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I agree whole-heartedly, and I am an accomlished absrtact artist! Art is seeing and understanding internal things. Primitive people made symbols and many meaningful pictures. Although my art is accomaccomplished, and Ive had many shows, I am squashed by the ny art scene, because i dont want to cover myself with chocolate or put a dead shark in an aquarium. My art is sophisticated and full of visual beauty & meaningful symbol and eroticisim and geshtalt psychological messages. i invite the representational artists to open up to abstraction, it is real, ( at least mine is) and abstract means "essence" so if I love a tree, for me, green brown and motion can represent that I am not stuck with the chore of "rendering it" this is in the school of thought of our primitive yet sophisticated ancestors in their cave art. I invite landscape & representational artists to realize that we are in a war to re-claim our culture, the liberal wackos have taken over art, from curator & writer to museum and newspaper. I have no place to show, but I will be included in the 2003 bienalle in florence italy! I take this very seriously to represent our true creative soul as americans in the joy and boldness that I put in my paintings. I have one criticism or advice for my representational brothers & sisters, ( I can do that too if i want), dont use abstraction as a cop-out to do paintings that are not complete with detail and beautiful paint, and that also great detail alone does not make a great work of art. I notice that many landscapes are not accomlished like the great hudson river school painters, or the great artist Turner,or Vermeer, and others but rather sometimes the works have summarized, with over simplified painting in them and i think they use abstraction as an excuse to just do anything. Abstraction is not a short cut and not an excuse for a landscape artist to make a "purple poorly painted tree" for example.
I am one of the few conservative abstract artists, and it comes from realizing that hard work and not "feel good stuff" makes a painting good. Liberal wackos have claimed abstraction for themselves, but dont believe it!! There is a pocket of serious talented abstract artists, I have included a few of them on my website at www.maffei.com under abstract essentialists. I understand representational artists not trusting abstraction, but thats because the liberals have taken it over and talented abstractionsits cant show! Ever since Jackson Pollock, they took over everything, and the ny times backs them up. So lets join as "Essentialists" painting whats essential to us and our American consiousness, lets join representational & abstract to rout out and take over the art world so our people can see beauty again! I invite you to read an essay on my website at www.maffei.com, titled " Aesthetic Engineering" it goes into detail at exposing the FRAUD in art and titles Aesthetic Engineers, NOT ARTISTS! those who do all those wacko projects, ie earth works performance blowing up cows etc etc. And invites them to get out of the way and let us paint and sculpt again. sincerely Nicholas Baker-Maffei