Style Scout: Down the Rabbit Hole

Don’t settle for the mundane in choosing art (even on a budget).

"Rabbit Goya"

Image credit: John Largaespada

Recommended by the Editor

Style Scout: Great Big Home

By: Cy Winship |   August 2011   |  From the print edition

Art. Time and again, when I work with clients designing their homes I try to keep costs down, yet by the time we’re done, there’s just no money left for it.

And every time, I fret that we’ve left out the most important thing. I scour galleries and ask who’s doing great work locally. I take folks to see artists’ work, but my clients just can’t afford it—and their walls remain bare. Someday becomes years, and people get used to those empty walls.

Or something worse happens: art fairs. I’ve been to them. For some, they’re entertaining. But as a source of quality art? Not very often. So I become the bad guy, saying no to this flower painting or that tortured wall sculpture.

Then there’s the thing I dread most: desperation meets the Internet. Clients send me pics of suspicious-quality landscapes by some foreign artist priced at a couple hundred bucks. I remember the client who told me she had found an artist in England who did Jackson Pollack-like splatter paintings in customized colors. She had already ordered one—“It’s only $300!”—and was disappointed and surprised that it was ugly upon arrival. Really.

So here’s the conundrum: How do we get good art for bad-art prices? We all dream of it. I mean, if we’re talking great art for $30, then we are truly crazy. But if we hope to find something for hundreds rather than thousands, maybe we’re only slightly mad.

There are possibilities if we look hard enough. Another client and I went to Anita Sue Kolman’s gallery in Northrup King and found sensational abstract works at great prices by Betsy Ruth Byers. There’s Eddie Hamilton and his wild-child creations, also at Northrup King, and Jim Dryden over at Traffic Zone Center in downtown Minneapolis. All these people are wonderful painters and actually affordable. Another thing I keep meaning to explore is photography.

With all this floating around in my head, I was picking frames for three great new paintings by Jim Dryden at Frame Ups on Nicollet when I was stopped dead in my tracks. What the hell was I looking at? There was a photo collage of a big, demented Donnie Darko-like rabbit devouring what seemed to be a child. Blood everywhere. I recognized it as a bizarre riff on Goya’s demented masterpiece "Saturn Devouring his Children." There were more: that same sick rabbit sitting on a monkey in the grass. The Mad Hatter’s tea party with a hydrocephalic Alice and sinister sidekicks, next to strange, claustrophobic portraits of distorted, menacing figures. Not Aunt Mabel’s idea of photography. Not even mine, until now.

I had never heard of the artist—John Largaespada—but I became an instant fan, and tracked him down to talk about his stuff. Turns out he takes lots of photos (the rabbit has his face, exploring his inner anarchic destroyer) and layers them in collages. He also flattens and distorts in what he terms a “Byzantine” style, a kind of representation that defies how actual bodies work. He’s got other, less disturbing pieces: gorgeous Minneapolis skylines from over the river or by the Walker, tinted and distorted as if Dali had made them. And for the faintest of heart, underwater collages of brilliant fish and corals that make me feel like I’m inside my childhood View-Master (God, I’m dating myself).

But, why be faint of heart? That’s the real problem with many of us. We can love challenging, even macabre, art in galleries (ooh, let’s stop by Rogue Buddha) but chicken out when it comes to our homes. Do we really need cheesy prints of cypress trees from Room & Board? Why not some controversy? Why not a disturbing photo or dark painting to spark conversation or even just make us feel cool in our homes: Look what I bought and dared to hang?

Just like I lament how every Halloween character and decoration has been made bouncy and cute, with all darkness and terror removed (I mean, that’s what we loved about Halloween—being scared) I hate to see us settle for feel-good art. Art is more important than pillows—hell, it’s more important than most anything we put in our homes!

I keep coming back to one theme. We all want to be cool, and overpriced, gaudy art-fair art isn’t cool. Nor is lame Internet crap. What is cool is local vision, daring artists who challenge and sometimes disturb us. Getting a deal is great but mustn’t be the goal. Good artists need to eat and should be paid for their work. Bad artists should not. If you can’t afford a good $4,000 painting, don’t buy a lousy $400 one. Track down demented talents like John Largaespada and buy a Goya Rabbit—at least for your hallway. Then, every morning as you head to the bathroom, marvel at how cool you are.