I found that via "The Artist Who Is Selling Out Shows Just Two Years After He Started Painting/Farshad Farzankia left his day job in 2016. Now, he’s putting the finishing touches on his first major U.S. solo show, which will open later this month" (NYT):
Farzankia’s paintings are instantly appealing: Simple, figurative compositions of androgynous bodies, birds, plant life and obscure symbols, rendered in bright pop palettes, they are well suited to the age of Instagram. Less apparent is that he’s only been making this work for two years. In 2016, Farzankia, now 38, quit his day job as an art director at an advertising agency in order to turn his attention to painting, a hobby he had picked up some six months earlier, after years of idly drawing and sketching in his spare time. Since then, he has become one of Scandinavia’s most buzzed-about emerging artists. When, last December, the Los Angeles-based gallerist Richard Heller presented a selection of Farzankia’s work at Art Basel Miami’s Untitled fair, it sold out instantly. Now, he is preparing for his first major U.S. solo show, at Heller’s gallery in Santa Monica, opening on Oct. 27.There's a link to his Instagram page. I just happened to click on one that had that Bob Dylan quote in the caption — "Don't ask me nothin' about nothin'. I just might tell you the truth" — which put it over the line of bloggability for me.
And you might ask, Althouse, are you not jealous?
Hell, yeah.
The Dylan song — from the first Dylan album I ever bought, which was the newest Dylan album back when I started buying Dylan albums — is "Outlaw Blues."
Ain’t gonna hang no pictureFor half a century, I've been listening to that song and hearing "I might look like Robert Frost." No one cares about Robert Frost anymore, but he killed at the Kennedy inauguration:
Ain’t gonna hang no picture frame
Ain’t gonna hang no picture
Ain’t gonna hang no picture frame
Well, I might look like Robert Ford
But I feel just like a Jesse James
I loved the absurdity of Dylan singing that he might look like Robert Frost, Dylan being quite young in those days. But the absurdity was all in my head. The line is "I might look like Robert Ford." Here's Robert Ford:
Robert Ford, better known as the man who killed Jesse James. The contrast was between looking like the cowardly killer and feeling like the daring outlaw he killed. All these years I thought Dylan was saying that he felt like an outlaw but he looked like the ancient poet, and now Dylan is an ancient poet, and I'm old too, finally reading a song I've misheard for 50-some years, and not hanging no pictures of my own anywhere, but blogging about a painter who's selling all his pictures, and after only 2 years of painting, because he's got Instagram. He's got Instagram, and I've got Blogger, and I'm going blind, like Robert Frost in that Inauguration clip.
I got my dark sunglasses
I got for good luck my black tooth
I got my dark sunglasses
I’m carryin’ for good luck my black tooth
Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’
I just might tell you the truth
Posts
60 comments:
Going blind is horrible. Having cataracts is a correctible condition.
"a song I've misheard for 50-some years"
I'm seeing a theme: first, a suspicion that prior judgments could be due to visual handicaps, now an acknowledgment of auditory distortion causing interpretive error--self-examination leading to greater awareness of fallibility. Which is admirable.
What's next, a sudden realization that the manipulative use of little-girl feminine wiles shows Blasey Ford is a liar? that penumbrae of emanations were the patriarchy's way of bamboozling women into supporting easy abortion?
"and not hanging no pictures of my own anywhere, but blogging about a painter who's selling all his pictures, and after only 2 years of painting, because he's got Instagram. He's got Instagram, and I've got Blogger"
Better than Blogger is a high standard. And of course, we connoisseurs don't judge quality by $$.
"Well, I might look like Robert Ford
But I feel just like a Jesse James"
Good summing up of the American left today, particularly the "resistance." They imagine themselves as Jesse James, but they are really a herd of Robert Fords.
Althouse, you need to immediately either watch or re-watch "Exit Through the Gift Shop", that Banksy filmatic extravaganza that puts the contemporary art scene in its place.
Oh, Ann. Don’t be jealous. You are a famous blogger. You live in beautiful Madison. Two good children. A loving husband. An Althouse Amazon portal that I used this week and others should use as Christmas approachs.
