ARTIST - Eva Lewarne
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The Dumbing Down

3/9/2023

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The fastest dumbing down of our society is happening on instagram reels, podcasts and workshops. People have learned a bit about electromagnetic energy and all they want us to do is to start controlling our mind so only positive thoughts supposedly related to positive energy are created by us. Ridiculous assumption overlooking years of academics like Jung, Freud and Wise men that showed us how being unaware of what we truly feel and acknowledging it, leads to suffering and mental illness ultimately.

Not to mention ignoring Zen masters that teach about being with what is and leaving things alone, in other words STOP trying to live EGO first. Ego control leads to unhappiness only.

Today I actually heard an artist say while throwing buckets of paint on the canvas, "If you are not happy, there is no point in having a long life, better to have a short happy one." Tell that to the suffering, homeless and sick you uncompassionate moron I say!

No wonder we are embracing AI and robots, they are always feeling nothing! We idolize that in our mechanistic society, encouraged by billionaires who only want us to be their slaves!
​
It is also no wonder there is no respect for artists if all they are concerned about is getting their own jollies.
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Mortification Not Perfection

6/7/2022

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How do we pass the time between the first cup of coffee in the morning and the last glass of wine at night? 
We go about our daily life trying to suck out the most juicy morsels of happiness we can with a bit of thought that we need to stay fit and healthy for as long as we can. 
Occasionally a spark of purity of thought occurs, squelched quickly by insistent emails and instagram and facebook friends sharing their last meal.
No time to purify anything because we are on overdrive to not miss the possibility of another moment of happiness. 
And who dictates  what it is to be? 
Our advertisers forever on guard to catch the unsuspecting mind into acquiring yet more and better stuff; keep them longing for far away lands, for more love (really only sex) for who has time for love in our mad rush to be happy. 
We glance at our iPhone every few minutes for a sign that we are on the right track and will soon be rewarded.
What track?
Fast track to no man’s land, the land of machine bothood, programmed by the needy rich with gaping holes for mouths.
And we allow ourselves to believe the next dress, car, barbecue or trip will matter, will make our existence meaningful.
And we walk by the homeless, shot children, the hungry while some gorge.
All the while hoping that machines will set us free, immune to impinging artificial waves on our brains. Willing to trade our dying souls for material comfort.
For who has time for soul searching? Not even the lifestyle gurus that confuse aerobics with real meditation, the kind that purifies your mind and soul. They feel high and think that is soul.
But alas soul requires heart, tears and gnashing of teeth when confronted with present day reality, a delving into the deep gut wrenching abyss of mortification and not a quest for perfection.
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Era of Positive Thinking

5/12/2022

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The role of art critic is flushed down the toilet along with critical thinking in our era of positivity, not positivity of doing just thinking.

The more we try to be positive it seems the worse our world gets.

Why? Ego is always motivated by desire for oneself, of happiness, money, beauty, fame, success etc. Ego thinks it is God. But in fact it is a recipe for spiritual death.

Doing positive acts towards others brings us out of our ego and closer to God. As does being able to scrutinize ourself realistically and change what needs to go.

So in the art world when we stopped being critical of art and life, it became dead.

Visual art became mickey mouse and a poem became kitsch.

Imagine being positive only when writing a poem.

"The deep crimson blood gushing from the beautiful cut impaled by my foot, sprinked red shiny drops on mossy green lawn creating a Pollock masterpiece." hahahahahaha
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Used Art Salesmen

4/21/2022

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Who are the artists who sell well? Generally we would like to believe it is the artist that has the best art that sells well. And maybe that was true a few centuries ago when traditional art was the norm. Art that had great technique and also evoked emotions and had something to say.

Artists produced their art and someone else looked after publicity, exhibitions, and putting together bios as well as marketing. Usually a number of people. Then there were art critics who wrote about their work  and established its validity in the marketplace.
Now art needs not be technically accurate, say anything at all or evoke any kind of emotional response. So who decides what is good art?

