THE FOLLOWING ARTISTS HAVE BEEN ACCEPTED INTO THE SOCIETY'S ANNUAL JURIED EXHIBITION "ART AND THE ANIMAL"

The Society is pleased to announce that the following members will have work in the 51st exhibition of "Art and the Animal". More information soon!

Adair, Sue deLearie
Agnew, Al
Aja, Douglas
Allmond, Charles
Altenburg, Tom
Askew, Julie
Bacon, Chris
Balciar, Gerald
Bality, Tammy
Bateman, Robert
Bell, Julie
Bemis, Renee
Bishop, Thomas J
Blagden, Allen
Bork, Beatrice
Boyce, Peta
Brent, Burt
Brest van Kempen, Carel P.
Burgette, Dan
Chen, Dan
Coe, James
Coheleach, Guy
Cornish, Mary L.
Crouter, Anni M
Davis, Patricia M.
Denman, Andrew
Diment, Kimberly Rae
Dodge, Kelly Ann
Doellinger, Mick
Dunn, Lori Anne
Egeli, Lisa
Ellison, Lyn
Faust, Anne S.
Fisher, Cynthie
Fox, Susan Lynn
Friedenberg, Kathleen M.
Gersch, Anita P.
Gilmore, Jim D.
Gilmore, Pat E.
Glanz, Daniel B
Gombus, Sue M.
Gould, Shawn K
Gray, Peter Clinton
Hacking, Grant
Harvey, Guy
Heaton, Janet N.
Howe, Nancy
Hutto, Leslie Jane
Hyde, Wes
Jammer, Clint Dana
Jarrett, Brett Malcolm
Jarvi, Brian Keith
Jesic, Stephen A
Johnson, Brenda D.
Kestrel, Steve
Kidera, Brenda Will
Kiesow, James R
Kobald, John K
Laney
Langley, Brent A.
Lawrence, Rod
Lick, T.J.
Mason, Diane D
Matia, Walter T.
Maxwell, Sally
McGuire, Jan Martin
McHuron, Gregory I
Miller, Darin T.
Miller, Terry
Milligan, Billy-Jack
Murtha, Sean R
Newman, Ken
Newmark, Marilyn
Nicholls, Alison
Offeman, James M.
Okada, Munenori
Osborne, Leo
Parcell Evans, Beth
Parson, Leon
Pas, Rick
Penescu, Cristina G
Pepin, Patricia
Peterson, Louise
Petlowany, David
Pettit, Bryce L.
Potter, John R
Rheinish, Arlene A
Rhymer, Paul D
Rosetta
Ross, Joan Binney
Rossin, Linda
Rowe, Kenneth R.
Royal, Edward
Ruehle, Jon
Rulon, Bart Coleman
Russell, Terri L.
Sainsbury, Jonathon
Salari-Sander, Sherry
Saunois, Laurence
Schafer, Sharon K
Schelling, George L.
Seerey-Lester, Suzie
Sharkey Thomas, Jan
Sheeter, Cathy
Siegrist, Rachelle
Siegrist, Wes
Solberg, Morten
Soos, Heather
Stajcar, Pati
Stevenson, Tiffany
Sulkowski, Joseph H.
Sweet, Francis Edward
Swibb, Darlene G
Tako, Jason L
Taylor, Kristine Davis
Thomas, Fred W.
Thompson, Dana Lee
Tremblay, France
Trent, Debra L
Tryggmo, Gunnar
Turner, David H
Ullberg, Kent
Vlaanderen, Lani
Westin, Sue
Williford, Ronnie
Witherspoon, Kay Elizabeth
Worthington, Steve
Yount, Aaron C

Wildlife Art on the Couch: A Struggle for Identity in the 21st Century by Andrew Denman

SAA Signature Member Andrew Denman recently posted this essay on his Facebook public page and included it in his latest newsletter. With his kind permission, it is reproduced here.