As a aside, Ron Hanson wrote the book about the coward Robert Ford. The book was made into a movie starring Angeline Jolie’s ex. Hanson is from Omaha and went to Creighton Prep.
After his show, Farzankia's going to reveal that the real artist is his 5 year old daughter. She's the one who has only been painting for 2 years. Because before that she lacked the dexterity to hold a pencil.
Amadeus 48 said...Althouse, you need to immediately either watch or re-watch "Exit Through the Gift Shop"
My favorite part of that movie was that neither Banksy nor Fairey could bring themselves to say they didn't like Guetta's art. They could insult Guetta as a person, they called him retarded twice, but about his art, which they clearly hated, we get pauses and careful fumbling for words.
Those paintings are awful. Look at any Pinterest where grade/junior high school teachers post their students' art and you'll find lots more creativity/skill/stuff that you can actually imagine putting on a wall and looking at more than once.
He has a really good color sense. Farshad Farzankia. And Dylan, I suppose, with his black tooth. Does Dylan lyricize about the color of things?
Lots of painters are accused of being unskillful.
It's an occupational hazard.
Grace Slick's pre-Jefferson Airplane group "The Great Society" recorded a good cover of Outlaw Blues.
Grace Slick's pre-Jefferson Airplane group "The Great Society" recorded a good cover of Outlaw Blues.
As does White Stripes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnG6043ojqMW
I am going from memory but think Grace may have changed the Robert Frost/Jesse James line to "Samuel Gompers/ Baby Jane"
"Althouse, you need to immediately either watch or re-watch "Exit Through the Gift Shop", that Banksy filmatic extravaganza that puts the contemporary art scene in its place."
Thanks for the reminder. That was already on my watchlist.
Don't ask me nothin' about nothin'. I just might tell you the truth.
That's a lot of nothin', but not too much.
Inlaw Blues:
Mother-in-law (mother-in law), mother-in-law (mother-in-law)
The worst person I know, mother-in-law, mother-in-law
She worries me so, mother-in-law, mother-in-law
If she leaves us alone, we would have a happy home
Sent from down below
(Mother-in-law) mother-in-law, (mother-in-law), mother-in-law
Althouse's rat drawings are better. Suitable for covfefe mugs.
" i am going blind" Hope it is not serious. To cope, read the history of one of my my heros ,Leonhard Euler and how he dealt with blindness.
Mondegreen - a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung (Webster's) - is a term coined a half-century ago. A Google search results in over 200,000 hits, and Wikipedia has a good entry.
Mondegreen
I love those things but had never heard that term.
"Dead ants are my friends; they're blowin' in the wind."
And we all remember the Elton John song “I Feel Like a Bullet (In the Gun of Robert Frost)”
Althouse said...
For half a century, I've been listening to that song and hearing "I might look like Robert Frost."
"I'm single again, but I never bothered to lose the Frost."
Althouse's rat drawings are better.
I colorized them and used them on a CD cover (private collection, not for resale).
Along with "Exit through the gift shop" this new documentary about the zillion-dollar contemporary art market looks interesting:
The Price of Everything
Ditto re Althousian talent.
The "rats" series deserves more continuity.
They are characters, they could be more characters.
And of course her old notebooks, drawn from life.
Could be prints.
I just looked at a bunch of Farzakia's paintings online. I like them. He's no draughtsman, and will not be remembered by art history, but his paintings are pleasing arrangements of shapes, color, and value on a flat plane.
There is more than one art market, not just the auction-house - New York galleries clique.
The market is split into a vast range of segments. My wife has one taste, I have another. My library-mancave has Detaille and Knotel prints. The Detaille ones are an indulgence I admit.
"The Price of Everything"
I just looked at the trailer...it looks fascinating! I have to see it.
I knew a woman years ago who enrolled in a painting class taught by Larry Poons at the Art Students League of NY, (where I took life drawing classes for years). She dropped out after a month, as she didn't like him. I can't remember her specific complaint, but she found his critiques too harsh, or his personality too abrasive, or both.
