The Story of Cutter’s Bizaar
I began looking at
hundreds of fashion and glamour images trying to fully understand their appeal,
to women and to me. I had drawn, painted, sculpted, and photographed nudes for
several decades. I had found nothing new—nothing avant-garde—about anything I
had done with figurative subject matter. Yet there were thousands of images of
beautiful women being published every month in fashion and glamour magazines
and they were being purchased, albeit as offset press prints, by thousands of
women all over the world. I asked myself what was new about these images and
the answer was obvious; styles change. I asked myself what made the images
exciting and different, and I found many reasons. I learned that the purpose of
an image in a fashion magazine is to create desire; desire to look like the
model. Few women look like the models in the magazines, but they can wear nice
clothing, do their hair, make up their faces, carry a purse, and wear bling,
and all that makes them appealing to men, and to other women. I already knew
that the latter was more important most of the time.
Yet the industry,
including the photography, is distorted. Almost every image is retouched, so
the models don’t really look that perfect in real life. The industry creates
illusions. Those illusions are interesting and compelling, and more
importantly, they encourage average women to look their best.
By distorting
fashion and glamour-like images, I found a way to create paintings that are
interesting, unique, and relevant to our society. The exaggerated lines are
artistically appealing. The compositions can, because of the distortions, be
visually more interesting than realistic portraiture. The colors can be more
vivid, or less so. All to create emotion that isn’t commonly present in
realistic renderings.
After finishing
the first five paintings I was inspired to write vignettes about the “models”
they represented. They are fictitious and I tied them together with a
fictitious fashion/glamour photographer. Those first vignettes caught a lot of
attention at the first showing of the paintings at a charity show in Wilmington,
NC. I expanded and improved these vignettes into a pseudo-fashion magazine that
I titled Cutter’s Bizaar. I published six of these “magazines” with my computer
and printer for a show in Carrboro. I was surprised when women waited in line
to read from them, and even more surprised when I was asked if they were for
sale. They were not as, like the vignettes before, they were published just for
the show. Subsequently I was unable to find other venues to display the
paintings in spite of many rave reviews by other artists and art connoisseurs,
the most impressive one from Nathaniel Kaz, who taught for over fifty years at
Art Students League of New York.
Two
Afternoons With Nathaniel Kaz
I spent two afternoons with Nathaniel Kaz in 2006. I had a
space in a gallery where his wife and the gallery owner were hanging her
pictures. I was designing and crafting jewelry in that space. The gallery owner
asked me to keep Nathaniel occupied so she and his wife could hang the show
without his intervention. She said that he was senile and interrupting the
hanging of the show. He wasn’t.
He told me a bit of his history the first afternoon and I
researched him that evening. The next afternoon we talked a lot about the art
of his time, especially Jackson Pollack who was a student at the academy for a
while. I had friends from Wyoming who had known Pollack. The most significant
part of that conversation was that when I said that Pollack bragged to his
friends that he was perpetuating a hoax—that his work was a joke—Nathaniel
responded that it may have started as a joke, but when his paintings were
accepted by critics as significant to contemporary art, it ceased to be a joke.
I had to agree, though I still have no appreciation for his work.
When the conversation finally lulled the second afternoon, I
pulled a portfolio of photographs of seven of my paintings of distorted fashion
models out and asked Nathaniel to critique them. He spent at least three
minutes tracing lines on the first image with his finger and repeating, “The
lines. The lines. The lines. He must have said the phrase fifty times.”
When I tried to turn the page to the second image, he
slapped the page so he could continue to look at the first image. He studied
the images for over ten minutes before he moved on to the rest. When I asked
him if he thought they were any good, he replied affirmatively. He was
incredulous when I said I couldn’t find a gallery that would hang them, not
even the one where his wife was hanging her work; incredulous to the point that
he couldn’t speak. He just gestured at his wife’s work and shook his head.
I can look at that experience as affirmation that I am a
victim of circumstances because I don’t have the recognition I deserve. Or I
can look at the experience as a most significant affirmation of the talent I possess,
and the personal accomplishment of executing that talent. I choose the latter.
I will take my feelings with me to the next world, not my paintings or any
monetary profit they generate. I will take Nathaniel’s kind words with me too,
and we shall sit again and speak about art.