02 Oct Town Without Pity

How can anything survive when these little minds tear you in two?

— Ned Washington

I’m happy to announce my work will be included in The Center for the Creative Arts’ 2020 Regional Art Exhibition.

Realists like me are lucky in that we’re immune from the nasty stings of the philistine, who looks at an abstract painting and pronounces “it’s a joke” or—worse—”a child could do it.”

Little does he know the abstract painter he’s dismissing, like Lee Krasner, could paint the human figure masterfully; or, like Mark Rothko, achieved his effect only by mixing his own paint (a secret blend of pigment, alkyd, acrylic, egg, glue, dammar, and formaldehyde).

The realist painter lives, in a sense, in Fat City; the abstractionist, in a Town Without Pity.

To the latter I’d pass along an observation of the writer and filmmaker Alan Parker: “No true artist should be afraid of what people think of their work. No comment on art, however accomplished, is as important as art itself, however poor.”

NOTE: The Center for the Creative Arts’ 2020 Regional Art Exhibition opens at 5 pm today and runs through October 25. All works are for sale.