Art, Craft and Archetypes

I was on an Open Studio tour today and enjoyed seeing the work and homes and studios of people I have come to know over the past ten years...
Oh boy, This may be more a book than a blog
I was struck by the attention to technique, detail, control, breadth of knowledge of these painters. There was something Heroic, Apollo-like about the detail and care of these paintings. Indeed, they looked very much like the person, the place the thing.
I'm moved by Saturn, the brooding one; and Hermes, the speedy one who turns things upside down. I like the Trickster who does several things at one: making order and disorder...

Do different archetypes inspire different "art"? Is one really any "better"?

Kurt Seligmann

January, 2012 will be the 50th anniversary of the death of Kurt Seligmann. Here is his 1954 work, Exotic Garden, currently available from The Art Institute of Chicago

His farm-retreat was here in Orange County and was willed to the "Citizens of Orange County" after his wife's death thirty years later. It is now a welcoming and accessible community organization with beautiful land and buildings.There is a growing group of regional people interested in exploring and marking the presence of Surrealism in this rural area.

For the moment(whatever else is there?), I'm willing to help gather these interested people into some discussions on how to manifest surrealism, again in this County; how to recognize the presence and legacy of Kurt and Arlette Seligmann.








Here are a few of his unfinished paintings still around