Josse Ford :: Art Journeys and Conversation ::

If you change one person, you change the world

If you are like me and love your double expresso coffee each morning you might be interested in this inspirational story about a man who fell in love with coffee and found his love leading him on journey that made a difference in the lives of coffee farmers and their children.

His story starts with something his father told him when he was a boy.

Just before I went off to college, my dad pulled me aside to give me some words of advice. He told me that he had once read in the Talmud that, "If you change one person, you change the world". While I knew and appreciated that he was trying to share something of profound value to me, I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard. There are billions of people in the world. And, changing one of them wasn't going to make one hill of beans worth of difference. Anyway, I went off to college. In college, while other kids were drinking beer and falling in love, I was falling in love with coffee.

For years he helped his father with a family run business. Although they had three businesses they had borrowed to expand and one day they could no longer keep pace with the creditors and they lost everything. After that he started up a small coffee shop and slowly he made that successful.

On a visit To Guatemala he became friends with the coffee farmers. He was shocked at the poverty they lived in and amazed at the honor, dignity and vitality of the people who lived in such conditions. So he decided to help them start up businesses where they could create better lives for themselves.

Coffee Kids began to support projects that coffee-farmers created themselves. Projects based upon their priorities - the things important to them, not something important to me. Coffee-farming families create their own strategies to solve those problems, strategies based on their own values, their own culture. In the end, they manage and evaluate their progress based upon their own standards, not mine.

To read more about this inspiring story visit Coffee Beans and the Man Behind it all.

How Did Animals Escape Tsunami?

According to Wired News animals seem to have a sixth sense for impending disasters.

Wild animals seem to have escaped the Indian Ocean tsunami, adding weight to notions they possess a sixth sense for disasters, experts said Thursday.

Sri Lankan wildlife officials have said the giant waves that killed over 24,000 people along the Indian Ocean island's coast seemingly missed wild beasts, with no dead animals found.

"No elephants are dead, not even a dead hare or rabbit," said H.D. Ratnayake, deputy director of Sri Lanka's Wildlife Department. "I think animals can sense disaster. They have a sixth sense. They know when things are happening."

The waves washed floodwaters up to two miles inland at Yala National Park in the ravaged southeast, Sri Lanka's biggest wildlife reserve and home to hundreds of wild elephants and several leopards.

Is Art Taught or Caught?

How important is formal training in the making of great art?:

I've always found this an interesting topic - I have seen art which was technically flawless but left me feeling nothing. On the other hand, I have seen work which was obviously the work of an emerging artist, but which sang with energy and had me on the edge of my chair.

Lets hear some different viewpoints on this topic. Firstly from Geoffrey Gorman, master art marketer, gallery owner, and artist career coach.......

When I was a gallery dealer, I would stay away from artists who had art degrees! There was too much you had to teach the artists NOT to do, like be spontaneous or original or fresh.

I found that artists just out of art school usually took at least a year (or more) to stop creating art just like their teachers or professors. Academia is not conducive to creating original art. It is conducive to talking and intellectualizing about it and learning technique. That's what school is about. But I was in the business of selling art and I wanted artists who were creating lively art.

Of course, artists have to master the basics of drawing, and mastering various techniques can usually be accomplished by completing several years of art classes. However, I see many artists come out of art schools and all they can do is create art just like their professors. These teachers dominate their students and then the students end up imitating their teachers. The work is tight, or controlled, and the artist is not willing to go and experiment.

For another viewpoint, I loved this infectious quote by James Elkins which I found in Ian Jackman's book, “The Artist's Mentor”:

There have long been doubts whether art can be taught. They go back at least to Plato's concept of inspiration, “mania”, and Aristotle's concepts of genius and poetic rapture (the ecstaticos). If art is made with the help of “mania”, then ordinary teaching can have little effect - and if it is inspired teaching, then it isn't teaching in the sense that I mean it here, but something more like infection. I may give someone the flu, but I am hardly ever sure how or when I did it. Teaching mania by being ecstatic and inspirational is like being infected and spreading disease: you can't really control it.

Finally, I enjoyed Salvador Dali's viewpoint which seems to bring it all together:

Begin to paint by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.

Salvador Dali

Edvard Munch Wanders The Edge of the Abyss

Quote of the Day - Edvard Munch:

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) was a norwegian painter best known for the painting The Scream, which was inspired by his sister's death from tuberculosis. I enjoyed this quote - it speaks to me of how life is about experience - we grow through our challenges, even though they may be tough to endure at times. Also that we grow the most when we walk close to the margins of life. I think of artists as walking close to the edge of life - I also think that when we walk close to the edge we ALL become artists in some way.

