Mentally challenged  artist hailed

here are a few of his paintings

artist interviewing artist eric adrian lee

eric adrian lee  is a painter living in portland oregon

here is his interview and pics

Tim: what are your favorite materials to work with?
Eric Adrian lee:
Well, I don't really know. I have consistently worked with Acrylic and Latex paints (on canvas), but I usually make mixed media work. So to answer the question, it's really whatever I have at my disposal at the time. I like found objects because of the pre-existing character that the objects usually have. So I use that sort of stuff if I can figure out how to use it. At the moment I am working with various types of sand.

Tim: what artists are you inspired by?
Eric Adrian lee:
I have a very eclectic background. I started "painting" as a teenager while I was living in the Czech Republic, but I was doing graffiti then, so I guess my first real influences were Czech and German graffiti artists. In college I was painting heavily under the influence of Robert Rauschenberg, Jean-Michel Basquiat may be even Andy Warhol I don't know. Mostly the first two. I guess the artists that still had a commonality with Graffiti. I later became very influenced by Japanese art, both new and old. Recently I have been studying people like Antoni Tàpies, Julian Schnabel, Anselm Kiefer and Mark Rothko. I like this newer guy (well new to me) named Ed Lentsch too. I like his texture. Also check out my good friend Harry Walters.


Tim: tell us about your educational background. Do you have formal training in art?
Eric Adrian lee: Yes I do. When I was young I thought I never wanted to go to art school so that I would be completely self-taught. Not now, I'm glad I had some formal training. It wasn't what I expected, but I was extremely helpful to me. My teacher was very good and helping me teach myself and realize my own ideas. I attended Greenville College for 4 years as a painting major. Greenville College is a private liberal arts College in Greenville Illinois.

Tim: When did you decide to pursue art?
Eric Adrian lee: Probably my freshman year of College in 1998. At least that's when I figured that maybe I could do this full time and make money doing it.


Tim: is there anything else you would like to tell us about your background in regards to how your art has evolved?
Eric Adrian lee: Over time I guess... That was supposed to be a joke, but really... I'm not sure. You get older, your opinions change and I guess you start looking for things that make you peaceful inside. You know, when you are young, you need all the noise etc. and you can't imagine ever being like your grandparents, listening to their classical music and watching their cooking shows. Now I'm starting to understand that I guess. I have always looked forward to being old. But back to the art question, I find that I become more minimal as time goes by. At least this year.

Tim: this part is for you to ask yourself a question or write
anything fun nonsense anything you want...
Eric Adrian Lee: how about a statement? I do what I want.

Tim: When do you know that a piece is finished?
Eric Adrian Lee: Good question. I ask myself that one all of the time. My answer is I just know. Sometimes I will finish a painting and just stare at it for a few weeks until I realize that it is definitely finished. The most minimal ones take me the longest usually. But it is a good practice I think. I mean looking at your own work and taking it in.


Tim: how does contemporary life impact your creative practice?
Eric Adrian Lee: Not sure. I don't feel like I relate to contemporary life much anymore. Although, I do watch an obscene amount of Television. I wasn't allowed to watch it when I was a kid much, so now I find I watch TV all of the time. It is a good way for me to stop thinking about the paintings I am working on (which I need to do sometimes). You need to take breaks if painting is what you do full time (I think). Sorry, didn't mean to turn that one into a TV question.


Tim: What motivates you to create?
Eric Adrian Lee: Finding new sensations I guess. I just have to make stuff. It's my personality. I would rather create than waste my time drinking etc... I like to try and surprise myself with what I make, so I guess painting or making music help me to do that (occasionally).


Tim: why did you choose to work in the medium(s) that you use?
Eric Adrian Lee: I guess in the work that I am currently making, the materials I have chosen just work in a way that keeps my interest focused. I like materials that have very natural or organic qualities. I like for my paintings to look as if they somehow could have created themselves on some level. Like they have a life within themselves. I often try to paint in a manner that my hand isn't extremely visible in the work. Almost as if the composition is a natural occurrence rather than an artist's dictation.


Tim: what is your studio like? Can you go into detail about your studio routine? Do you work in silence-- listen to music?
Eric Adrian Lee: My studio isn't huge, but I use the space well. It is basically half of my living room. We have high ceiling though, which is very nice, I feel like I have more thinking room for some reason. My studio routine? Well, that has changed over the years. In school I usually painted from about 6pm to 4am. I like the night and I like white light, so I had fluorescent lighting then. Now that I am married things are very different. I tend to paint in the mourning and during the day while my wife is at work. Usually between the hours of 9 and 5 ish. I've gotten used to painting in daylight, it's similar to fluorescent light but with out the weird frequencies from the lights. I also prefer to paint alone. I usually listen to music unless I am "stuck" on a painting and need full concentration. I usually listen to ambient and droney music. Stuff like Boards of Canada, My Bloody Valentine, Freescha, Vincent Gallo, Clara Rockmore... I guess I listen to everything, but I like it to be low key. Oh, and one other thing I might mention that may be interesting is that I don't eat while I work. I find it distracting. I just drink a lot of water and tea all day. I usually eat my first meal around 5pm.... Wow, that was a long answer.

