That's Not Art - Broken Area Podcast

Les tapisseries du musée de Cluny are lush, sensual, repetitive, heraldic and bright. After all these years, the colours still dazzle my eyes. The figures are strange and funny sometimes, especially the leopards. Art and Nature intertwined. Fabulous!! Photo: Broderie aux léopards, Musée de Cluny.

Hodgkin is super neat because he paints in lose, large, and  strong strokes over the frames of his paintings. So in effect, the paintings are about the paintbrush and the frame first and then about colour. Or you could argue that it's all about colour, too... His minimalist way of painting brings the painterly to the maximum, it overtakes all the space available on his surface.  Or you could argue as well, that it's all about emotion, of course. Bold, muttled, garbled, primal emotions. Whichever strike your fancy, it's all there to be discovered!!  Photo: Howard Hodgkin Fisherman'Cove

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Henri Matisse is perhaps the most often cited painter by my professors. His Fauvist style has no equal still today.  He has the unique ability to place elements in his paintings. His compositions are super fantastic; he might be the master of colour in the 20th-21st centuries mindset but in my view, he is the master of composition first and then of colour. Yay Henri!! 

While Mark is away doing super important family activities and other cool summer things, I decided to keep the recordings alive until his return which I hope will be very soon. So the next series of podcasts will be about a wide array of topics, from Matisse to the use of crochet in art. Each episode will be short, 7 minute podcasts about stuff I like, artists I admire, things I like about art.  I know you miss Mark, I do as well, but he shall return very soon. 

After a three week break, Mark and I discuss the business of art, the way in which art is evaluated,  and everything we can think of around this subject.  We argue that collectors are central to the valuation of artwork and wonder if some artwork will hold up well in 200 years.  Will Mark pick up his paintbrush again? I do hope so. He's a good artist! It looks like I'll continue giving my paintings away for a while as I am not quite ready yet to enter the world of making art for money. Living the life of the Visual Artist interests me more right now. It's a good life.  Photo: Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone living, 1991.

Abstraction is vast, people often hate it, but Mark and I love it in our own specific way. Why is this so? We're not quite sure exactly, we're figuring out. Maybe some questions can't really be answered. Mark went to the AGO and Museum London and talks about what he saw there. 

The art that was created through the ages fascinates us. From the cave paintings of Chauvet to the Byzantine mosaics in Greece. We cover a lot of ground today but there is still so much we wish we knew.

In this episode we cover a huge amount of topics: Algoma Blue by Llewelyn Davies, Frank O. Gehry's Gugenheim in Bilbao, Serra's UN Square entrance piece, Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial, amongst a few. As usual, our conversation meanders to what we've done and liked. I have since found what the pick up stick game is called, it's called Mikado sticks! That's what Algoma Blue looks like! Although Isabelle laughs at Mark's red paintings, she actually loves them. Enjoy and don't forget to comment!

Artist Stephanie Babcock a.k.a Geordie joins me on a discussion about our time together at Algoma University. In this episode, we talk about her end of the year Thesis show, about Conceptual art, and Expressionist art.  We also talk about Jack Bush and Kazuo Nakamura. Expressionism is one of those categories that we find difficult to define. But what the heck, we'll have fun talking about it anyway! Thank you so much for joining me today, Stephanie and I hope we can join our voices again soon. 

I came upon the Group of Seven when I came to live in Sault-Sainte-Marie, Mark learned to see art through the eyes of a friend who initiated him to the vastness of art in Southern Ontario. Mark's sensibilities were closer to the Automatistes, Paul-Émile Borders and Jean-Paul Riopelle.  My parents loved Jean-Paul Lemieux and the Automatistes of course. Who else is there beyond Varley, Carmichael, Lismer, Johnston, Harris, Jackson and MacDonald?  A whole lot more! But somehow, no matter what, we always seem to return to these seminal seven (or eight with Tom Thomson, or eight with Emily Carr, or nine with Casson...) Somewhere deep in our hearts, they have a special place and that's all fine.