The Origins of Artists

When I saw from last week's coming attractions that this week's episode of Bravo's Work of Art would deal with childhood art themes, I knew that some of the contestants would likely have more trouble with this challenge than anything else thrown at them so far. The gang was brought to a children's art gallery/studio in SoHo, and asked to make art that referenced their beginnings as artists, using only the materials available in the location. Some of them interpreted the concept as producing art that resembled what they had done as children, while others used more adult art strategies to explore incidents and emotions from their pasts. Miles pretty much blew off the assignment and made a giant minimalist grid piece using duct tape.

In general the results were not impressive. This seemed like one of those times when the producers were making the decisions. Miles, whose piece did not even remotely address the assignment, was put in the safe group, and the judges couldn't find any redeeming qualities in Jaclyn's piece, but she gets to hang around for another week, perhaps in hopes that she'll be finding an excuse to take off her clothes again. The top two this week were Peregrine (brightly colored sculptural work that evoked childhood pleasures and interpretations of adult behavior) and Nicole (a conceptually complex construction that in my opinion required too much explanation in order to understand), with Peregrine getting the nod, but no immunity. Jaclyn survived her latest visit to the bottom group, but Ryan wasn't so lucky. His installation of childlike art wasn't particularly good, but at least it was apparent what he was up to, as opposed to Jaclyn's incomprehensible last minute construction.

Unlike some recent weeks, I could have gone to town with this one, since I've dealt with the concept before, and on that occasion I pretty much worked out the whole idea in about two minutes. A few years ago I produced the above print, A History of Art, which dealt with my personal history as an artist (click on the image to enlarge). I went back to very early childhood, and represented such things as building with blocks and erector sets, using hand tools in various wood construction, painting, and whittling, not to mention comic book characters, a favorite subject of my childhood drawings. (the tower also incorporates many things of that era that would go on to influence my adult artwork, but wouldn't have been an artistic interest then) Obviously I couldn't produce a large woodcut in the 12 hours allotted by the show (I think I spent about 6 months on it), but I could have used the materials at hand to make an actual tower of some kind that would incorporate most of the childhood related aspects of the print. I'm sure it would have been more interesting than most of what the contestants came up with.