I have created a new website.....same domain (karenmuntean.com)....but new format and images. Anne Popperwell turned me onto this template at www.artistrunwebsite.com and I've used some of my "down time" while I recover from shoulder surgery to update my website.  Anne has also created a new site using this template which shows her most recent work.  My show at Saturna cafe has been extended through March 17 and after that Tony Green is putting up a show of his travel sketches and watercolours which will open March 19.  Watch for posters from Jean-Francois!  

Saturna Artist Abroad by Janet Strayer

This year (2016) I have the pleasure of living and painting in Europe for some months while also writing a column, called Artist En Route, for the Canadian Arts Avenue magazine.

I've expanded these columns dealing with Anticipation/Preparation, London, Provence, and Sicily (so far) with more info and many more photos on my blogsite: janetstrayer.blogspot.ca.
You can visit it, if you like, for travel tips and other matters.

Provençal Suite 1: Abundance www.janetstrayer.com

Provençal Suite 2, www.janetstrayer.com

My first several months savored Provence, one of the most beautiful regions of France. With Cézanne as my nearest and constant neighbor, I was living inside a painting. The abundance of simple daily experiences inspired a series of  still life paintings (Provençal Suite) and some large landscapes (Autumn, below.

www.janetstrayer.com

Onward to intense Sicily, where exhilaration and overpowering contrasts led me to seek inner refuge and to create a set of unexpected ink wash paintings/drawings.

(if interested, see more of this series and other monochromatic works done in Sicily at www.janetstrayer.com)

 Then to Umbria, Italy, where I continue to live, travel, paint, and write.

Those Beautiful Ruined Cities, www.janetstrayer.com

Life continues to hold many adventures, sought and unsought.

Happy Valentine's Day,
Janet

Energia

Opening this afternoon at the Saturna Café, Saturna Island, BC, and showing through to March 3rd.

Winter Art Show on Saturna

Winter has arrived... even on Saturna Island! (There were snow sightings on the main road...)

ArtSaturna members have put together a winter show, on display at the Saturna Point Store Gallery, above the Pub, right next to the ferry dock. Come and enjoy an interesting selection of paintings, watercolours, textiles, photos, ceramics and wood pieces.

Artistic Idolatry by Janet Strayer

All the artists at Art Saturna are busy with winter shows and other events of the season on Saturna. Meanwhile, I'm in Provence, France, enjoying living and painting here, and musing about all manner of things.

I've seen (and will continue to see) so much great art in the exhibitions and museums here, that it's almost overwhelming. In fact, that response led me to think about how artists among us might come to feel ourselves overburdened by all the great art we witness. So much so that, rather than be inspired by all this wonderful art, we might sometimes come to feel diminished in our own capacity and even paralysed from going futher.

Here's my posting (from janetstrayer.blogspot.com) that addresses the question: Why do ordinary people involved in the arts sometimes feel paralyzed after viewing collections of great art, or witnessing great performances of music and dance, or reading the works of great writers?

Even such an accomplished artist as Virginia Woolf, for example, so adored Proust's novels that she felt herself incapable of writing after reading him. Such profound (and misguided) experience of great art nearly silenced her unique voice and vision. Woolf wrote in a letter to a friend: "Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. "Oh, if I could write like that!" I cry. And at the moment such is the astonishing vibration and saturation that he procures-- there's something sexual in it-- that I feel I can write like that, and seize my pen, and then I can't write like that."  (p.213). 

Many of us may feel something like this. We're smitten by great art, transported. It's a wonderful experience. But this can also have crushing consequences. Art is dangerous. For instance, I consider it a great gift to be able to witness art in many forms, and I spend what time I can doing so. Perhaps like some of you, I can also feel the burden of all the great art out there as an impossible expectation, a negative judgment upon my own paintings in comparison. Paralysis sets in. Nothing I can do is as worthy as what I've already seen done. Self-defeat.

But why the contest?  Some take it so far as to wish to kill art history, falsely accusing it of stopping us from thinking and seeing for ourselves. Musing about this, here are my thoughts and those I've gleaned from a fine little book, How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton (present quotes are from pages noted in this book, London: Picador, 1997).

Here in Provence, where  I've been living and painting for the past months, I'm always  reminded of Cézanne, whose work I admire. I'm not a Cézanne or any other artist I admire. Too bad, perhaps. But Cézanne isn't me, either. And, who knows what that particular path holds? My point isn't to inflate oneself, especially and surely not at anyone else's expense. But neither is it to deflate oneself in comparison to others. It's a bit of a juggling act to hold in perspective (rather than in zero-sum judgment) all that is worthy in art and in oneself.

Provençal Suite 1, homage to Cézanne, www.janetstrayer.com

What Proust called artistic idolatry is a cause of the burden great art can have upon us. Idolatry is like a fetish: it suggests a fixation on one aspect (or image) that distracts us from, or even contravenes, the overall message and spirit.

For those attempting to make art, it can feel impossibly heavy to have the weight of all the great art already accomplished upon our shoulders. By comparison, how meager our own efforts, how distant our works are from the artistic expectations we may have, based upon the products of those we revere. We are likely either to be silenced, on the one hand, or defensively to conflate ourselves with those we revere, on the other. In the latter case, we become inflated with our idols, identifying ourselves with them rather than learning their lessons on our own, through our own efforts. Probably most of us suffer the first outcome, though, and are inclined to defeat ourselves.

Turning back to Virginia Woolf, after reading Proust, she wrote in her 1928 diary, "Take up Proust after dinner and put him down. This is the worst time of all. It makes me suicidal. Nothing seems left to do. All seems insipid and worthless." (p.204). Fortunately, she stopped reading Proust for a time and wrote a few more books of her own. By the time she returned again to Proust, her diary entries suggest she'd made her peace with him: he could have his magnificence and she her own scribbles.

