MEET A SUCCESSFUL STREET ARTIST

Meet Banksy, 45, a Brit who's got the art world talking about him.  In October he stuck his picture, "Girl with Balloon," in his shredder, cut the canvas into ribbons and while he selling the ribbons, it sold at auction for $1.4 million.

This is one of his self portraits as a lawbreaking vandal, political activist, provocateur, who upsets  people with his satirical street art and epigrams that combine humor with graffiti--all of it done in his distinctive stenciling style. Banksy says, "The poet produces poems, the painter produces paintings, the criminal produces crimes. If you can do all three at once, you can really confuse the shit out of them."

This guy defaces homes, street corners and walls, stenciling pictures in odd places. A famous 3 x 4 ft  Banksy that's at the top of a tall building cannot be seen unless you climb ladders. You can't see his "Grim Reaper" stencil unless you take a boat trip. Without getting permission, he'll create a stencil on your house. A ramshackle house with a Banksy on it will sell for millions.

So where can you go to see one of his works? The New York Times says, "At the Brooklyn Museum one of his artworks was surreptitiously placed there by the him--a soldier in a red coat holding a can of spray paint, with anti-war graffiti in the background. The Museum of Modern Art has a stencil of a can of cream-of-tomato soup that was found in an elevator. They're not sure it's a Banksy so it's not on display.

Here's Banksy stuff you might see in London.

Banksy's last face-to-face interview took place in 2003, but I found this wall stencil with a 45-ish, ordinary, balding guy who looks like he's discussing it. Bet it's him.

"Pest Control" is the name of the organization set up by him to control his business. He says, "It has never been easier to sell one's art. You don't have to go to college, drag around a portfolio, mail off transparencies to snooty galleries, or sleep with someone powerful. All you need now is a few ideas and a broadband connection. This is the first time the essentially bourgeois world of art has belonged to the people We need to make it count!"



The shredded girl picture, auctioned for $1.4 million in 2018, is now worth double.

Banksy net worth: $50 million.

Attending auctions or interviews, he wears a paper bag over his head.  Protected from negative reviews, intellectual discussions of his art, as well as negotiations, Banksy is clearly a super, successful artist whose work we will surely be seeing in various major museums through out the world.

...that paper bag over his head...what a wonderfully appropriately creative, perfect self-portrait...

 

DO YOU FEEL LONELY? OR ALONE?

You are sitting on this bench.

The busy world across the way makes you feel lonely. Or does it?

I waded through a two page article on the "loneliness epidemic in America." It quoted former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy saying: "During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes, it was loneliness." The article quoted other big name researchers who've said loneliness causes high blood pressure, weakens the immune system, shortens a person' s life by 15 years like obesity, like smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

In the photo below, is that you feeling lonely as you're watching the bird, the waves and the horizon? Or are you just a person who is alone?

Thomas Wolfe, one of my favorite authors said, "The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence."

Like the person just below, who is heading into the distance, the footsteps--the path you make by yourself --are just  steps you make by yourself, alone.

I have a husband and son and we are deeply loving, deeply connected family, sharing thoughts about ourselves, but we are, even so, very separate human beings. Yes, even though, sometimes, the chair next to me is empty.

Guys, if  the picture above makes you aware of what others have and you lack, turn the page, and change the thought. 

Philosopher Kahil Gibran said, "Love one another but make not a bond of love. Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls." Also Tennessee Williams, a very inspiring playwright, said, "We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life." And according to Nietzsche, "Loneliness is one thing, solitude another." Even Marilyn Monroe said, "I restore myself when I'm alone."

More than any other person, what Orson Welles said rings in my mind. "We are born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we are not alone."

 Hold onto that. You are alone. It's YOU. Celebrate it. 

Grab aloneness. 

(VIDEO) PLAYING PEAS PORRIDGE HOT

What can you do on a day when you're working on artistic things, when you keep getting interrupted by prosaic things you need to tend to immediately?

Take a look--see what John and Emily do. It might work for you.

THE FASCINATING JULIA LEWIS-DREYFUS

Here she is in her pretty-girl Seinfeld days. Here womanly Julie is winning her 6th Best Actress award for her hit HBO show, "Veep"

Watching her in reruns of Seinfeld, Julia as Elaine in "SEINFELD" continues to give me moments I enjoy freshly, even if I've seen the scene before. "The New Adventures of Old Christine" delighted me, and now I'm a fan of "Veep."

It's Julia's sense of humor. You feel she's saying the first thing that comes to her mind, not censoring, not thinking ahead--just reacting. What comes out of her mouth is surprising, fun, shocking, even ludicrous, ridiculous. Occasionally, it's witchy bitchy, blunt, crude, and what she's said even seems to surprise her. She reacts with a grunt or an oops, a big-eyed look with a slightly crooked smile which becomes  frown and turns back into a smile.

I love this picture: it's HER---the fearless, unique, theatrical cartoonist, who says and does whatever she feels like saying and doing.

Brace yourself as the video below rolls--you'll be chuckling. It takes us back in time to the days when politics was riveting, important, and interesting no matter which side you were on. And we enjoyed the quirks of the people involved, not feared and dreaded them as we're fearing and dreading them nowadays.

Hurray for Julia/Selina Meyer the "Veep," hurray  for the liberated guys who write this show, and the be-anything-do anything art of Julia Lewis-Dreyfus.