Funny, being an artist myself I never thought much about the crossover between my two passions, art and motorcycles, but suddenly I find myself in contemplation.
A friend of mine sent me a link to a woman rider who is also an artist by trade. She is a painter. Her latest venture into the art world was creating canvasses by adding dead bugs to her wet medium in a specific process. Hmmmm, well, I have no problem with pushing the artistic envelope, but whether or not it adds to artistic integrity, I am unsure. The process is the means in her case, creating buggy art.
A.D. Maddox is a rider. She rides a Ducati Monster S2R 1000. After receiving a degree in Sports Medicine from the University of Colorado, she decided her passions lay elsewhere. She reawakened with art, fly fishing and nature as her new passions.
While riding she discovered, in her words, a “thousand motorcycle mergers looked more than just a mess to be cleaned up”. Strapping canvases to the front of the Monster, Maddox zipped up the highway collecting nature. She made color pallets of insect remains. Is it art? Well, I am certain she believes it is.
Clive Bell, a formalist theorist of Kant and Coleridge, argued that one needs to define art in terms of common, exhibited, or inherent characteristics to distinguish works of art from other phenomena. So…did Clive Bell know what the hell he was talking about??
I believe that to become art one must first have to have an audience, someone who feels its passion. Art must have significance within its time frame and art must move the viewer either metaphorically, symbolically or as a simple and quick slap to the senses. Art must awaken.
Ok, so let’s look at AD Maddox’s bug works. Well, it seems all her Bug Art Canvas are sold. So, to that extent she has an audience, her work seems timely enough, and it is obviously moving someone to pay $300 bucks for her 11″ x14″ pre-stretched canvases.
Hmmm… dead bugs. And I thought you actually had to know how to use a graphite pencil and eraser to draw. Michelangelo be damned. A.D. Maddox….u go girl!