We can change the metaphor. Instead of feeling all the truly great art out there as a burden upon our shoulders, we can climb upon the shoulders of the artists we admire. Great artists historically did just that, even while breaking new ground. Significant works of art can help us define and celebrate our own independence and choices. Appreciating and learning from them, using them to shape and differentiate our own ways of looking, seeing, listening, hearing, making, sharing, developing.

When caught in the spin of artistic idolatry, however, it can distract us from what art has to offer. Idolatry is at work when we value something because it's signed by a given artist without appreciating the work itself. This feeds the industry of making golden calves and their replicas. It also helps fuel our picture-taking mania to make everything in the Louvre ours (click for my post on this topic ).

Idolaters combine a literal reverence for objects in art with a neglect of their message or spirit. They search for the exact recipe for Proust's madeleine, without realizing that a doughnut could serve just as well. After all, Proust's position is that "a picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it" (p. 206), but on the way of seeing that it shows to us. Though we're enchanted to visit the spot on the Seine where Monet painted, this spot is merely a coincidence. The real gift is how we appreciate the impression afforded Monet, so that then we may ourselves apply such vision to what Monet never had a chance to see. A genuine homage to a great artist is "to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes." (de Botton, p.214 ). 

The important point here is to grasp the general lesson a great work of art provides so that we can apply it to the particular things we encounter. The privileged status accorded to places painted or written about may or may not exceed the evidence of other places we've seen. It may indeed be latent in almost any place or encounter, so long as we take the effort to consider it as Proust, Monet, or any great artist might do.

Provençal Suite 2, www.janetstrayerart.com

I welcome and am grateful for the chance to see things through their eyes. I'm grateful for my months of living in Provence and seeing bits of the world around me as Cézanne might have seen them. When the paralysis and self-doubt set in, I have to remind myself that I'm the one doing the looking, listening, and sensing. I'm the one who has the paint in hand. Maybe I've even learned something from my neighbor, Cézanne, to enhance my own inclinations and skills. What I'm left with, whether inferior or superior to anything else, is what I can do. While still alive, I haven't yet found what the best of that might be.

Autumn Earthbound, current painting in Provence, www.janetstrayer.com

Artist En Route by Janet Strayer

I'd like to share the following posting with you, as a contributing member of the Art Saturna community. Currently, I am and will be  writing a series of articles for Art Avenue magazine this year, based upon my travels and life in Europe that began this September. (You can also check for additional photos and related material at my personal blog: janetstayer.blogspot.ca).

Here's what it was like for me just before I left for the grand trip: 

Artist En Route: Anticipation

As a creative person, imagine yourself faced with the reality of leaving your home in Canada for an 8-month adventure in Europe: an art-life exploration.

Bye to my magical Saturna Island studio!  Photo taken just before leaving for grand trip. 

Are you thoroughly delighted with this prospect of nearly a year in Europe? A bit overwhelmed? A little unsure about leaving the familiar context of your studio, workplace, friends, your familiar work routines, even your local sources of inspiration or diversion? What about missing the round of local art shows, including those in which you typically participate, for example? No longer rooted in your usual activities, and leaving your familiar sights to travel and live in different places with few expectations but much anticipation, you become an artist-en-route.  

Our opportunities, choices, and goals may differ, yet we are all en route in our lives, each an artist in his or her own life. The particular artist en route this time is me, and it's a very real journey. In mid September I approached my imminent departure from Canada with a mixture of excitement and anxiety rolled into one overarching feeling of anticipation: keen, eager, hopeful, and a bit worried.

My orienting goal on this journey is to be open and attentive to the incitements of the places and lifestyles encountered. Personally, I know that such life travels broaden, deepen, and break, if needed, current perspectives on what one thinks is known or familiar. Welcoming the less familiar and less known, even the apparently familiar takes new shape. 

My guiding principle is to hold lightly what I currently value so that it doesn't predetermine what I'm ready to see, hear, experience, and share. I believe this to be an essential kernel of the creative process. This column, though idiosyncratically selective by necessity, hopefully will resonate with you, as fellow travelers: each of us, in a sense, willing to see the world a bit anew from the often useful perspective of  'a stranger in a strange land' .

Some of the art materials to pack in airplane suitcases.

I'm pleased to think you might come along with me on some of my European travels and art experiences. I'll be sharing them with you in this column. Not quite sure what we'll encounter. The plan is to have an adventure in creative living -- however and wherever we find it ... and make it!

We'll be living primarily in France and Italy, with excursions south to Sicily and east as far as the Adriatic (maybe even across it).  Here's our general itinerary.

We start with an overnight in London. Then Provence for several months, that beautiful area of southern France, birthplace of Cézanne and nurturing grounds for Picasso, Van Gogh, and so many wonderful artists. Next, a month in Sicily, that sun-baked crossroads of culture, art, and bad repute. Then, for a longer period, we'll live in Umbria, near Piero della Francesca. Nearly every village in Italy has its famous art hero. We'll spend a few weeks near the Adriatic, exploring less tourist-trekked regions, like Le Marche and the art of perhaps less-known masters of the region, like Corelli.

I expect we'll find some new treasures while appreciating the old ones. And we'll meet some living artists too, as we take in contemporary art exhibits and explore our new settings. What's it like for local artists? Do they face similar challenge to those we might face? How much is what you're inspired to paint rooted in the ground you walk, the sights and experiences you have, the cultural climate you breathe? Is your technique or the content of your work changed by your milieu?

Wherever I go, and whatever I find, I'll do my best to convey what might be interesting to fellow travellers on routes of their own making. Keep your anticipation up!