the painting life
From Jim Mott: There is gift-exchange in my life, to be sure, but even I have never had the nerve to try an experiment as full as the one you undertook. Bravo! – Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift, praising Jim Mott’s itinerant art project Traveling Artist Seeking Hosts for Cross-Country Painting Project: Fall 2015 [2015 tour webpage] […]
I’m in California for a week with my family, but I thought I would pass this notice about a show back home along, something I’d like to see when I get back next week. Artists include: Betsy Lee Taylor, Jean K Stephens, Cathy Chin, Lanna Pejovic , Denise Heischman , Bob Dorsey, Carol Acquilano, […]
Jim Mott, my friend the itinerant painter, has modified his M.O. just slightly. He’s an itinerant painter who now, sometimes, becomes a . . . hm. . . sojourning painter, I guess. Not to put too fine a point on it, technically speaking, he goes somewhere now and hangs around longer. Until lately, he’s been doing very long-distance laps […]
I had a desultory conversation with Jim Mott recently, touching on why we paint, so I’m just going to leap into it in media res: Jim: In a better world the agenda for painting since the Sixties might have been to integrate the abstract and the real. Dave: Everybody tries to some degree. I think […]
This studio of mine is humming with work right now, which is why it’s been so long since I’ve posted anything. I have a backlog of about a dozen posts I want to write, including a long conversation I had with Jim Mott recently, as well as an assortment of random thoughts, some long overdue praise […]
I could write a dozen posts based on my conversation this week with Jim Mott. Knowing me, I probably will eventually, one way or another, but one small point we talked about just surfaced while I was working on something entirely unrelated to painting. We both spoke about work habits and how difficult it can be […]
I spent a couple hours talking with Jim Mott yesterday, which I’ll write about shortly, but I wanted to pass along this nice opening paragraph from the September New York Review of Books he gave me: “Imagine the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art as the perfect storm. And at the center […]
My friend Jim Mott came by a little while ago to discuss painting, “Tim’s Vermeer,” marriage, money, the uncanny behavior of birds, and an app he invented and created with the help of his partner, Bruce Campbell. A few days later, as a follow-up, he introduced me to a spot on the southern shore of Lake […]
Jim Mott, my friend the itinerant artist, is in the middle of his Great Lakes tour, which takes him through Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit and a couple stops in Ontario. He stays with hosts who give him room and board in exchange for a painting of their surroundings. It’s probably the most radical way of being […]
Landscape artist Jim Mott has taken it upon himself to redefine the nature of art, travel, money, and hospitality in an age increasingly defined by individual insularity. – Christian Science Monitor There is gift-exchange in my life, to be sure, but even I have never had the nerve to try an experiment as full as […]
I got two thoughtful responses, via email, to my posts about Arthur Danto. Rick Harrington reacted as a practitioner suspicious of theories divorced from the actual practice of art. I agree that theory ought to arise as a response to art, not the other way around. (Tom Wolfe, in The Painted Word, suggested that in […]
My friend and fellow painter, Jim Mott, once asked Arthur Danto if it was okay to paint landscapes again. It makes me laugh to write that, and I’ll bet it made Danto laugh to hear it, or at least smile. I don’t think Jim seriously thought he needed Danto’s permission, but he got a nice […]
When I was in my mid-teens, one night, I was seized with the classic existentialist question: why is there something rather than nothing? It was a bit more complex, and the experience I had felt more like a frightening recognition than a question, but that was the heart of it: along with a sense of […]
My friend, Jim Mott, the itinerant artist who does paintings in exchange for room and board, has begun a blog where he’s posting a day-by-day account of his 2007 drive from Seattle to Rochester. http://mottart2007.blogspot.com/ What’s wonderful about the way he’s presenting his story as a plot is that you get to see the paintings […]
If anyone represents the ideal of what it should mean to be an artist right now, it’s Jim Mott. It may, in fact, be an impossible ideal, but for the past twelve years, Mott has been living an itinerant life, driving around the country with almost no cash, and doing paintings for anyone who offers […]
I’m going to deliver about eighteen paintings to the Williams-Insalaco Gallery today for a solo show opening next week: No Ideas But In Things. It’s the motto coined by William Carlos Williams for the Imagist poets a century ago. The exhibition is a survey of work I’ve done over the past decade. I’m giving a […]