June 7 - July 26, 2014
Gallery Two
179 Easy Steps to a Masterpiece
V&B (Alex Jacobs and Ellemieke Schoenmaker)
179 Easy Steps to a Masterpiece is the answer to every aspiring artist's questions. An easy How to… like Painting for Dummies. However the 179 easy steps might not be so easy after all and the more you get into the work the more irrational it seems to become. Yes, we don’t know what we’re not doing. But we are trying to satisfy our need to be inspired, our need to be free and our need to be bedazzled. We don’t need rules of engagement. We don’t want our work to look like good art.
This show uses a spectrum of ideas on how to make a masterpiece, how to survive the life of an artist and what choices to make. We have tried to stay as open minded as possible by varying the way we paint and using anything that inspires us. From self-help book titles like 6 Steps to a Happy Life to the everlasting burden of Sisyphus carrying a painting of himself up the hill. The artist's life, a Sisyphus-arbeid*
Alongside the Sisyphus painting (Pointless Acts of Struggle for Heroism) we can see the artist as a healer of an empty canvas or is she using her extrasensory perception (ESP) to see the future of the painting? (Building Conscious Awareness of Color, Composition and Concept). On another wall we can see an artist trying to make sense of an abundance of images (This Paintings needs Attention from an Expert in Statistics). The Disappearance of Reality uses ‘Analogue Photoshop’ to make things disappear, raising questions about the manipulation of reality in the media. Recently we were working on a small sculpture for a children’s exhibition which we titled The Story about the Argument between the Curator and the Llama. This title makes perfect sense in context to this exhibition. We are the Curator and we are the Llama and most of all We Argue. But we have faith and we keep trying in order to never become a part of a million difficult steps to a poor frustrated artists life.
*Sisyphus-arbeid: (Sisyphus-labor) an impossible, heavy, useless task
