Burning Issues: February 2006

Here's some background information about Art Salvage, who we are, what we do, why we do it. There is also some scene setting, attitude, and general rant. You can either scroll through the text in its entirety, in which case start by clicking here, or you can get a quick overview of the subjects covered by scanning the 'sound bites' in the synopsis below, each of which link to the full text of that particular topic.

If you have any comments or suggestions we'd really like to hear from you >>

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Introduction to Art Salvage

Getting around the Art Salvage site is pretty easy; we've tried to make it as intuitive as possible and provide as rich a user experience as we can. The downside is relatively high file size. And that's just one more compelling reason to get broadband...

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Our take on painting in the 20th / 21st Centuries

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Text in full

Introduction to Art Salvage

Whether the culprits are Romans legions torching the library of Alexandria, Nazis attempting to eradicate non-Aryan influences, or Red Guardsmen intent on promulgating the Cultural Revolution, book burning is now synonymous with barbarism and is universally condemned by all right-minded individuals.

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Yet every day we blithely tolerate equivalent acts of  cultural vandalism by allowing thousands of potentially significant original artworks to be lost or destroyed - either willfully or through neglect. The scale of the loss is truly epic and the Art Salvage mission is to snatch the best of these paintings from the jaws of oblivion and in doing so make original art more readily available and popular.

In its own small way Art Salvage could we are seen as launching an assault on the mass produced art poster market.

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Art Salvage is so named to provoke comparison with an Architectural Salvage yard. If you have visited one of these fascinating establishments you may see our point. There'll  be scraps of buildings in various states of preservation, fire places, doors, guttering, building facades, old stair cases etc, from a disparate range of eras and styles. These artifacts have two things in common - one, they are disconnected from their original structure -.two, they have been preserved because they were deemed to have worth (and for worth read commercial value).

The paintings on the Art Salvage site are similarly disconnected. For the most part, they are from 'unknowns' and they are therefore detached from reference to a body of work and in consequence don't occupy a neat niche in art history. But, and this is my big point, this should not diminish their intrinsic worth.

Art Salvage suggests that the prospective purchaser take a step back, forget their knowledge of art history - and ask themselves whether they are really confident that they would recognise either the creative or commercial value of an Alfred Wallis, an L.S.Lowry, or a Grandma Moses if they stumbled over them in a garage sale? What if this site contains similar, but as yet unrecognised, genius?

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Why are paintings being lost? The short answer, we don't value them. The reasons for this disrespectful treatment have their roots deep in the cultural confusion of the 20th century, which saw most academic criteria discarded.

Just about every aspect of human endeavour has advanced further in the last 100 years than in the preceding 5,000. And it's been a very bumpy ride. In this century mainstream art underwent a seismic shift from the Victorian emphasis on romantic subject matters, pictorial representation and academic accomplishment to the wild unstructured worlds of, inspiration, expression, and concept; all the way from the tail end of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to Tracy Emin’s unmade bed.

Somewhere along the way mainstreem art lost its relevance to the man in the street and became what it is today, the province of an intellectual elite, leaving printed media, film, and television to become the dominant visual arts of our era.

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I have enormous respect for anyone who has the courage and commitment to put brush to canvas. And I therefore feel a great sense of responsibility when choosing a painting; not least because, in many cases, I can be the court of final appeal. Decide for it and it stands a chance, decide against it and it is likely to continue its downward spiral from obscurity to oblivion. For this reason I could be accused of being over cautious, but I operate on the basis that I would rather let ten bad paintings survive than risk loosing a good painting.

Inevitably personal taste plays a major role but those works that I see as teetering on the on the fine edge of acceptability I'll pass on to clients at no cost (via our FREE STUFF page) and thereby effectively delegating the ultimate decision. So in reality Art Salvage is just part of an extended filtering process.

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You've found a tramp on the street and, for whatever reason (maybe just the challenge) you decide to treat him to a makeover. He has a bath and a shave, you send him off for a haircut and a manicure, and dress him in fresh clothes. And he is no longer a tramp. (Ok, the above scenario was stolen from a Nick Nolte film, but it kinda makes my point.) Framing can perform the same rehabilitation for a painting. Crack off the old tired, out-dated surround, give it a light cleaning, choose and fit a brand new mount and frame, and the painting suddenly reveals the virtues that previously had only existed as an intuition.