Wildlife art is in serious need of a therapist, or at least a conscientious and impartial friend who's willing to lend a sympathetic ear. Over a decade into the new millennium, wildlife art seems to be in the midst of an identity crisis. I see the evidence sprinkled throughout museum and gallery shows, hear it whispered at workshops and art receptions, and encounter the debate in social media forums. Certainly among my closest colleagues the question comes up with some regularity: just what is the future of wildlife art?

The online publication, Wildlife Art Journal has been one of the more lively participants in this discussion. Two recent articles are a case in point, sculptor Simon Gudgeon's "A Meditation on Wildlife Art" and painter Ron Kingswood's provocatively titled essay "Is Animal Painting Dead?" Both authors make the case that 21st Century artists must abandon pure representation and go beyond the thing observed if animal art is to remain artistically relevant. It's certainly a clarion call that I, as a more contemporarily leaning animal painter, respond to with favor.

Gudgeon astutely points out that wildlife is a subject, not a style, and that "wildlife art" has straddled many different genres throughout history. But if wildlife art is not a cohesive genre, why have so many animal artists subsumed into the weary stylistic homogeneity that dominates the field today? Other subject matter driven art forms, figurative work for instance, don't seem to make this error. While there will always be popular trends, there seems to be no broad social or market pressure for every figure painter to approach figures in the same way; instead there's plenty of room for this more interpretive approach, that more objective one, this one more painterly, that one more photorealistic. Amongst friends of mine who paint figures, I've never encountered with the same frequency or forcefulness the desire to "correctly" represent their subject matter that I've experienced among wildlife artists (and even felt myself). Certainly wildlife has always been approached in a diversity of styles, but the natural history and scientific illustrative roots of animal art, coupled with the commercial dictates of the print market, and even today's popular emphasis on ecological narrative, have all lead to a certain orthodoxy in wildlife art, one that overwhelmingly values the objective over the subjective, the commercially acceptable over the personally fulfilling, and the "technical skill" of the artist over his intellectual and spiritual vision. Every animal artist, whether he agrees with it or not, knows that the overarching expectation of the market is this: a detailed animal painted in a detailed environment engaged in a natural behavior. In such a climate, it's easy to see how paintings like mine and many of my closest contemporaries that use the natural world not as a template for pure mimicry, but rather as a springboard for less objective explorations, stand out as oddballs. Is it any wonder then that so many animal painters who don't play by the rules of wildlife art are reluctant to call themselves wildlife artists at all?

Though in my childhood my primary focus was fantasy art, I've painted wildlife all of my life, and when animals began to assert themselves as my primary subject of choice at around age fifteen, I was thrilled to discover that wildlife art seemed to be one of the few artistic communities that appreciated representationalism for what it was rather than scorning it for what it wasn't. I had the unique experience of being inducted into the professional wildlife art world at a very young age, exhibiting with Pacific Wildlife Galleries in Lafayette, CA, since age 16, an association that granted me the opportunity to meet Bob Bateman, John Seerey-Lester, Terry Isaac, and Carl Brenders, among others. Every artistic evolution begins with observation and description, and at the time, these artists provided me with great motivation to hone my skills. The more I struggled to draw and paint what was in front of me, the more I became aware of how the "mainstream art world" dismissed my chosen field. I regarded the snobbery of the academic art elite with my own resentment, carrying an attitude not unlike that of a misfit child who asks, heedless of the irony, "Why don't those popular jerks like me?" It wasn't until my own experimentation led me to move away from a more illustrative format that I began to understand the struggle of which I was a part. I became aware that many wildlife artists, Bob Bateman being perhaps the most vivid example, were far more modern painters than I had realized, and that it was their association with the term "wildlife art" more than anything else that caused them to be marginalized by the cutting edge art world. The San Francisco Chronicle art critic who described Bateman's work as "mere illustration" is only one case in point. As I began to appreciate my mentors for reasons quite apart from what had originally drawn me to their work (the subject matter), my views began the shift. Gallery owner and mentor Dennis Salvo introduced me to Ray Harris-Ching, whose wild bursts of contemporary experimentation and total refusal to be categorized gave fuel to my own explorations. A rigorous study of art history in college expanded my world view in ways for which I will always be thankful, and the insularity of the wildlife art community in general began to look less like the bullying of the bigger artists on the playground and more like what it was, a very limiting and self-imposed isolation.

