AN ARTIST SALON 1: Attention
Drawn Together Arts in collaboration with The Art Spirit Gallery facilitates an after hours Artist Salon to provide a space to intersect any medium of artistry; Creating a safe, vulnerable space to explore, question, and engage in the art of thought. We believe this will create a thriving artistic community, foster collaboration and a stronger network, and form new concepts, ideas, philosophies that can inform, inspire, and motivate new work in the inland northwest.
What is An Artist Salon?
An Artist Salon was best described by NIC choral director, Max Mendez, as a "think tank" for artists.
A "Salon" has been around for a long time but specially popular event at the Turn of the Century in Paris France, where artists and thinkers of different disciplines would gather and share ideas, experiment, and philosophize. Our salons are modeled the father of symbolist poetry and art critic Stéphane Mallarmé's. His work was a catalyst for impressionist and symbolist thought of artists like Debussy (Composition), Degas (Painting), and Paul Verlaine (Poetry). A primary reason why his salons were successful was his art of suggestion and creating a free, vulnerable, and safe place to question. His leading philosophy was
"To define is to kill. To suggest is to create."
One might surmise that it is in this experimental space that also made way for the diversity of art movement in that era. His famous salon frequented some of the era's greatest artists like Paul Verlaine, Oscar Wilde, Paul Valery, Redon, Renoir, Monet, Degas, Whistler, W. B. Yates, Charles Baudelaire, and Marcel Proust. It is in this space where diversity of perspectives, nationalities, and artistic mediums that attendees were free to question, explore, and intersect disciplines that formed pathways for new concepts, art schools, philosophies, and invention. It is in this wealth of history we want to invite a similar space with An artist Salon at The Art Spirit Gallery.
Our first Salon was on October 20th, 2021 and on the subject of attention. We gathered artists from mediums such as sculpting, playwrighting, oil painting, charcoal, dance, theater, and pastels to share our passions and curiosities.
The topic was on the facets of attention in how they relate to audience and the creative process.
How do we captivate attention in an ever changing, ever vying for our attention world, media, and commercialist society?
What is our jobs as artists to captivate attention?
How do we captivate attention in the creative process- the flow state?
How do we cultivate attention in the marketing state- the talking about the art work?
How do we captivate attention from the audience, weather that be the exhibit space, gallery hall, auditorium, or other?
We discussed how memories inspire our attention to create art. Robert Henri remarks,
"“There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. If one could but recall his vision by some sort of sign. It was in this hope that the arts were invented. Sign-posts on the way to what may be. Sign-posts toward greater knowledge."
— “Robert Henri” The Art Spirit
Attention gives us the capacity to create, but then draws attention from the audience to remember the moments of seeing beyond the usual, moments of happiness, moments of greater knowledge. It is in this thought that the arts serve a great deal to community building, serve public art and creative placemaking to slow people down to pay attention, to distract from a busy life or from our phones and invite us to craft moments of our own.
To inquire more about Artist Salons, email Duncan Menzies at duncan@theartspiritgallery.com