Tim: Do you have any upcoming exhibits? Where readers can view your work? OR .COMS?
Eric Adrian Lee: Well, nothing on the schedule at the moment, but you can see some of my work at my dealer's gallery in Portland. Her website is www.margojacobsenartdealer.com.
Also I am represented in Denver at Rule. www.rulegallery.com. I am in the process of getting my personal newly designed website up, but it isn't quite finished yet. It will be here: www.ericadrianlee.com. And of coarse you can find my paintings and music on myspace at www.myspace.com/ericadrianlee.


Tim: favorite word?
Eric Adrian Lee: Googolhedron. No, but that's a good one. I have no favorites when it comes to words.

Tim: least favorite words?
Eric Adrian Lee: That's funny; I actually do have a least favorite word... Luncheon. And the only way to make it worse is put the word light in front of it. "Light Luncheon"... I hate it.

Tim: favorite color/colors to work with?
Eric Adrian Lee: Earth tones, black and white.


Eric Adrian Lee: Thanks for the interview. It was fun. And thanks listening to my long answers.

tim .. thank you eric

feel free to ask eric questions and i will contact him for answers

click here for eric adrian lees myspace page

more interviews on the way i will try to drop an interview a week on sundays

kudos welcome thank you

if you would like to see more interviews click here

please subscribe to my blog thank you

french version

here are a few of my myspace pet peevs in no special order
people that use comment pic shrinking codes :)
when you get an add request
and you accept and never hear from that person again
when you reply to a bulletin with a congratulations and they dont thank you lame when somone uses a massive more then three inch main avitar pic
when somone advertises in your comment section thats lame i used to do it but i stopped doing it
when an artist wont put other artist on there top 8
ha ha when somone puts only celebrities on there top 8
when someone emails you about being on your top 8 and you say no sorry and you never hear from them again i wont name names thats omg lame here is one of the worse ones for me when somone sends you a huge comment pic and doesnt allow html comment pics themselvs post your myspace pet peevs this should get interesting

update on myspace pet peeves

when an artist doesnt allow pic comments aka html comments

why? i wonder

i didnt meen to offend anyone please dont take this bulletin seriously its just me playing

repost from www.theartnewspaper.com/

In mid July in the massive modernist Supreme Court in Darwin, a frail Aboriginal man with a shock of grizzled white hair and beard took the witness stand to give evidence in a case that goes to the heart of alleged "carpet-bagging"-dealers exploiting indigenous artists to make a profit-in the country's booming indigenous art trade.



Tommy Watson, who only began painting five years ago, is one of the new stars of the Aboriginal art world; his 2006 work Waltitjatta sold for A$240,000 ($197,160) at a sale in May held by Lawson Menzies auctioneers in Sydney-an ­auction that also saw the first Aboriginal painting break the A$1m ($840,000) price barrier, the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye's Earth's Creation.



Watson is also one of eight indigenous artists from Australia whose work is included in the Musée du Quai Branly, the new museum in Paris dedicated
to the arts and civilisations of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.
The case has been brought to the Northern Territory Supreme Court by Red Sand Art Gallery and its proprietors Peter and Nathan King, who are seeking damages for alleged defamation in two magazine articles.



According to their counsel,
Paul Heyward-Smith QC, the articles invited ­readers to consider them as "carpet-baggers" exploiting Watson.
The defendants are Alison Harper, a former director of what was then Phillips Fine Art in Australia, who publishes the quarterly Australian Art Market Report, and journalist Jeremy Eccles, who wrote two articles in Harper's magazine in late 2005 and early 2006.



The defendants claim truth, fair comment and qualified privilege.



Tommy Watson was appearing as a witness for the defendants.
Born around 1935 in the desert of central Australia, Watson cannot read or write, and speaks only a smattering of English.



He moves between Irrunytya, a small community of 150 people described as "one of the most impoverished places on earth" and the town of Alice Springs, a day's drive away.



Speaking through an interpreter in his native Pitjantjatjara language, Watson told the court of his dealings with the Red Sand Art Gallery in Alice Springs in 2005 when his paintings started attracting attention from collectors.



"I brought a lot of paintings in and I gave [them] to some mob and they didn't pay me," he said.
Watson supplied the gallery with 41 paintings over four months, but how much money changed hands and how it was distributed is still to be established.



