Day 3491: The news.

 

"The news": ink drawing, journal.

 

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Keith Haring on How to Be an Artist

 

Haring’s ebullient figures—the babies, the dancers, the dogs—may have been born in New York City’s subway stations in the early 1980s, but they certainly didn’t stay there. Over the span of a single decade, the American painter rocketed into the international spotlight. His distinctive style, incorporating elements of “low-brow” culture such as comics and graffiti, infiltrated the worlds of fine art, advertising, and fashion all at once. For that, he was sometimes derided as a sellout—an artist whose work was too commercial to be taken seriously. But his journals reveal a young man thinking deeply about his role as both an artist and a public figure. Haring was 18 years old when he penned his first entry, then a high school graduate preparing to hitchhike to Minnesota to see the Grateful Dead. He continued to keep records of his thoughts and his itineraries, often written during international plane flights—rare breaks in his increasingly frenetic schedule. His final entry, from Milan, is dated September 22, 1989, five months before he died of AIDS-related complications, at age 31. Below, we highlight four takeaways from Haring’s writings.

Lesson #1: Make work accessible to the public.

Keith Haring Konvolut, 1987 Wallector

Keith Haring Untitled - Yellow Matrioska, 1989 Wallector

In 1978, while living in Pittsburgh, Haring attended a lecture given by the famed artist Christo, followed by a screening of a film about his 1976 installation in California, Running Fence. The experience affected the young artist deeply. In an interview years later, he recalled watching a group of California farmers—initially resistant to Christo’s project—rising early to watch the sunrise reflected in the fence. They were “saying it was the most beautiful thing they had ever seen!” Haring said. “And seeing them affected and challenged by and inspired by a work of art! No matter how contemporary it was, and no matter how alien it was to everything they knew—somehow, that forced intervention by an artist made them see things in a whole other way.”

 

The film, along with the writings of artist Jean Dubuffet, were two of Haring’s earliest influences. “The thing I responded to most was their belief that art could reach all kinds of people, as opposed to the traditional view, which has art as this elitist thing,” he told Rolling Stone in 1989.

 

Keith Haring  Fight AIDS Worldwide , 1990 TAG TheArtGallery

In 1978, working out of a studio on West 22nd Street with the doors propped open, “the main thing that impressed me was the ‘kinds’ of individuals who would stop and talk to me,” he wrote. “They were not, for the most part, gallery-goers and not people who generally frequent MoMA, but they were interested. There is an audience that is being ignored, but they are not necessarily ignorant. They are open to art when it is open to them.” He continued to widen the audience for his art through the Pop Shop, a Manhattan storefront that sold his creations at price points that the average person could afford, and his numerous public murals scattered across the globe.

 

Lesson #2: Create artwork in a single sitting

Keith Haring, Statue of Liberty, 1986 Koller Auctions

Keith Haring Free South Africa, 1989 RoGallery US$2,800

 

According to Haring, the best art is made in just one sitting. “To paint differently every day makes it impossible to paint a consistent composition over the period of more than one session,” he wrote. “It is done, but not without pain, needless changes, de-evolution, false repetition (duplication), over-working, collage (piling ideas on top of each other and calling them a ‘whole’), etc. Pure art exists only on the level of instant response to pure life.”

 

Lesson #3: Leave the meaning of your art  open-ended

Keith Haring Act Up / Ignorance = Fear, 1989 Rennert’s Gallery

The quickest way to kill your art, according to Haring, is to rigidly define it. “There is no need for definition,” he wrote. “Definition can be the most dangerous, destructive tool the artist can use when he is making art for a society of individuals.”

Lesson #4: Lower the stakes

Tseng Kwong Chi Haring Pop Shop Window New York, 1986

Eric Firestone Gallery

 

Everything Haring made, he considered a work in progress. “The paintings are not final statements,” he wrote. “They can be changed, reshaped, combined, destroyed.”

 

“If a piece is final, that implies that it is perfect, or the purest form attainable,” he explained. “I do not believe I am capable of imitating the perfection of nature.” That mindset, he believed, kept him moving forward in his practice. “Risks are what make the difference between new ideas and re-worked old ideas,” he wrote.

 

 

No time for a collage today ... 

 

 

 

 

 

   A 3-minute video, Doll that could drive, here.

 

 

 

Just because ...

 

Poupa

 

 

 

Smiles for Friday ...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

                                                               Thanks for coming by today.