Artists Say The Darnedest Things

My thoughts on this week's episode of Bravo's Work of Art, with spoilers included.

This week the contestants were each paired with a child artist and a previously created artwork by that child. Mostly drawings and paintings, though also one print piece. The challenge was to create an artwork that was based on the child's work- addressing the same theme, visual style, etc. The work from the kids lacked the polished skills of professional artists, but some of the ideas were fairly interesting and would not be out of place in a professional art gallery.

Dusty was perhaps the most at home with this challenge, since he is a full time teacher and works with kids every day. His piece wasn't the most exciting, but it was well made and did make excellent use of the work brought by his child partner. I was not surprised when he vaulted from the bottom group last week to the the top 2 this time. Although Sucklord mostly works with toys at the conceptual level, few pegged him as someone who would engage with kids on an artistic level. But he really seemed to connect with the piece he was assigned and worked hard to make something his artistic partner would like. I thought that the resulting sculpture was probably more interesting as a toy than as fine art. He ended up in the bottom group, but survived for another week.

Sara was presented a large grid format print piece, words in various styles cut as some kind of relief print and printed as colorful blocks. She took part of that idea- cutting words into small linoleum blocks and making the resulting prints part of the image, but she turned it into her own tragic life story. When she found herself in the bottom group she became an emotional wreck and spent so much time sobbing uncontrollably that it seemed the judges were a bit hesitant to criticize the art, especially when they looked so bad when the same thing happened with Kathryn a few weeks earlier. Perhaps this will be the new strategy employed by contestants in trouble- cry and the judges will be afraid to confront you about your artistic failures. Tewz inherited a still life with a few vegetables. Like Sara, he expanded this based on his own (urban) experiences, making concrete letter shaped planters spelling out "GROW", with some grass like stalks growing from them. The piece could have used a little color, but I've seen much worse on this show. Claiming it had not enough of a relationship to the original piece, Tewz was also part of the lower group, and he was the one eliminated.

Sometimes it was hard to tell whether the kids or the adults were coming up with the crazier ideas. Michelle was given three pieces of paper of different colors, each with a pair of human eyes floating in the center. From this she got the idea to make one of her paper sculptures, but one that included the long necks of geese, with bloody eye sockets from pecking each others' eyes out. Simon and her fellow contestants pointed out that this was really not a good idea in a child themed art show, and citing last week's visit to the bottom group, she decided to listen this time and got off that ledge. Her new piece ended up in the safe group. Kymia's young partner had a simple painting of a carrot on the ground. Looking for more input, she asked the girl about what would be around the carrot if we could see more, and was told there would be the body of a girl on the ground, dead from having eaten literally everything around her, with the carrot being the thing that finally did her in. Kymia responded with a detailed fine line drawing of the imagined girl, her gut exploded from all stuff she had eaten (food, animals, the house, etc). Kymia was the other artist in the top 2 and she won the challenge, and immunity for a week.

I don't make a regular habit of collaborating with children in my artwork, but I do remember one recent case where I did. About 4 years ago we painted the first of the Belmar murals, the large one on the side of the Boatworks, showing our view over the river and our fantasy of what would be found under the waters of Shark River. Every year the BAC has a big project that can involve the community, and for this one people were invited to come one day and draw and paint their ideas for the underwater part. Some BAC members (including me) made things that day, but most of the participants were kids. The images were cut out and stuck to an indoor version of our mural. Later these parts were rearranged and we used them as the basis for what we painted on the final version of the mural. For example, a child makes a white fish with bold spots in primary colors (kind of like the packaging on a loaf of Wonder Bread), and one of the adult professionals created a fish with similar colors for the far right side of our mural. In addition to helping with the watery blue background, over the course of a few weeks I painted sea plants, a piece of the lost city of Atlantis, a hammerhead shark, a sea robin, a lobster, and a sunken speedboat.