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When “Last Dim Sum in Singapore” won entry in the 2010 All Florida Competition and Exhibition, Boca Raton Museum of Art, I was completely surprised because it depicted a city halfway around the world, as far away from Florida as you could get without leaving the planet. Maybe the juror wanted to show the international flavor of the exhibition, though only Florida artists were allowed to enter.

When I returned home after delivering the painting to the museum, I felt like I had lost a brother. I had never been so fond of a painting and didn't know what it was like to part with it. I imagined it hanging on a wall in that dark museum surrounded by the strangest things. You know, artworks.

When I saw the painting hanging in the most prominent place in the gallery and a photo of it used in the brochure to accompany the juror's statement, I was excited about winning a prize. After all, the juror, Linda Norden, had written, “I’m partial to direct, clear expression--painterly, structural, but also things that are hyper-real, as in some of the realist and surreal paintings and photos submitted.... I found myself being toughest on the photography, given the preponderance of photographic imagery these days, and how easy it is to manipulate images digitally."

What better judge could a painter like me have, an artist who uses plant oils, animal-hair brushes, and rough cotton canvas, imperfect tools from his own hands, not a computer? Well, so I thought. The best of show turned out to be an odd assortment of chairs displayed in a room somewhere outside the main gallery, a room that few visitors knew existed or even saw. I could understand Norden's problem with making aesthetic judgments in an era when aesthetics is so diverse and trendy, but when she stated, "I'm also looking for work that's arousing, without relying on cheap shots," how could she have picked such a work that most art lovers would call a “cheap shot?”

"I want to be excited or surprised or moved or made to laugh," she stated. Well, I'm sure everyone who attended was just that. And I wonder where all those ugly chairs went. My Last Dim Sum is back home where it should be.

Artist statements often amuse me, especially those written with philosophical jargon. They might impress art dealers and dilettantes, but not philosophers and art historians. Deenesh Ghyczy’s intention, for example, “is to depict figures that stand beyond the cause of everyday life…to frame past, future and the acutely present on canvas…perception is in equal measure directed inwards at the mind capable of transcending linear time. Streams of consciousness appear to be channeled and frozen in the recurrent motif of fragmented, disintegrating figures.”

Given a name like Deenesh Ghyczy, I suppose one has the right to speak philosophically, but when you look at his paintings you see duplicate portraits stacked alongside one another, usually receding into space left to right (to give perspective and interest) with marked decreases in solidity (or increases in diffuseness). I do not see the past or future in any of these figures, nor a stream of consciousness in the subject’s mind or the artist’s.

Albert Einstein once said, “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” It seems Ghyczy would have everything happen at once on his canvases.

These artworks mimic cinema and subvert the real meaning of painting. The challenge of two dimensional art is to capture an intriguing moment, to suspend action for an instant, to show the power of origination or accomplishment. Painting is fundamentally a static medium and is used to greatest effect when the figures or subjects in the scene are poised at some moment in time, whether anticipatory or consequential. Simply put, the past and future cannot be present in an extant canvas and neither in a single frame of a movie. Rene Magritte showed this with his profound painting “Man with Newspaper,” which depicts four identical rooms with only one difference—a man reads a newspaper in one room and only one room. Of it, he said, “Visible images conceal nothing.” There might be a parallel universe existing somewhere where the man reads a newspaper in four rooms at once on Magritte’s canvas, but never in our universe.

Philosopher and self-taught artist Georges Mathieu lived inside his art, splashed and texted color onto canvas, not on the floor, living the battle inside his art, straight up, not bent over like a drunk. His art was the text and he the context. Deconstruction twenty years before his time. Ninety-one years of life says something about his artwork, as well as the glorious medium of oil.

Yesterday, I saw his pictures in Life magazine, the same ones I saw yesterday, 1952 I think, camouflaged soldier shooting at the enemy hiding in the bush. VC or NVA or something evil like that.

Would the Twin Towers still be standing if federal air marshals were flying on September 11, 2001? Get Lost in the Blue Room and find out.

Harold Stevenson painted Sal Mineo as The New Adam in 1962. It is considered by many art critics to be the “great American nude,” even though it was born in Paris. I consider it to be the great American dinosaur.