We have a framing service which you can choose use or not. And we also have a 'virtual' framing service - for the small fee of £5.00 you can choose from our 12 framing options and we will we will insert your chosen painting into a virtual frame and publish it to a special page on our site so you can see exactly what it will look like. If you go on to order the frame from us the £5.00 is discounted from the framing cost. But you are just as welcome to print off the image of your painting in the virtual frame and get your local framer to carry out the work.

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Buy a mass manufactured print and it will loose 90%+ of it's value as soon as it leaves the store. It'll cost the same to frame as one of our originals, but it will have absolutely zero connection with the original artist. And that really is the whole point of Art Salvage - all our works are originals and unique. That's the very least you can expect from one of our paintings; and that's not too bad a starting point.

In line with the Art Salvage mission to popularise 'home grown' original art our paintings are not expensive. And in an area where commercial value is notoriously confused with artistic virtue the pricing of a painting can involve brave decisions. To put this into perspective some cases our paintings are priced at less than what it would cost to frame them or, for that matter, the cost of a new blank canvas. But don't let the price fool you, what they cost and what they are worth are separate issues. There isn't a painting on the Art Salvage site that I am not proud of and wouldn't hang on my own wall. And in terms of appreciation I think that these paintings are best regarded as the 'penny shares' of the art world. Buy them, enjoy them for what they are, and one day they may surprise you!

Moneys derived from the sale of these paintings contribute to the funding of further purchases and broaden the scope of the Art Salvage operation whilst redistributing these fascinating works to people who will best appreciate them. The aim is to create a resource where, regardless of the filtering process that has inevitably been applied, discoveries can still be made.

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You may disagree with this judgment (after all there are no hard and fast rules in the art world) in which case we would be pleased to pass them on to someone who will give it a good home at no charge save £2 each for packing plus the cost of uninsured postage.

Have a look at our free stuff page (click here >>>) and decide for yourself.

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Getting around the Art Salvage site is pretty easy; we've tried to make it as intuitive as possible and provide as rich a user experience as we can. The downside is relatively high file size, so if a viewer doesn't have the benefit of broadband the site could take a while to load (but we like to think that it's worth the wait!).

The site is not database driven yet (it's all carved out of solid html) therefore there isn't a sophisticated search function and you'll have to rummage around for what interests you (but that's probably more in keeping with the spirit of the site). You can click on virtually anything to get a deeper level of information. The home page links to thumbnails pages (categorised by media) which link to details pages, which link to further enlargements.

We go to great lengths to communicate the enthusiasm that we feel for our subject and, in pursuit of this end, many of the details pages have links to other sites - even (in the case of landscapes) to live webcams. We try to find photographs of the subject taken from as near as we can get them to the artist's viewpoint. The comparison between the artwork and the photograph is a great opportunity to focus on exactly what it is that the artist 'brings to the party' as well as to fix the work in its historical context (as in, 'look how much those trees have grown since the painting was completed').

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I left school at 17 with a modicum of artistic talent and found myself at a not uncommon crossroads. Did I get a job in the City (like dad) and paint as a hobby, or did I go to art school and make career of it? Art school in the seventies (?) not really a difficult choice! So I did the regulation four years (one at Walthamstow, three at Wimbledon), had a ball, graduated as an illustrator, had a book published, and worked in the creative industry for 35 years. But. I have always wondered what would have happened had I taken the other branch of the crossroads. And that thought has given me a real empathy with anyone who feels the impulse to engage in a creative activity for which they are not necessarily going to be paid.

You may have sensed that I have a certain passion for my subject. And that is undoubtedly true, but my love isn't blind (but, maybe, not 20 x 20 either), and I am very selective as to what I lavish my affections on. The paintings on this site all have some quality that 'lights my fire', 'rocks my world', 'floats my boat'. I'm sure that I could be accused of championing the underdog and that, in some cases, the humane thing to do would be to have it put down. But taste is taste and where I see interesting crossbreed you may see a flee bitten mutt. But differences of opinion are the stuff of life as far as art is concerned.

