I got an A Plus!

damnit! ive been so incredibly hungry these past two days! I don't get it. This weekend i felt all thin and stuff
maybe its because i havent gotten a lot of sleep

hey if anyone reading this hasn't seen ill will press & foamy then go HERE NOW: Your Lord And Master..

Crammed down with tons of projects.
tonight isnt as bad cause i had two incredibly stressful things due today. Art History midterm sucked bad. I'll be thrilled to get a B on that test.
definately a reflection of my lack of study time. :\
BUT! On the up note! check this out!!!:D
(this has now become my refridgerator door)

This isn't any old grade either.. I don't think i've EVER gotten an A+ from this professor before!!

Next adv type project: I'm going to make a "Target brand" wine gift set complete with glasses!;D

Incase u actually feel like reading my toils..

The life of Ralph Albert Blakelock is an intriguing account of an artist struggling to make a name for himself as a professional between the mid 1800’s and the early 20th century. A discussion of the public’s affinity for Blakelock’s experimentations in material and subjective, romantic style is impossible without the mention of his mental state throughout his professional career. A schism occurs between his earliest, more realistic works done in the Hudson River School style and his latest pieces that were painted during his institutionalization up until his death in 1919. Although he was always recognized as an innovative, visionary thinker that seemed steps ahead of his artistic contemporaries—indeed, almost foreshadowing the impressionistic release of brushwork that became favored over the strict, detailed realism that American masters such as Church and Bierstadt—Blakelock’s career was riddled with set-backs as he received almost no recognition by artistic society prior to 1916. By this time, his newfound fame had come too late.
Because of his original, romantic and often poetic style, Blakelock is the most forged painter in American History. His “trademark” moonlit landscapes leaped into the spotlight public eye with the sale of his Brook By Moonlight on February 22, 1916 that acquired an unheard of price for an American painter--$20,000. After this grandiose sale, Blakelock was praised with the lavish title of “the finest painter in American history”. The denotation of Blakelock as such is indeed extravagant but there is no doubt that Blakelock was one of the most original American artists, and not just with his unique experiments with medium.
Between the years of 1869 and 1873, opting not to follow in the wake of the majority of American artists in taking the Grand Tour of Europe and studying under the masters of the Old World, Blakelock instead chose nature as his guide and explored the untouched American West. Ralph A. Blakelock was not completely without training before he ventured into the American frontiers. Although too young to be drafted during the Civil War, Blakelock had the opportunity for studying at the Free Academy, (later called the City College) and was admitted into the class of 1869.
Around the time of his admittance, many new ideas were cropping up the American art world. A small group of American artists who deemed themselves The Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, promoted the idea that romantic elements, in a search for truth in the art, should be revered over the “old, Claudian conventions of landscape painting [that] drew more attention to formulas of art than of nature.” This change of thinking would be something that slowly gained momentum after the Civil War and persisted throughout the 19th century as an unanswered question in the minds of American painters, critics and viewers. There was no doubt that the taste of the American public was changing. As the grandiose canvases of Church and Bierstadt became too pompous for American tastes, the search for a style that was in harmony with the American mindset of lyrical individualism was broadened as the war-torn country was reconstructing, and looking towards the future for a deeper synthesis between man and nature, and man with himself.
In choosing the artistic profession over a career as a doctor, Blakelock was going against his father’s wishes and against the tide of ever-changing economy. In 1869 Blakelock has secured enough money to travel westward, supporting his travels by selling his artwork along the way. It was in the remote American West that Blakelock began diverging from his teaching at the Free Academy, which at the time was heavily influenced by the Hudson River School of detailed, realistic landscape painters. While his earliest studies out West remained tight, academic and truthful to the realism of his subjects, the time Blakelock spent in the wilderness either alone or with American prospectors or Native American tribes shows his own stylistic development. There was not a sudden change of style as evident after his institutionalization, but instead a slow, bouncing effect between looser brushwork, experiments with paint application and varnishing and his learned, detailed studies in the accepted style of “Church-esque” landscape painting. Technique was not the only defining detail of Blakelock’s true American artistic identity. His decision to travel westward instead of crossing the Atlantic for Europe had the effect of literally placing him into the heart of a Bierstadt or Church painting and wandering off the white-man’s mapped territory into the haven of the virgin, untouched wilderness. Blakelock wished to paint truly unique scenes of the American frontier.
