perfect example of great art that triumphs over all obstacles and that can reach into your heart today- 200 years after it was written.

I plan to write more around the topics that I’ve touched on here so please stay tuned! I invite you to join my mailing list to get updates when there is a new post.

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That Owl and “THE SHIP OF DEATH” by D.H.Lawrence

“Owl’s Failed Shipbuilding”His efforts fell short and did not please the pussycat. From here everything started to unravel.

“HAVE you built your ship of death, oh have you? …”

If you don’t know this poem by D.H.Lawrence you may, like me, find the subject off-putting or depressing. But give it a chance and consider it. As humans the fact that we all must die is one of the things we all have in common. Much of the wisdom passed down to us over the centuries has aimed to help with this transition.

I have illustrated this post with a painting “Owlship” because the poem has a connection to the story of its creation. I was made aware of the poem while I was working on the painting. I am grateful to Dr David Louis Magee for this.

On a June morning in 2014 when David came up to my studio, my beagle Rolo, then a puppy, was tied to the walnut tree while we worked and talked at a table outside. Katherine (Kitty) Joyce, my late mother in law came outside with a chair to sit in the sunshine and a memorable conversation happened. Kitty had just been diagnosed with cancer and had had a stroke a few years before. We talked about the painting, which Kitty seemed to like. David had brought a photocopy of the poem and I did an impromptu reading. We spoke of death and I think she found it comforting. She had been preparing herself for this for a while.

Three months later I read it again at the “removal” (it’s an Irish thing) for Kitty the night before her funeral. It was moving and seemed and seemed a significant way to say farewell.

When I researched the poem online I found that there are many versions – the poet kept revising. However I prefer the one below.

THE SHIP OF DEATH

HAVE you built your ship of death, oh have you?

Oh build your ship of death, for you will need it.

Now in the twilight, sit by the invisible sea

Of peace, and build your little ship

Of death, that will carry the soul

On it’s last journey, on and on, so still

So beautiful, over the last of seas.

When the day comes, that will come.

Oh think of it in the twilight peacefully!

The last day, and the setting forth

Om the longest journey, over the hidden sea

To the last wonder of oblivion.

Oblivion, the last wonder!

When we have trusted ourselves entirely

To the unknown, and are taken up

Out of our little ships of death

Into pure oblivion.

Oh build your ship of death, be building it now

With dim, calm thoughts and quiet hands

Putting its timbers together in the dusk,

Rigging its mast with the silent, invisible sail

That will spread in death to the breeze

Of the kindness of the cosmos,, that will waft

The little ship with its soul to the wonder-goal.

Ah, if you want to live in peace on the face of the earth

Then build your ship of death, in readiness

For the longest journey, over the last of seas.

There is another poem which is relevant to this painting. This is “The Owl and the Pussycat” by Edward Lear. Another painting in this collection with an owl in it which also seems to refer obliquely to the nursery rhyme is called “Owl’s Failed Shipbuilding” and is an assemblage on breadboard too. There are no guitars or pigs in either piece, so they are by no means literal illustrations.

In this one (Owlship) there is not exactly a silvery moon (unless you see the owl’s head as a stand-in), and the boat is not exactly pea-green. However, unusually for my practice, I must have known from early on in the process what the subject was going to be. I hope it’s evident somewhere in the magpie-like accretion of found objects in this post-apocalyptic, ridiculous vessel that I really enjoyed the making of this. The construction of these assemblages always challenges my ingenuity and sets puzzles of making that I love solving. Objects randomly found and picked up, or whose original usefulness has passed, are incorporated into a new purpose.

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And I started painting…

“I was given my first real box of paints for my eighth birthday. I can still remember how enjoyable it was to sit outside our house that first day with these colours and brushes and make a picture of what I saw before me. That must have been April 1959 – we lived outside Kyrenia in Cyprus.

Since then the act of painting has remained my passion. Before long I was back in Ireland and wanted to paint the Irish landscape. I loved going into my uncle’s art studio, the smell of oil paint,. turpentine and linseed oil – the brushes and palette, and watching him paint.

I continued painting throughout my childhood and teenage years , wanting to represent what I saw in the landscape. We lived in South Kilkenny where my Dad was farming, and I wanted to try and paint what I saw in the landscape. At school I was lucky that my teacher, a sculptor, ignited that spark of enthusiasm. I made some woodcarvings. I was determined to go to art college.

After leaving school I had a gap year and worked for six months in a bookshop. Then I went to Italy, and lived mostly in Florence, soaking up all that wonderful city had to offer, and studying in a university there.

my first painting — The very first painting I did with my birthday present, aged 8. The house where we lived in Kyrenia, Cyprus, 1959.

That autumn, 1969, I did start in art college, in Belfast. It was also the beginning of “the troubles” – 30 years of strife in that place – with hindsight not the best choice! However I did remain for three years and had some inspiring teachers.

