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Kingfisher
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Featured Painter James Martin
We are pleased to feature several paintings by Jim Martin, a classmate of the Editor's at the UW, when we were both thought we were writers. I published fiction by him in Month's Best in 1952, before he turned his talents to painting. Most of his life as a painter was spent in self-styled reclusion. He painted what he felt like, when he felt like it, and most of his work contains cartoonish elements. Either you like him or you don't. I do. He is a funny man, with a whimsical sense of humor that both mocks and enhances the art object and doesn't take art deadly seriously. Perhaps this is how it should be. Sheila Farr persuaded UW Press to publish a large collection of his work in 2001. Museum of Northwest Art is the book's co-publisher. It is entitled, Art Rustler at the Rivoli. To the those not long familiar with Seattle and its seamy features, The Rivoli was a burlesque house on Seattle's First Avenue, very near to Skid Road. It is a little unfair to brand Martin this way, nailed by an episode out of the long-ago past, much as it was not kind to link Richard Gilkey with his bad old days at The Blue Moon Tavern, but so it goes. Nice book, go buy it. In his "Afterword," Martin states: "At some point in my efforts to learn to paint, I had to finally decide not to be intimidated by what has gone on before--to learn from the influences of others and then find my own voice. . . . The flavor and aroma of art emerges with the degree of the maker's genius." [The boldface is his.] I say, "Good job, Jim. And, I notice, you still have a way with words."
Susan Sontag The vast maw of modernity has chewed up reality and spat the whole mess out as images. According to a highly influential analysis, we live in a "society of spectacle." Each thing has to be turned into a spectacle to be real—that is, interesting—to us. People themselves become images: celebrities. Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media. Fancy rhetoric, this. And very persuasive to many, because one of the characteristics of modernity is that people to feel they can anticipate their own experience. (This view is associated in particular with the writings of the late Guy Debord, who thought he was describing an illusion, a hoax, and of Jean Baudrillard, who claims to believe that images, simulated relativities, are all that exists now; it seems to be something of a French specialty. It is common to say that war, like everything else that seems to be real, is mediatique. This was the diagnosis of several distinguished French day-trippers to Sarajevo during the siege, among them Andre Glucksmann: that the war would be won or lost not by anything that happened in Sarajevo, or Bosnia generally, but by what happened in the media. It is often asserted that :the West: has increasingly come to see war itself as spectacle. Reports of the death of reality—like the death of reason, the death of the intellectual, the death of serious literature—seem to have been accepted without much reflection by many who are attempting to understand what feels wrong, or empty, or idiotically triumphant in contemporary politics and culture. To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment—a mature style of viewing that is a prime acquisition of the "modern," and a prerequisite for dismantling traditional forms of party-based politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify "the world" with those zones in the rich countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people's pain, just as it is absurd to generalize about the ability to respond to the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about war and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality. (Page 97)
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More Joni
Mitchell Paintings
Joni Mitchell is famous as a singer and song-writer, and to a few as a poet, but not many people know about her life-long dedication to painting. Her website (www.jonimitchell.com/paintings) is where she shows some of her work and permits it to be copied by fans dedicated to her and her work. Below are a few representative pieces. As you can see, she is a highly talented painter. Note, these are not thumbnails, so clicking won't open them.
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