Help!

In the 1980’s I was alone as a Dutch artist in depicting naturalism, and figurative paintings. My subjects were mostly portraits of people and women, nude or
clothed. My art was influenced by surrealism and Giger, French comics (Druillet, Moebius), Willink, Symbolism and the PRB. I drew roses with stems and leafs, withered and fallen on the ground. I made a portrait with real hair stuck to it. I worked feverishly.
I didn’t know of other painters like me. In The Netherlands people like Mondriaan and De Kooning were worshipped and realism was ‘something from the Nazi’s’.
Nonsens of course, but the Dutch are quick to condemn everything they don’t like, be it people, movements, art, cultures. They are inherent racist and bigots.

After a couple of years of rejection at galeries, I destroyed most of my artworks – about 200 drawings and paintings. I burned them on a pile, and a lot got
stolen by people who liked drawings or paintings. I stopped making art for years, got addicted to heroin, speed, cocain and alcohol. In about 1995-1996 I made a number of drawings, based on ufos and aliens. Only in 2010 I started to make a lot of art again.
It is offensive to my art, to see my principles and downright copies of my ideas portayed in Stuckism and similar movements. I am NOT a movement. I’m an original artist, not a copyist and my art has depth, is not superficial. The art I see on the internet, for instance on Deviant Art (concept art = NOT art) looks like the stuff I made in te 1980’s.
Others would be overjoyed, but not me. I’m broke, am to be kicked out of my house and forced to live on the streets, being a diabetic is almost impossible. I have no job, being almost not able to walk due to to claudication – pain and cramps in my legs. In this dire situation, nobody is able to help me. I have no friends (because of a social phobia), my mother has no more resources, my girlfriend is an ex now and is the one leaving me, so I’m stuck in a house I can’t pay for. I have no ID and can’t get welfare, because I have no ID. And even if I got welfare, I can’t afford this house. I have no money to move, and what
about my belongings? I’m very depressed and sick of life. The Netherlands is a cruel state. If I get no help, I will be dead in a few months.

So, I ask for help this way. I need money, I need a house with low rent, I need assistance. Who is able to help, who can help me?

I feel ashamed of this. Today, August 18th is my birthday. My mother called me up, nobody else. My ex girlfriend, still living here, refuses to do anything festive. My
lovely son is with his mother in Greece somewhere, and she refuses to tell me where he is. I feel alone.

I need money to live, I need money to make art. Is there nobody out there who can finance a starving artist?

Thank you for reading.
Ivo Westerlaken, aka Robotklaw

A new art – a sketch

Up until Marcel Duchamp: The worldly – art is a craft. Wealthy people and the church commission artists.

After Duchamp: Ideas – art is a pose. Wealthy people and institutes commission artists.

The Anti Art

And now what? Can we continue on this path where artists behave like children, do not possess any craft, are not even able to translate their ideas, so that there now exists a world of thousands of ‘artists’ who basically work for themselves, solely for their own gratification.

There must be another way of making art, translating ideas. There must be art out there which still has any depth, which doesn’t resonate with superficiality.

First a bit of history. Duchamp’s Legacy

Marcel Duchamp showed the way to a new kind of art. Compared with the varieties of visual expression that came before, this new art seeks to to engage the imagination and the intellect instead of just the eyes, embraces humor as a valid aesthetic component, and strives to portray invisible worlds instead of just visible ones.

Some of the most fruitful influences in modern art, from Surrealism to Abstraction to Pop to pure Conceptualism, have a common forefather in Marcel Duchamp.

Duchamp grew disillusioned with what he called “retinal art” after 1912, he wanted to create a new kind of art, one which would engage the mind. He constructed conceptual art.

And therein lies one of the problems of ‘modern’ art. Conceptual art was fresh and new in the 1920’s, but almost a century later, it has become something you can study at an art academy. It has almost become a craft. It has become a gimmick. There is no experiment in it. It is indistinguishable from what children can come up with and produce in staggering amounts.

The essence of Duchamp’s art is of course the realization that all art is

a)      In the eye of the beholder

b)      In the mind of the maker

We are all our own mind. Our minds construct the world around us in our own minds.

Duchamp: whether some other things which are presumed to be absolute — namely, artistic conventions of beauty and craftsmanship — might also be merely arbitrary.

We need a breath of fresh air in art. And after that we need new art!