Archibald Prize Entry 2011 Jasper Knight

Here's my Archibald prize entry this year, plus a couple of studies I did when I was warming up, and working out colour schemes and proportions.

Everything they didn't teach you at art School

The last few times I've been out to openings I've run into friends who have been reading my blogs, and they were most interested in the blogs that I have written about about how to get more press, and succeed as an artist. I'm sure that there are are others more capable of writing blogs on PR, and marketing skills. I'm certainly not an expert, but I have had to pick up these tools to further my career, and most of it has been learned from watching other successful people, and coming from a family that was self employed, so I was never afraid to go out there and sell my art, in fact I have really enjoyed it.


My motivation to share these tips is from having to endure my first day of art school being told by the head of the school that 95% of us would fail. Motivating! not all, and apparently it goes across right across the board with Design schools as well.
 The other thing that the head of the art school used to like to say during class, was that when we leave and we probably don't become  artists, we can always use the creativity that we have learned here and become chiefs? what...............I know! I didn't want to be a chief either!

I really believe that the main reason that  reason people don't succeed is because they are not equiped with the skills, and by skills I don't just mean talent, because there are many talented people in the world, I mean the confidence to treat your art like a business and marketing it accordingly. Success is in the eye of the beholder too. If you are exhibiting and selling your work, no matter on what level, that is a success.

People need positivity, and encouragement. The negative comments at Art school went right over my head, because I never truly doubted myself.  The other core thing to attaining the success that you want is to toughen up, and filter out negativity, and concentrate on creativity which is positivity plus plus.

Whatever skills I have picked up here , sure weren't from doing a harvard school of business degree, they are from wanting with everything in my soul to succeed as an artist, and knowing that nothing else would make me happy. These simple tips for PR which I believe is so important are outlined below.


MY PR  TIPS

This really important, to building your career, and expensive. So you know that what a PR company would charge to do the recent pr campaign I did for my show, would be within the vicinity of $5000-$10,000. As this is not an amount of money that everyone has at their disposal I hope that you find some benifit in these tips.

Most of the free magazines, such as MX have a section where the writer has their contact details for you to email. Every body reads the free mags by the way. Build up your contacts by compiling a big list of arts writers from many magazines, and newspapers. You will find the writers email addressses by contacting the paper directly.

Create a Simple PDF with some good images of your work, and a press release. Then send out to all your contacts at once.

Regarding the Press release, keep the writing readable. Don't get too long winded on the artistic explanations here. Remember this is a sum up of your artistic statement. When writing the press release think of human angle, a story, something personal, that will amaze people, or that they can relate to.  People will often remember the stories long after the art if it's an interesting one.

Include images in the PDF that are bold, or have eye catching colour combinations. This always comes out better in print, and writers, and editors will seek these sort of images over blander more subdued work in general.

The following day you can begin to follow up your emails with phone calls. Remember that the Press are always looking for stories, so you are doing them a favour by sending them in one, so don't be nervous. Begin by introducing yourself, and then ask if it's a good time to talk, if so then ask if they received the Pdf of your Press release. This process can go on for a while. In my case I sent over 500 emails so I spent 1-2 weeks following up with calls and further emails. It's quite a lot of work, but the results will be worth it.

WEBSITES


Even if you're with a gallery, It's very important to have your own website. One that show cases the full depth of your work, to the world.
It amazes me how some very established artists, only have some very paltry examples of their work on a gallery site. It's not really enough. Websites need to be updated every few 4 months at least with new work, other wise they become out dated, that's why it's a good idea to attach a blog so that you constantly show new work.

BLOGGING AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Many people have covered this topic in some depth. The main points are that once you have established what the blog will be about, it has to be regular or otherwise people will lose interest. 1-2 times per week at least. Some people Blog every day. I've found that Blogging is a great way of connecting with collectors, friends, and fans, while not having to go very far from the studio.

Most people I went to art school with were very talented people, some of them just lacked a bit of confidence. The world has opened up so much with web, and it's possibilities, that so many things are more possible today than they were even from 2002 when we all sat in that room and were told that we probably wouldn't make it as artists. Now is the best time to be an artist, we have so many things to comment on, and the means to comment on them so very quickly. I hope this information has been useful.

Archibald sitting with Jasper Knight

This afternoon I went down to Jasper Knight's studio and met him for the first time, to have an a sitting for this years Archibald.

The studio was a large warehouse in Surrey hills, shared by 5 other artists. With his gallery down the road, another down south, and a brand new show about to open at Metro 5 gallery, Jasper is a modern artist. Connected as fluidly with  the business, and marketing side of being a artist as he is with the production of his stunning pieces.

I arrived with my boyfriend and we watched as he finished up some of his paintings of trucks and cars on yellow perspex.

We chatted about some of the people that we had in common, and he showed us photos of his wife and new baby boy. I talk about almost anything with a subject until I can see their hands stop twitching and their facial musicals relax, and then they can reveal something inside themselves, beyond our surface conversation.

When I look back over drawings and photos that I have taken it's this eureka moment that I discovered with the subject, and will try to capture later on the canvas.