If asked to summarise my role I'd say something like this...think of me as a potential Wayne Hemingway of the Art World. Where he coined the term 'pensioner chic' my equivalent would be 'amateur chic'. Wayne Hemingway founded his Red or Dead empire on the inspiration that he found in charity shops, and I seek mine in equally unprepossessing circumstances. (But when you are digging for gold you don't mind getting your hands a little dirty.)

I'll leave you with these words of wisdom imparted by my uncle Jack (my family was lousy with painters!). When, in my 12th year, I plucked up the courage to ask him what was 'the ultimate secret of painting' he replied as follows...

“We’ll son, the secret of painting is to always start with the sky because if

you start at the top of the canvas and work your way down you won't get paint on your sleeve.”

To this day I have no idea whether he was being serious! 

With any questions, comments, or suggestions contact me - Paul Richard >>

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The evolution of art in the last 100 years

What triggered this (seemingly exponential) separation - world wars, technological advances, social developement. What is certain is that advances in physics so parallel the development of the visual arts as to suggest a causal link. Throughout time art and science, (seemingly polar opposites of human endeavour) have marched hand in hand. Who leads, who follows, who knows? Suffice it to say that it’s a debate that has, if not raged, at least simmered, for quite a while.

My personal contension is that art, being essentially intuitive, gets there first. Take this case in point. The single greatest leap in the scientific understanding of the world around us occurred with the discovery that light comes in discrete chunks and not a continuous stream. These particles, termed ‘quanta’, were unveiled in a paper published by the physicist Max Planck in 1900. The painter Seurat adopted pointallism, a technique which broke light down into discrete chunks, as early as 1864!

Both physicists and artists over the last hundred years, or so, have become less and less concerned with the solid, tangible, and mechanical, and more and more concerned with the intuitive, philosophical, and conceptual. The man in the street, however, still views the world from a Newtonian (essentially 17th century) perspective whereas, in reality, we are living in a quantum world. And if the layman doesn’t understand the simple basis of current physics what chance has he with art!

Where’s all this going? Well, there are two subjects that have always been regarded as synonymous, and those are art and painting. In the last hundred years it has been made graphically clear that they are separate activities. Art can be painting, and painting can be art, but they are not inseparable. And, while mainstream art movements have evolved into little more than gangs of intellectual pranksters, painters (especifically amateur painters) still paint. They do it for a multitude of reasons, but mainly, and simply, because some people gain satisfaction from representing the world in two dimensions, and some people gain satisfaction from seeing the results.

You won’t find rolls of carpet felt, stacks of bricks, bisected animals, or unmade beds at Art Salvage. You will find paintings, some have great technique, some naïve, simple, expressive, all chosen because they have some (maybe unquantifiable) merit.

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The amateur painter is a real national resource and in his or her own humble way reveals the untouched creative soul of the country. While mainstream art has become more and more rarefied the amateur keeps painting, feet on the ground, doing what painters have done throughout the ages; representing a three dimensional world (as they experience it) in two dimensions for sheer pleasure.

The amateur is less, of course, likely to inhabit an ivory tower than he is an ivory bungalow or semi. He's the ordinary man in the street who sometimes can do extraordinary things. To corrupt the words of the Bud Flannigan tune that introduces 'Dads Army'..."Mr. Brown goes of to town on the eight twenty one, then he comes home each evening and he's ready with his...for gun read paintbrush , pallet, and grubby old smock!" I genuinely believe that it would be possible to make the case that the amateur is more in tune with public taste than the mainstream artist who's (courageous, but sometimes perverse) mission is to challenge current values and to gratuitously shock.

In some respects there is a parallel between the ways football and art have developed over the last hundred years or so. At the beginning of the last century football was a working man's sport, played by working men, paid working men's wages. Now players are remunerated so highly, and in consequence lead such exotic lives, that most of us find it almost impossible to relate to them. But there is another side to football, the side that is of no particular interest to the media, never hits the headlines, and you definitely won't see on television but is, nevertheless, as vital and important as the professional game. I'm referring to the amateur sides, the Sunday leagues, the school kids in playgrounds, the five a side teams, all of them booting a ball around for sheer fun.