It wasn't long before decidedly modern elements began creeping into my work, and to my surprise, the market I was already in the process of building seemed pleased. I've often wondered how different my work (and life) would be today if those first steps out of bounds had been met with derision and empty bank accounts rather than delight and sold out shows. Certainly (and understandably) it is the necessity to make a living that is the most common and pernicious source of artistic self-editing. I recall quite vividly the skepticism with which then gallery rep Dennis Salvo looked at some of my first experiments with the non-objective, most notably my Resurrection of Flight series, five works featuring realistically painted birds wheeling through miasmic swirls of chromatic space, their flight paths prescribed by arcing lines and streaks of color. I recall him praising them as "artistically fabulous" which I already knew to be code for "Great work Andrew, but these will never sell." To his credit, however, he hung the pieces, and to my relief, they did sell. To this day I remain grateful for the success of that show and the role it played in reaffirming my path toward carving out a niche that today is both uniquely mine and, quite startlingly, as successful as it is honest.

I was a marketing presenter at the Susan Kathleen Black Foundation Workshop in Wyoming in 2005 when Greg Beecham complimented the workshop participants on their technical proficiency, but noted that the work was "lacking poetry." For whatever reason, I was approached over and over again during that workshop to clarify what Greg had meant. In addition to the obvious, "You'll have to ask Greg," all I could offer was this: the difference between prose and poetry is economy. The poet uses one carefully chosen word where the novelist would use a hundred. Poetry is not deliberately abstruse; it's simply dense because what is there is saturated with meaning, rather than glazed with it. When Greg asked in his quiet and gentle way for more poetry, I believe he was asking for the same thing Simon Gudgeon is asking for, for artists to bring something of themselves to their work. Art is more than the sum of its parts, and many inexperienced or hesitant painters fill their work with noisy and unnecessary details either to mask what is essentially an unrefined vision, or worse yet, simply because it was there in the photographic reference. It's easy to see how, in a field of art so dominated by concerns about "accuracy," that photographs become dangerous masters rather than valuable allies. Unfortunately, artwork that is blithely drawn from a slew of unfiltered reference material is almost certainly destined to be prose, not poetry, and not very good prose at that. Kingswood and Gudgeon both admonish painters and sculptors not to allow the photograph to supplant one's own artistic vision. There is nothing inherently wrong with being descriptive, but art that has proven itself to be the most historically enduring has done so, not because of what it describes, but because of what it evokes. Between the drudgery of illustration and the vacuity of decoration lies the evocative; that is the province of the artist, and that is the vein that wildlife painters who wish to challenge themselves must mine.

I don't want, however, in this esoteric discussion of artistic intentionality, want to gloss over the commercial realities of life as a fine artist. What if galleries and collectors don't march to the beat of our new drummer? That's always a risk, but I firmly believe that every artist is better off painting what his soul demands and then seeking out those who appreciate his vision, rather than subjugating his own impulses to perceived market requirements. I'd be lying if I claimed that I had not created plenty of "artistically fabulous" (as Dennis Salvo would say) paintings throughout my career that have never found a buyer, but overall I'm shocked and thrilled by how often I find a home for truly unique work that I painted solely for myself without any regard to its salability, and often in full knowledge of its unlikelihood to sell. Hemmingway once observed "The truth has a certain ring to it," and I wholeheartedly agree. Strictly playing the numbers, it's a pedestrian world, and we've all cringed at the sight of manufactured dreck passing as art and raking in a fortune, but true artistic expression, unfettered, naked, and unabashed, exudes the raw beauty of truth, and that is as unmistakable and alluring to the discriminating collector as it is imperative to the artist who creates it. If wildlife art is to evolve in the new century, and if it is to find a way out of this identity crisis, it must shake off the external forces of commercial and critical acceptance and look to satisfy its own needs for its own sake. Whatever our freedom costs in the short run pales in comparison to the burden of dishonesty. With a little luck, the rest will follow.

