Why Art Matters


Art is all about transformation and illusion.
The artist transforms inanimate materials such as canvas, pigment stone, paper and wood
into representations of apparent three-dimensional domains
seemingly inhabited by people, places and things, but, most importantly,

by ideas and emotions.

The magic
is to watch the viewer respond to the illusion created by the hand, heart and mind of the artist,
in this often brief encounter between the viewer and the object;
attempting to understand the artist’s intentions in their own unique way,
by constructing a visual and visceral bridge to the subject matter
and emotion being portrayed.


We care about art...

because we can choose to act in collaboration with the artist,
however anonymous or far removed from our daily lives he or she might be
and allow ourselves to be transformed into believers by their creation.

Visual art is theater, suspended in time.

We are converted by this encounter
because we soon understand how beauty, essential truth and purity of form can anchor our lives

and reaffirm our human spirit.

Works of art can serve as signposts
to places of enlightenment and emotional well-being in our culture,
pointing to a locus in our consciousness where we can allow ourselves to believe,

in spite of everything,
that there is balance and harmony in the world

and that life can be good!

Art may be illusion but,
when you surround yourself with its message,
sooner or later your psyche will commit to it and, given time,

art will make a believer out of you.

Richard J. Friswell

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*Art: Thomas Cole, Falls of the Kaaterskill, o/c, 1826, The warner Collection of Gulf States paper Corp., Tuscaloosa, AL

Transformation (a short story)

By Richard Friswell

All day long I dreamed of what I would do when I got home. School, recess, lunch and homework were small obstacles on my way to the adventure that awaited me each day, just a few backyards away from my own.

I would not allow for any distractions- the Brooklyn Dodgers-Yankees game droning on Mr. Hill’s radio just inside his open kitchen window on the walk home from school; the household chores that always awaited me there; my heavily-perfumed Aunt Ethel, sitting at our kitchen table drinking pale tea out of a too-fancy cup and eating Lemon Coolers, dusted with white confectionary sugar that stuck to my face when she kissed me.

I was on a mission! I ran to my room where I strapped on my guns (matching 6-shooters with white pearl handles), pulled on my boots, cocked my cowboy hat jauntily to one side of my head and, hopping on my red Schwinn Hornet complete with handlebar streamers, I galloped off to… THE WOODS.

Entering the woods held all the transformative power of a magic spell for me. I left the boy behind and became the western hero of my Saturday morning, grainy, black and white television world. This place was filled with all the props a hero needed: rocky outcroppings; low-slung tree limbs for spying over the ridge; bad guys just around the bend; the forbidden railroad tracks bordering the woods that rumbled with the clattery sounds of late-night freight trains. But as dusk settled in, even busy cowboys keep an ear tuned for the dinner bell and a brisk gallop home to the chuck wagon on ‘Charger’.

I remember lying in my bed late each night, listening wide-eyed to the mournful whistle of the Boston and Maine locomotive as it crept along the moonlit rails, ever imagining the dangers my cowboy hero would have to confront tomorrow…


Read more free-lance exerpts @ http://www.richardfriswell.com/
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The crisis for museums today

OPINION POLL


by Richard Friswell

Museums Adjusting in a Changing World

In a 1999 New York Times report on museum attendance for the previous decade, increases of 20% were reported in the U.S., Europe and Australia. Based on a survey by The Art Newspaper, blockbuster exhibits by the likes of Monet, van Gogh, Gauguin and Winslow Homer’s private collection drew thousands of eyes and millions of dollars to some of the most established museums in the world. Shows featuring the ever-popular Impressionists (both French and American) appeared to be a can’t-miss formula for art institutions, both large and small. One spokesperson interviewed for the piece proclaimed that, “The museum plays an incredible role in American cities: it’s a focal point, a place for entertainment, for shopping [my italics-- no mention of the actual art that these buildings house].”

So what has happened in the last ten years? Why is museum attendance down by 5-15% since the publication of that study 10 years ago?