It's this grass roots enthusiasm that fuels the sport and would certainly continue to exist and thrive if all the major stadia and high priced professional players disappeared one day in a puff of smoke. Would people stop painting if a similar fate overtook all the world's contemporary art establishments? I think not.

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Primitive artists graduated from being mere influences and became celebrated in their own right - painters such as Henri Rousseau, Grandma Moses, L. S. Lowry and latterly artists like Billy Childish. But in truth they are regarded by the art establishment more as artistic anomalies or curiosities than serious contenders. And you can be certain that many more naive painters were overlooked because the difference between acceptably primitive and just plain bad is a very moot intellectual concept. So who decides which are celebrated and which are mocked - whether the Emperor is clothed or naked? Usually it's those with a vested commercial interest. And unfortunately discovering joy in a one off painting by an unknown artist, no matter what its virtues, just won't pay the rent on a gallery in Cork Street. And that's where Art Salvage attempts to plug the gap.

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Broadly speaking there are two categories of amateur artist. The naive painter who makes up for a lack of proficiency with charm and enthusiasm, and the untaught painter who nevertheless possesses a natural, seemingly God given, talent. I am privileged to have personal experience of both these types of individuals from within my own family.

The naive painter: let me introduce my great uncle - a heroically productive naïve painter. A quiet, simple man, retired many years, who spent the remainder of his long life painting. He'd paint in oils and he'd paint on virtually anything. One of his favourite surfaces was the lids of tobacco tins. Sadly I have only one of my great uncle's paintings - it's a view of Waltham abbey from across the River Lee. Technically it's a disaster, but I love it – not in spite of it's lack of technique, but precisely because of it.

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The untaught prodigy: now meet my great aunt Florrie who produced a torrent of watercolours just for her own pleasure, again late in life. But, unlike great uncle Dave, her work is distinguished by stunning draughtsmanship and impeccable watercolour technique. A truly gifted individual, untutored, unassuming, but inspired to paint. Again I have just one of her paintings.

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Way back in the early '80s Charles Saatchi poached my delightful, Kew trained gardener. I am not suggesting for a second that this troubled his conscience, but as a gracious gesture he suggested that she (the gardener) should invite us for dinner at his home / come gallery in London's St John's Wood. This afforded me a fabulous opportunity to roam unsupervised around the converted Victorian chapel which he had packed with an amazing array of (now priceless) contemporary works of art. (would you believe that, in one room Carl Andre [of brick fame] had actually hand drawn the pattern of the wall paper!).

This was leading edge modern art as few have the opportunity to observe it - in a genuine domestic setting. And for some pieces it worked, but most were diminished by the relatively small scale environment and close juxtaposition with other works. I felt that they needed room to breath, the big stage, indeed that the big stage was an integral part of their act. And shortly afterwards most of these works found a more appropriate setting when they were relocated to the Doris Saatchi Gallery at the Tate.

The general public, having given up trying to understand contemporary art, are now inclined to believe that if an artwork has a whole wall to itself in a major gallery it must, by definition, be important. And the process works in reverse - find a painting at a provincial auction covered in dust and being sold as part of a job lot which includes a few items of damaged crockery, a cuddly toy and a broken can opener and it is not going to exactly scream 'serious work of art'. What gives me a particular thrill is discovering paintings in marginal circumstances and re-clothing them in what I believe is their appropriate context - thereby revealing their worth.

I achieve this rehabilitation by recognising the painting's intrinsic quality, cleaning and/or restoration (if required), researching the artist, the subject matter, the era, making reference to, and comparison with, known artists, finally virtual reframing and re-presenting the painting via the Art Salvage web site. Effectively giving it an honest review and presenting it in its own room in an art gallery (albeit on-line).

It is worth noting that the most likely amateur painting to survive is one that is representational. Very few abstract paintings produced by amateurs outlive separation from their creators and that's because they need the suspension of disbelief that is really only possible in a gallery setting. Although I would like to have more abstracts currently Art Salvage portfolio only has four - and it's not for want of looking.

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