BrickWeekly.com: Where Richmond goes for entertainment

The Forest for the Cadmium Green Trees
Whoever you sent out to cover my last Richmond exhibit obviously got stuck on my website - which is not a bad place to idle away an hour or so (or at least no worse a place to be than any another site). This anonymous writer had no trouble "getting" my antagonism for local arbiters who wouldn't get off their butts and cover exhibits that were not "cool" - as mine most certainly were - or overrun by political considerations whereby the Bev Reynolds, The Virginia Museum, and perhaps 1708 got the lion's share of the coverage.

That is to say, he or she got the rhetoric, but ignored the work - which was precisely what I was bitching about.

Well, I can't make anybody go out and look at something that is most definitely off the Cool Radar. I'm just a good landscape painter. You'd think there would be a great many of me in Richmond, which is not only lousy with old-world charm, but seething with natural habitat. The vast and teeming numbers of wannabe practitioners is a matter of record, but it's a little bit different to claim ownership than to actually have the title in your pocket. I'd always hoped, while I lived in Richmond, that it would become increasingly obvious to an increasing number of people that HOW, and not necessarily what, I painted would win the day. Well, it didn't happen; nor can it unless people are willing to look.

In focusing entirely on the entertainment value of my remonstrances, your writer overlooked the very thing that gave rise to them. I wouldn't have written such scurrilous things if I respected any of the people I'd appointed as targets. However, I found them useful as a way of dramatizing the sort of apathy you find among arbiters of taste in a city that doesn't provide a lot of opposition. In strutting around, as I do there on the site, I was not intending to secure the last word.

I was, in fact, being provocative as a way to inspire a second look. Or even a first-time perusal. You've got a good thing going. I would have thought that the smart and independent-minded folk who do your writing would have seen my play-acting as a tactic and not The Whole Story. Perhaps you might have given my larger, better-publicized exhibits their due. I can never know. But you did have a chance to see some pretty good work and you chose to highlight its producer's eccentricities. I think the worst unintentional insult I receive on a fairly regular basis is being called "a character." I realize your writer didn't do it maliciously, but when that happens, the work this character happens to produce is generally back-shelved. In some cases, it ought to be. A great many artist-types can do no better than "act like artists" - whatever that is. But I can't refrain from insisting that the painting I've done merits some serious consideration, my flourishes of "character" aside.

Keep up the good work. I still think you're doing a swell job. Regards.

- Brett Busang

You make a lot of good points. This response is officially my third (the first having been discarded because it sounded too whiny, the second because I sneezed and hit the delete button with my elbow). You're right Brett, we should have talked about the work instead of your reputation as a "character." We should have dedicated more space to an insightful and informed exploration of landscape painting. We should have spent time standing in front of your work, reflecting on an actual canvas instead of staring into a colorful field of pixels. Hell, we should have run a bigger picture. But as a famous rapper once said, "we do what we can up in this mutha-----."

The media is weird and print in particular is an impossibly silly business. You can never make anyone happy. There is never enough coverage, someone's always overlooked and you go to bed every night thinking you could have done a better job. But what can we do? Cry about it? Sometimes yes. Sometimes we cry very hard and for a long time. But we get over it.

In a perfect world, every word on every page would work toward delivering the reader toward a rapturous and all-consuming explosion of enlightenment. In reality, the deadline stalks us like a hungry bear. It rakes its claws along the metal doors and drools all over the industrial carpet. Our terror leads us to embrace quick solutions that will not provoke the bear and cause it to maul us like human jerky. We see empty space and panic and reach for the nearest relevant digital image and rush to fill the gap beneath it with words that are adequately strewn together to make sentences and paragraphs and then, after the sun gets in our eyes and the damn dog eats our homework, we hit print.

And that's how weekly papers get made.

To make a long story short, we're sorry for talking about everything but your work. We like your work, really we do. Thanks for taking the time to write.