Why Couldn’t He Have Been a Painter ? - Lamentations of Sculpture Roadies

The most basic fact about cast bronze sculpture is often the most overlooked. Each piece is made of metal and is, as a result, very heavy. With the inclusion of the expected granite or marble base you’re hard pressed to find a piece that weighs less than fifteen pounds. And, of course, each sculpture has to have a pedestal on which to be displayed. While these aren’t made of cast bronze they are still heavy and certainly awkward. When the gallery is properly set-up with all the most recent works placed to best advantage, prices and signage in place, and lighting correspondingly designed, it’s easy to forget what a mammoth effort it is to move work around.

The reality came crashing down on us this weekend due to our participation in the new Carmel Art and Film Festival. In addition to a slew of other events the festival, which was organized with the director of the Sunset Film Festival, included an art show in a local Carmel Park. As a selected artist, Steven had a booth to display work. The idea of an outdoor art show with noted artists all displaying their work in the usually sunny Carmel autumn is a romantic concept and I’m sure it’s a pleasant attraction to visit. But, the transport and set-up for the event is a mammoth and cumbersome undertaking. Not to mention it was strangely cold all weekend.

The event found us loading trucks with sculpture at 5:45 in the morning, only to have to bring it all back in the evening for security and then return it the next day. Of course, as with any struggle, you immediately feel as though your lot is the hardest. This mature response is how we have come to hate all painters. It’s an indiscriminant, purely selfish resentment based solely on the fact that their artwork weighs less, takes up less room, displays faster and is just generally more portable. The painters at last weekend’s event made one trip and set up their booths in an hour. Five trips later, we’re exhausted, bitter and depressed that the other painting artists have eaten all the good muffins. The noble pursuit of artistic expression is nothing in the face of such hardship and unbalance.

At 8 p.m. on the last day of the festival, when two and a half hours of transporting finally brought the conclusion of our participation, we drove out of town and passed the park. One car was still parked near the edge, hazard lights on and back door ajar. We looked over to find it was being loaded up by one of the festival’s only other sculptors. If I had his address I’d send him a solidarity muffin.

Auction for the Arts: The Difficult Balance of Creativity, Finances and New Traditions

We participated in the first annual Carmel Treasures Auction for the Arts events this weekend and the aftermath is such a mixed bag of tricks. The event was beautiful and well organized, but not particularly successful in terms of sales or fund-raising.

The whole night was very symbolic of a current trend in so many industries, where nothing can be launched, sold, or introduced without the presence of food and wine. Steven and I are both semi-professional appreciators of tasty drinks and dishes, but living in a community like Carmel, which is equally celebrated for fine food and fine art, it can be difficult to focus attention on the art work and distract from the concentration on food and wine.


Art seems to suffer particularly from this connection, paintings and sculpture are appreciated passively and museums and exhibitions often add to the perception that art is there to beautify and appreciate, but isn't necessarily something that you buy. The difficultly is that without collectors and patrons new art would cease to be created or produced.


It’s a conflict in many ways, even for those “in the business.” As artists or agents you can quickly appreciate the value of a piece its creativity, skill level, quality, or collectability (code for investment value) of an item, but that’s not the same thing as being able to afford a piece. The result is that when you go to an auction as a participant, not as a bidder, you spend a lot of time yearning for the $40,000 painting, that is a steal for $25,000 and sharing empathy with the painter or agent since today’s economy means that they won’t even earn the asking price. The skill is being able to communicate your knowledge and perception to an appropriate individual, but sadly such folk are a little hard to find these days.


The Treasures event also had me pondering the difficulty of establishing new traditions, particularly in the current economy. The Central Coast has a couple of occasions that mark the calendar year and bring locals and visitors out into restaurants, shops, etc. They’re institutions now, the kind of events you block out a week for every year, but I wonder if they also struggled at first and how they managed to keep on and eventually succeed. When the first Concours d’Elegance was held at Pebble Beach, did people think it was ridiculous to drive a bunch of pretty cars out to park on a bluff by the ocean?

