Thinking About Obscurity

Sandy Kinnee
April 2019

The Word I Was Thinking of is Obscurity.

Good but not quite good enough to be in the history books. That essentially sums up the mission of a museum I visited today on the outskirts of Paris. The walls are covered with the works of artists who made a career of pleasing their audience. These were serious painters whose craft you can enjoy and admire, but none of which you would recognize by name, because they are not included in the canon of modern art, let alone Art. These painters and sculptors were as skilled and active as any of those you would find in an art history book, yet they represent the vast invisible majority of artists. Some live on, nailed to the walls of this museum and in the collections of the heirs to the estates of those who liked their work or otherwise patronized their careers, for example by commissioning a portrait. They existed. They painted. They were neither slouches nor hobby painters. They are the artistic benchwarmers on the baseball team of life.  These gifted people led their lives making art. They contributed in a way to the taste and fashion of their day.  Unfortunately, their work, as good as is and was had a short shelf life. They were not the ones who made waves or changed the course of taste or the direction of art. When you are an artist known only to other artists and those who own your artwork, you stand being forgotten within one generation or so.  Maybe they were already forgotten while still alive.

Better to identify these people, who used a brush or molded clay, as simply neglected or lovely shadows, talented practitioners assigned to obscurity. They were better than good, but truth be told, how many examples of Manet-esque or Picasso-like or similar-to-whoever can you hang if you already have a Manet or Picasso or Pollock?  You don’t.

So, in a way, a museum like this one serves a real purpose: it says that there are many more than those with brand name recognition.

Worth enjoying, if you can find them.

They are anonymous, obscure, even if their signature is crisp and legible.

Does being forgotten matter to the dead who have lived a life doing what they were meant to do?

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Sandy Kinnee is yet another obscure artist who is an even more obscure writer/poet. Best known for his work with handmade paper since the early 1970s, he has for the past five years been exclusively painting fifteen foot canvases. He splits his time between Paris and Colorado. When in Colorado he paints. In Paris he writes because the apartment has no floor space for fifteen foot canvases.

sandykinnee.com