I subscribe to a service that provides information such as auction results for artists, both living and dead. It is always interesting to scan the auction results for my favorite artists, to see how they are currently viewed by buyers. For example, anything by Vincent Van Gogh still draws huge money, even the work that doesn’t possess the signature brushwork and color of his better known works. Those pieces that do, go for astronomical sums. His popularity with the public is as strong as ever. I guess that is no surprise.
It’s also interesting to scan the results to see other work from artists than that which we know them by that hangs in museums. We tend to think of artists by their best work and seldom see the complete chain of work that runs through their career, never really seeing their weak links or developmental work. The image at the top, Paysage Avec Cheval, a painting that goes up for auction at Christie’s London, is a good example of this. It’s a lovely piece but you might not guess the artist. This is from George Seurat whose work, such as his most famous work shown here on the left, is forever tied to pointillism. But scanning through his records, you can get a better sense of the evolution of his work.
I am also looking for consistency in the artists whose work I am scanning through. Again, we always think of the artists in terms of their best known works and are often unaware of the totality of their body of work. Some artists are incredibly consistent, even in their early formative years. Others have high peaks and deep valleys, with a huge disparity between their best and not-so-best work. I am always encouraged by both types of artists.
I strive for consistency in my own work but have had dips and valleys in my work, particularly in the formative days early on. In those days, I thought of the great artists only in terms of their best works that hung in the great museums of the world, thinking that they simply got up each day and turned out incredible work. I could not fathom the possibility that they had swings and misses. It’s encouraging to see that those icons whose work I revere often struggled in the same way as me and that the great works we know them for were not created in a vacuum. They came with great effort and day after day of moving ahead in often small increments.
I think any aspiring artist should take a few minutes to look through the whole of the works of their heroes. They might be encouraged, as I often have been, to know that the path they are on is not so much different.
Redtree Times 