The Outside World Today
(All images depicted in this post have been taken from James Howard Kunstler’s website: https://www.kunstler.com/).
If you’ve hung around the online alt-right for long enough you might be familiar with some of Jim’s longer thought-pieces. They’ve appeared on Zerohedge many times, pulled off his own blog. And Jim was also clearly an early reader of the fourth-turning theory, as it comes up time and again in his work.
What you may not have known is that he is also a painter, and his work is up on display on his website. He also looks to have published a book of his works.
I’m not a critic, so i’ll only write about what I like. That’s not to say that every artists work perfectly lines up with my aesthetic tastes, but if I can value them as people or the other work that they have done (and Jim Kunstler checks those boxes by virtue of his writing alone) then I might have something to say about their artwork as a general conversation and character insight.
This is what painting outdoors looks like. The French phrase “en plein air” is what anyone with art knowledge in the english-speaking world has been taught to call it. I think that’s a bit pretentious so i’ll just stick to an english phrasing.
Plain air painting is what the word says. The impressionists popularized it as they were the first group of artists to benefit from portable art materials, made and distributed during the industrial revolution. That means portable easels, paint tubes, drying-accelerants, acrylics and perhaps other conveniences like an easy-ride home on a train or in a closed-carriage, an umbrella, a pack-lunch and drink bottle, photography, an increasingly educated but homogenous public that largely tolerated this practice (try doing it in a big city today), a sense of novelty from the art-appreciating public and a general peacetime vibe.
The ones who first did it were also anxious to get out of the studio once they realised they could (All those fumes and pigment particles aren’t good for you). They were also pretty obsessed with painting colour as they saw it accurately.
If you compare paintings done indoors with paintings done outdoors you begin to notice a difference. Even if the indoor painting is meant to be painting what was seen outdoors, and even if it uses a photographic aid.
I can tell Jim Kunstler is not using photos, and if he is then it’s minimal. He’s focusing on the subject in front of him and drawing directly from that. Nature can do annoying things like move. (Clouds, winds, blowing trees, birds, animals, people and cars who pass in front of view). This is frustrating to people concerned with accuracy, and hence they take photos to assist them. Its meant to be a still moment in time isn’t it? But If you choose to use photographic references, are you doing a painting, or a painting of a photo?
I would call JHKs paintings, in the most neutral way possible, Boomeresque. That’s fine. There have actually been a lot of good boomers who’ve done good things. I think JHK is one of those. FWIW Adam Piggott also seems to have backtracked on his boomer-hate in one of his recent articles, reorienting the focus of his ire, correctly in my view, towards white “liberals” (leftists, as we call them in Australia. Because they are certainly not liberal about any tolerance for deviation from their dogmatic beliefs).
What I noticed about JHKs work though is an element I have in mine, which is an admission to the reality of our modern world. Powerlines, abandoned cars and houses, highway railing and so on.
It makes sense, that shit is all out there now. There should be at least some art out there that admits to its existence, whether people like the look of it or not. Maybe the people need to confront the reality of what we’ve turned our physical world into in the name of technological progress. Certainly the younger gens have picked this up. In turn the younger gens might get an understanding, by joining the dots, that those idealized scenes of the past they share around online are often just that: idealized. The past had problems too. And some past artists did depict them as an admission, even a declaration, of their own reality. Can you make the ugly into something visually appealing? Learn to appreciate its form in another way?
It would be good to return to a world once again where more people were comfortable drawing or painting outside. They certainly feel comfortable filming everything with their smartphones (most often themselves, the narcissistic shits), and the government and business sector has also picked up on the mood with their own expansion of surveillance systems. But to return to that kind of world we would need to return to a high-trust world. Which I see as pretty far-off right now.
Like my good self, Jim appears to be fond of paddock bombs. This is one of about 2 or 3 paintings he’s done that I can see featuring car wreckage.
I felt it important to include this one. Art tends to be very affiliated with trends and fashion, but a lot of people who practice art couldn’t care less about either. In various art classes I’ve done throughout the years there has been people like this, and they also run the shops, their own studios, regional galleries and fair, write books and blog on art. I couldn’t care less either. If I like the work I like it.