Painting As Lifeline

Jerry Fresia

The Story of Bansky

Wikipedia tells us that Banksy “is an anonymous England -based street artist, vandal, political activist, and film director.” One of his more inventive pieces is “Balloon Girl,” particularly clever in that it self-destructed after it was sold at Sotheby’s. Banksy had installed a shredder into the frame of the print and when the print was sold, the shredder was mysteriously turned on and half the print was shredded before it stopped.

The Story of Peter

When I was 18, at least for a time, I didn’t think that the easel painting approach taught to me was sufficiently hip. I wanted to do something overtly cool. Then one day when I was visiting my teacher’s studio, I stood before a simple, small painting of a house on a street. In a way that I can only describe as mysterious, I was moved. The feeling I experienced was telling. I could remember how in the past when I stood before these studio paintings I would be moved, but remembering that I had those feelings was totally different than actually having them in the present, being in the feeling so to speak. That did it. This was plenty cool enough for me. I wanted to do that.

Anyway, I recalled these thoughts when I heard an interview with Irwin Redlener, an American pediatrician who specializes in health care for under served children who found themselves in “extreme adversity.” What caught my attention was a story about a young boy named Peter:

What jumped out at me in this story was the concept of lifeline. We live in a time when, institutionally — certainly in the western world, it feels as if the wheels are falling off. Our social orders are increasingly politicized with each side fervently believing that the other side is “unhinged.” The wheels aren’t coming off in the art world, though, because they have already fallen off decades ago.

In the art world, easel painting must be and has been, dismissed out of hand by the high-end types since 1949 when the top down construction of Abstract Expressionism as a branding gambit that would lend to New York City the right cultural posh to make it the financial capital of the world at the start of the Cold War . And why must it be? Because high-end speculators have zero authority when it comes to exploiting color, or painterly bravura, or the understanding of nature as source, or the novel use of paint to achieve startling effects of light. Our practices could possibly subvert the authority associated with the hegemonic practices that turn on shock, cleverness, and succès de scandale. Or to put it more simply, what makes Balloon Girl, let alone Shredded Balloon Girl important is that they provide speculators both with authority and unparalleled opportunity.

So here’s my point. We are like Peter. We unfashionable easel painters live in art world adversity. And you know those methods that you studied, paid for, and worked hard to master? Those methods which allow you “to feel larger, more powerful, more beautiful” (to quote Agnes de Mille)? They are like young Peter’s yellow, old article from the NYT. They are lifelines in a world that is moving with a tortured tension, to paraphrase Nietzsche, restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river as toward catastrophe.

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