My whole life has been spent walking by the side of a bottomless chasm, jumping from stone to stone. Sometimes I try to leave my narrow path and join the swirling mainstream of life, but I always find myself drawn inexorably back towards the chasm's edge, and there I shall walk until the day I finally fall into the abyss. For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art. Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder.

Edvard Munch.

Edvard Munch, The Scream 1893

“I was going down the street behind two friends” wrote Munch in 1892. “The sun went down behind a hill overlooking the city and the fjord. I felt a trace of sadness and the sky suddenly turned blood red. I stopped walking, leaned against the railing, dead tired. My two friends looked at me and kept on walking. I watched the flaming clouds over the fjord and the city and my friends kept on. I stood there shaking with fear and I felt a great unending scream penetrate unending nature.”

How To Help the Psunami Survivors

I found a link at Benjamin Rosenbaum's blog on links to different charities and the efficiency of their relief efforts. So if any of you want to give a donation towards helping with the relief work - some families have lost everything and there is a grave danger of cholera outbreaks from the lack of fresh water. Now's a good time to give generously.

Many more survivors need relief supplies including food, medicine, and safe water. An ongoing list of relief resources, ways to help, and other information is available at http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com

Stolen youths

Stolen youths,
originally uploaded by javajive.

Here's a photo of the some of the children from Indonesia who died in the tsunami. Blessings be with their Souls and their loved ones.

Did Van Gogh foresee his own death?

Vincent Van Gogh - Wheatfield with Crows:

I saw the original of this painting in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam several years ago. I was stunned by the contrast of the black crows and stormy skies over the beautiful golden wheatfield - It was unmistakable to me that Vincent was clearly giving a message about his life. He shot and killed himself a few weeks later. I later visited the site of the painting - in Auvers-sur-Oise, France and gazed across the same wheatfield. It was a stunning vista. Vincent is buried nearly.

Vincent's brother Theo who worked with and supported Vincent closely throughout his life, died just a year later - it was said that he never recovered from the death of his brother. Several years later, Theo's body was moved and re-buried in a grave next to Vincent at Auvers-sur-Oise. It felt totally right that they should lay side by side - two souls who had given each other such support.

The experience of this painting made me wonder if we have an internal awareness of our lives and when we have achieved what we came here to do - it seemed like Vincent knew his work was finished. I am really stunned by how Vincent and Theo Van Gogh worked together to achieve something wonderful - what greater legacy could you leave from a life?

Wheatfield with Crows, 1890
Oil on Canvas, 50.5 X 103 cm
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
(Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Here is the official text from the Van Gogh Museum:

Wheatfield with Crows is one of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings and probably the one most subject to speculation. It was executed in July 1890, in the last weeks of Van Gogh’s life. Many have claimed it was his last work, seeing the dramatic, cloudy sky filled with crows and the cut-off path as obvious portents of his coming end. However, since no letters are known from the period immediately preceding his death, we can only guess what his final work might really have been.

Art Quote of the Day - Michelangelo

Michelangelo Buonarroti 1475-1564:

“The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection”

Marcello Venusti. Portrait of Michelangelo at the Time of the Sistine Chapel. c.1504-1506. Oil on panel. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy

Turning guns into art in Cambodia

This is an interesting project from BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Turning guns into art in Cambodia. Students are using left over weapons to create art. The Peace Art Project Cambodia aims to:

• Introduce Young Cambodian Artists to new artistic methodology and materials and train them in metalwork skills
• Produce, exhibit and sell sculpture made from de-commissioned weapons
• Promote a Weapon-Free Society and Young Cambodian Artists in Cambodia and internationally

In a high-roofed warehouse on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, a group of Cambodian art students stood hunched over work benches, beating, welding and re-shaping pieces of twisted metal.

The sculptures are made from old guns, triggers and rifle butts

This was not any old metal, but triggers, gun barrels and rifle butts, all taken from decommissioned weapons.

In the hands of the young artists, such unpromising raw materials were being turned into pieces of art.

The workshop was full of starkly beautiful sculptures - a skeleton man with a hand-grenade head, an elephant with its trunk fashioned from the barrels of AK47s, a peacock whose fan-shaped tail was made from metal springs.

The Peace Art Project Cambodia was established in November 2003 by Neil Wilford, a small arms specialist with the European Union, and British artist Sasha Constable - the great, great, great granddaughter of the English master John Constable.

Asia battles earthquake aftermath

I can't even begin to imagine how horrible and frightening this must have been for people to look up and see that giant wall of water coming towards them. And that sound. I can't even begin to imagine what 23,000 people piled up on beaches would look or feel like. Oh, so sad.

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Asia battles earthquake aftermath:

Survivors and rescuers are battling the devastation left by sea surges that wiped out entire communities, killing about 23,000 people.

The death toll continues to spiral up and mass graves are being dug even as people hunt for the missing.

The extent of the damage is still not known in areas worst hit, including Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India and Thailand.