You'd think I knew by now what I want to draw/paint, or what I should paint/draw, which is not always the same thing. After the success of my local art show (in the fine arts, breaking even is considered a success) I should concentrate on painting interesting and mildly sentimental old buildings and pastoral landscapes. After all, people love them and are willing to pay for pictures of them. But I have done so many kinds of art that I would feel constrained and bored by having to do the same thing all the time.

And yet that's what I see in a lot of artists' output, especially in the "fine arts" world. There are some famous modern artists out there, both alive and dead, who painted more or less the same thing for years and years, and were counted as greats in their field. The twentieth century German artist Josef Albers, whose work I love, and who was (incidentally) a mathematician, got maximum mileage out of nested colorful squares. Mark Rothko, who is even more renowned, also painted lots of color fields which are multiple variations on a theme. This is indubitably Fine Art.

But I've been involved in the commercial art world for most of my career, from fantasy art to book covers to illustration to portraits, architectural rendering, and even tattoo design, let alone all my sign work for Trader Joe's, Starbucks, and other places. I have done signs for commercial establishments of various kinds for at least thirty years. In the late seventies, while based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I designed ads for a friend's "Science Fantasy Bookstore," and in 1979-1980 I did more than a hundred illustrated menu cards and display items for a small local chain of Mexican fast food restaurants, "Paco's Tacos." (There is a "Paco's Tacos" restaurant in Los Angeles, but it has no relation to the ones that were in Boston and Cambridge back in the late seventies.) So I have lots of experience of doing many different types of art for paying clients (who sometimes pay in food and coffee!).

I don't know enough about the fine art world to know whether these fine arts types also take commercial jobs. They seem to gravitate toward a university art department and academia, or teach students at an art school, or do some other non-commercial type of work. Another of my favorite artists, the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte, did not go into academia, but did advertising art to support himself for much of his career. But I just don't see someone like Mark Rothko doing menu cards for a Mexican restaurant.

I find that I need to do different kinds of art to keep interested. This may be dilettant-ish from a Fine Arts point of view, but makes some sense if I want to sell what I make. I cannot allow unsold artwork to pile up in my dwelling. Art product must be moved out of the studio.

I gave up doing fantasy and science fiction art a few years ago when I realized that no one was buying it, when I brought it to science fiction conventions. After switching to abstractions and architecture, I declared myself a Fine Artist or at least a fine-arts-oriented commercial artist. But now, years later, as I admire the wonderful work of many "concept artists" who work for film, gaming, or entertainment design, I find myself missing my old fantastic worlds. Not just the architecture, but the super-heroes, the knights, the beasts, the spaceships, exploding stars, and colliding galaxies. I am really tempted to go back and do some more of this, but would that be "slumming?" Would that be sinking back into the pop culture gutter, when I had finally climbed out of it by painting geometric abstractions and tasteful houses and landscapes?

My friends and fellow artists tell me, "Just do what you like." Well that is easier said than done. I am not one of those artists who is driven by some profound inner vision to create works of art no matter what happens to them. I expect to communicate to real people and eventually to sell the work. Which means that if I painted "what I like," I might be stuck with it gathering dust in my cluttered apartment. I like painting pictures of sunlit porches, but I can only stand so many of them before I want to depict a steel mill or a fantasy skyscraper, or a super-hero with a glowing aura. But as I found out, that stuff doesn't sell, and you can't show it in a gallery.

I believe that this whole problem is about to be solved, at least for me, in my practice with Photoshop and other artistic and graphics software. The artists whose Websites I currently visit are almost all working in digital format, not with paint on paper or canvas. The more I explore Photoshop and Painter, the more prospects open up for doing my own work in this medium. And the great advantage of working digitally is that even your most complex work doesn't take up any space. It is not a dusty canvas or a stack of drawings. It is recorded on a hard drive or at most on a CD or DVD. I don't intend to completely switch to digital art. My clients and art buyers want a "real" painting, and I like working with traditional media. But it is much easier for me to indulge my craving for lowbrow art in the privacy of the virtual world, where no one can see it and I don't have to sell it. And you won't have to look at it on Electron Blue, where only the Fine Art will appear.

Posted at 3:32 am | link