It appears now that after many hours of trying and failing, of wrong turns and backward steps, of losing text and images, and having to redo them, I have finally solved the problem of the Webador Blog. It still took me sometime to locate this specific space and begin typing however, but I am learning bit by bit. Therefore the previous two posts, and this new one, are now part of a working Blog where posts are saved in a secure Webador area outside and beyond the website itself. This means the posts cannot be accidentally deleted. Unwanted drafts still in the Pages area of the editor can be safely deleted to avoid cluttering up the site, while their duplicates are held secure in the blog. I'm not very savvy with all of this, and other people may find it a good deal easier.
A couple of years ago a fellow painter I met at an exhibition advised me to sign up to Instagram as a way of presenting my work to a wider public. I already had gallery pages on Saatchi Art, and had sold three or four things from there. I was also intending to build myself a website with lots of images, but I opened an Instagram account instead and was quite fascinated by the work of hundreds of good painters around the world. Much of it seemed quite brilliant, and the artists concerned were clearly successful. However I began to feel overwhelmed by beautiful images, many reels or short videos of artists in their gorgeous studios, by artists' posts about their work, and also by the sheer popularism and commercialism of it all. Also how many artists were producing generically similar paintings, with combinations of happy, on trend colours and shapes, possibly because of interior design influence. I found the use of photographs for portraits, landscape and even still life, and the search for 'style' very maddening. Many abstract painters were working within their found style and repeating the successes of colours, shapes, materials and textural techniques; such repetition, to my mind, leads to less inventiveness, less creativity and an inability to move on.
Eventually becoming mesmerised by my daily visits to Instagram, I grew tired of what I mistakenly thought was the awful banality of much of it and, in a very negative frame of mind, closed my account. I think now I was probably wrong to act in such a negative way.
A few days ago I was talking to my daughter, who is a publicist, and she said that I ought to give Instagram another try because it makes the most of connections between users and visitors in ways which have proved useful to many people, including artists. So I have opened up my account again.
Of course there are some superb artists using Instagram. Jenny Nelson from the east coast of the United States is outstanding, and makes me feel quite inadequate. Mitchell Johnson is another, also from the US. His use of colour is amazing.
And then there is Stanley Whitney. What a presence on Instagram! I was reading a book about him the other day; apparently he listened to the same jazz music , Miles Davis it was, each day for twenty nine years while he worked in his studio on paintings that hardly varied in composition, beginning each one in the same way. Such a simple and minimal approach allowed him to concentrate on colour.
Like these few I've mentioned, many of the painters are so good I'm thinking of closing my account again before they put me off altogether!! However, truthfully, I feel galvanised by what I've seen, and strongly convinced by my own very abstract and minimal approach.
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