Starving Artist, indeed

I caught an ad on TV for an upcoming Starving Artists sale, where you can buy pedestrian, tacky paintings on the cheap.  The “art work” is sold out of rented rooms in local hotels, one step above the level of no-tell motel where you might find one of the pedestrian, tacky paintings hanging over a lumpy bed with those spongy acrylic blankets that set off spark showers every time you roll over.  Anything more assertive than rolling over could produce lightning that would strike you dead. (Which you might well deserve if you were doing anything assertive in a no-tell motel.)

Even if you don’t frequent no-tell motels, I’m sure you know the exact type of paintings I’m talking about: landscapes done in lurid colors; a boy in patched overalls, fishing pole over shoulder, walking into the sunset; a little kiddy couple – little kiddy boy presenting frog to little kiddy girl (awwww…); clowns; more clowns; the Eifel Tower; powerful waves; abstracts for those retro types with living room sofas upholstered in turquoise lamé. The sort of art work that makes Thomas Kinkade, painter of light, look like Rembrandt.

As a sample of the types of works that would be going on sale nearby flashed by, I got to wondering just how these masterpieces were produced.

Were they paint by numbers? They certainly had that lifelike lifeless quality. Were they mass produced in a factory, where artists smeared on a bit of extra paint to give them some dimension? Were they done by “artists” who specialized in speed painting, capable of turning a couple of full blown works out in an hour or two? (Industrial blowers in the background, drying them.)

Not that I expected to find the answer on their site, and not that I tried very hard to find it, but the google did not quickly bring up a link to the outfit that runs these hotel sales – and I couldn’t remember whether the ad I saw on TV contained a URL.

But it did bring up the site of one Dr. Lori, an art historian, who had the skinny on  just where and how this junk is produced.

The where is “outdated printing plants and Asian sweatshops.”

Those that come from the “outdated printing plants” are oleographs, cheap prints coated with “a clear varnish used to simulate brushstrokes.”  Produced by ill-paid factory workers in God-knows-where, Asia.

Or, they could be “real” art, done by:

Factory workers [who] stand, for hours at a time, in front of machines that support a long roll of blank canvas. With brushes and paint, each worker is responsible for painting one image or portion of a painting’s entire composition. For instance, when producing a landscape painting, Artist #1 will paint a tree, Artist #2 will paint a bird, and so on. At intervals and without warning, the canvas is automatically repositioned by machine to expose the next blank area of canvas to the workers who will paint it. The workers repeat the painting process. During the process, Artist #1 paints that same tree over and over again for the next 14 hours straight. 

Thank you, Henry Ford, for perfecting the assembly line.

In addition to the tree, bird, and clown nose painters, there’s a worker whose job it is to sign the paintings with a “common western surname.” Because who would want a clown painting signed by Tran, Li, or Gupta?

Once it comes to the end of the line, the rolling canvas is sliced, stretched, stapled, framed, and crated for delivery to a hotel near you.

I always wondered.  Now I know.

As Dr. Lori says, if you have $50 to spend on one of these little horrors, you have $50 to buy a pencil sketch from a real starving artist.

Not that the “artists” slaving in the painting factories aren’t starving, too. Ill paid, ill treated, ill fed, ill clothed, ill housed…

My sympathies.

But not enough to suggest that anyone buy one of these pedestrian, tacky wares. Even if they do have a turquoise lamé covered couch to hang it over.

So, no, I did not go to the starving artists hotel sale yesterday in Peabody.

But I would have been tempted, just to see the types involved in running this sort of grim import business that’s the worst of both worlds: exploited workers on one end, and pedestrian, tacky, tawdry junk on the other.