The good news is that the first steps toward a brighter future for animal art have already been taken. Over ten years after my first major gallery showing, I've become quite involved in our close knit community through organizations like the Society of Animal Artists and the SKB Foundation, my participation in major shows like Birds in Art, and relationships with important institutions such as the National Museum of Wildlife Art, and I've become more and more aware of the pulse of this strange creature we call "wildlife art." In just the past few years, I'm seeing fresh and contemporary work peppering the market with increasing regularity and, in some cases, becoming quite prominent. I believe that a loose but broad movement is afoot within the wildlife art community to take on exactly the challenge that Ron Kingswood and Simon Gudgeon are making, to look beyond the photographic reference, to see beyond nature itself to something higher, something only the artist can see with his inward looking eye, and create work that has relevance beyond its subject matter.

Along that vein I must clarify that I have no desire to impose on other artists the same kind of pressures and expectations I once resented. Just the opposite. If artists begin moving in a more contemporary direction because they don't want to be left behind as wildlife art evolves into the 21st Century, if they make changes to their work simply because the market shifts in a more contemporary direction, the point will be missed entirely, and we are likely to come to a place even more dissatisfying than the current malaise. It would be akin to moving to another apartment in the same building, a different room with the same tired view. The challenge I offer is only for self-identifying wildlife artists to honestly ask themselves the question, "Why am I painting what I am painting the way I am painting it?" If the answer is, "Because it pleases me," then there is no reason to change, regardless of whether or not your work is riding this contemporary wave. If, on the other hand, the question makes you uncomfortable and the answer does not come readily, at the very least it is time to honestly reevaluate your work and its direction. If enough animal painters and sculptors do that, then we can be assured that whatever identity wildlife art finds in the new millennium, it will be one that is more honest, more appealing, and ultimately more meaningful than its current incarnation.

Ron Kingswood's "Is Animal Painting Dead" and Simon Gudgeon's " A Meditation on Wildlife Art" can be found in the Winter 2010/11 and Fall 2010 issues, respectively, of Wildlife Art Journal, available at www.wildlifeartjournal.com

Kitler's Work Features in The Artist's Magazine

Society of Animal Artists member David N. Kitler and his work are being showcased in a feature article in the April 2011 issue of The Artist's Magazine, on newsstands now.  The multiple-page spread includes several of David's latest pieces - with an emphasis on David's quest for uniqueness and originality in his work - along with a step-by-step demo on acrylics techniques.

With a circulation of over 140,000 copies, The Artist’s Magazine is the world’s leading magazine for artists. It focuses on spotlighting the processes of the best artists working today, while keeping readers abreast of professional practices that can help advance their own careers.  A regular contributor in the "Drawing Board" column, David has also won First Place in the magazine’s prestigious Annual Competition (Animal/Wildlife category), and was later honored to serve as its Juror.

Visit www.artistsmagazine.com to check out the extra online materials:

- Masking with Cellophane:    

www.artistsnetwork.com/article/masking-demo-david-n-kitler/

- Perceiving Transparent and Opaque Colors:

www.artistsnetwork.com/article/transparent-opaque-colors-kitler

(rc)

Diane Mason featured artist at NatureWorks

Congratulations to Society of Animal Artists member and president Diane Mason, she will be the featured artist at this year’s NatureWorks Art Show & Sale in Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

March 5^th and 6^th, 2011
RENAISSANCE Tulsa Hotel & Convention Center
Tulsa, Oklahoma

Diane has been a proud member of the SAA since 2003, and she has served on the Executive Board since 2005, becoming President in November of 2008. She has received the Leonard J. Meiselman Award for a Representational Sculpture in the Academic Manner in 2003, and an Award of Excellence in 2010 for her service as President.