Some would argue that 9/11 instilled a fear of open and very-public venues (particularly those with exhibitions that might seem to carry a charged political or social message). Another is the state of the economy; but rates of attendance were dropping prior to the down-turn in the global financial markets. Some would argue that increased ticket costs are to blame, rising to cover increased costs of staff and building maintenance; but even free museums like the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and many no-cost museums in the mid-west report decreased attendance.

With more families electing to vacation closer to home, why wouldn’t museums be at the receiving end of the tourist dollar largess? The answer may be found in the changing demographics of the population and the discretionary capital (dollars, yen, euros or pesos) devoted to cultural venues . As an example, I sat at the back of the room at a recent presentation at The Yale Museum of Art (another free museum) for a presentation on Picasso’s relationship with the writers of his time. Except for a handful of eager, bright-eyed undergrads, with notebooks in hand, the crowd appeared from my vantage point to be largely gray-haired and/or balding. Dismissing, for the moment the esoteric nature of the topic, I believe that I was seeing a trend that is the root of the problem with museum attendance in this new century: the younger generations are largely missing from the roles of the committed!

For the majority of the population, aged 25-45 (and certainly for the real youth of the country—aged 12-25), there is no real perceived sense of the past and the role it can play in our future. Funding for art and culturally-based curricula in schools has been slashed. In too many homes, books have been replaced with cell phones and laptops, home libraries with flat screen TVs and video games. First-person, content-rich cultural pursuits (art, literature, music and theater) are being displaced by MySpace, Google and Twitter.

How many times have you spotted a minivan on the highway, with video screen cartoons or movies playing for the benefit of young back seat travelers (and for the peace-of-mind of their front seat parents, I assume). Belted in, they sit glazed-eyed and enthralled while the big, bright, interesting world that we once studied as it whizzed by the car window has all but disappeared from the awareness of these children and their impressionable, expanding minds?

Antique dealers report a similar drop in sales for the under-45 set (artifacts of the past have less meaning when the historical context of their creation is missing). Without naming names, many experiential museums, where history and architecture comes to life through a first-person experience of the time and place they specialize in are struggling to survive (the exceptions would be Disney World, with its glitz and myriad ready-made events and Williamsburg, where commerce and history have been so effectively co-mingled (coincidentally, you don’t have to wait to get to the gift shop to spend money in either of these destinations).

In response to this growing trend, some museums have attempted to reinvent themselves with bold and beautiful additions to their existing buildings (The Chicago Art Institute, MOMA, The Guggenheim’s Frank Gehry structure in Bilbao, Spain and Yale’s restored wing, by architect Louis Kahn, for example). In these cases, art and architecture work together (or not!) to draw the eye and hopefully, boost attendance. Others, with less money to spend on brick and mortar are mounting shows with a decidedly non-artistic message: the successful Treasures of the Titanic show and the once-controversial Human Body Show have toured the world and called attention to the museum as an institution that can flex its message to accommodate diverse tastes and interests.

There is more hope on the horizon. The Brooklyn Museum is one good example of an art institution that sees its role and responsibility to its surrounding community to assume an active, outreach role, with dozens of events each month. Categories as varied as modern dance in the lobby, film festivals, children’s art classes, jazz concerts, to overnight stays for the more adventurous (think: “Night at the Museum”) are regular features of this and other active institutions, which see aggressive community outreach as the antidote to ailing attendance.

Institutions are also finding new ways to solicit and commit harder-to-find funding to more-targeted new acquisitions. At a recent opening for an emerging artist, I was asked to cast my vote for which piece from the show the museum should acquire (American Idol and Dancing with the Stars meets the New Britain Museum!). Strategies like these work because they promote involvement and introduce an entire segment of the population to the museum as a place to go and have fun—a place to begin to believe that their opinion and non-monetary contribution may help shape what the museum can become. That’s a basic public relations lesson that much of the business world learned eons ago.