Some say it is the unwashed masses who want to buy your work…

So do artists need to appeal to their sensibilities…? No, they just have to be good salesmen.

Artists are no longer just mandated with producing art but also have to be publicity star, networking schmoozers, write glowingly about themselves, pay for exhibiting their work and find venues to exhibit and above all, be  great salesmen.

Selling is an art form in itself and good used car salesmen will tell you, you have to be born with the right gene. Actors are probably the closest that come to having such a gene.

Actors are by nature extraverted, whereas visual artists are mostly introverts. A good salesman needs to be extraverted, charismatic and know how to charm and convince people. Most visual artists I know don’t even want to schmooze at their own shows and generally are shy and would much prefer being alone. Otherwise they would have chosen to be actors.

So thus we have a bind, where visual artists are expected to be all and everything, and in the end develop split personalities or simply give up focus on their art and become great salesmen.

Those are the artists that sell well and what they produce matters very little. And if they thought about it for a while they would have used their selling skills in a car lot for a hell of a lot more money than they are probably getting now for their art.

But there is always a subtle urge to be famous that comes with artistic endeavours, even though we know the possibility is one in a billion but then we remember Van Gogh who sold nothing in his lifetime.

The problem for us now however is the small matter of how we spend our time producing art. Van Gogh had a brother who supported him and he didn’t have to do anything else except paint and observe nature and life. We however don’t have that luxury needing to make a living and interact with the market place. This takes more time than actually art-working. ​

The industrial age effectively killed great art and is now producing great used car salesmen.
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ART &  WAR

4/20/2022

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Katia Grubisic, a poet and writer for The Walrus a canadian magazine wrote that..”In the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many of us were in shock and were doing whatever we could to help. A number of cultural organizations—orchestras, arts councils, museums—reacted by withdrawing support for Russian artists and arts organizations. But does cancelling artists do more harm than good?” And she concludes it is “knee-jerk wartime discrimination.”​

I now know for sure why I have stopped reading The Walrus a longtime ago. First of all to say that watching thousands of women and children die before your eyes on social media everyday is no longer shocking says more about Katia than us,. Secondly I listened and watched famous Russian artists talk about the war in Ukraine saying how much they support Putin and Mother Russia and one even added that all Ukrainians should die!

There is no inherent value in being an artist that makes you stand above being a decent human being. Nazis artists that promote killing have really nothing of value to offer the world and should be shunned.

Real artists are sensitive compassionate humans and abhor violence. If they portray it in their art it is to wake people up to its horrors, not to show how lovely and innocuous it is. Many artists stopped creating during WWII as a sign of rebellion and disgust with the war.

Art writers that think otherwise should stop writing.
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Is Stardust Disappearing From Our Part Of The Cosmos???

9/28/2021

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We all know now that we are star material, proven by physics. Energy knows no boundaries and when people meet in person their energies mingle and create a form of communication that is new each time. When people face each other instead of FaceTime, there is an acknowledgement of a force greater than just worldly existence, matter.

Touching hands brings joy and confirmation of our existence, not because it is just a sensual act but also because it intertwines our energies. For where two or three are gathered in the name of love, there is a force activated that is greater than the sum of its parts.

What is happening in the digital age? We are focussed only on ourselves, isolated and living in our minds. Even if we have 5K followers we contact with everyday it does not give the surge of power that contact with even our pet does.

​Why? Because love does not come into our intellectual exchanges on facetime.


We can try to pretend it does and attempt to manufacture it artificially in our heads but is a broken connection from the star world.

