knowing and not knowing
A friend wrote today: “Saw your post on facebook “watercolour painted directly on absorbent ground on gessoed birch panel”.
“You know I’m not ‘in the know’ in the art field….but do people care what the medium is? Do people only like watercolour or oil or only watercolour on canvas vs gessoed birchpanel vs newsprint?”
“Do you just tell us what you’ve painted on because people want to know, or simply because you want them to know?”
” The reason i speak of the medium or how it is done is simple; there are people out there who paint on paper and GLUE the fucking thing onto panels and pretend they are working on panel and people are aware of this and unless you let them know they ASSUME that this is what you are showing them. Which is absolutely not the case….by GLUING the work onto a panel they have destroyed the work – no museum would ever touch it / but obviously these people do not seem to care, perhaps they have little faith in their work, more likely they are simply trying to cash in on the current popular ‘fad’ that panels have become; and when the next public itch comes along they will move into it – i have seen people switching mediums from what they were doing to whatever is the current popular hot thing – encaustic painting seems to have grabbed the publics’ attention for now so much so that even photographers have been covering their photos with encaustic. The point is that there are negative things going on out there and i do not want to be associated nor confused with any of them. I do what i do and that is it.”