In this new era, where an economic crisis has leveled the playing field for many, museums are no exception. Once the hushed ivory-tower bastions of good, but inaccessible, taste for the few, museums have had to get creative and reach out to the many. This can only have a positive impact on the place our museums occupy in our cultural landscape and will serve to introduce a whole new generation to the idea that art and the historical context in which it was created can have direct and immediate meaning in their lives.

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Doud Akhriev Exhibition, Rockland, Maine

Department: SPEAKING OF ART
For immediate release
Catching the Light: The Frenchboro Paintings
Works by Daud Akhriev
At the Archipelago Gallery, Rockland, Maine
Through September 20, 2009



Nature and the
human spirit
come face-to-face
in this exhibition that
explores island life,
Down East

At the narrow margin where land meets sea, beauty and ruin co-mingle. The source of inspiration for so many artists and writers, the waterfront can also stand as a symbol for despair. At once the Giver of Life, Ocean can be a cruel taskmaster, exacting a dear price from those that labor on or near its shifting tides.

In an exhibit entitled, Catching the Light: The Frenchboro Paintings, at the Archipelago Gallery in Rockland, Maine, artist, Daud Akhriev, captures in his paintings and pastels the contradictions and hardships of Maine coastal living in a collection of powerful and compelling images. Sponsored by the Island Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to cultural awareness, conservancy and research along Maine’s island-rich coastline, the show features both portraits and landscapes by this Russian-born artist, now residing in Tennessee.

In one riveting work, scaled to life-size, Danny, 2007-2008 (left) a mixture of hardship and determination is writ large on the weathered face of a native Frenchboro fisherman. In this work, based on a series called, Weathered People, completed in Russia years before, Akhriev’s impasto style imbues the canvas with the same rough-hewn texture that makes the subject appear both vulnerable and indestructible. He wears his sweat shirt like fragile armor against the ravages of his occupation; his face at once care-worn and intrepid.

In the intimate and touching portrait, Clearing, 2007, (below), a unassuming goddess arises from the broken shells and detritus of the inner harbor. And much like Botticelli’s, Birth of Venus-- the embodiment of female perfection—Akhriev’s twenty-first century version stands at water’s edge, nightgown clad. She radiates beauty and self-confidence as she appears to step from the sea, hem lifted in a modest but poignant gesture of her womanhood. Newly awakened, she appears slightly dazed and disheveled-- as surprised to see us standing before her as we are to witness her emergence from this unlikely Eden.


Inspired by Andrew Wyeth and following in the footsteps of Winslow Homer, Rockwell Kent, Marsden Hartley and the many others who have come to call Maine their home-away-from-home, Daud Akhriev has spent many summers on the small island of Frenchboro. While there, he has integrated the colors and moods of the island and its inhabitants is a way that is both direct and respectful.


Akhriev’s landscapes, Clarity, 2008-9 (left) capture the timeless quality of the island village and the often rough-cut boundary between civilization and the forces of nature. Piers and wharfs teeter like broken monuments in the struggle to exact a living from the surrounding waters. Like poet, Percy Shelly’s fallen and once powerful king, Ozymandias, whose emblematic remains are slowly reclaimed by shifting desert sands, Akhriev’s shoreline is littered with arrays of pillar and post, coiled and tangled lines, stacked lobster pots and gray-shingled sheds—symbols of the uneasy bond between the cold North Atlantic and its coastal villages. Floating serenely in these settings however, are the ubiquitous harbor craft—principle tool of the fisherman’s trade—sleek and well-ordered as they swing on their moorings in the saturated colors of Frenchboro’s late summer afternoons.

Akhriev’s waterfront scenes are complex and meticulous studies in color and form—a gigantic game of Pick-Up-Sticks, gone array. In each of his works, the docks, like the island inhabitants he portrays, appear to have reached an uneasy truce with a world where the power of nature is relentless and the flesh endures against all odds.

by Richard Friswell

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In Search of the American Identity

Sample Diary Entry: Hudson River Painters Story

DAY 1: Tuesday, 7/7/09-

First glimpse of mighty Hudson after NYC-- a narrow sliver of blue wedged between aging facades on Yonker’s main street. Destination: Hudson River Museum on the river’s eastern bank to view Dutch in America show. New Jersey’s rocky palisades rise starkly on opposite shore, looming in shadows of a high summer sun.