During the summers while I was at art college I travelled to some fascinating places – The first was Finland, where I stayed with a friend at first in Helsinki, whose father was a British diplomat. I tore myself away from the glittering life of embassy parties and went North to take up a job in a summer school teaching kids who were about three years younger than I was. They were fascinated to learn about this little province called Ulster which was beginning to be in the headlines just then. Most of all I remember the haunting light in the landscape, in July most of the nights consist of twilight – that mauve violet light reflected on the lake surrounded by forest. After the day’s studies there was plenty of time for long treks through the wilderness, wonderful relaxing saunas, and special sausages grilled in the open air. I also remember a “happening” that I put on with a screening of “Closely watched Trains” by Jiri Menzel. This was a really magical summer, in which I fell in love, and I also went further North, to Lapland, nearly as far as The North Cape, just inside Norway.

The following summer I travelled to the United States of America on a J1 visa. Starting with a week in Westchester, New York, I travelled south on a Greyhound bus to Florida. The landscapes that I travelled through on that trip were incredibly evocative, especially when we reached the Carolinas, where the trees had long creepers hanging down, and everything seemed different. In Florida I stayed some time in Miami Beach, not having great success with employment, but making many friends and enjoying the exotic surroundings beside the Caribbean. I then travelled to Atlanta Georgia, where I spent about a month. 1971 was a fascinating time to be in the U.S.A. – the youth culture was exploding and I was in the middle of it all.

It was to be another nine years before I began my full time painting career. During that time I worked in bookshops and as a shepherd – among other jobs. In 1981 I left a job on a farm in County Wicklow, Ireland, to begin a full-time painting career. Having reached the age of thirty I decided it was time to get started seriously.

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My first art career 1981-2001

When I decided to leave my job on a farm and start a full-time painting career in 1981, it was because I felt impelled to give my time to painting. I had reached the age of thirty, and I felt I needed to get on with it. I did not really have a proper plan, but I have always been an optimist, and mostly I have not had cause to regret my rash and brave decisions. Life is short, and there is no time for getting stuck in a life that has not been chosen.

Although my life on the farm was far from unhappy, I had this inner drive that kept pushing me to keep painting. In the three years that I had been there I had painted more and more landscapes, always landscapes. I had discovered that I worked better from photographs. Painting in the open air is not ideally suited to the Irish climate, and the rapidly changing light means that it is extremely hard to capture a scene in a single sitting. There are some artists who do manage it, perhaps they have a better memory, but I was not one of them. So in 1980 I bought a Fujica SLR, and in the following twenty years I must have taken many thousands of photographs. By this time I had begun selling some of my work.

Before my notice to leave my job expired I had already opened my first One-man show in The Third Policeman gallery in Dublin. This was quite successful, thanks to the many friends and relations who came to the opening and bought paintings.It was the first of many exhibitions that I organised in the next five years. Although the paintings were mainly Irish landscapes, I nearly always included some of my “imagined” pieces, fantasies and inventions which I loved doing.

I had been seeking to develop my imagination through drawing and painting for most of my life and clearly from this time (1980-81) I had the idea of presenting it to the world when it was ready. In the meantime, my landscape and genre painting would help me to develop a kind of vocabulary of images which would help me later on. I thought- perhaps naively- that the people who liked my work back then would come around to this more personal work.

In the next 20 years I exhibited in many galleries in Dublin and throughout Ireland. Looking from the present (Where I’m at now) I can see it was a preparation for the work I’m doing now. Of all the years 1985 was probably the most hectic. As well as starting to exhibit weekly in the brand new weekly street market on Merrion Square and the larger one on St. Stephens Green, I also did a residency in Switzers department store and organised three one man exhibitions. That Christmas I did my first craft fair in the Mansion House.

I continued with all these activities during the following years, and the craft shows and street exhibiting became a regular part of my calendar. Around 1987 I began painting scenes from a vanished time, from black and white photographs, mostly of Dublin in the early 1950s.These, along with interiors, became popular subjects that helped me to gain new customers.

In 1991 I produced the first series of twelve small prints based on Irish subjects old and new. I travelled around the country placing them in craft shops. With another set of twelve, produced in 1993, I continued this business for about six years. It was quite successful, and for a time I enjoyed going around the beautiful coastline and lovely landscapes of what they now call “The Wild Atlantic Way”. But after some time these places that I loved began to lose some of their appeal. Not just because I was visiting them so often, but because in the busy season, when i was there, there was so much traffic on the roads -I would be stuck behind a tour bus on the Ring of Kerry or in Connemara.

My studio at this time was close to the centre of Dublin, in Mountjoy Square, and I was a partner in a framing business there. We had a lease on the building and rented out studios to other artists.

Some time around 1997 – 98 it seemed as though the excitement and fizz was starting to go out of my work – this must have become evident in the results and was reflected in sales which began to decline.

In 1998 I had the first show devoted exclusively to “imagined” paintings. This was in the Cobalt Gallery in Dublin. This exhibition was successful in terms of sales but I was starting to run out of ideas about how to make a full-time living as an artist.

In 2001 I began driving a taxi while I started to seriously develop this imagined way of painting. Although I did not enjoy the driving after the novelty at the start, it was a relief not to have to paint one more Dublin landmark at sunset so that I could pay a bill. I had the freedom to paint what I wanted.

During this time I kept a studio, paying the rent so that I had a place to continue working. Even while I was only able to spend 10-20 hours a week there I was steadily making pieces which excited me.

How to start your art collection

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW