From the NYT last week was an article about a Chilean artist whose exhibit took place recently in the back room of butcher's shop in Copenhagen. (!) The subjects of the 'exhibition' were three piglets who were being starved to death. The theme was to voice discontent about the industrialisation of the entire unethical food industry. The small critters were given just water to drink as they headed into a deathly decline that was to have lasted about five days. But surprise, the upside to the story is that they somehow 'disappeared' when a door was mysteriously left ajar for a short time. They thus were spared of their cruel fate.
The artist, Marco Evaristti, (bless his heart), in the photo below, either really believes in this cause or is just cashing in to make some publicity. I think it's the former, and I even think he saved the piglets himself, but hey, what do I know?
(Disclaimer: I haven't eaten red meat or pork, or anything, except for about a dozen chickens since the Spring of 1980.
But I applaud the artist, if in fact his idea was to save the piglets in end. The Food industry is disgusting.
In 1971, when I was a freshmen at Denver University, a group of anti-war protesters designed and distributed flyers around campus declaring that they would napalm a Golden Retriever at a specified spot on a certain Saturday. Naturally, it cause an uproar as everyone went apoplectic.
"A dog! really?"
On the day on which it was supposed to happen there was a big crowd and also the campus police, but possibly even the Denver Police on hand to make arrests. Of course, it was just a hoax just to see how riled up people would become over the killing of a dog when at the same time, Vietnamese were being slaughtered by the Nixon regime.
I wasn't too involved either way, my cynicism had already been too well established in both heart and mind by that time and I just wanted to get the hell out of America and into a cafe in Paris.
And today, it's also a pretty insane time and I think it behooves us all to make our own decisions thoughtfully based on fact not fiction today.
An installation view of Jennifer J. Lee’s 2023 “Square Dance” exhibition at the Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York.Credit...Heidi Bohnenkamp Photography
The Art World’s Next Big Thing: Tiny Paintings
Works the size of postcards and bathroom tiles are challenging the market’s appetite for grand scales.
While the artists who make them vary in style and approach, they seem to share a somewhat old-fashioned view of what art is for: individual communion rather than collective spectacle — only one viewer can stand in front of each of these pieces at a time.
The scale echoes that of the source, squinted at on an iPad screen or laptop. Some of Lee’s most evocative works are around the size of a shower tile. She compares looking at one of her paintings in a gallery to peeking through a keyhole: “I love being able to beckon someone to look at something.”
Small paintings are also intimate, seductive and unpretentious. As Middleton puts it, they “creep up on you.” While the artists who make them vary in style and approach, they seem to share a somewhat old-fashioned view of what art is for: individual communion rather than collective spectacle — only one viewer can stand in front of each of these pieces at a time.
Mia Middleton’s 6.3-by-6.3-inch painting “Bill” (2023).Credit...Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson
Today, some artists and dealers are looking to cultivate sustainability by staying small. “Why can’t we have a middle-class existence? Why do we have to make hundreds of thousands of dollars?” asks Lee. “All I’ve ever wanted is to keep going.”
Lee’s 4-by-4-inch painting “Untitled (Train)” (2023).Credit...Courtesy of the artist and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery
Of course. a painter like me would love this article, but even more, I love this movement away from the gigantic works of Art that engorge museums and galleries world-wide and making them feel like airports and shopping malls. Enough, I say!
Not only do such large Disney spaces seem overwhelming, but they further legitimise an idea that Art is somehow entertaining which it really isn't. There are many over-sized pieces like Jeff Koon's 'Puppy' and Anish Kapoor's polished steel 'Cloud Gate' which are extremely successful public outdoor sculptures, and of both, one could possibly describe them as 'entertaining' to experience, but I wouldn't unless they are under 15 years of age. For me, they answer an audience's thirst for amazement, or even to be surprised into enlightenment. But entertainment, no, I don't think so. (disclaimer, I really like them both and very much in their outdoor context, but I might feel differently if they were parked indoors. Why? I couldn't say, just a hunch.
That said, there is an intimacy in looking at small things because like someone said in the article, they draw the viewer in closer. Personally, and though my paintings are not quite as small as some of these, I've always dreamed of exhibiting a few dozen of them on white walls with at least a meter of space between them so in order to give the viewer a a reflective moment. I like space guy, and I like it everywhere, and in every context, so naturally I appreciated these views in the article.