Of course, I've seen Exit Through The Gift Shop, another highly entertaining film.
I have to imagine that, after a successful show, artists like this guy get together and have a good laugh at the people buying their stuff.
The statues of Robert E.. Lee get torn down, but Jesse James still gets played by Brad Pitt. I just read the Wiki entry on Jesse. He was a guerrilla fighter for the Confederates and participated in several massacres. His post war robberies also had a partisan tinge. He targeted banks that were owned by Republicans. He robbed from the Republicans and gave to himself. There's no record of his ever sharing his wealth with any but gang and family members. Interesting that Dylan and Hollywood still take the side of a Confederate terrorist.
Re "rat drawings"
Those were done deliberately carelessly, with my finger.
But consider that I went to art school. My undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Fine Arts. It was kind of a miracle they let me into art school.
Anyway, I painted a lot in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Lots of drawings too. Just a shitload of stuff that I never really sold at all. I once donated a painting to a charitable cause and it sold for $700, but basically nothing at all.
Now, my problem is just having all this stuff in my house. It isn't even easy to throw away. It's not like having 50 unpublished novels on your hard drive. It's real objects that are not easy to destroy, if we're talking about the paintings. The drawings I could incinerate.
I'm considering embarking on some Instagram project where I photograph paintings or details from paintings, just to get the images out there before I destroy the originals in some kind of "performance art" where you have the power to save anything if you bid a large enough amount of money. Like my old pictures are hostages to ransom. It's not easy to pack up 36"x36" canvases and mail them safely, so this is not a cheap prospect. People would have to pay at least enough to cover professional shipping. But my main goal is to disinfest our house of the artwork.
"Going blind is horrible. Having cataracts is a correctible condition."
Yes, and until you get the surgery, you are in the process of going blind.
I am currently suffering in the condition of going blind. The link on my sentence about it gives the details. I am not suffering from a belief that I will end up in the condition of blindness, which would hurt a lot more, but I am going blind and will be for the next 4 months, when, with reasonable luck, I will be rescued from what is now an ongoing process.
It's like how you could be on the road to ruin or the Road to Mandalay and be able to get off that road. You're still on the road now, and if you keep going, you'll be in ruin... or Mandalay.
Farzakia was an art director in an ad agency, so he was in the art field. He had commercial art experience, so the "2 year" thing is hype. You can switch from one medium to another. It's not that big a deal, and I assume his expertise as an ad agency art director put him in a good position to leverage himself using photographs of his work on Instagram. His work is charming and likable. There's no reason to begrudge him his success. I think it's a nice inspiration to do an Instagram project of my own to make some kind of game of disinfesting our house so I can get it done.
From Virgil Hilts: Those paintings are awful. Look at any Pinterest where grade/junior high school teachers post their students' art and you'll find lots more creativity/skill/stuff that you can actually imagine putting on a wall and looking at more than once.
My thoughts, too.
I have an Instagram account — https://www.instagram.com/althousea/ — I just have never posted on it.
Maybe that's the project I need while I'm hunkering down over the winter....
Please encourage me or discourage me.
"But consider that I went to art school. My undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Fine Arts. It was kind of a miracle they let me into art school."
Oops.
That should read: But consider that I went to art school. My undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Fine Arts. It was kind of a miracle they let me into law school.
Dylan's answer is Why Nothing From Nothing Leaves Nothing Is Nothing To Worry About - or something like that.
The value of things is hard to ensure these days.
I destroyed almost all my remaining artwork about 15 years ago. I had it stored in the basement of a building a friend owned. It was big work on 8 x 4 sheets of plywood, and she was selling the building. I cut it to pieces with a circular saw and put it in her dumpster. I didn't agonize over it. It had been in storage for so long that I knew it was from a dead era.
This summer I destroyed more of my artwork. My mother had saved boxes of drawings from when I was kid. I transferred my siblings' artwork to undamaged boxes and threw mine away.
