On "Untitled" 2015

Untitled is one of those paintings where I started it setting up problems that I could not have known how to finish until I dove into in - and indeed, was not happy about displaying until a key, nearly final little market brought it together enough to feel it was worth showing. Like many of my large paintings, including Patricia, Population, and another large Untitled piece in my studio, it is a of jazz, begun with a melody guessed and something of a color structure, and weeks, months, and sometimes years of refinement; it's executed reactively, in the moment, like jazz, but its structures emerge and are refined over time, like a classical work.

I've grown to like this one- it's also in that group of abstracts where I worked on the edge of losing it constantly (painters will know exactly what I mean). There are some paintings that you "give up" on early, but keep working on, ready to follow where it leads only after you surrender all your assumptions about what it SHOULD be.

If you look at the detail photo, the relationship between the two final marks: the isolated, complex and bilaterally symmetrical blueish mark in the upper right, and the leaf like folded mark in the lower right, after a lot of refinement, made the whole work well enough to show. The energetic forms that I forced into illusionistic space elsewhere in the painting (DeWitt Cheng ties this to Abstract Illusionism) could be much looser, but these two demanded very specific forms that were organically "believable," meaning that look less like paint and more like a painting of something specific.
But what? Here's a way to look at this: paintings are often about what is heard and felt, not only what is seen: if it works as visual music, I'm doing ok.

"Untitled" is available for view at my studio by appointment. Sales information is on my website, www.JamieBollenbach.com.

"Fabricators"

Buttressed by the mushier flavors of critical theory divorced from its humanistic core, this view of art in this NYT article, an old, Post-Warhol concept of the conceptual as supreme, elevates what are basically fussy collectors as artists while Artists become mere "fabricators," patronized as heroic. It that now our meaning of what is supposedly contemporary?

This view of this NYT article about what Art is, is very common in museums and especially in the high end of the art market; I think it often reflects a worldview not only doggedly amoral but hostile to that very process of creating meaning from all of the senses and all of the materials to signify what matters, art-making that has been part of the human experience since the very emergence of our species.

The "contemporary" view - at least a century old at this point - marginalizes poetry, the human hand and eye, dismisses both individuality and community and empathy. It's hostile to the value of creativity itself, and utlimately, by methodically eliminating why actual Artists- artists by any historical standard- would have any worth, it demands compliant enthusiasm for the dominance of rich people as the final arbiters of the human experience.

Ironically, it is often justified by a wholly degenerated form of pseudo-Marxist critique whose main point seems to celebrate the commodification of absolutely everything, particularly all the processes by which capital A Art is created.

You can always tell this view by the tired trope of "well Reubens/ Rembrandt/ Your Momma had assistants," or the ceaseless war on painting as a bourgeoise activity- so "bourgeoise" that every human child has an instinct for it, and you can see yourself up with a painting kit for about $30.
Museums now fill so often with half-art, cold, impoverished, 2nd tier illustration created by uncredited artists. This mirrors some patrons' Social Darwinism, Art as spectacle, as the wholly branded self, broad, empty, interchangable: parts that might as well be made by robots and sold on Amazon.

The mission to dismiss Artists as art makers seems a hell of a lot like a bid to erase Art that varies from a nihilistic world view: an erasure of deeply humanistic ideas/artworks born of the building and deepening interplay of material, hand, eye, senses and mind.

At real musuems and galleries, I take comfort in watching museum-goers invariably linger far longer, and engaged far more deeply, in the rooms of artworks sweated over and loved and credited to the people who not only thought of them, but earned the fully flowered refinement of their idea by the work of their hands and minds and senses, their whole being, physical and mental and spiritual wrapped inside the creation of the work.

That is a human being, seeing and making, in balance with the world. Why any feeling human being, let alone entire Art Schools, work so hard to destroy this is despairing