celebrity artists

A few years back I was at Jenkins Showler Gallery in White Rock and came across the work of Toller Cranston. Toller Cranston? The Olympic medal-winning figure skater? Sure enough it was the same guy, painting and selling his colourful, stylized art for prices I can only dream about. It got me thinking about the celebrity-turned-artist phenomenon and what a huge boon it could be to galleries. Why promote and risk time and money on gifted but untested artists whose submissions they have to turn away on a daily basis, when celebrities at all ends of the talent spectrum can trot their work in and it will fly off the walls?

Not long after that I was listening to singer/songwriter Jann Arden being interviewed on the radio and she started talking about her Calgary restaurant and how she'd done a few paintings to decorate the place and how well they were selling. I got hopping mad and wanted to blast her for ignoring her so-called responsibility to real visual artists who hadn't yet made it and who might need a place to hang and sell their work. (Too bad it wasn't a call-in show but I'd probably have been too cowardly to call anyway. :) It was probably one of those days when I'd received a gallery rejection. In any case, it was a serious moment of sour grapes on my part. The truth is, I've never actually seen her work and she's probably quite talented!

It happened again a couple of days ago while looking at best-selling author Jon Katz's blog. He mentioned how a Vermont gallery would be selling his evocative photographs of farm life in upstate New York:

March 9, 2009 - A few years ago, I would never have imagined that a classy art gallery would want to show and sell my photos. Now, it has happened, a big step for me, and an affirmation of the creative community of encouragement that was one of the ideas behind Bedlam Farm.

I'm not proud to admit it, but I blew my cool. It has been a bit of a bad run for me lately: a long winter, backfiring hormones, very little inspiration, too many family/community responsibilities and very high levels of distractibility. In other words, bad attitude on overdrive and very little work produced. Note to self: never answer the phone or write emails when the fight or flight (in my case, fight or fight) instinct kicks in. Oops. I wrote an email to Jon Katz, who did not accept my whining graciously. He called me on it and forced me to think about my attitude. Eventually I started thinking about my son, Adam, the actor-writer-artist. He's good at all these things. What if he becomes a success at one, then wants to explore one of the others? Would I begrudge him that opportunity just because he'd already been a success elsewhere? Maybe I should just leave the judging up to the 'consumer' and stick to painting.

Taking it one step further, I realized that there are bona fide visual artists amongst the ranks of celebrities in other fields, Joni Mitchell being one. And if you think about it, she could be the world's most amazing painter but since she won acclaim, icon status even, for her work as a musician first, she will always be a painter second, no matter that she was a painter before she was a musician. How fair is that? Well, I for one am not going to cry in my beer about poor old Joni's fate, but it definitely puts a different spin on things.

Attitude restored, I'm just happy that in spite of economic juggling I get to paint, period, rather than spend the rest of my life at the front of a classroom or behind a desk. How lucky am I?