Legal searches found that Watson's niece had received A$61,000 ($50,100) in cash and second-hand cars on his behalf, and the gallery later showed the court receipts showing that it had paid a further A$11,000 ($9,200) for used vehicles.



At the time his paintings were selling for over A$30,000 ($24,650) each.



The gallery began ­placing the works with auction houses in Sydney and Melbourne; to date they have realised A$347,300 ($285,300) for 20 works sold so far and are likely to make around A$844,700 ($693,920) when all are auctioned, according to Adrian Newstead, head of indigenous art at Lawson Menzies.
The Senate investigation
The hearings in Darwin came just as the Australian Senate's standing committee dealing with the arts handed down a landmark report after a year of hearings on the state of indigenous art, in which accusations of widespread "carpet-­bagging" figured largely.
The Senate report surveyed an art movement involving as many as 6,000 indigenous artists working in over 80 remote communities spread across Northern Australia.



They generate between A$400m and $500m ($328m-$411m) in sales a year, although the majority of this would be categorised as tourist or ethnographic art rather than the fine art capturing attention among collectors.
The report found that although there is currently an annual increase in sales of 40% to 50%, the number of artists has remained steady.



This means either that artists are getting more for their work, obviously the case for some, or that money is going to other art market participants-raising "the question of whether artists are getting a fair share of the growing value of their works.



The increasing criticism of 'carpet-baggers', scrutiny of the ­secondary market, and growing calls for a resale royalty (droit de suite) scheme, all may be ­symptoms of this concern."
The committee also noted that some cheaper-end "Aboriginal" works were being mass produced by backpackers or imported from Chinese factories.



Indigenous art derives from love for a particular piece of "country", the Senate inquiry was told by Isabelle de Beaumont, who buys paintings from Aboriginal communities for European private ­collectors and institutions.



"You take that away and the art loses its roots as well as the specificity and power that captures so much international attention and acclaim," she testified.



Sometimes particular images and styles are vested in communities and handed from custodian to custodian in perpetuity, she added-a property not recognised by Australian copyright law.



"Aboriginal" dots, lines and stylised figures are freely used to decorate products from clothes to buildings and airliners.
The Senate report recommends a two-year ­period for the Aboriginal art industry to put a code of self-regulation into practice, otherwise a ­mandatory regime under the Trade Practices Act and policed by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission could be considered.



But the committee balked at recommendations that Australia introduce a resale royalty system to ­ameliorate the exploitation of Aboriginal artists.



So far, the majority from the ruling Liberal-National parties have opposed the idea on the grounds that it "would not help most artists".



However, the Labor party has just announced that it will introduce a resale royalty scheme, if it wins elections at the end of the year-as polls currently suggest it will.



"This [is] particularly pertinent to indigenous artists," said Tamara Winikoff, of the National Association for the Visual Arts.



"The value of the work rises so sharply in their own lifetimes as they are resold, and they don't get anything from that."
However, there are also issues that Aboriginal artists need to address.



The market has been beset with forgeries and there are cases where famous artists have only a loose creative input into works, which have been executed by family members under their name.



The committee also cited an attempt late last year in Melbourne to pass off four forged paintings by artist Rover Thomas with leading auction houses at total estimates of A$330,000 ($271,100).
So far, efforts to capture more of the sales value for artists and establish good practice regarding provenance have come through the establishment of community art centres, pioneered by the famous Papunya Tula artists' cooperative in a community 240km north-west of Alice Springs.



It is where the now thriving Aboriginal art movement had its start in 1971 when schoolteacher Geoffrey Bardon asked some local men to paint a mural on a schoolhouse wall.



A network of centres provide information, and handles sales to dealers on behalf of member artists.



The Warlayirti Artists cooperative at Balgo, in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, returns 60% of its A$2.1m ($1.7m) annual sales to 400 resident painters.



"The centre," reported the committee, "is a place where artists can congregate, socialise and generally escape from the often ­difficult conditions of community life."
But if a major figure can be lured away from the community art centre by a gallery, the profit margin can be immense.



The practice involves a dealer-sometimes an amateur opportunist-­persuading an Aboriginal artist to sell recent works for quick payment.




Aboriginal artists as "free agents"
In the Darwin court case, Red Sand is arguing that Watson had left the Irrunytya arts centre of his own accord before making contact with the gallery in Alice Springs, and that at the time he was ­virtually unknown as an artist.



Consigning freshly-painted works to Sydney's Shapiro Auctioneers (where one fetched A$36,000 or $29,574 as against estimates of A$12,000 to A$18,000) was a way of establishing market value, the gallery says.
The defendants' counsel, Francis Douglas QC, argued that Watson was an old man from a tribe which only recently came into contact with white Australia, and had no independent legal advice on his contract with Red Sand.



