"I think we draw the spiritual from many wells. The horse -- and I’m mostly familiar with the racehorse -- is one of the innocents in life, very much like the young girl in todays society."
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"Those who value what artists can and should say about the age in which we live are losing patience. They wait in vain for those who can interpret contemporary life against the rich history that led to it." WJI
OVERVIEW:
Windsor is currently writing and painting in Jeju Island. He will be giving a speech at Korea University on Art and Innocence this fall. How To Become a Famous Artist and Still Paint Pictures is being revised for publication for a Korean language edition.
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FOR NEARLY TWO YEARS Windsor lived and painted in a peaceful colonial town deep in the plantation country in the state of Veracruz, an old and mystical part of Mexico. |
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Published 2009
I’ve long admired the traditional arts of Korea, particularly the high arts of calligraphy and ink and wash paintings, the historical arts at the heart of this exhibition. Even the landscapes and florals seem rooted in a land that predates contemporary times.
Much of today’s art suffers from its detachment from history. Not only is this heritage ignored in work filling museums and galleries across the globe, often history’s very existence is denied. The Postmodernist has gone to great lengths with their argument that theirs is a new art uninfluenced by the past and by the legion of fine art painters and sculptors who labored before them.
Happily, it hasn’t silenced those who steadfastly believe that art is neither a clever invention nor a raw idea, but a dark, well-concealed pathway lit by momentary revelations. These provoke us to travel further. There’s no end to the path, because there’s no end to the search for what can be seen as true and inevitably beautiful, even, or especially, when this thing of beauty is wrought from the ordinary, unconventional or ugly.
The language of art derives from its history, one delightfully present in this exhibition. The artists who’ve mastered that language are among us. That almost all of them populate the past is no reason to ignore them. Seek them out. Study them. They will teach you. They will lead you, and, if you’re lucky, they will argue with you. Sometimes the disagreement will get heated. See this as a good sign, for it means you have begun to veer from their path to your own.
Wherever the conversation leads, there is no artist alive who cannot benefit from it. These denizens of another world are also your members.
Congratulations to each of you, and special thanks to my good friend and your chairman, 이영일, for inviting my comments here.
Windsor Joe Innis
Jeju Island
Windsor's Mystic Island
Korean edition:
윈저와 신비의 섬
윈저 조 이니스
172mm × 225mm
272pages
ISBN: 978-89-929-8464-5 07800
$15
Mellon Limited
Shinwon Literary Rights
March 15, 2008
Softcover; $75.00
Size: 10" x 14"
Non-fiction
ISBN 13: 978-89-960065-1-0
278-pages
222 color plates
48 b/w photos
"Unique, fascinating, thoughtful and thought-provoking, "Innocence Abroad" is a superbly presented art study that is enthusiastically recommended for personal, professional, and academic library Art History reference collections." -Midwest Book Review
Windsor - Girl with Ugly Fruit
"In seeing the truth, Windsor
has added another perspective on how
to see beauty." -Donald Kuspit