I really this tiny blue face by Mia Middleton. I think I like especially because it is so small, but tragic too. And as some of us know, small and tragic seem to go well together for some odd reason. Just sayin.
But then, (the elephant in the room), is the greater issue about why Paintings are losing their appeal to the public, writ large. Are we painters destined to also be flung out of the castle and into the dark landscape of illiteracy like our brethren poets? (Say it ain't so!)
The biggest culprit appears to be our obsession with i-pads and smart phones. Have we all lost our souls to these tiny but miraculous devises?Do we have the time or even the ability to focus on an artwork? Maybe, if it's a poor artwork or one of just little interest to us, that's fair to assume, but are we not possibly moving away from art as a form of contemplation and visual reflection? I wish I had an had answer to all this.
So, I am finally beginning the last of the six Gnossiennes, a series of piano solos by Erik Satie that started six years ago. There are short and sweet. I am still working through the last one which is tricky, but towards the end of learning one piece I like to just begin even fifteen minutes a day on the next piece, a few bars at a time, so that when I really do dive into it I'll have a momentum.
Of course, I have to keep up all the others in my head,,,, or my heart, as we say. I cannot still get through them all without making mistakes, alas.... But hey! That's the way it is for us amateurs for to study, is the whole point.
Th last one is very, very quirky, quinky even and discordantly melodic, in a word; original and other-worldly. In fact, it's like this picture done here in the studio in Myocum just about ten years ago.
Untitled, 7 September, 2015, oil on plywood, 180 X 120 cm, Myocum N.S.W.
Few of my friends seem to have appreciated this painting despite my own enthusiasm, but it doesn't change anything for me because an artist
makes what he or she needs to make, irregardless of others.
Yes, perhaps I do live in another age, one from an era wherein the creator lived in a small bubble seemingly excluded from the comings and goings of the big world churning around outside them. Then again, I'm not a POP artist, someone who 'needs' to please the general populace. No, in this moment I seem to live in a world created by my own intuitive needs and desires. I wonder if it is not unlike an exotic flower which is found in some remote spot in the world, a place so inaccessible and to where only great aficionados will make the effort to tread. I may be exotic but I do not consider myself 'great' or indispensable to the world at large. I'm just a painter working alone with my own ideas at my own speed.
I suppose one could say that Erik Satie has been a model for me ever since I first heard his piano pieces back in University. Both he and Thelonious Monk mad a huge impression upon me in that time of my unhappy life. Their music was so wildly and strangely personal, yet at the same time, so classical and even traditional. Something in them inspired me, lifting me up, but at the same time it also left me feeling that I was lost and I'd never catch the lifeline that all artists throw out to young aspiring ones.
Later, when I went to France and discovered that I might have a talent for something in the Arts, I grew more confident perhaps for the very first time in my entire life.
Of course, I hope not to die broke in a tiny cold water studio flat in Paris like Satie, nor go off the spectrum like Monk, but still, because I've always been an outsider, I think I embraced my own eccentricity enough over the years to practice something authentic in my life. Yet funny enough, over these same years, the Buddhists were teaching me to forget about achieving anything in life by ignoring the whole point of life. What's the point of anything, they quizzically asked me? But I eventually learned that just to be authentic in action I took each moment was enough. Though not easy, it made sense. Learning any craft like Painting or making music, is still really hard but like Degas said a century ago, "If if weren't hard, it wouldn't be fun." Easy said him.
Like the picture above, this one image from nine years earlier and done in France, has something of both Satie and Monk in them. Can you feel it?
Nothing Special, Dieulefit, August, 2006, oil on plywood, 180 X 120 cm
The New York Times periodically offers readers an opportunity to spend ten minutes looking at an image. Usually, they are oil paintings but this latest one is an iconic photograph by the much revered Henri Cartier-Bresson.
I have been a fan of his for a long time now despite my 'ennui' in front of many Black and White photos. I am a colour sort of fellow. But, HCB is my great exception to this visual bias on my part.
