GALO: Apparently you started the first Chalk festival in 1987 in Santa Barbara California after envisioning bringing in artists from all around the world. Yet, you were never able to achieve this. What prevented you from achieving your dream of what the Sarasota Chalk Festival has triumphantly done?

KW: I think this was due in part to the newness of the art form and in part to the objectives of the first hosting organization. They created a financial model that was very profitable for their organization, but did not include significant compensation for any artists. This was then replicated in many other cities. The festivals, therefore, tended to launch new artists who did not require payment. This caused a great proliferation of new pavement artists who enjoyed the media attention. It also surrounded pavement art with an air of amateurishness that it did not need. A decade later the advertising world injected enough money into the art form to make it a viable profession for many artists. As a general rule, the organizers of festivals have not changed their business structure according to this new paradigm. Denise Kowal, in Sarasota, has an innate respect for artists, not just art. She took a great personal risk to launch an event that gave importance and recognition to individual artists. I think her approach has a much better long-term chance of moving pavement art forward and benefitting her community than the older amateur and volunteer model.

GALO: Speaking of which, quite recently you were one of the guest artists at the Sarasota Chalk Festival. What were some of your favorite pieces there?

KW: Many artists did a wonderful job. An artist working near me was Eduardo Rellero, who I rank as one the most interesting of the “newer” pavement artists. I fear to mention other individual artists because too many of them did great work and it would be unfair. There was a Dutch group and a German couple that did large and impressive works with great professionalism. I also saw Melanie Stimmel work for the first time after being impressed by her images for years on the Internet.

GALO: You were awarded the Kennedy Center Medallion for your outstanding contribution to arts education – an achievement of yours that is quite often overlooked by many. Why did you decide to dedicate 10 years of your life to teaching children and college students to work with pastels and chalk and how did this influence you as an artist?

KW: I think that teaching and writing will eventually be my most important contribution to the arts. I have been stuck for a number of years now because I feel that the current approach to teaching art needs to be rethought from the ground up. This is a significant task, which involves forming a new philosophical basis for the method, as well as reintroducing important aesthetic ideas that we have reviled and discarded in our century with a fresh approach. I am working in a way that is contrary to both “contemporary art” theory and also “academic realism,” so it would be nearly impossible to get a grant or funding for my studies.

GALO: Do you still teach today?

KW: With some trepidation, I have given a number of public lectures this year. To my surprise, even my most outrageous ideas were well received. This has given me a lot of confidence, but I still want to formalize some of my philosophical ideas before launching a more comprehensive program of courses. At the same time, I am already searching for venue options in the arena of workshops and lectures.

GALO: As someone who has studied classical art, how do you perceive the modern art of today? Arguably there are some critics and artists who feel that the modern age era has reduced art to a comical level. Calling it meaningless or valueless they often question the purpose of it and how it could have ended up on a museum wall or on the stage of one. What are your perceptions on this?

KW: I don’t personally think that modern and contemporary art is worthless or meaningless, although I must admit it doesn’t personally interest me enormously. The greatest mistake, in my opinion, was the annihilation of the classical tradition in visual art. Music managed to maintain its classical traditions while also creating modern music, jazz and rock, along with countless other expressions. The visual arts destroyed their vast classical heritage in order to focus exclusively on the individual expressions and tastes of a small group of artists and critics.

I think that the results have been devastating, not because no interesting work has been created, but because of the overall demise of the visual arts in education and culture. The obsessive focus by institutions on the works of a few contemporary “branded superstars” may be financially convenient, but is no compensation for the resulting devastation of mass culture and education. It insults the many artists and craftsmen that do beautiful work in relative obscurity. At this point, the intellectuals should be ashamed to participate in it, not because it isn’t amusing or fun or intellectually stimulating for them, but because the world needs a fresh approach to displaying art that can create a more effective and rewarding global culture. I think the official approach to contemporary art is kind of tapped-out, and more interesting images appear every day on the Internet than in most contemporary museum shows.

GALO: Over the ages art has been thematic; be it religion, revolutions, or human relations. What theme do you see transpiring today?

KW: We need a new way to view the universe and our place in it. We need to see humankind as being an integral part of the natural world instead of being separate from it. Ecology and global culture will be great themes, but we also need to create a global visual culture and aesthetic language that makes creativity productive and life worthwhile. Art can do this, but not in the way it is currently produced. My own favorite themes will remain spiritual and mythological, but this is my personal taste.

GALO: Any last words for our readers?

KW: In my philosophy, creativity is not fundamentally an attribute of an individual or even of humankind, but of the universe itself. The universe manifests its creativity in the physical world, creating all of the myriad forms of nature, including man. It has further delegated this potential to the human mind and soul, giving us the capacity to create.

When we create, we can work from our individual “ego” center, within our particular cultural paradigm, or we can utilize some of the creative potential of the universe itself. The wider our “creative circle,” the more power we have to be original, and the more joy we experience from the process.

In our time, fine art has concentrated on the “ego center.” In times of great creativity, it was concentrated on wider cultural and universal centers — this is the true nature of the classical tradition in the arts.

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