Southwest Art, December, 2005

“Special still-life issue”

Checklist:

Yellow slickers: p. 65. Not exactly, but a couple of James Bama guys in waxed canvas dusters.

Eating places: P. 74: Hilarie Lambert’s Parisian and tres elegante dining room. P. 78: Lindsay Goodwin’s equally elegant celebration of light, paneling and wine glasses.

Depicting writing: On pg. 58 there’s a purple rabbit typing and a lady in a patio chair with a notebook.

Doorways: p. 42 The front of a ‘dobe strung with Christmas lights. p. 67 a very fantastic and un-Western door to a house with Gothic windows and fairy in a tree out front. p. 119 Actual doors to order! Works of art, though.

Simplest: p. 107: One of the top best toys this year is a plain cardboard box. This is a painting of four plain boxes, mostly toward the top of the painting, all boxes open, welcoming.
Most complex:

Most haunting: p. 73. Oreland Joe steps away from his usual classic and restrained stone carvings to both paint and cast the same strange shape of a face topped with frondy feathers and looped with turquoise beads.

Money marks:

ARTS FOR THE PARKS, Jackson, WY:
$25,000 & gold medal to Morten Solberg for “Morning Flight,
Olympic National Park." Painting is shown on p. 128. A heron flying over a
tide.
WESTERN VISIONS MINIATURES AND MORE, also Jackson, WY:
$1,055,000 total sales.
BUFFALO BILL ART SHOW & SALE, Cody, WY:
More than $900,000 total sales. Highest yet for them.
Krystii Melaine’s “Moving Cattle” and James Bama’s “Black Elk’s
Great-Great-Grandson” each sold for $30,000.
SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA, PLEIN AIR PAINTING FESTIVAL
$111,000 total sales.

MOST OUTRAGEOUS -- even CRIMINAL:

The classified ads feature two (relatively) big color ads with the identical photo of a Remington bronze. THESE COMPANIES ARE BOGUS!! They are selling illegal replicas and castings, some of them bearing very little resemblance to the originals and some of them evidently close copies done from photos or maybe molds pulled from legitimate castings. We’ve been hearing about these bronzes, cast in SE Asia like those cheap clothes you love. They claim to be “wholesale to the public.” Believe me, there is no such thing as really fine art bronzes that are “wholesale to the public.”

Aside from their dubious source, these castings are ruining the market for authentic American Western castings because only highly experienced people can tell the knock-offs from the real thing. Some worried people simply make a rule: never buy bronzes. Amateurs are likely to end up with something that has no provenance, which is the real key to art value. (Provenance is being able to document the source of the art and the various owners until the present.) People with no real eye for art are liable to buy stuff that doesn’t even resemble what it purports to actually be. (Take a look at what is supposed to be Rodin’s “Thinker.”)

Southwest Art magazine should be embarrassed for allowing such people to run ads. It is simply false-advertising and piracy. Probably the person who runs the ad section has little contact with the editors, who presumably know better, but this is pretty serious and whoever has the authority ought to draw a line.