The further we develop into walking robots glued to our iPhones the less star dust will exist in the world. We are rich in technology and bereft of love and joy as the two go hand in hand.
​

Contemporary art portrays the disconnect of ourselves from the very fabric of existence, the star dust we are, and no amount of travel to Mars will change that.
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​REALLY SEEING

8/13/2021

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Being a visual artist is really all about seeing things as they are below the surface, below your conceptual mind. You learned to create visual shortcuts in school from about the age of 11, when abstract thinking became more important than seeing. So you created shortcut images in your mind for the everyday world. When you heard the word dog, you immediately conjured up an image of a hot dog with ears, a tail and four stick legs. Then your mind did not have to linger any longer on the image. You knew what the other person was referring to. Unfortunately due to the fact that left-brained activities became the most important through your school career and later on, you stopped really seeing altogether.
Drawing is really about learning how to see light and dark shadows and the edges of things, contour lines. Most people never pay attention to these things preferring to use their symbols conjured up in there minds.
When I taught adults art, who were beginners and did not have time to go through four years of art college and learn technique, I would teach them to see and think like an artist instead. Often times they were able to draw a decent self-portrait after eight lessons, instead of four years of school.
Why you ask? Because they learned how to really see what was there.
One of my exercises was to have them view a white bland coffee mug for ten minutes without thinking about anything else, a sort of mindfulness meditation. At first they struggled due to an overactive mundane mind, thinking to themselves “how boring, I came to learn to draw faces, not white mugs.” But with encouragement they overcame their resistance and started to become involved in the seeing itself. One of the reasons they struggled is because they were used to being primarily in their left brain with the kinds of activities demanded of them in their everyday life. The extreme left side of the brain functions in a very fast way, needing more and more stimulation and being easily bored, needing constant novelty. Thus the technological fast-paced age is born, feeding that need.
To help my students pop over more to the right side of their brain, they needed to stay with their feelings of boredom until the left side gave up (apparently it gives up only in times of boredom or shock and I could not bring a gun to class) and the right side to take over a more leadership function.
Things would suddenly change and people began to get excited about the activity and find meaning in it. People who insist we always use both sides of the brain maybe are correct but we need to understand that the brain is vast and unexplored and it is useful to talk about the continuum line, where activities are placed, to understand how we can have more control of the brain. There is a lot of research on this topic I won't go into, just share my own experience of how to move people from an uncreative way of perceiving the world to a creative one.
What happened next astonished them. All of a sudden they began to enjoy what they were doing and were able to see more and more of what the cup actually represented, in other words they saw more than just the cup, plus the cup as is, and they felt wonderful doing it.
I used to tell them if they actually looked at their partners and children and pets in the same way, life would be nothing but adventure and a miracle for them. Unfortunately after the initial honeymoon we start imagining we know our partners inside out, have a shortcut version of them in our minds and actually stop seeing them at all.
Out of touch with our senses, imprisoned in our conceptual mind we also stop feeling and need more and more stimulation to know we are alive. It is no wonder porn is big business.
The adults in my classes did not necessarily become professional artists but their lives started to change, they learned to enjoy and appreciate every moment of their existence, they become more tolerant, less judgemental and saw the world as mostly beautiful. That is what really seeing will do for you.
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Political Correctness and Appropriation

8/6/2021

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People are so hung up on political correctness and not appropriating other people’s culture now. But if we were at all versed in history we would know that there are no other people and that we have access to archetypes of culture through dreams and visions and no one has a monopoly on dreams. 
If you believe particularly in reincarnation we have been a part of every culture at some point in time. I have dreams of shamans often, some are white people some Asian and some even natives. Artists are more open to visions than anyone else, but not only.

Native Americans have visions and dreams and that is how they discover the world of the spirit.

Before Judeo-Christian religion, if you read history books, earth religions existed everywhere in the world. There were shamans in Europe, Asia and Africa.

When I began painting bird women I had actually not read very much about Native American beliefs. I saw them in my dreams and then discovered that people had been carving bird women symbols in Poland and Africa and elsewhere. There was a large exhibition of the original bird people carvings in NEW York when i was there.
 
If spirit wants to communicate with someone it will be with the people who are open to it and not necessarily a particular culture.

Yes we need to understand earth religions in order to appreciate Nature again and life in general as Christianity made us divorced from nature and as a result we have devastated and exploited the earth without mercy.

So lets stop exploiting each other and carving out what is mine and what isn’t and realize the earth is ours. Lets learn from each other with appreciation and a leg up for those who need it.
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“The Death of the Artist”

7/24/2021

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Thank you very much for sending me “The Death of the Artist” by William Deresiewicz. A fascinating read and very poignant critique of the place artists hold in our society. I am not yet quite finished but thought I would jot down a few of my insights while reading so far.

