Painting Box for Russia
Eventually...
I have a solo exhibition opening November 20 in Rochester, NY, entitled “How to Price a Painting—Recent Work by Ron Throop”. I wrote about the concept in February after getting some critical feedback from an essay about Stuckism. A 20th century paradigm stubbornly refuses to leave the art scene, though every one of us, artist and non-artist alike, have repeatedly asked it to vacate its obnoxious self from the premises. Those of us not “made” by the powers invested in visual art, music, and publishing (most everyone) must suffer the world’s champions thrust before us every second, every day, until our brains begin to actually suspect there are no actors unless Hollywood® and Netflix® say, no painters but whomever Christies® sets up on the auction block, no singers that I Heart Radio® hasn’t imprinted on a microchip, no poets but Maya Angelou playing pat-a-cake with a muppet on Sesame Street. Modern pop painter Roy Lichtenstein has been been dead for 25 years and his paintings are traded among billionaires for millions of dollars. He taught industrial design and painting at the college next door. Made 7 paintings in 1957. Five years later sexy women in sunglasses wanted to make out with him in Venice. That’s the power of sleek promotion! Money makes money, and money takes you everywhere—from European hotspots to the make-out session with the sixth extinction.
The 20th century needs to go away. Celebrity worship isn’t even for the birds anymore. We should stop at the birds and let celebrity sink further into the hell of progressive history. We could do nice for the planet and just sit in our nests and sing to the sun, for the joy of life, of being gifted another day to use our senses to their fullest potential. Every solar plexus gets this—our guts know what uneasy is; there are no lies getting made (and believed!) below the brain. I am ready to devolve if that means finding out what human is again. Let’s just keep the antibiotics while we figuratively take the Tom Cruises and Taylor Swifts out at the knees. I want to know who the almond growers and pickers are, and I want to make a painting for them because that’s what I can do. It’s very nice that they feed me, profoundly important because almonds are a source of good fat and facilitate the delivery of myself toward another dawn.
No doubt I’m off track. What about this painting show and the Russian box?
Well, I’m not even close to poor/rich, though that’s where I need to be. I know it can never come to fruition in my lifetime. But I can dream. I can sum up what success is to an energetic dreamer who paints. It’s this: More time to walk one way half a day, and return on the other half more awake than when I awoke. I carry a sack to forage, and a journal to log more dreams. Paint on the dreary days and be indebted with my life to those who shelter, clothe, and feed my body in homeostatis.
Still off track.
The Russian box is a parcel filled with paintings that were ready to be delivered to Saint Petersburg for an exhibition with my painter friend Olga Knaus. Then the lockdown happened (March 2020), and the box has set beside me in the studio unopened, ready to go, ever since. So at this upcoming exhibition, I will display it with thumbnail images of what’s inside, price it according to my standard equation for selling art (see here again), and hope I get some interest. I’ll attach a donation sack, so I can afford to mail it to Olga if there are no takers. If neither successes are achieved, I will keep the box sealed forever and bury my bones with it.
Here are some of its contents, to whet the appetite for fair priced original wall-hangings. But you’ll have to buy the lot (20 paintings). That means I’ll be inviting the 20th century to my solo exhibition.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
—Walt Whitman, 19th century present moment gold medalist.
Thanks for reading!
Ron