The night before I stayed up drawing playing with colour, and drawing portraits to free up my mind, and loosen my hand. Bright, bold colour combinations shot across the pages, and I could see the Archibald forming in my mind.

I want to create something that is totally out there, but also manage to capture that genuine expression, a face that know's a thing or two about something. A face that is Jasper Knight's.

Making LUCY LUSH

 

Here's some photo's of me working in the studio on some collages, that a friend of mine took.

Often my best paintings are a mix of accidental experiments and a magical creative hurricane where everything seems to work out. Similarly my worst paintings find me going over and over the same painted territory, each brush stroke worse than the last.
THe above drawing "Lucy lush" was a good creative moment. Working like this is a bit hit and miss. First the collage has to have some zing to it, and then the drawing over the top has to work out. I work on 10-15 at a time and there's a 50% success rate. Indelible ink is unforgiving, and I guess that's why I like it. I like to gamble with my work......throw the dice, even get angry with it. The best ones can come out of some serious frustration.

I'm working on several commissions at the moment. Lucy Lush had 3 reserves at the exhibition, on her so I am having some fun, working on these in my studio. Drawing is a great way to ease your way back in to the creative process after a break. If you fuck it up, so what it's just a piece of paper. No pressure, and you can't be too precious.

Also I'm really chuffed that that this year I'm painting Jasper Knight for the Archibald……..NO reclining nudes in flower beds….Don't worry Jasper!
It's really exciting, as I've always really dug his paintings, and hope to really attack that canvas, and do my own version of that famous beard.

Stay tuned for my Etsy store where you will be able to buy prints of my work. That's coming soon, but not before I take  off on a holiday to Bali.....got to get some down time and fresh inspiration in before things get super busy again.

All Dressed Up Like Art Galleries- NEW YORK TIMES

 I found this article recently about artists showing in retail/fashion spaces in New york. Due to the economy the artists were looking to take advantage of other opportunities, besides their galleries, many of which were going under. I really enjoyed this article, about artists who had been financially disadvantaged by a poor economy and have managed to turn the situation around for themselves by linking with the fashion industry. As artists we need to keep in touch with our clients, and explore the potential to create new clients, and this article is a fantastic example of the many new pathways opening up. Artists have always been creative thinkers. Using your creativity to get ahead in a business sense, is just as important these days to succeeding as creating fabulous art is. Enjoy the article.

 ALL DRESSED UP LIKE GALLERIES- NEW YORK TIMES

ANNIE PEDRET eyed a standard-issue sawhorse improbably dressed up in fleece. “I’d love to have that in my bedroom to put clothes over,” she said, apparently prepared to part with $750 to turn that conceptual artwork into a high-ticket coat hanger. Ms. Pedret, an associate professor of architectural history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, could have been forgiven.

 

Wall sculptures are a backdrop for shoppers at Robin Richman.

The sawhorse, one of several by Cheryl Pope, a local artist, was on view, after all, not in a gallery, but at a fashion boutique on North Damen Avenue, a mercantile thoroughfare that is home to the likes of Marc Jacobs and Club Monaco. That it vied for attention with satin cocktail dresses and oversize cardigans was fine with Robin Richman, the owner of the shop that bears her name. She is mounting the works of emerging artists to fill space once reserved for fashion labels she can no longer afford to sell, and to pique the interest of her worldly clientele.

“In this economy,” Ms. Richman observed, “we have to be really inventive.”

Those words would surely resonate with merchants across the country who have transformed their boutiques into one-stop emporiums offering gladiator sandals alongside rare lithographs and vivid oils on canvas. And these days they have as compelling a ring for scores of artists forced by a rocky commercial climate to seek new settings for their work. As the galleries that once embraced them succumb to soaring overheads and declining sales, some have taken to exhibiting in restaurants and hotel and condo lobbies. Even more are seeking refuge in the fashion world.

Exhibition in a dress shop? “You can’t say no,” said Monica Serra, who agreed to show her moody portraits, priced at about $10,000 each, at Mina, a boutique in downtown Manhattan, after the Miami outpost of her German gallery shuttered last month. “If the economy was different, I might have thought twice. I might have been worried that the art world wouldn’t take me seriously. But what are you going to do — stockpile your paintings because the venue is not right?”

Quite a few of her peers have adopted a similarly flexible attitude. In exhibiting alongside camisoles and candles, they have stood convention on its head: If their presence once lent cachet to the clothes, today it is the artist who seeks to borrow fashion’s luster.

Juan Angel Chavez, whose sculptures and large-scale artworks have been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, did not hesitate to mount an installation — a raffish collage of urban street signs — in the designated gallery space of Ms. Richman’s store. “I’m a very opportunistic artist, Mr. Chavez said last week as he scoped out the room, which was filled with the collectors, scholars, artists and architects who are among Ms. Richman’s clients. “If you stay in your studio, none of these people will see you.”

Artists like Mr. Chavez have put a literal spin on Andy Warhol’s dictum that a store is something of cultural repository, the contemporary equivalent of a museum. That notion is not lost on Confederacy, a cavernous retail space in Los Angeles selling frocks by Zac Posen and Mr. Jacobs, and etchings by blue-chip artists including Francis Bacon and Francesco Clemente.