I totally agree that the dilemma for artists is one of making a living so they can eat and buy tools of the trade, and pretending money doesn’t matter. Also needing to suck up to billionaires to make a name for themselves and to eat.

The problem occurs when the billionaires know nothing about art, except what appeals to them, who hold disdain for Academias of Art, and who believe anybody scribbling on a page is a  professional artists.

A while back in Europe where I am from, art was divided into fine art and commercial art. Commercial artists were very capable at rendering concepts for their bosses, the billionaires. Fine artists had no external boss and listened to their muse, they also were trained and educated. Often fine artists were told to not work at commercial art to make a living but work at anything else unrelated to to art. Otherwise their sensibilities would suffer and they would lose their authenticity.

There was sound reasoning behind this, namely, in order to hear your muse you had to live in a heightened state of existence and in solitude to be able to capture on canvas  what the Muse was communicating.

All of that in our times has become blurred, with the advent of everyone is an artist, and as soon as you do an hour workshop online and can draw a reasonable tree you consider yourself a professional, especially if your neighbour buys the tree. Education in art doesn’t count anymore, nor does that extra element of making a work alive, something beyond just its “bark”.

I agree with the author that artists are the most exploited group of people in our society as a result of this disdain for professionalism or even a vocation in art.

Priests have a vocation and they are supported by their institution. They need to have a degree and education behind them. Artists also should only be professionals when they have a vocation for art and be supported AND educated and degreed. 

But billionaires did away with that when they started using art as a Wall Street Game and deciding what is art and what isn’t. People with no aesthetical training or knowledge. For example Andy Warhol did kitsch art to show how valueless capitalism is and how empty hollywood stars. The billionaires then reversed this message and made Koons famous saying mickey mouse and pop art is actually what is great and forcing that genre on the public. Kitsch art became popular and is being sought out by collectors and museums. In fact anything that stinks of beauty is laughed at.

Well now we know we can no longer show our souls in art and help others to become in touch with their souls because we would be ridiculed and starve…

Having lived in Communist Poland during my teen years, where pursuit of money was discouraged, artists were much better esteemed. If they graduated from an academy of art, they were given a studio, a place to live and connected with a gallery. Of course communism had its ow problems, namely the State decided what is art, so political themes. etc were discouraged.

The role of artist as visionary is also discouraged in capitalism, as in communism. Fine artists were ones that could somehow predict the future in their musings and only often after their death, when the future was now, were they discovered, like Van Gogh who sold  not one painting even though his brother was an art agent. And now scientists are saying that somehow Van Gogh saw beyond the material and painted fractals.

Billionaires have taken over the world and dictate the rules in practically every profession now, even religion. As my ex father in law used to say, “If you have money you don’t need anything else”. Billionaires only trust other billionaires, no longer respecting artists, or scientists or anybody that does not bring them a profit. Art agents now want to take on an artist only if he has money people behind him and gets sales. It is no longer enough to do art.


It is time to teach billionaires a lesson in respect, by firstly taxing the hell out of them, because people do not need that kind of money to live and shaming them to give to community instead of buying private space ships.

When religion was respected and respectful, billionaires who attended sermons of brimstone and fire were far more inclined to be charitable.

Now there is no moral philosophy they listen to only their own egotistical narcissistic voices backed by Capitalistic economical thinking.
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Industrial Era Art

7/13/2021

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We are living in an industrial era where money is god. Culture has become a play toy of the rich. People no longer look towards the artist to give them an experience of the transcendental. The best they can hope for is titillation. Pop art is in fashion as a result. Hiding the real meaning which is that art is dead. Abstract art is a toy of decorators. Not meant to have an impact on a viewer’s emotions. So what is left? Realism? Photography does it better. Thus artists are busy cutting and pasting. What is missing? The mysterious, elusive soul that points to the temporal nature of life.

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