Ralph Blakelock’s sharp rise in popularity after 1916 took all but a lifetime to appear. Blakelock was a confident young man when beginning his studies in 1869 but the choice of an artistic career turned him away from mechanical Industrialism to face the greater, unpredictable machine of New York society. Ms. Beatrice Adam’s “rediscovery” of the artist doubled the public’s previously dismissive interest in Blakelock to a voyeuristic frenzy, with reporters and collectors jockeying for interviews and purchases to out-do the last, feeding the new wave of the American Romantic style that seemed to fill in the last of the searching void of poetic, personal and subjective work that was originally torn open in the wake following the Civil War. This public craze is a far cry from the critics who generally ignored Blakelock’s submissions to the National Academy, and described him as, “never expressing a really coherent or thoughtful idea in any of his works, and achieving only a passing success of certain vague but agreeable harmonies of color.” This quote from the November issue of Harper’s Weekly in 1886, reveals the critic’s resistance to step outside the pre-set standard of the Hudson River Style rooted in the Baroque landscape tradition. Because of Blakelock’s previously unknown status, the explosion of a “hitherto unknown artist made things exceptionally easy for the picture forgers,” who, after taking advantage of Blakelock’s insanity and lack of ability to defend his own name, made Ralph A. Blakelock the most forged artist in American History. The sky-high prices that were rolling in on Blakelock’s work made him a tempting figure to impersonate. “One effect of the forgeries was to make is daughter give up painting herself when she found that her pictures were being passed off as her father’s.”
Blakelock’s rise to fame would have never been realized without the help of Mrs. Beatrice Van Rensselaer Adams. On Blakelock’s long road of hardships, this seemingly guardian rescuer who had come to save his career, was in fact the wife of a jailed swindler, who manipulated everyone who came in contact with her. Blakelock’s family, the press, and Blakelock himself were placed in compromising positions when the consensual agreement by Cora Blakelock, R.A. Blakelock’s wife, to make Mrs. Adams his legal guardian. Adams was responsible for egging the media around Blakelock’s fame, and in doing so, upped the value of his paintings by the sensationalism of the existence of Blakelock’s many forgers. Under guise of protecting Blakelock, Adams blocked all communication from his family and forced Blakelock to continue to paint canvases that she hoped to sell for large sums of money. It was not unusual for a publication at this time to run exploitive stories on Blakelock’s state of mental sanity and or genius, this during a period where artistic genius and madness were generally accepted to go hand in hand.
The problem of Blakelock’s forgeries was not resolved by Mrs. Adam’s involvement in the “protection” or should one say “exploitation” of Blakelock’s talents. Indeed it would seem that in the end, Blakelock had the last laugh. During his forced trials of painting, he produced work, but either signed in a strange crytogram or not at all. All of Adam’s hard work in directing media attention towards his genius and those who sought to deceive the public (though ironically the public never realized Mrs. Adam’s own deception) through forgeries, in the end turned upon her as she could not sell Blakelock’s paintings for any amount of money.
Blakelock’s genius was visionary and ahead of his time. His expressionism and subjective views brought the American public into his world of landscape, something that was so unlike anything ever seen before in the new country. It was Blakelock’s success in experimentation of pigment, varnish and other materials and application, along with his dedication to find unique, untouched wilderness to bring to his viewers that made his voice echo beyond the boundaries of the traditional landscape formulas of Bierstadt and Church. The abuse of the forgers, the malevolent manipulations of Van Rensselaer Adams, and Blakelock’s own inability to cope, sadly overshadow the universal draw of his dedication to career, originality of work and his true-to-self expression. It was this fantasy of a genius-gone-mad through the workings of his profession that held the public in a romanticized sway that fueled the fire of the already burning American desire for the more poetic, individual landscape, and allowed others to profit on what was once one of America’s greatest artistic minds.

Bibliography
Vincent, Glyn. The Unknown Night. Grove Press, New York. 2003.
“The Academy of Design,” Harper’s Weekly. vol. XXX, no. 1562 (11/27/1886), p.760.
“The Art of Blakelock,” The Nation (5/4/1916), p. 473.
deKays, Charles. “Blakelock and Maynard—Pictures from France—E.M. Ward,
Sargent, and O’Kelly.” New York Times, 5/2/1879.
Evans, Dorinda. “Art and Deception: Ralph Blakelock and His Guardian.” American Art
Journal, vol. 19, no. 1 (1987), pp. 39-50.

^-- note on the bibliography.. I got to research on Microfilm/fiche for the actual articles that were written in 1886 or whatever. I'm such a nerd, but I had so much fun looking through all those old magazines! Not only did I get more ideas for other projects, I gained a greater appreciation for the 2nd floor of our library...
Totally cool;)

Posted by BLiNK at February 17, 2004 05:45 PM | TrackBack