"He is a man who in no way, shape or form would be able to bargain on equal terms with men such as the Kings," Mr Douglas said.



"He can't speak English, he can't read, he can't count.



I venture to suggest that he possibly has no conception of money in the way in which we Westerners understand it."
Another witness, Adrian Newstead, head of indigenous art at Lawson Menzies, defended his remark quoted in one article that it had been "unseemly" for auctioneers Shapiro to accept freshly-painted works directly into the secondary market, but noted that in current boom conditions auction houses were accepting more recent works.



He also noted that some of the biggest names in Aboriginal art had worked outside the art centres.



"But to go out and seek them, to go into a ­community and try and coerce them away from the art centre, is another thing altogether," he said, ­citing the late Clifford Possum who once claimed to have been locked up at gunpoint in Adelaide to complete paintings.



He added that Aboriginal artists often thought little of the "career development" offered by ethical, qualified galleries and dealers, opting for ready cash and becoming "free agents" who used the industry as much as it used them."Artists leave their communities constantly, they go on the road," Mr Newstead said, adding: "They talk about Aboriginal art as Toyota Dreaming...if most Aboriginal artists were asked, they'd want to get a Toyota so they could be nomads again."
The case resumes on 12 November.

repost http://www.theartnewspaper.com/

Last year we revealed that Damien Hirst was to replace the rotting shark in his The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991 bought by collector Steve Cohen (above) from Charles Saatchi, reportedly for £6.



5m.



The work is now on loan to the Metropolitan Museum in New York for three years.



Now the British artist is to repair his Mother and Child, Divided (1993), an installation of a bisected cow and calf in four formaldehyde tanks, in the collection of the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo.



The work is leaking and has been sent to the artist's studio in London for emergency repairs.



"A leak emerged due to a flaw in the glass, and some formaldehyde was lost," says Gunnar Kvaran, the museum's director.



This edition of the work was displayed at London's Tate Britain in 1995 as part of the Turner prize exhibition.



Hirst won the award that year.



A second version of the work on loan from the artist goes on show this month at Tate Britain as part of a Turner Prize retrospective (2 October-6 January 2008).



Although only one case in the Astrup Fearnley version is damaged, all four have been sent to Hirst.



"Our insurance will probably have to cover the costs of conservation," says Mr Kvaran, who declined to disclose what these are.



The Art Newspaper understands that the museum bought the piece in 1996 for around 1.



5m Norwegian Kroner ($266,000) from White Cube gallery in London.



Clemens Bomsdorf

i did a few collages tonight the first one is called the "the"

the second one is "unwashed flag"

this is my new series umuse bouche mini paintings for sale $25 you pick

here is the definition of amuse bouche

Amuse-bouches are tiny bite-sized morsels served before the hors d'œuvre or first course of a meal. These, often accompanied by a proper complementing wine, are served as an excitement of taste buds to both prepare the guest for the meal and to offer a glimpse into the chef's approach to cooking.

The word is French, literally translated to "mouth amuser" [for bouche = mouth; amuser = to amuse, to please].

and here they are :) if you want one just send me an emial and please comments on your favorite the sizes range from 8x5 inches ti 11x5inches

this one is $40

#1 the name of this series is

#1"process" tittled "again" ©

# 2 1/2   series "process" tittled "bring"

#2 need a better pic 

series "process"

untitled ©

#3 series process

tittled "process" ©

#4 series "process"

tittled "in" ©

#5    series    "process"

tittled            "more"©

#6  series  "comience"

tittled "phone"©

# 7 series "stand" tittled "stand"©

#8 series "stand"

tittled "limpio"©

#8 1/2 ©   series "stand" tittle "step"

#9 © series "bindi" tittle "bindi"

series untittled

#10 tittled self portrait"©

#11 untittled

new series untittled oil wood 06 #12

i took these with a digital cam it was fun

today i scanned these two under this writing when i do art all day and keep doing art the art starts to come in waves at the end of the day there was a huge wave i did a big painting and some med ones before that and before that i did about 20 5 inch by 5 inch paintings it felt so good i went to the art store and boought vermilion color oil paint and some acrylic for a project i am working on its crazy i just kept painting all day no music no anything just me and the paint and canvas im really happy with todays paintings

click on pic

call to artist post pics of  your studio here.  heres mine to add an image to a blog you upload an image to photobucket copy the url for the image not the tag click on the icon with a tree on it  erase this http:// and paste your url press ok then click preiview and post your done :) if you have trouble posting a pic to this blog email me and i will post it for you along woith what you want to write thanks again