Ann: I liked better the notion that it was kind of a miracle they let you into art school: even at 18, they could tell you were cut out for the law. (Have there ever been lawyers who turned out to be great visual artists? Seems like the critical mind gets in the way of the spontaneous creativity--just letting her fly-- that seems to be at the heart of the painter.)
"Farzakia was an art director in an ad agency, so he was in the art field. He had commercial art experience, so the "2 year" thing is hype."
I don't believe anything I read in the art world, because I've known a few uppity-ups in it, and they're never beginners, or amateurs, etc. Blurred Lines is as good a primer on it as anything. Someone like me, talented or not, are rarely welcome.
Well, I'd rather look at his art than Keith Haring, but that's faint praise.
I have reservations about the sort of people who'd sell out a show of that.
Well Jesse had a wife
To mourn for his life
Three children now
They were brave
Well that dirty little coward
That shot Mr. Howard
He laid poor Jesse in his grave
Well Jesse had a wife
To mourn for his life
Three children now
They were brave
Well that dirty little coward
That shot Mr. Howard
He laid poor Jesse in his grave
How does one become a financially successful painter? Be a Scandinavian with a name like Farshad Farzankia is step one, I would think.
I've seen better, for sale by local artist, on the walls of the local coffee shop. To be fair, I've also seen worse there.
The "I'm going blind" link in the post is busted. I wanted to look at it. I'm curious how it can take 4 months (or more) to schedule such an ordinary procedure as cataract lens replacement. It's an inpatient operation, with, fortunately, very low risk of complications and a very high probability of a very successful outcome (*). Not to minimize the fright and anxiety of having the condition which can affect you very strongly - but the fix is routine (and has been for some time). (Anecdotal evidence: My wife waited no more than 3 weeks for both her eyes here in Seattle.)
(*) Remember: in the medical world a "successful outcome" of a procedure is one where you come out of it no worse than when you went in. (That's the definition used in medical journals, which you need to know when you're reading articles on some procedure that's been recommended to you.) But cataract surgery is much much better than "no worse".
Ann:
Have an online auction of your artwork. Harness the power of the internet. I can see Proxybid.com from my office. They do internet auctions.
I am old enough to remember when cataract surgery required admission to the hospital the afternoon/ early evening the day before the scheduled surgery. Then a one hour procedure under anesthesia. Followed by a couple of days in the hospital with an eye patch and sandbags on each side of the head to prevent any motion.
Now it is a 20 minute out patient procedure under local anesthesia with modest IV sedation. No significant restrictions post op and a remarkably high degree of an excellent result. A piece of cake and a testimony to the progression of the technology and the outstanding quality of medical and surgical care we enjoy in this great country.
Blogger Yancey Ward said...
How does one become a financially successful painter?
Buy lottery tickets.
Correction: Proxibid.com
Get Meade on it.
"Bringing together more than 4,000 unique auctioneers, asset owners, and consignors with buyers from 190 countries.
Farmers, fashionistas, construction contractors, art lovers, car junkies, and collectors of just about everything buy on Proxibid. And every month, more are joining the Marketplace—more than 13,000 new buyers create a Proxibid account each month.
Buyers can purchase in four different ways on Proxibid: buy now, make offer, timed auction, or live auction. At Proxibid you can buy what you want, how you want, when you want.
Proxibid is backed by the industry’s most sophisticated fraud prevention tools—a hybrid of proprietary technology, manual processes, and third-party partnerships—all with the goal to ensure buyers and sellers are safe when transacting online. Proxibid is 100 percent PCI compliant. Combine that with our enterprise-level technology and infrastructure that boasts a 99.9+% uptime, and buyers and sellers can transact with confidence in our Marketplace.
And we are perhaps most proud of our Nebraska heritage—Proxibid is a thriving company that got its start in the Silicon Prairie. We will always remain committed to the community that has helped shape what we have become.
Proxibid’s headquarters are in Omaha, Nebraska. We also have offices in London, UK, to better serve our UK and European buyers and sellers."
Althouse goes global.
