Ani Rose likes a good discussion....

My response to Robert Genn reflection...

2008-06-27T10:16:00.002-06:00

Hello. This is the first weekly reflection I have received, and lo and behold a subject I can easily soapbox about.

I am reminded of another artist, Matt Lamb and his philisophical swearing on similar subjects ( http://www.mattlamb.com/). Our job as artists is to do it fulloy, as present as we can be to the process at the time, to know when we are done with our work and to let it go.

Recently I was sitting on my own back porch and in high zen fashion forming one after another of small tea bowls out of Raku clay. One hundred and fifty later I had summarized my thoughts and decided that creation must have been a very hapy day for god/dess. Every single little pinch of clay, rolled into a ball, formed into a cup and smoother was essentially the same - at first. But then, each one required it's own perfection. I just had to keep working on one at a time until, "I was happy." They all lined up and all was right with the world. But now, they all looked different from the other. Each one it's own. And my next job was to let them be, let them go, watch what the Fire would do to them, uniquely.
It is the same with my paintings. I know when I am finished and I have put all into it that I can. After that? It has a life of it's own. People will see different things, buy or pooh pooh for very different reasons. Maybe it will fall off the wall behind a piano and be forgotten. I accept this. I let it go freely. I have done my part, as fully as I could at the time.

The folks who do the rest? Whatever. Who says it is or is not "fine"? Whatever. Professional? worth a billion? Something a child could do? Whatever. Raw art, art brut, self taught, folk, fine......... Whatever. I think those who analyse and decide have their own worlds to worry about, and it has little or nothing to do with my experience as the artist. Along with matt Lamb at times, I say, "hell with 'em." let them drink wine!

Ani Rose Whaleswan
www.livingstonesunlimited.com

----- Original Message -----
From: Robert Genn Twice-Weekly Letter
To: anirose@livingstonesunlimited.com
Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2008 10:50 PM
Subject: Reflection

Who is Matt Lamb????

2008-02-05T11:05:00.000-07:00

HI Folks. I have recently discovered Matt Lamb. He is an artist, ex-multi-business owner, reul-breaker of every possible kind I think..... I like his approach to art and politics and peace and the art world. Question everything, do it different, come up with new ideas....

Please go to his site and blog and see what he is doing. (just google matt Lamb)

New Website is done and changing all the time

2008-02-05T11:03:00.000-07:00

yes, go there for to see my artwork, my plans and events, etc.

2007-10-06T10:01:00.000-06:00

HI -- I'm building a new website --- please go there and see how it is coming along -- and send me your favorites and suggestions and questions.

http://livingstonesunlimited.com/

Thanks and take care.....

Ani Rose

Leslene della madre

2007-09-23T18:45:00.000-06:00

take a look at this woman's site -- and definitely read her book.

She will be trave3ling to the Springs in November and doing a booksigning here. I am also setting up a workshop with her -- hopefully an all day thing.

newest painting - mother love

2007-09-23T18:38:00.000-06:00

this is the newest painting I have done -- really of me and my own relatiopnship to an inner child. My 3D daughter thinks it is her and I -- which is ok too.

On Being Woman flyer

2007-07-21T18:00:00.001-06:00

One-woman, one-month art show!! mine!!!! Aug. 3

2007-07-21T17:56:00.000-06:00

On Being A Woman

pieces reflecting the emotional, political and physical aspects of being a woman in clay, stone, paper and paint

at The Commons Gallery

opening First Friday Aug 3 shuttle stop
214 W Colorado AVe, Depot Arts District, under the colorado bridge
near Bridges and Smokebrush galleries, Rainy Days Screen Printing and The Liberal Store

a funny healing card

2007-07-01T19:43:00.000-06:00

on the outside : The healing journey ...

on the inside: sucks sometimes.

Rosie the Riveter fans still working for Peace

2007-07-01T19:32:00.000-06:00

This is one image in a series of simple line posters/cards... I really like the line ... rosie the riveter fans wtill working for peace....

One Really Busy July

2007-06-18T11:21:00.000-06:00

July 6 -- First Friday Art Walk -- the shuttle stops here!

July 7 -- Opening for month long show at the Coffee Exchange on south Tejon

July 15 -- all day vending at PrideFest, downtown...

and if accepted/juried in - July 13 - August 8th, some special photography for the show, Through the Looking Glass

also: I'll be using the month to prepare for other upcoming stuff -- like my own show at the Commons (gallery in depot arts district) in August
and prep for week long camping and vending at DragonFest starting August 7

and there's more and more to come as well ----- expect a web site, cell phone, newsletter, and regular studio open time/classes... within the next seven months. :)

experiential art ---- inspired by phil Hansen and others

2007-06-11T21:59:00.000-06:00

This guy is amazing in what he does and how he does it. Check out his site.