Sal Mineo was only 24 and already descending from the height of his fame. He never became the new James Dean, just as the painting never became the new Adam. The artwork is hardly mentioned in art history books, but holds a place in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The usual interpretation is that it is a representation of homoeroticism.

It is composed of nine sections eight feet high and 39 feet long. It is impossible to view all at once, even at a distance. You can’t get far enough away from it to see it altogether. It is often shown bent in the middle at 90 degrees and covering two walls. Stevenson intended to cover all four walls of a room, leaving no exit for the viewer.

He painted The New Adam for a pop-art show at the Guggenheim in 1962, but when the curator saw it in the raw, rejected it, because it was too large and stark. To be sure, it popped as an in-your-face proclamation on gay freedom, but Stevenson didn’t know that Sal Mineo was a famous gay actor when he painted him. Mineo was supposedly a substitute for someone else who was unavailable. His hand covers his face, which might be hiding the artist’s inability to paint a good portrait, or deference to the friend he wanted to paint in the first place.

The size of the work works against itself. It shows only the torso of Mineo’s body. This suggests the freedom possessed by the new Adam, the inability to be captured totally, least of all by paint and canvas and the museum it hangs in. The main parts are there in full glory, and his all-important hands, obviously belonging to Adam himself and no one else, though the visual connection is not made. The hands are mirror images and reversals of the ones painted by Michelangelo in the Creation of Adam. This is not the instant of creation, but one of narcissism and denial, not only of the face but of the body.

Our understanding of the body as a being-in-the-world depends upon our perception of the body’s horizons, its relationship to objects around it. The philosopher Sartre posed the illustration of a baby who crawls off a plank, because he does not perceive empty space at the edge. The New Adam denies our knowledge of his body, not only because we cannot perceive and master its size, but because the body is cut off at the edges. We cannot walk to the edge of the plank and experience our being. Adam creates himself and we are not invited. “I exist my body!” (Sartre). Even inside you, I exist my body, which can never create another body.

But isn’t this true of all two-dimensional paintings on canvas, that the objects they depict cannot be perceived fully and really but only imaginatively? Yes, but this is the beauty of art, that it allows us to perceive two dimensional images as three dimensional objects. It exalts our powers of perception and understanding. Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse made a point of showing their images fully and completely on canvas, and not hiding any aspects from the viewer. This was precisely the meaning of cubism, fauvism, surrealism, and even pop art. It can be said that multiplicity, as in the case of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, is a greater statement of denial, for though the artist puts everything on the table, the viewer cannot really know the full measure or being of the objects that exist on it.

Enormousness is not a sign that a new Adam has been born. Dinosaurs were enormous but became extinct 65 million years ago. Five-foot-eight Sal Mineo was probably the spitting image of Adam, but Stevenson didn’t know it.

John Howard Sanden, who painted the official portrait of George W. Bush, was hardly mentioned in news coverage of the unveiling at the White House. President Obama hosted the event, and it was primarily a media show to see how the two presidents would react in the same room with one another.

The Bush family chose Sanden because he is considered by many to be the country’s most eminent portrait artist, as well as being a close associate of Billy Graham. In addition, he is very handsome, has a pleasant manner, is meticulous, works clean and orderly, and can be trusted to produce a realistic and suitable work of art. And it didn’t hurt to have a handsome portrait of Jesus in his oeuvre.

I do not think the painting is a significant work of art, even though it begs attention. One would expect a more refined expression on the face of the president, but then, Bush was difficult to characterize or pin down, being a very successful politician. A great representation of his overconfident personality appears in the portrait printed on the cover of Time magazine, December 27, 2004.

The painting depicts Bush standing in the Oval Office with his right hand on the back of an antique armchair embroidered with an official seal. He seems to reach out for help, perhaps to balance himself. Over his right shoulder hangs a 1929 western painting, A Charge to Keep, by William Koerner. This is a fitting prop, for it is Bush’s favorite painting. On his left is a bookcase with three sets of books arranged by size and color, symbolic of his lack of erudition. But the president looks as he does today, not ten years ago when he actually stood tall as Commander in Chief fighting the war on terror. Does this convey Sanden’s battle with age also, the sad things that happens to handsomeness over time, the one thing they shared in common? Bush was born in 1946, Sanden in 1935.

