Edward Winkleman, art dealer and owner of Winkleman Gallery, has an incredibly active blog. Not only does he thoughtfully blog almost every day, but he usually generates 100+ comments.

Edward’s honest and frank posts gives those on the other side an incredible insight into the gallery scene and business. Bravo for transparency!

Recently, he started a weekly post, Tuesday’s Aside, in which he answers people’s gallery and career questions.

Here are some recent gems:

1.) Investing in Yourself - what to do to advance your career when you come into extra $
2.) Political Correctness - in the gallery scene and artworld
3.) Studio Visit Strategies - what to do and not to do when a gallerist or curator visits and when, how, and even if to ask for one

and finally one of my favorites, Shifting Gears: Trust the Spiral
- what do to if your signature style & subject changes

In this last post, Edward introduces a fantastic metaphor, the art spiral pictured above, and goes on to share his insights on this process. It’s such a wonderful summation of the artistic process (which so often does have an artist coming back to the same themes and ideas again and again, just parsed differently) that I will quote it in full. Enjoy!

Anonymous you note: “I know the direction I’m (already) moving in, which is quite different.” In my experience, though, the direction most artists are moving in only seems different for a while. Here’s a simplified version of how I imagine most artists’ journeys/interests (as opposed to careers) would look if charted. [see above]

The spiral is the path I see/hear about repeatedly in studio visits. Obviously there are many more spokes to this spiral, different subjects that reemerge from time to time, points along the path where you adopt the influence or return to a subject (marked with the red asterisks) and others when some idea/subject/concern occurs to you but you press on ignoring it (where the spiral crosses a spoke but there is no asterisk).

I find this image useful, though, when I recognize during a studio visit that an artist has “returned” to an idea or introduced something that might seem entirely new until I see much older work and realize that for many artists they keep returning to the same ideas again and again, only with more insight/ experience than the last time. At such junctures, certain ideas might seem to be threatening what you’ve built perhaps because it’s been a while since Subject A was part of your practice/ consciousness. You might have dropped it off at one asterisk. But generally it’s radiating through your overall practice all the while. If you need it again, you can pick it up and use it.

An artist I showed this diagram to the other day suggested it’s actually much more complex than this. Rather than one two-dimensional spiral, each artist’s journey is actually a three-dimensional series of multiple interwoven spirals, and the intersections are not always so chronological. I suspect he’s right, but the whole point of illustrating this is to note that I don’t think dealers (or anyone else) should associate changes in an artist’s practice with a lack of seriousness. Not if they’re taking a long-term view.

It may not be easy even for the artist, at the point marked “Today,” to see how it’s all related (and how a drastic change in medium or practice will later be combined with other more thoroughly examined spokes and bring one’s audience back round). Personally I think what seem like dramatic shifts are OK so long as the artist has interesting ideas, is rigorous about exploring them, and has a solid studio practice. It will all come together again, and probably be much more interesting for pushing further out along the spiral, rather than sticking in one spot along it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Blogs We Like. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.