I would very much like to do more with experiential art of this kind, making something in process, in community of some kind, and compiling the process in various ways.... for instance, he created the face of buch using names of fallen soldiers in Iraq, "as of APril 30th, 2005" --and a compiled photos of vitims making a huge rendering of Gary Ridgeway --- he used dandelions, must have been thousands, to create a large imge of Mother Theresa....
I have ideas, and the mind set.... to create in this way... It will happen.
I'd appreciate any other names, site you may know of in the same vein ... Thanks to you...
Ani Rose

SPRING SPREE and Habitat Hike

2007-06-07T19:26:00.000-06:00

I'll be vending at this years SpringSpree, right downtown next to Acacia park -- June 16 - all day. This is really a fun family event. The Habitat for Humanity annual Hike is in the same area that morning, out of Monument park. I will be donating 30% proceeds to H4H. If you make it to either event, stop and say HI!

take care, Ani Rose

some recent transformation type paintings....

2007-06-06T23:09:00.000-06:00

speaking of artistic influences....

2007-06-04T09:01:00.000-06:00

hey all. Van Gogh is an influence in my life and art. I have always loved the MOVEMENT and interconnection I gleam from his textures and colors. Recently I have been reading a book, "Hi, how are you: the Life, Art and Music of Jermaine Johnston." This is an interesting study of an interesting man and his work -- much of which is cartoon-like (hence the photo-manipulation of a drawing, "watch out, Im an old hippie!"). A Sundance Film was made about him and his work and life, and the film and this book ask a lot of questions about his bi-polar life-illness. mad genius? craz artist? brilliant songwriter? which came first, bi-opolar or art.... obviously a question for him, and many, many other artists, famous, infamous, and the not famous writers, composers, actors, painters, dancers, comediens, politicians......

Several places on line have long long lists of these people -- those who have made themselves known in the world, and who struggled throughout their life with major depression, bi-polar illness, PTSD, and/or other disabling "mental" breakdowns or life-time illnesses. Is madness artisic, or art madness, or soem combinatino of both?

thoughts on a Monday morning...

Ani Rose

calendar, links, and stuff

2007-06-03T08:40:00.000-06:00

I added a couple more links of interest--- art stuff, spirituality stuff, and a great book store in town. More will come.
I am moved IN to the new stuio and will be pretty busy in the coming months. Check out: SpringSpreee this month: First Friday Art Walk, the PrideFest and The Coffee Exchange in July; First Friday Art Walk,the Studio area and DragonFest in August; First Friday Art Walk and The Ravens' Nest Coffe and art spot in Septemeber.

I am still looking into the website -- and waiting on kilns and more. At the same time, it is all happening fasts. And I am loving it!

please feel free to comment here, or send me email anirose3@msn.com.

