The Fine Art and Design Blog of Darren Daz Cox

This house, the crappiest looking one in our neighborhood in West Peoria, is the one the universe compelled me to leave three point two five years ago. It was quite a journey in terms of physical space (to Detroit then to the NYC area) but even more vast in terms of spiritual and emotional travels. I sit here amazed at how happy I am now with little more than a newer car than I had before, compared to how unsatisfied I was before I left.

The good thing about a house that is in the process of being rebuilt from the inside out, is all those potential finished spaces and the temporary messes along the way such as piles of charcoal dust on the fiberboard floor…

Like some fragment of a dream or half remembered memory, the remains of a mural I did before I left is still visible in a corner of the stairwell leading to the basement (the green paint on the white wall)…

and while we don’t have many of the interior walls finished yet this allows for precipitous thumb-tacking of inspirational artwork!

I haven’t slept so well in a long long time…

Jen was kind enough to include one of my paintings in a blog post of hers on Shine (Yahoo’s new blog service) . she enjoys the world of art and posed the question in another post - What Is Art Worth?

One of my pet peeves is this constant association of everything to a monetary value and then status being associated with that monetary value as it makes struggling artists worth more dead than alive. Society is enriched by artists in ways beyond mere money, we add color to your community, we show you an alternative to being ‘normal’…

Vincent Van Gogh was what you’d call a ‘leech on society’ while he was alive, he was a starry eyed dreamer who mooched off of his family, a slacker, a bum living a childish fantasy of being a famous painter, he wallowed in the luxury of dedicating his life to the arts while real men worked at real jobs, yeah, most people wouldn’t like Vincent Van Gogh if he was alive today.

Amazingly people revere him as something close to holy now that his paintings are so famous, everyone knows the story of how he only sold one or two paintings in his lifetime and many assume that had a direct affect on why he killed himself, after all, if people are rich they live happily ever after, except Kurt Cobain, there’s always that exception to the rule right?.

I think if people stopped talking about how much they think art is worth in terms of cash then maybe the conversation would be about why art is important in other ways.  I think this whole ‘price’ thing is the lowest common denominator designed to distance the masses from the wealthy elite.

Van Gogh mostly painted the poorest of the working people, he considered their toil to be a tribute to God not some kind of punishment or failure that made them unable to purchase his art.

"Inspire, be inspired and appreciate" - Dannion Brinkley on the meaning of life.

It’s actually kind of insulting to make Van Gogh into a money machine when his whole life revolved around making art based on the most humble of surroundings.

Why is art a ‘commodity’ anyway? You realize that Van Gogh could easily have made art that was similar to what he saw was selling in his day but chose to follow his own muse instead of making a ‘commodity’.

In so many ways Van Gogh stood against making art into a mere ‘commodity’ and I feel he would be saddened that his legacy is reduced to tabloid journalism talking about how much his "commodities" are worth, his personal psychological problems and who got famous by simply being rich enough to buy his work.

(Jen asked) "How can one become an image consultant for dead people?"  I assume you mean how does someone get to decide how much a dead persons art is worth in terms of money Jen?

Art is only worth what someone will pay for it, there are no rules, just be convincing, memorize all the prices of what art has sold for, find some rich people who don’t want to spend those extra millions to help the very same type of people that Van Gogh painted and tell them how much more important they will be if they buy the art for a lot of money, the more they pay the more famous they become. Make sure you get a fat commission and some of that fame for yourself.

I think that if you are rich enough to buy a Van Gogh painting you are rich enough to buy some art books for your local schools, buy the kids a trip to a museum, fund their art department, do something other than gloat over the prize because if you are only collecting art or selling it as a commodity then you can’t see the real beauty of it in my opinion.

I just saw the documentary on tv about how computers can analyze paintings known to be authentic and then pick out a fake based on a number of logical algorithms. The show had an impressive looking fake made of a van Gogh painting by an ‘expert on creating fakes to help museums find fakes’  and then three teams of computer geeks used their computers to find the fake out of a stack of photos taken of the fake and authentic van Gogh paintings.

The geeks, of course, used their amazing brains and high tech toys to save the museums of the world from being ‘ripped off’ by unscrupulous villains who might fool them into spending millions on a ‘fake’ painting and they all lived happily ever after.

Of course, as long as people are in charge of the machines and people desire money, then people will lie, including the lab techs and museums *gasp*.

Whether a painting in a museum is authentic or not is ultimately up to you, at the very least, make up your own mind about whether you like something or not.

The honesty that matters is your personal honesty, as Vincent van Gogh himself wrote in these words to his brother Theo.

"Believe me, in art matters the saying, "Honesty is the best policy," is true; rather more trouble on a serious study than a kind of chic to flatter the public. Sometimes in moments of worry I have longed for some of that chic, but thinking it over I say, No, let me be true to myself, and express severe, rough but true things in a rough manner. I shall not run after the art lovers or dealers; let whoever wants to come to me. In due time we shall reap, if we faint not!"

The reason why history has remembered our friend Vincent is because he didn’t sell out, he didn’t make art in a style that was currently selling because he was following a muse, and we as a society like that. We wouldn’t know who he was If he had been a regular guy, you know, someone with a normal career like a computer tech or someone who paints fake paintings for museums (so they can tell what a fake looks like, not to increase their revenue by pretending the fakes are real because unlike the rest of society, museums care about authenticity more than money!)

At this point I’ve added four different green’s and three yellow oil paints. The orange pink red layer is underway then a layer of violet!  Photographs don’t really do oil paintings justice, the color is really vibrant in the light,  in some ways this painting is more like Mark Rothko’s color field paintings than a landscape, at least to me. 

My friend Pamster asked me what were the trees looking at down the hill? hehe, funny how it takes another person’s comment to make the picture take on a whole new direction! I was thinking about having faeries flying around so I think I’ll have them flying from the lower left corner up! I’ve been wanting to paint simple faeries like John Anster Fitzgerald did in his Fairies Looking Through an Open Window painting.

This is one of my all time favorite paintings, look at how punkrock the faerie at the window looks! The white allows for a rainbow of colors to be added subtly, and heck the faerie at the top has violet while the one at the bottom (punk faerie) has red, the extremes of the spectrum! I keep thinking about light, from the pure joy of seeing rainbows from crystals to the holographic universe theories.  I’m not a scientist and I don’t have any spiritual insights to share but I do know that there is a magic in art.

hmmm I guess this is a point for the faeries! Faeries 1, Angels 0

To become an oil painting soon!

The part of this series that you can’t see, is the part where I am imagining that I am the artist who is summoned to fill the walls and ceilings of a secret palace where money is no object and, like the mighty Jean-Honoré Fragonard with his private patrons, I realize that very few people will see this art so it gains that magical quality of a secret treasure.

I really love the art of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and have long dreamt of having an opportunity to create something really huge and magnificent, like much of his work.  I’ll probably have to hire models for the foreshortening of people sitting on clouds for the ceiling paintings but heck, money is no object and one of my fantasys is to emulate Raphael  who legend states would throw gold coins to his models to encourage them to stay in their pose for as long as humanly possible.

Angels tend to be associated with religion and faeries with folklore and while a majority of people do or have believed in them at one time or another, they don’t necessarily believe in both of them at the same time! Sometimes people are quite polarized on which of these two they believe in (which has to be pretty funny to those who believe in neither) and while I’m not here to take sides I am curious as to what you all think on this pressing topic!

Consider it a reality show, Angels Vs. Faeries - which side are you hoping will ‘win’ and what contests would you have them undertake?