When Baco, a cafe-boutique-and-gallery opens in Dumbo in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge in March, visitors will be invited to sip mocha lattes as they try on jewelry and inspect the paintings on the walls, priced up to $3,000. Neighborhood artists are pleading with him to show their work, Motti Berco, the owner, said. “They come to me because they expect there will be a lot of traffic here.”
That would be nothing, of course, to the traffic at the suburban malls that are home to the youth-oriented Metropark chain that sells CDs, fur-lined hoodies and raucously colorful art prints.

A scant half-dozen years ago, in hermetic art circles, showing in even the most rarefied retail environment was veritable heresy. “Tradition dictated that art be displayed in a clean space on a white wall, with nothing around it,” said Linda Warren, a dealer in Chicago. To stray outside the confines of the white cube was, she said, to risk a “perception that the artist is selling out.”

Last year Ms. Warren broke with tradition when she oversaw an installation by Carson Fox, at Neapolitan, an upscale boutique in suburban Winnetka, Ill. When Ms. Fox, an artist well known for her resin floral sculptures, agreed to exhibit, Ms. Warren was taken aback: “But I thought, ‘If she thinks it’s not beneath her, why should I?’ ”

There is also a perception that a merchant of even the finest jumpers or jeans, is a dilettante, too distracted or ill-informed to give the art its due.

“With clients there is a lot of hand-holding and a lot of scholarship involved,” said Island Weiss, a dealer in Manhattan. A shopkeeper as gallery owner? No problem, if the merchant is committed to the job, Mr. Weiss maintained. “Selling an Andrew Wyeth tempera isn’t the same as selling a dress.”

But as galleries continue to shutter — at the rate of about one a week in Chelsea, in Manhattan, according to Kathy Murphy, who is the publisher of the art monthly Modern Painters — such once-rigid standards are yielding. As an emerging artist, “you do whatever you need to do — you have to get by,” said Gracie Mansion, who is no stranger to the improvised exhibition space, having famously shown and sold art works in the early ’80s from the back seat of a limousine.

Natasha Calzatti for The New York Times

ONE-STOP LUXURY At Confederacy in Los Angeles, designer frocks are sold alongside etchings. 

Andrea Salerno, a curator, organized an exhibition last summer at the Tahari boutique in East Hampton, N.Y., in advance of the Scope Hamptons Art Fair. She recalled that the collectors stopping at the store didn’t raise an eyebrow. Nor did the artists, prominent figures including Alice Aycock, Lynda Benglis and Bryan Hunt. On being approached, “the artists were all ears,” impressed perhaps by the location, Ms. Salerno said. “You can’t turn your nose up at Main and Job’s Lane.”

AS long as the artist’s intention and the context of the work is not compromised, said Amy Cappellazzo, a deputy chairwoman at Christie’s Americas, showing in a retail space is “great, why not?” As Ms. Cappellazzo pointed out, the boutique-as-gallery phenomenon, is hardly without precedent. In the 1980s, the Japanese retail giant Seibu sold lithographs by Matisse and Braques. In London, the venerable Liberty department store has long housed a gallery.

The granny of all concept stores, 10 Corso Como in Milan, has exhibited artists’ works in the same selling space as billowy dresses and fountain pens. Prada lent the trend new impetus in 2001 by hanging a photographic mural of the German monumentalist Andreas Gursky in its SoHo boutique. In recent years Hermès has exhibited fine art photos in its Madison Avenue shop.

And if stores once sought to cash in on an artist’s prestige, today it is the artist who stands to reap the benefits. Jamel Shabazz, whose photographs of hip-hop culture have been published in book form and shown at shops like Harriet’s Alter Ego in Brooklyn, said that exhibiting at boutiques has exposed his work to the influential “downtown crowd.” “I have heard from my publisher that some of my success is due to these boutiques,” said Mr. Shabazz, who work was shown recently at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Nor does it much matter that some cutting-edge merchants juxtapose wares in ways once deemed unthinkable. At Confederacy, in boho-hip East Hollywood, a series of Julian Schnabel etchings, marked at $12,000 a piece, face off against a row of swaybacked mannequins wearing radically abbreviated underwear. Ilaria Urbinati, a partner in the shop, with the actor and D.J. Danny Masterson, recalled that it was her mother, the respected Los Angeles dealer Fiorella Urbinati, who encouraged her to take a swipe at convention.

“I was shocked at first: my mother is such a huge art snob,” the younger Ms. Urbinati recalled. “But she has always told me that in the art scene you have to be innovative.”

Such inventive strategies whet consumer appetites and even those of dealers. Steven Borts, the owner of the Light Gallery in Costa Mesa, Calif., which sells both clothes and pieces by surf, skateboard and tiki artists, was mildly surprised to find that galleries had taken note. “They see that we’ve taken a risk,” he said, “and that we’ve been drawing pretty goods crowds.”

Not long after he mounted shows of tiki art, and the hand-shaped surfboards of Rory Russell, the pipeline legend, neighboring galleries held similar shows. Mr. Borts was delighted.
“It feels good to be an influence,” he said.