Ford got a bad rap. James was a gangster, a criminal, a murderer. He lived by the gun and died by it.
@SayAhhh - you're right I had it backwards above (brain fart): It is of course an outpatient operation. At the hospital my wife went to they had 6 patients lined up at the same time in the morning … then went one two three … six down the line doing the surgeries. Then repeated it after lunch. Highly regarded clinic, very successful outcomes. Eye treatments these days are remarkable - for stuff that can be treated. Not everything has such great solutions, though. E.g., Macular degeneration, sadly enough, is one that doesn't.
Frankly, I think it amazing that eyes work at all, much less as well as they do (when they're working). If I had to single out one piece of biology that makes it most difficult to believe in evolution and most persuasive to believe in intelligent design it is the eye, providing clear vision through lenses that give you variable focus (for most of your life), with great resolution, with color, in a wide variety of lighting conditions.
Sorry the link on "I'm going blind" was bad!
Fixed.
"I'm curious how it can take 4 months (or more) to schedule such an ordinary procedure as cataract lens replacement."
I think that's just how their schedule is. It fills up.
But I believe I'd have to wait 4 months anyway, because if you've been wearing contact lenses, you have to stop wearing them and let your eyes go back to a natural state. The rule of thumb is a month for every decade you've worn contacts. By that standard, I'm going in early, because I've worn contacts for 5 decades.
I feel out of it having to wear glasses all the time. When I go out walking, I don't feel right without contacts, and with the badly blurred vision on top of it and light sensitivity, I don't feel right at all. But I'm better off in the sense that I know what's wrong and believe I will be more than cured next February.
More than cured = there will be lenses inside my eye that correct for astigmatism and myopia, and I will have much better vision without glasses than I have had in more than half a century.
I'm looking forward to the delight of going around without glasses/contacts and really seeing. (I will need some added glasses though, reading glasses, probably and perhaps distance glasses too, but not glasses/contacts all the time as I've needed for nearly my whole life.)
I looked at the photo of Farzankia’s studio and said no way he's been there for two years. More like 10-15 years of accumulated stuff, plants, etc. But it did get me thinking about the hype about how long he's been working. You see that psychology all the time on line in facebook artist support groups where someone posts their work and says, "Here's my painting, I've only been painting for a year ..." The people who do that sometimes are the worst painters asking for kindness and encouragement in comments, and some are better ones who are fishing for compliments over their obvious superior talent. In Farzankia's case I'm not sure what the brag is about, he must be a great artist because of his success? Of course that's bs. He's been in art marketing a long time. Kudos for transitioning that skill set and his art ability into a fine arts career. That took nerve.
I'm not there yet but I have been thinking about whether to choose close up or distance lenses when the time comes for cataract surgery. I assumed I would choose the long distance lens because I am used to not wearing prescription glasses for distance (result of Presbyopia), but I do wear UV protection sunglasses. I also wear prescription reading and computer (arm's length distance) glasses indoors. Wearing some form of glasses either way. But getting the close up lens would save on not having both computer and reading glasses. So maybe I will go with the close up. Or maybe there will be some automatic focus lenses by then.
"I'm not there yet but I have been thinking about whether to choose close up or distance lenses when the time comes for cataract surgery."
I'm thinking a lot about that too.
I have had distance and computer-level contact lenses for the past 10 years and, with that choice, I nearly always chose the computer-level. I have a lot of distance-prescription contact lenses. I'm more used to the feeling of being nearsighted than the jarring experience of putting something close and having it hard to see.
I, too, find it most frustrating not being able to see things close up as well as I need. That's probably a bigger issue for someone who does close work or a lot of reading than it is for the average person. There are a lot of details I don't know about the field of cataract lenses but mostly my question would be what is the range of vision for the close up lenses? From a foot to fifteen feet? I'd need to know that. I have one eye which is near sighted and one which is far sighted -- I once asked an eye surgeon if I would benefit from surgery to correct that imbalance and he explained that he actually gave that arrangement to his cataract patients. I would have to discuss that as well.
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