How do we encourage creativity and new traditions for our community with the understanding the immediate success in unlikely? How do you cultivate interest, appreciation and attendance alongside likely buyers? Is there an appropriate balance between the broader goal of collective appreciation and the necessity of private ownership?

The Calm After One Storm And Before The Next

It’s a strange nervous calm the follows the conclusion of two back to back shows. The feeling is very reminiscent of Christmas when you’re young - a lot of anticipation and preparation, followed by a few moments of pure joy and the overall amazement that after months of waiting and preparing for the event, it’s actually here and then so quickly over. It can be a little anti-climatic and a peculiarly sad.


Working in a community like Carmel these events take on an even stranger feel. Their attendance is mixed with the close friends who are so supportive of everything we do, new acquaintances that we hope to build into friendships, business connections that demand attention and of course the constant pressure and need for potential sales. It makes the whole venture very difficult to digest in the aftermath. You worry that you didn’t spend enough time with those close to you or that you were too cautious and spent all of your time talking to friends and not enough time building collectors.

More than anything I just wish there was time to appreciate. Steven’s work is displayed at the Sunset Center in Carmel. It’s an interesting venue and the work has a wonderful museum exhibition quality to it – the kind of space and show we’ve always wanted to have. It’s a great accomplishment, but it’s so hard to balance that with the built in self-criticism that comes from always thinking you could have improved on well, everything.

I sometimes wonder if the day will ever come when we finally feel like we’ve gotten to where we want to be – or if the nature of working for yourself just makes it impossible to stop striving, stop planning, stop critiquing.

We also had the second of our new Fine Art First Friday events last week. The evenings seem to be gaining in momentum and they’ve been a wonderful opportunity to bring a little life to nighttime Carmel. Steven and I have both enjoyed working more closely with the other galleries and artists. Like any other industry art is complicated in that your colleagues are also your competition. It can lead you to cultivate a kind of insulated existence and while you can really admire another artist’s work from afar you’re so busy cultivating your own collector base that you don’t have the time you might like to support other artists and you can be instinctually wary of any group projects or activities.

The First Friday program has us working with three other galleries and it’s been great to let our walls down a little bit. The next one is Friday, October 2 at 6:00 p.m. – stop in and visit if you’re in town.

Show Prep: The Artistry of Glue Covered Dogs and Good Friends

Another late night getting ready for another show where I spend the whole time thinking that there must be an easier way and that you would think that after so many events like this that we would have a better a handle on things.



As always, we are saved by the generosity of our friends and the commitment of the studio staff. But the whole process is just another reminder of how strangely unglamorous and messy the whole process is. When Steven and I are both cleaned up at an unveiling or other fancy event and a new acquaintance rhapsodizes about how blessed Steven is to have this amazing talent I often flash back to these moment when we are both too tired too speak straight and everyone including the dog is covered in paint, primer, glue and plaster not because we’ve been sculpting, but because we’re building pedestals for a show that just like every other show has snuck up on us. Sometimes I think the true talent is that we don’t fall down laughing when someone waxes on about the romance and magic of it all. If they only knew that Steven’s greatest pleasure this week has not come from progress on any piece of art, but instead over his new nail gun they might start to get a taste for the reality of it all.

The upside of the chaos is that it hides the bad and can overpower the good until it sneaks out as wonderful surprise. In the midst of trying to save some shopping from the torrent of construction dust (which yes, must all be completely gone by tomorrow’s show) I snuck into the office and found a sales form for a fairly significant sale. I asked Steven about it and he shrugged that it had come through this morning. It seems like just yesterday that we would have been calling both sets of our parents to exalt a sale like that as proof that it might work out after all. Now, it’s good news, but not nearly as important as the fact that all the primer is dry and we can do the second coat.