For some time I have been struggling as to how to best use Social Media to benefit my art promotion. By Social Media, particularly I mean: Facebook and Twitter; but also my Blog, my Website, and my opt-in email list.
For me, Facebook has been a mess. It is a very flexible tool, but as I have used it, it mixed family messages with my Art business messages. But recently Facebook has introduced its Fan Page which change the whole picture.
As a result I now have:
• My Website - which is a database of my recent paintings; a database of various articles that I have published designed for Art Collectors (potential Art Buyers of my paintings), and for Artists and others who are interested in how I create my paintings; and a database of older paintings which will soon be launched.
• My Blog - which I use to introduce new paintings; new articles of interest to Collectors and/or Artists; and occasional commentaries on Art related subjects.
• My Twitter - which are very short emails that go to self-selected followers of my twittering. I use Twitter to spread the word about new entries to my Blog; new events such as upcoming show openings; major changes to my website. Each brief twitter usually includes a website link to a longer message with more details.
• My new Facebook Fan Page - which I intend to be for longer writings about new paintings, website articles, new Blog entries, and discussions with other Art enthusiasts.
One of the advantages of the Fan Page, is that a fan or follower of the page does not have to have their own Facebook listing. Like Twitter, such a person is a self-selected follower who gets to hear about my postings (usually by email messages), but may participate in writings and discussions on my Fan Page. Also, like Twitter followers, they may leave at anytime.
At this time I have a mix of family, personal friends, and Art friends on my Facebook. I plan to invite each Art friend to join me on my Fan Page as a Fan, and for some, remove them as Friends from my regular Facebook page.
• My opt in email list - which I will continue, much as before, is for those who prefer this method of occasional communication. This list consist of people who have expressed interest in knowing of only the most important events of my Art life.
Now to invite people to follow my activities by one or more of these paths.
A young couple pause to have a leisurely cup of coffee, while their daughter drinks some milk. They lovingly look at their little girl, while enjoying each others company.
This 12 x 24 inch oil painting was derived from a series of photographs I took at an outdoor coffee shop in Palm Springs. The open simplicity and color depicted in the painting is in marked contrast to the chaos of the table clutter and backgrounds of the original photographs.
(Much of this material has been extracted from Wikipedia and Yahoo! Directory.)
Social Realism, sometimes known as Socio-Realism, in the past depicted social and racial injustice, and economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working class activities as heroic.
The movement started as a style of painting in which the scenes typically convey a message of social or political protest edged with satire.
Later it expanded to include scenes of normal American life beyond the gritty side, and had a strong influence on mid century popular culture.
Eventually, it fell out of favor as other more edgy styles took over.
Today, there is a revival of a style of colorful paintings showing ordinary people going about their everyday life - Contemporary Social Realism.
Social Realism became an art movement during the late 19th Century, was adopted by American painters in the early 1900's, and became particularly important during the Great Depression of the late 1920's and early 1930's. It is closely related to American Scene Painting and to Regionalism styles. It fell-out of fashion in the 1960's, but is returning to influence thinking and the contemporary art of today.
The term dates, on a broader scale, to the Realist movement in French art during the mid-1800s. In the 20th Century, it refers back to the works of the French artist Gustave Courbet and in particular to the implications of his 19th Century paintings "A Burial at Ornas" and "The Stone-Breakers," which scandalized French Salon–goers of 1850.
Many of the early artists who subscribed to Social Realism were painters with socialist (but not necessarily Marxist) political views. The movement has some commonalities with the Socialist Realism used in the Soviet Union and the the Eastern Block through about the 1990's. But the two are not identical - Social Realism is not an official art, and allows space for subjectivity. In certain contexts, Socialist Realism has been described as a specific branch of Social Realism.
Realism, a style of painting that depicts the actuality of what the eyes can see, was a very popular art form in France around the mid to late 1800’s. It came about with the introduction of photography - a new visual source that created a desire for people to produce things that look “objectively real.”
Realism tended to be heavily against Romanticism, a genre dominating French literature and artwork in the mid 19th century. Undistorted by personal bias, Realism believed in the ideology of external reality and revolted against exaggerated emotionalism. Truth and accuracy became the goals of many Realists.
The origins of American Social Realism lie in the Ashcan School painters, who in the first decades of the 20th Century depicted the commonplace, gritty, and unglamorous realities of city life. John Slone, Robert Henri, George Bellows, and George Luks were prominent members of this diverse group who painted scenes from everyday life. Later, Reginald Marsh, though not a member of the Ashcan School, continued this tradition, taking lower Manhattan and the Bowery as his themes.
The advent of the 1930's Great Depression and the enactment of the New Deal’s programs beginning in 1933 stimulated a broad trend toward sociopolitical commentary in American painting. Many artists were commissioned to decorate public buildings with murals dealing with American subject matter.
In the Depression era, American painters began to grapple more openly with such themes as joblessness and poverty, political corruption and injustice, labour-management conflict, and the excesses of American materialism. Works in this vein by Ben Shahn, Philip Evergood, William Gropper, Charles White, and Jack Levine, all of whom worked for the WPA, are notable for their overt and sometimes scathing pictorial criticisms of American society.
But other artists such as Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, Edward Hopper, and other Regionalist painters also dealt with everyday life in their works, but in a romanticized way that was basically incompatible with explicit social protest or criticism.
Their work, often called American Scene Painting, depicted scenes of typical American life and landscape painted in a naturalistic, descriptive vein during this same Depression period. Sometimes it is referred to as an umbrella term for rural American Regionalism and the urban and politically oriented Social Realism painting, but its specific boundaries remain ambiguous.
As an Antimodernist style and reaction against the modern European style, American Scene Painting (including American Social Realism) was seen as an attempt to define a uniquely American style of art. The term did not signify an organized movement, but rather an aspect of a broad tendency for American artists to move away from Abstraction and the Avant-Garde in the period between the two world wars.
American Regionalism and Social Realism had a strong influence on popular culture. Its imagery appeared in magazine advertisements, and influenced American children's book illustrators such as Holling Clancy Holling. Norman Rockwell is the most popular and easily recognizable painter of this style and period.
But in the later part of the 20th Century, this style of painting grew less popular. The movements towards new ideas and new ways of expressing old ideas predominated. It seemed each new artist wanted to out do or over extend the thoughts of the previous artists.
But today, in the beginnings of the 21st Century, a desire to display a brighter, lighter form, as Contemporary Social Realism, has emerged. Some collectors and artists, including myself, are embracing this return to reality with the depictions of today's everyday life of ordinary people in the bright colors of the earlier styles.
Five ladies are walking purposefully in line, along a path on a bright sunny day. A green field lays behind them. The first lady shades herself with a colorful red parasol; the last, with one that is yellow. Each woman caries an equally colorful purse or handbag. The rear lady carries a rolled pamphlet.
Though each is looks towards their destination, beyond the painting. Somehow there are interactions in their eagerness to move forward. Are they of the same family? Or, maybe part of a tour group? Where are the going? Only the viewer may guess.
This 12 x 24 inch oil painting on canvas, is the latest in my Social Realism series once again shows a group of ordinary people going about their daily lives. It is loosely based upon some photographs I took of these women walking along a path at the Huntington Library and Art Museum near Pasadena, California.