Take care all ---

Ani Rose

a different approach to everything: pronoia

2007-06-03T08:27:00.000-06:00

Prayer for You
Pronoia Therapy
Prayer Warriors Standing By

Pronoia Therapy
The primary meaning of the word healing is "to cure what's diseased or broken." Medical practitioners focus on sick people. Psychotherapists wrestle with their clients' traumas and neuroses. Philanthropists donate their money, and social workers contribute their time to helping the underprivileged. I am in awe of them all. The level of one's spiritual enlightenment, I believe, is more accurately measured by helping people in need than by meditation skills or mastery of religious doctrine.
But I also believe in a second kind of healing which is largely unrecognized: to supercharge what is already healthy; to lift up what's merely sufficient to a state of sublime blessing. I'm driven with ambition to promote this work, even as I aspire to do my share of fixing what's hurt.
What would the world look like if there were doctors who specialized in fostering robust health in their patients? What if the textbooks that psychotherapists used to evaluate their clients were crammed not just with descriptions of pathological states, but also with a catalogue of every variety of bliss, integrity, magnanimity, eros, and wisdom? Imagine how odd and wonderful it would be if universities began turning out professionals in a brand new field, the science of happiness.
I must confess that early in my career, I was proud of my well-crafted cynicism. Like most novelists, poets, journalists, filmmakers, and critics, I subscribed to the dogma that evil is interesting and good is boring. You can imagine my dismay, then, when my muses began to nudge me in the direction of sly optimism. "It will ruin my image!" I complained to them from the depth of my worried meditations. "I refuse to write shiny happy propaganda! I will not turn into a dopey Pollyanna bereft of all critical thinking skills!"
But they were immune to my protests. Slowly and inexorably, the muses reconfigured my coyote angel rebel clown persona to serve a new master: PRONOIA. The opposite of paranoia, pronoia is defined as the sneaking suspicion that the whole world is conspiring to shower you with blessings. (Terence McKenna had a slightly different angle on it: "I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement, and everybody is working very hard to make me happy.")
To their credit, my muses managed to pull off this alchemical abracadabra without annihilating my native skepticism. If anything, it has become more robust, anchored as it is now in the thrilling quest for good news.
But the transformation was neither rapid nor smooth. So strenuously did I resist and so deep were my imprints, that it has taken me until now to begin writing the ultimate self- help book on pronoiac living. It's titled, "EXTREME PRONOIA: 888 Steps to Becoming an Aggressively Sensitive, Wildly Disciplined, Lyrically Logical, Ironically Sincere, Insanely Poised, Lustfully Compassionate Master of Rowdy Bliss." Here is how it begins.
Beauty and truth fans, you don't have to struggle and slave for 15 years, as I did, to throw off your addiction to pop- nihilism. You can launch the first phase of the cold turkey cure right now. Simply carry out the following 13-step crash course in pronoiac reprogramming. Report on your adventures and results here.
PRONOIA THERAPY FOR BEGINNERS
1. During an intense half-hour rant, complain and whine about everything that pains you. Get a sympathetic listener to be your receptacle if possible, or simply deliver your blast straight into the mirror. Having emptied all your psychic toxins in one neat ritual spew, you'll be able to luxuriate in rosy moods and relaxed visions for a while.
2. Locate or create a symbol of your own pain. Mail it to us at the Angst Incineration Crew, P.O. Box 150628, San Rafael, CA 94915, USA. We will then conduct a sacred ritual of purification during which we will burn that symbol to ash. While this may not banish your suffering entirely, it will provide a substantial amelioration which you will be able to feel the benefits of within a month.
3. Eat a pinch of dirt while affirming that you are ready to kill off one of your outworn shticks -- some idea or formula that has worked for you in the past but has now become a parody of itself.
4. Using crayons, paints, scissors, glue, collage materials or any other materials, create a piece of large-denomination paper money, good for making a payment on your karmic debt.
5. Kick your own ass 22 times.
6. Brag about yourself nonstop for 10 minutes. Record it so you can listen back to it later.
7. Perform a senseless act of altruism, for instance by giving an anonymous gift or providing some beauty or healing to a person who cannot do you any favors in return.
8. Deliver a concentrated stream of praise about someone, either to that person herself or to anyone who will listen. Extra credit: Force yourself to think a kind and loving thought about someone you don't like or from whom you feel alienated.
9. Conjure up an imaginary friend and have an intimate conversation with him and her for at least 15 minutes.
10. Build an altar devoted to beauty, truth, and love in one of the ugliest places you know.
11. With a companion, watch a blank TV while making up a pronoiac story featuring plot twists that are rife with happiness, redemption, and good times -- yet not boring. You may either speak this tale aloud or write it down.
12. Compose and perform a ceremony in which you get married to yourself.
13. While making love, imagine that your physical pleasure is a carrier wave for a spiritual blessing which you beam in the direction of some person you know who needs a supercharged boost.

© 1995-2004, Rob Brezsny. All rights reserved.

six paintings

2007-05-24T07:51:00.000-06:00

definition and brief history: outsider art

2007-05-23T22:08:00.001-06:00

The term Outsider Art has different meanings to different people; there are however some key points, which the majority can agree upon. Historically, the first known definition was written by the French artist Jean Dubuffet in 1949 and his description still holds true in many respects today. At the time he used the term 'Art Brut' (which translated from the French means 'Raw Art') to describe what was so distinctive about his own collection of art works. Raw because it was uncooked by culture and independent of conventional artistic tradition, fashion or trends.Dubuffet spent 30 years collecting works from 'Art Brut' artists and in 1972 this collection found a permanent home in the Collection De L'Art Brut in Lausanne. The curator of this museum, Michel Thevoz, has written:
"Art Brut", or "Outsider Art", consists of works produced by people who for various reasons have not been culturally indoctrinated or socially conditioned. They are all kinds of dwellers on the fringes of society. Working outside fine art "system" (schools, galleries, museums and so on), these people have produced, from the depths of their own personalities and for themselves and no one else, works of outstanding originality in concept, subject and techniques. They are works, which owe nothing to tradition or fashion."
The term Outsider Art was coined from the title of the book by Roger Cardinall published in 1972 and was meant to be an English translation for 'Art Brut', but other words that have been used in connection to what can be called Outsider Art are Raw, Brut, Naïve, Compulsive, Independent, Visionary, Spiritual, Folk, Self-taught, Marginalised, Intuitive. There is still an ongoing debate about the terminology of these words, but for us at The Other Side Gallery we use the term Outsider Art to incorporate the work created by artists from socially excluded groups and by social exclusion we mean people with mental health problems, physical or sensory disabilities, learning difficulties and others disadvantaged or excluded from society such as homeless, refugees, substance misusers etc.

