I’m honored Michele wanted this piece. It was the start of a new series I continue to develop.
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
The continuation of a new series of Remodern America videos. These videos are possible due to the technical skills of my wife: I am the director, and she makes my vision come to life. It’s another fun part of our creative collaborations.
Video Number Six: Masculinity and Art
A video on art and masculinity. Art is not an American male priority. With our focus on responsibility and practicality, art might seem frivolous. It’s considered a hobby, therapy, good for the kids. We have little sense of its potential power.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Peter Doig ” Country-Rock (Wing-Mirror)” oil on canvas 76.7″ x 106.3″ 1999
Peter Doig is a contemporary painter who I was very interested in at one time – until I discovered he uses a projector to create his art. I have strong feelings against this practice, as I wrote about in an earlier piece, The Image Morgue:
“Projector artists. Artists who cheat themselves and their audience by projecting an image onto their canvas and doing a paint-by-numbers routine to create their works. Artists like this have reduced themselves to a mere cog in a mechanical reproduction process, not creating, but taking dictation from their gadgets. They let their tools make their discoveries for them. It is an inferior mode of creation.
“If you’re an artist, do your own rendering.”
Still, Doig has done wonderous things with color and the handling of the paint. which is why I continue to enjoy his work. He can evoke beauty.
It’s estimated Doig’s 1999 painting Country-Rock (Wing-Mirror) will be setting some auctions records.
“In 1972, sixteen-year-old Berg Johnson – a self-anointed ‘Caretaker of Dreams’ – painted a rainbow over the grey façade of a roadside underpass on the outskirts of Toronto. Johnson was inspired by the memory of a friend, Sigrid, who had tragically died in a car accident nearby. He would often complain to her that people in Toronto ‘never looked up’ and following her death he wanted to do something to make people smile.
“It is Johnson’s rainbow tunnel, just off Toronto’s Don Valley Parkway, that we glimpse as if from the passenger seat of a passing car in Peter Doig’s Country-rock (wing-mirror), 1999. This mysterious landscape is distinctly Doig: characterised by his trademark otherworldliness and capturing the familiar ennui of such peripheral spaces.
“Every time a major landscape by Doig is offered at auction it represents an important market moment: only last year, Swamped, 1990, established a new artist record of US$39 million. Replete with mystery and intrigue, Country-rock (wing-mirror)will be a highlight of Sotheby’s Hong Kong Contemporary Evening Auction this autumn, the most significant work by Doig to be offered at auction in Asia.”
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Art is not an American male priority. With our focus on responsibility and practicality, art might seem frivolous. It’s considered a hobby, therapy, good for the kids. We have little sense of its potential power.
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Richard Bledsoe “Reef” acrylic on canvas 24″ x 24″ 2022
Looking back through my photo archives, I see paintings that I no longer have access to because they sold. I’m happy to let pieces go, because I’m always making more art.
That being said, there are some I consider collection of the artist, and will hold on to them.
2022 got off to a great start, when I finished a painting on New Year’s Day. After watching countless nature documentaries, I realized any colors and shapes can be applied to the complex ecosystem of a coral reef. I invented this imagery, keeping it all loose and aquatic.
The piece sold as soon as I posted it on Facebook. I went on to do several other under the sea paintings before I started pursuing other interests.
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
William Blake, “Albion’s Angel rose / Europe A Prophecy”
A commentary on a William Blake exhibition in Cambridge, England.
“The exhibition reminds us how much Blake was a man of his times — which were incendiary ones from a political and a literary point of view. The French Revolution broke out when he was 32 years old, and at the height of his powers as a poet. And, although no traveler himself, he was a man of Europe whose currents of thinking were shared by other European artists — that mixture of passion, idealism, nationalistic drum-beating, and mystical fervor.”
I would suggest far from those currents of thinking making Blake just a man for his times, they make him a definitive artist for our times as well – and for all times.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
The continuation of a new series of Remodern America videos. These videos are possible due to the technical skills of my wife: I am the director, and she makes my vision come to life. It’s another fun part of our creative collaborations.
Video Number Five: Empire Follows Art
Over the last century, our way of life followed art away from reality and into a fantasy world generated by The New Aristocracy of the Well Connected, where they reign supreme. Art for them is just another form of propaganda to propagate their own power.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
The continuation of a new series of Remodern America videos. Number four is a video about painting and intellectual theory about “the end of history.” There is no end to history, just as there is no end to human potential. Great art reminds us of this.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
Richard Bledsoe “I Believe I’m Sinking Down” acrylic on canvas 30″ x 40″2023
In September of 2023, I completed the third work in a commissioned series of paintings.
I spent much of 2023 on this major painting, a depiction of the final act of a great American myth.
I’ve loved blues music since I was a teenager in the 1980s; the first purchase I ever made in the genre was a cassette of the Robert Johnson compilation “King of the Delta Blues Singers.” I’d read about the legend of how Johnson went to a crossroad and sold his soul to the devil in exchange for worldly glory. The tale resonated with my interests in both spirituality and weirdness.
Those same fascinations drive my art. In 2021, I finished a major painting on Johnson’s tragedy.
In an earlier post I described how my depiction of “Hellhound On My Trail,” sold to an out of state patron. As this painting represented Johnson haunted by his diabolical deal, this patron requested two more works to show the beginning and ending of Johnson’s downfall. He wanted depictions of both the initial crossroad meeting and the ultimate consequences, when the devil comes to collect.
“I have visions. They come at the most random times. I could be washing the dishes, or driving to work, and suddenly the picture is there. It usually arrives now with a title, dimensions and suggestions for technique.”
I had to find the vision within myself for the paintings before I could commit. I was was blessed that inspiration struck, and I saw how I could tell those other parts of the tale.
The new version of “Crossroad” would be that moment where the man had to make that choice, hesitating right on the threshold of destiny and damnation, all taking place as some eerie moonlit blues.
The new version of “Sinking” shows the man where he thought he wanted to be, experiencing the glamour of being on stage, under the lights, unleashing the talent he sold his soul for. But he has never been more alone, singing to no one, in front a kudzu patch strangling the life out of a dark forest. Only an owl, a harbinger of death, witnesses his performance.
The lights reveal the man’s soul demonically twisted into oozing corruption. The end is near.
It was intense to return to this large work over and over again throughout the year, slowly bringing it into full realization.
Here is the full story in the order of occurrence.
Richard Bledsoe “At the Crossroad” acrylic on canvas 30″ x 40″
Richard Bledsoe “Hellhound On My Trail” acrylic on canvas 30″ x 40″
Richard Bledsoe “I Believe I’m Sinking Down” acrylic on canvas 30″ x 40″
I will look forward to doing more paintings exploring America’s rich heritage and mysteries.
As I worked on “Sinking,” I took pictures charting its development, some of which I share below.
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I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
The continuation of a new series of Remodern America videos. Number three is a video about art and the shadow side of humanity. I am humbled in the presence of the Shadow. I don’t make the mistake of believing its power is my own. I can accept the flaws it shows me I have. And as a artist, I can translate its secrets into a shared experience.
I don’t fundraise off of my blog. I don’t ask for Patreon or Paypal donations. If you’d like to support the Remodern mission, buy abook. Or a painting.
THE REMODERN REVIEW 