Observation: As I drive north beside river, appears decades of hardship and economic woes have hit these towns hard. In stark contrast to Hudson’s mighty vistas, glimpsed at every turn, towns and cities that once thrived here, now seem pale and broken by comparison. Yet, the names—Sleepy Hollow, Peekskill, Cold Spring, Annandale-on-Hudson, Red Hook--preserve a mythic and magical quality. During stop in Sleepy Hollow, NY, across the street from a National Sleep Center office, an impromptu conversation with story-teller in colonial dress about Rip van Winkle and the Headless Horseman confirms I am in a dream.

The river keeps its promise to awe and inspire. Thick grey clouds hang overhead all day, bellied with rain that refuses to fall. Break- through sun slants like columns in thick summer air, spotlighting patches on steep hillsides and river ...then a wind-whipped deluge late in the day, followed by a double rainbow over Hudson valley. I now believe no hyperbole in Thomas Cole’s paintings!


DAY 2: Wednesday, 7/8/09-

Continuing north, focus of riverside communities shifts from suburban to rural—compressed neighborhoods morphing to broad reaches of open farmland, new car lots to John Deere showrooms, CVS and strip malls to acres of corn, apples, cherries and vineyards in neat rows beside road. Sign in front of a house: ‘baby sheep and goats for sale’. ..just a half-day’s drive from the heart of the city.

Casting its spell, the Hudson continues to appear when tree lines parts, summer clouds piled high overhead, like rumpled pillows, lazy and slow-moving. Trains as long as city streets snake along the river’s narrow shoulders, appearing toy-like in the distance. Growling and frowning diesels pull cars behind in a clattering but obedient row, the wail of engines’ whistle their only complaint…plaintiff echoes in the valley.

Destination: Hudson, NY, the river’s namesake, south of Albany. Once a center for boat-building and brick making, here is another city whose restored buildings and quaint streets are lifting themselves out of a decades-long legacy of hard times—but without fail, one street in town leads toward the Hudson. Contrast of eternal river and places that time forgot, repeatedly juxtaposed. Nearby, Olana, hilltop home of Frederic Church, master painter of Hudson scenes, commands sweeping views of river and distant Catskills,rising blue-gray in the distance. Wonder how these local towns, in their day, squared with painterly ideal image shipped out to the world?

Read more about the Hudson River School of Painting at: http://www.artesmagazine.com/

The story behind art...the art behind the story

Reaching out to those that love art, architecture and design and an in-depth perspective on all aspects of the fine art scene!!!

History plays an important role in how major art movements came to be...nothing happens in a cultural vacuum...and A R T E S magaizine lays it all out. Still like to read for content? If you like The Atlantic, New York Times Magazine or Art & Antiques Magazine, than your my kind of reader!

A R T E S eMagazine is just 5 months old now and a labor of love. I have spent my life painting, studying art and immersing myself in the history and cultures of the world. The Feature stories, Departments and Editorial components of A R T E S reflect my passion for those who look at the world through the critical and creative eye of the artist.

This site will carry regular updates that will not make it onto the e-magazine's Web site. In my travels and conversations with gallery owners, museum curators, appraisers, dealers, artists and the world in which they live and work, I regularly draw impressions and obeservations that become the basis for the stories that I am writing and editing. Often, this is were the true color and flavor of the piece are being drawn from.

Culture Vulture is a look behind the scenes at my diary entries, my notes for a piece, edited photo journals that add depth and range to a story (I promise it won't be an endless slide show) and some original articles that add depth and range to the A R T E S reading experience.

Victor the Vulture can be a road hog and break the rules... A R T E S is his well-behaved city cousin!

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A R T E S eMagazine is looking for skilled writers in the art, architecture and design space, too.