quality link -- intuitive /outsider art

2007-05-22T15:05:00.000-06:00

http://outsider.art.org/theOutsiderMag/current.htm

one "outsider art" article

2007-05-22T14:54:00.000-06:00

On Outsider Art and the Margins of the Mainstream
By Marcus Davies
Friday, April 6th, 2007
Hans Prinzhorn
While the hard-line approach of scientific inquiry came to a tragic head during the 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition in Berlin, a more interdisciplinary, humanistic, and ultimately successful appraisal of the art of the outsider is evident in the career of Dr. Hans Prinzhorn (1886-1933). Trained in both psychiatry and art history, Prinzhorn’s approach to the art of the mentally ill, while still influenced by the diagnostic tendencies of his peers, bears the mark of an individual genuinely in awe of the “beauty, originality, and expressive intensity” underscoring the breadth of art works found within the clinics, hospitals and asylums of the time (MacGregor 1989:193). In his seminal book, Artistry of the Mentally Ill, first published in 1922, Prinzhorn strives to cast off the dominant paradigms equating genius with madness, arguing that, if a work may be said to constitute genius, judgment “by any fixed, outside standard” should have little bearing on its intrinsic and lasting value (Prinzhorn 1972:6). In light of this Prinzhorn strives to examine his subjects, a vast collection of patients’ work from Europe and America held in the Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic, on the basis of their own merits, “as free of prejudice as possible” (Prinzhorn 1972:6). To do so is Prinzhorn’s challenge to both himself and the field of art history as a whole. Sensitive to the long-standing habit of the academy to perpetuate “a distinction between one class of objects and another very similar one which is dismissed as nonart,” Prinzhorn set about discovering a common ground between the mainstream and outsider production, finding it in what he considered the single, elemental purpose of all art-making activity: “to actualize the psyche and thereby build a bridge from the self to others” (Prinzhorn 1972:1,12).
With the assertion that “the most sovereign drawing by Rembrandt [and] the most miserable daubing by a paralytic” are both valid “expressions of the psyche,” Prinzhorn (1972:xviii) manages to level the playing field to the point where the work of the outsider may be examined using the same methodology as applied to the masters. Once this is achieved, the author formulates a series of universal “tendencies of pictoral configuration” by which an individual may achieve “configurative power,” meaning the “ability to translate whatever moves him into a picture in such a way that a viewer may participate in the experience” (Prinzhorn 1972:15,33-34).
Significantly influenced by the inward gaze of German Expressionism, Prinzhorn’s theories allow for the existence of variable approaches to the configurative process. In fact, Prinzhorn likens the art of the avant-garde to the very “nature of schizophrenic configuration,” citing a shared preoccupation with a “decisive turn inward upon the self,” coupled with the “free treatment of the outside world [as] raw material” to be reordered according to individual intentions (Prinzhorn 1972:264,271). Alluding in this manner to the “schizophrenic outlook” of the art of his day, an art caught between wars in a time of massive social and political upheaval, Prinzhorn ultimately posits the revolutionary hypothesis that art by its very nature can never be truly pathological (MacGregor 1989:205). Despite its origins, he concludes, it is the intention of the artist that must be considered, and that, because this intention is essentially an effort to communicate the contents of the psyche or soul, it is the responsibility of anyone serious about the existence of art to set aside their prejudices in order to perceive the innermost expressive essence of a given art work.
Prinzhorn’s writings, groundbreaking and highly influential as they were, did not arise as an intended manifesto meant to destabilize long-established art historical practices. Rather, Artistry of the Mentally Ill served to demonstrate an integration of ideas and ideals already effecting great change within modernist sensibilities. In keeping with Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky’s call for an art of “internal truths” unconcerned by the restrictions of “external form,” Paul Klee was fully immersed in the exploration of elemental sources of creativity (Kandinsky 1977:1). Writing in his diary in 1912, Klee (1964:266) focuses his attention on the work of children and “the mentally diseased” as inspiration for sweeping reformation in an art world that had, in his eyes, degenerated into “the very incarnation of exhaustion.” For in these “primitive beginnings” Klee insists, one may glimpse “instructive examples” of pure expression existing independently of the dictates of cultural expectations (1964:226) . Recognizing the potential of these peripheral sources to invigorate the avant-garde agenda, Klee and his contemporaries, seemingly unaware of or unconcerned by inherent ironies, speak with passion about the need to spare the ‘primitive’ from the aggressive corruption of the art world. Unsurprisingly, there is little mention of a proactive preservation plan, but the notion of an outsider art free from cultural influence was by this time firmly rooted in the imagination of the twentieth century.

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dark spiral goddess, acrylic on canvas

2007-05-22T09:58:00.000-06:00