Notice that Bush's left eye is larger than the right and appears to be looking in a different direction. (Search Google images for larger picture.) Is this artistic license or just the result of faulty vision (artist's and/or sitter's)? I doubt that the inspiration for this was Manet's Olympia, which has an entirely different purpose and meaning. It looks weird and not appropriate for this one-dimensional man.

The painting has all the elements of portraiture that Sanden professes. The only thing that seems odd is Bush’s face. It is not fresh and Sanden’s attempt at “premier coup” failed. I do not think this was intentional, since he has never to my knowledge attempted anything other than courtly portraits. But there is a chance that he was influenced by Freud’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth. (See my blog, Portrait of Queen Elizabeth…). If the portrait is an interpersonal statement between artist and subject, as I think Freud’s is, then maybe this painting has a meaning that reaches beyond the limits of the canvas. Otherwise, it is a blunder and we citizens didn’t get our money’s worth.

It is unfortunate that after such a distinguished career, Sanden should get the most prized commission of all and be unable to meet his own standard. Maybe it’s the subject, a president who ranks lowest in public opinion, a president who deserves a portrait just like himself.

It should be interesting to see who paints Obama's presidential portrait. Probably a con artist just like himself.

Fine Art America’s voting statistics appear to be great indicators of personal preferences in art. With over sixty new contests each week, themes run from the traditional (surrealism) to the ridiculous (dodo paintings). Could the voting results actually support previous findings about what kind of art people want? Komer and Melamid found, for instance, that “Everywhere the people want outdoor scenes, with wild animals, water, trees, and some people…but in general people hate gold and orange. They all hate the sharp angles and geometric patterns.”
FAA contests are designed to promote the economic interests of its members by exposing as much art as possible to dollars. It’s the same technique used by retail stores and grocery markets—exploit grazing habits rather than promote food for health. Dangle it in front of their faces and they’re bound to nibble.
So, how does an artist measure success, by how many contests s/he can enter to lead potential buyers to his or her portfolio? The system seems to blur the distinction between the wanted and the needed. Give them what they want, not what they need. After all, they are all adults.
My recent contest, GOTV (Get Out The Vote), was unsuccessful attracting both artists and voters. The results: 10 artists, 10 artworks, 14 votes. The intent was to get artists to submit their worst work of art and to get people to vote for it, a contest that would demonstrate the artist’s marketing skills rather than artistic talent. The winners were: Homunkulus by Vsevolod Poliohin (3 votes), Witches Wash Day by Jeffrey Koss (3 votes), and Mountain Scene by Merton Allen (2 votes). Had I actually gotten out the vote, an easy task since I needed only two friends to vote, my Striptych (2 votes), shown here, might have taken first place.

Why does this painting appeal when it defies the traditional rule of composition not to center prominent objects? Portrait artists normally center one eye along the vertical axis in order to add "life" and latent movement to the subject. But here, Betty's eye is dead center. Coordinates 0, 0. Nonetheless, Betty "sees" perfectly well. Her eyes are round and defy gravity, the forces that distort her face. Turn the image sideways and the distortion becomes evident. The rich lips are reminiscent of Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring," but the composition goes one step further, giving the viewer a “dog’s perspective” so common in contemporary art.

Have you noticed that they always set up in large, up-scale malls, where space is at a premium; and they hang paintings all over the walls from floor to ceiling? Don't they know that art lovers will travel many miles to see original artworks? For example, NudeNite in Orlando is usually held in a warehouse in an industrial area, yet it is always crowded. Artworks are displayed as in a museum, eye-level, freely spaced with good lighting. Proximity to a mall or affluent neighborhoods is not necessary, drives up membership fees and operation expenses, and limits membership to retirees who have disposable income to keep it afloat. You know, retirees that love decorative watercolors of flowers and wildlife.

Though selected to show at a major art museum in the U.S., Last Dim Sum in Singapore didn't even place in the top 120 works entered in Light, Space & Time CityScapes Art Competition, Feb 2012. It seems ironic that this exhibition gives numbered places to electronic images that don't exist in real places. It hasn’t a clue as to what light, space, and time are really all about. The images are visually amusing, but that’s as far as they go. It’s as though the primary criterion for winning is whether an image would look good on the cover of a national magazine. No courage shown on the part of the curators.