“The Award of Excellence was the most appreciated and valued award of recognition that I could ever imagine receiving. This organization is very, very special to me – as are all of the artists in it.”
-Diane Mason

(rc)

SOME THOUGHTS ON APPLYING FOR MEMBERSHIP IN THE SOCIETY OF ANIMAL ARTISTS By Susan Fox, SAA

The deadline for the next round of consideration is coming up in mid-April. I thought that, having participated in three membership juries now as a member of the Executive Board of the Society, I would offer some observations and tips that might be helpful to those of you who aspire to membership in the SAA.

A couple of notes before we start- First, I’m a painter and that’s what I know best. What I’m going to say applies to most other media, but creating a successful painting will be my main focus. Second, this article represents my personal views and is not an official statement by the SAA, any of its officers or the other board members. If you have any comments or questions, please direct them to me.

Now, to begin: I recommend that you do this exercise. Go to the Society’s website, visit the virtual museum and the individual websites of any member’s work that catches your eye. Then get out at least eight or ten of your own pieces. Line them up. Look at them objectively. This is not easy. We tend to be either too hard or too easy on ourselves. Do your best to be honest since that is when opportunities for growth happen.

Representational painting in general, and animal art in particular, have well-established criteria for what constitutes a “good” painting. These principles have evolved over a number of centuries. They are not “subjective”.

You are not in competition for a limited number of spots as would be true with a juried show. We usually have between two and three dozen applications to consider. We can accept all of them. Or none of them. Each applicant’s work is judged on its own merits.

Pick one piece that you honestly believe is at or is close to the level of the work of the artists who are already members.

You now need four more at or near that level, because one of the things that will sink an application fast is one or two good pieces followed by the jury seeing the next three or four go off the cliff. You will be judged by your weakest pieces. Consistency is very important.

Consistent in what? Glad you asked...

1. DRAWING: Animals have a physiological and behavioral reality that a competent animal artist has to understand and demonstrate to the jury. In other words, you need to be able to draw them with accuracy and understanding if you are a traditional representational artist and clear understanding if you are going to handle them in a more personally expressive way. You are hoping to join the ranks of animal artists who have been doing this, in some cases, for decades. They know if the drawing is correct or not. Which way a leg can bend, how a wing moves in flight or what the pattern of spots are on a leopard are not really subject to debate, however open they are to informed interpretation.

2. CRAFT: We want to see a solid understanding of your chosen media, whatever it is. If you decide to submit work in more than one media, then all of them need to be at an equal level of competence. Don't submit a little of this and a little of that, hoping that something will stick, like spaghetti on a wall.

3. DESIGN AND COMPOSITION: Do you have a solid grasp of design and composition? Have you made a conscious decision about every element of your piece? For instance, are the subjects in the majority of your submissions plopped automatically into the middle of the canvas or thoughtfully placed to carry out your central idea?

4. PERSONAL VISION: Are you creating art based on a personal vision or simply copying photographs? (It is well-known that photographic images flatten and distort three-dimensional subjects like animals, so the artist must learn how to compensate for that if their goal is a realistic representation.) What do YOU have to say about lions and elk, butterflies and buzzards? Let your opinion, point of view and passion come through. HAVE an opinion, point of view and passion about your subjects.

5. KNOWLEDGE: Do you understand basic animal anatomy? Do you understand the habitat of the species you are representing? Have you learned about their behavior as an inspiration for your work? Or is everyone just standing around? If you put an animal in a realistic setting, you are now a landscape painter too. Are both your animals and any habitat shown depicted at the same level? Or does one lag behind the other?

Animals are specialized subject matter that require study and the accumulation of knowledge over time to represent successfully. There are no shortcuts.

We are looking for artists who have mastered their art and craft at a consistent level and who present us with a body of five works which all reflect that level.

Good luck!