Peripheral vision, part I

By frank | Published: May 13, 2009

Here’s the routine. I’m browsing through paintings on Ebay, weeding out the made-in-China assemby-line facsimiles, the self-indulgent faux primitives, the authentic but too continental mid-century European moderns, the nineteenth-century cigar paintings and the generic but earnest amateur landscapes and still-lifes that make up the bulk of the listings. My girlfriend doesn’t have the patience to plow through, say, twenty pages of this stuff and set aside the few potential winners. Besides, she won’t use browser tabs, so her saved windows proliferate like tribbles, bogging down her memory-challenged computer. Believe me, works out better if I do it.

Next step is, I call her over and we give the first pass a second pass. Lucy is pretty sharp on a single glass of wine, decisive on two, and together we cull out another round in less than ten minutes. We’ll make an evening over what’s left, shifting back and forth between pages, sizing the windows and setting paintings side by side, occasionally googling a name to see if anything comes up.

We might end up with one or two paintings to bid on. Of course, price is a consideration. It isn’t worth it on Ebay if you’re going to pay gallery prices, so we’re looking for undiscovered artists and overlooked deals. It happens.

Joseph Crepin 1947 painting no.300+

Several years ago we bought a small primitive butterfly for under three dollars. It was mislabeled as a paint-by-number, probably for its simplistic technique and obsessive within-the-lines vibe. Although the painting was signed and dated, we just liked it (especially at $2.59) and it wasn’t until a year later that we remembered to look the artist up.

Researching an unknown artist can be tricky. You’d be surprised how many people there are in the world with the name Warren Vornadeaux or Langley P. Wickenstauffer. Okay I made those up, but try searching something as abbreviated as H. Paul or A. Decker — even with qualifiers like ‘art’ or ‘painting’ you come up with hand-carved wooden santas by Paul H. and battery-powered paint rollers from Black & Decker. Pages of pretty much everything except what you’re looking for.

The butterfly was signed JB Crepin, information Google considered worthless. Adding 1947 to his name pulled up … continue »»

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Ebay in the cave

By frank | Published: May 7, 2009

The first item I ever bought on Ebay was a vintage Flosso-Hornmann magic catalog. Dipping my finger into Ebay’s stream of consumption, I recognized the classic red and black rabbit-in-a-tuxedo-with-magic-wand-and-top-hat cover floating among the listings, and it was click at first sight. My finger was making up for the long-lost copy my brain had discarded years earlier in a rare moment of apartment cleaning. [Author's Note: My girlfriend will laugh when she reads this. Sarcasticly.]

Flosso-Hornmann magic catalogmagic_catalog_page

Once the catalog arrived and I flipped through its instantly familiar descriptions of x-ray glasses, floating silks, Svengali card decks and mechanical aids to throw your voice, it was like popping in an episode of Dick Van Dyke or Scooby-Doo (the original Where Are You! seasons, please) and sipping a cold beer. I was submerged in a comfortable nostalgia, remembering the hours growing up studying similar pages until they imprinted on my neural synapses like an old pop song repeating endlessly across the AM dial.

Ebay enables rediscovery. Its role as a digital conduit for cultural effluence is central to its lowly origin-myth of the unemployed programmer who creates an online auction just so his girlfriend can trade Pez dispensers with her friends.

Although the Pez story has proven apocryphal, the truth that the first item sold on Ebay was a broken laser pointer is no less symbolic. The official story goes when the founder of Ebay called the winning bidder to make sure he understood the item was broken, the man said “I collect broken laser pointers.”

The takeaway is that there’s no accounting for taste. And Ebay is the land of broken toys. Without the … continue »»

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The happy circumstance of WR Watkins

By frank | Published: April 26, 2009

I discovered the artist WR Watkins on the web in the way that most things are discovered on the web, by happy circumstance. Many web services understand this phenomenon and facilitate it with complex algorithms and relevancy engines, luring you deeper into their content, but serendipity happens whenever you find a link and click on it.

Back in January of 2009 I was browsing for paintings on Ebay. Happy circumstance was already at work — ten minutes earlier I had been reading political blogs, tracking the disintegration of post-capitalist culture, and cross-checking tomorrow’s weather against the two cities where I commute. By whatever tenuous argument of web logic, this led me to Ebay.

Ebay is the grandfather of Web 2.0, the original user-generated site where people upload photographs and short narratives of their personal history. Even if they’re not aware of it. [Author's Note: expand on this.]

I found myself searching for Big-Eye paintings — the kind of kitschy oils and prints that hung in my mother’s house when I was young enough to be spooked by them. Maudlin images of large-eyed children staring sadly at the world like abandoned war orphans, with nascient tears welling in their oversized lacrimal glands. These images were pioneered by Margaret Keane in the late 1950s in San Francisco. [Off Topic: Some critics have credited the migration of this work from San Francisco to Japan in the early sixties for the emergence of the big-eye style of Japanese Anime so prevalent on Adult Swim today.]

Margaret Keane Big-Eye paintingMargaret Keane Big-Eye painting

Search engines are not perfect. Thankfully. Try to explain to me why pink-toned landscapes of Arizona deserts and portraits of George Washington should turn up in the search results for “Big Eye painting” along with the harlequined adolescents, lonely puppies and those wide-eyed waifs that disturbed my childhood sleep. Page after page of serendipitous results, each encapsulated by a thumbnail image taunting me to click. Even at 80 pixels I’m easily led astray.

Soon I was happily browsing WPA-era watercolors of Harlem street corners and Russian charcoal studies of sturdy models that, although unsigned, the credulous buyer was assured were attributable to a late nineteenth-century master.

In this mix of high and low I stumbled over the work of WR Watkins, of whose cultural altitude I was in the dark.

[Author's Note: continue with Watkins after discussion of Ebay.]

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  • About WR Watkins




    William Reginald Watkins (1890-1985) is an artist well positioned for rediscovery and revision. Once known as the dean of Baltimore artists, he lived and worked in that city from 1910 until his death at age 95, and taught painting for half a century at the Maryland Institute of Art. His work exhibited at major galleries and museums across the United States, and now appears in auction or on ArtNet and other online art networks where he is typically represented by local landscapes, seascapes, snowscenes and still lifes.

    However, it is the amazing series of recently discovered watercolor nudes he produced from the 1930s through the 1960s that are among his finest and most distinct work. This blog follows the discovery of this work, building a collection, researching his life, and creating the website wrwatkins.com.

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