I have left the following article intact so one can read the follow-up to this exercise by the NYT. (see below)
I can explain why I like HCB so much in a few words. He was an artist (as he himself explained in many articles) who liked to find "des lieux" (places, or spots) where he could 'wait out a picture' that is to say, wait for something to transpire. He liked spaces which lent themselves to a visual contradiction and/or ironic context.
This is my own understanding of course. But I've read accounts by him describing how he would sometimes wait whole afternoons uncomfortably in cramped spaces just for drama, a cat or dog, human or otherwise, to enter his frame and allowing him to grab a photo. He was like a creature who waits patiently for his prey before pouncing on it.
Like the Real Estate people always like to say: "Location, Location, Location". Well, it was apparently the same for HCB. But I would point out that for artists (of any kind), I think "Relationships, Relationships, Relationships" are more apt. All great art is about relationships in a work. And in this extraordinary photo there are indeed, many!
And like it is pointed out in the explanation below, HCB loved spontaneity. Me too! For I paint quickly and spontaneously, and is my favourite mode of operation. But then, I'm obliged because twilight seems to move carefully at first like a butterfly, but then it transforms as fast as a freight train, and I must be on it.
So though I also take lots of photos myself but they are always in colour like in paintings.
Addendum; HCB was also a painter and loved this craft as much as photography.
Evening Prayers Brunswick Heads, 17 February, 2025, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm
(go do the ten minute exercise at the NYT!
Thanks for spending10 minutes and 10 secondswith the photo. If you want to look a little longer, just scroll back up and press “Continue.”
Now, we’ll tell you a bit about it.
In 1932, as he was walking around Paris with his small Leica camera, a young man named Henri Cartier-Bresson came upon a construction fence behind the Gare Saint-Lazare train station. He peeked through.
There, with his camera wedged between wooden slats, he saw a man running across his view and pressed the shutter. The result would become one of the most influential photographs in history.
In the frame, time seems to be stopped. The man is suspended millimeters from the water, as if he may never hit that puddle.
“A second later and the photograph would have been lost to me forever,” Cartier-Bresson recalled years later.
That jump is the obvious focus of the photograph, but the scene is full of visual connections. There are so many, in fact, and in such alignment, that it’s easy to imagine the scene as staged. In reality, the image was captured at precisely the perfect time — the “decisive moment,” as Cartier-Bresson would call it.
Photography once relied on clunky equipment and long exposures, but Cartier-Bresson’s Leica was hand-held and allowed him to snap quick pictures like this one. It took him exactly three days to master the new camera, he told The New Yorker in 1989.
At the start of your 10 minutes and 10 seconds, you might have noticed this delightful connection, with the shape of our puddle jumper and the poster of the dancer in the background:
But there are other doubles in the image, too. These two men, and their double reflections:
The doubled dancer posters (and their reflections):
The words RAILOWSKY RAILOWSKY (and their reflections):
(It’s actually a poster — probably an advertisement — for Alexander Brailowsky, a pianist. The ‘B’ is hidden.)
“You are projecting yourself into this inkblot,” he said. “You want to find significance or a sense of meaning in this doubling effect. I truly believe that this is part of the fascination of this image.”
“All the Surrealists were into the idea of the chance encounter,” he said. “The whole idea that where you were walking in the streets of Paris and you were encountering: encountering people, encountering beautiful things, encountering just light, beautiful light, or encountering a strange situation.”
Cartier-Bresson caught these moments throughout his career, like at the top of a spiral staircase in France, with a bicycle whizzing by:
And here in Greece, a young girl in an Escheresque scene, dashing through the shadows:
Notice the black border on these two images. Notably, Cartier-Bresson said he never cropped his photographs, leaving the edges of the film to show the full frame, as he would have seen it through his viewfinder.
But our image is an exception. If you look at the original negative, the blurred shadow of a fence post crept into the frame. This decisive moment was nearly spoiled, but it was saved by the final crop.
By all accounts, he took great joy in these moments of visual connection.
It almost seems impossible that all these elements lined up on that day in 1932 and that one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century was right there to see it.
But the truth is, even if Cartier-Bresson had not been there to capture it, the man would have still jumped, still looked like the dancer on the poster in the background and still had a perfect reflection.
As his career proved, these small miracles are around us all the time — whether we’re looking or not.
You may be holding a camera in your hand right now. Maybe go take a walk and tell us what you see.
