davus's Blog

For the past years I have given slide and powerpoint talks on the works of Clay Spohn, 1898-1977, one of the innovative and prominent artists of the 20th century. As an abstract expressionist, admired by his contemporaries, he was the first to break through into pure feeling on the canvas, but unlike his friends of the New York School, he died impoverished and his works are neglected. My book Understanding Modern Art; the Boundless Spirit of Clay Edgar Spohn with 18 pages of his paintings in color tried to remedy this neglect but it is in vain. At the last venue in Palm Beach, Florida, no one appeared at my lecture—possibly because it was not well promoted by the museum but probably because no one recognized his name and the populace, including the art students and staff, lacked the intelligent curiosity that people used to have, even just a few years before , when I gave several lectures in Florida that were well attended. Has the anti-aesthetic, conceptual art that followed after the high-point of abstract expressionism turned the public against modern art? In my book on the art curator Douglas MacAgy I quoted a critic: “Much of the art practised today is, in its shallowness, the direct consequences of the producer-consumer orientation, and it is experienced and assessed from much the same viewpoint. When this viewpoint is still further undermined  by the trivialized perception and mental processing of a public created by mass media, false values are inevitable…. Indiscriminate visual or perceptual infantilism, together with a lack of aural sensitivity, prevails for the overwhelming majority of people who are already illiterate as readers through sparse education, or because the activity of reading has been undermined by the assault of easier and swifter alternatives…. Eventually a mindless vacuum could be attained, undisturbed by the slightest emotional, intellectual or retinal challenge but confirmed from time to time by the reassurance of nostalgic clichés.” It appears from the present panic over education in our schools that the critic has been proven right. Spohn, above all, emphasized the importance of emotion in art. It is time that educators became interested in his work and absorbed his ideas. I invite comments, particularly on the emotionally sterile conceptual art of today.

IMAGINATIVE HISTORY

From Bloody Beginnings: Richard Beasley’s Upper Canada. David Richard Beasley. Davus Publishing. 388 pages. Illustrations $15.95 softbound

The central character of this story, Richard Beasley, was indeed a man of some prominence in the years just before and the decades after the creation of this province. A descendant has cast his ancestor’s biography as a personal narrative—a drama with famous players indeed: Richard Cartwright, Major John Butler, Chief Joseph Brant and Isaac Brock as well as Family Compact members John Strachan and John Beverley Robinson along with radicals Robert Gourlay and William Lyon Mackenzie. Readers who enjoy fictionalized scenes with imaginatively created dialogue, all based on extensive research, will welcome this volume and its fresh approach to an important historical period.

OHS BULLETIN, December 2008

My first post is really my third since I neglected to post my first. Then I posted it when the operation was down and since it did not record and I have forgotten what I said, I try to repeat what I was thinking. I want to engage readers in my blogs because I want to lead them to my books, which are all first-rate—not just my opinion, by the way. I self-publish now [see web site www.kwic.com/davus] because I  refuse to cut my books down to save publishers the expense of printing a larger volume than they want. Also my writings have been anti-establishment in some cases or championing the unfamiliar in others or elucidating the unrecognizable-by-mainstream-thought by others—in other words non-commercial by instinct and choice. My compulsion to write this again about self-publishing, in self-justification, comes from my wife’s enjoyment of Robert Gover’s On the Run with Dick and Jane which I chanced upon. She wants more of his writing. I met him in the early 60s in an apartment of friends on east side Manhattan at a small party in which his agents were present. He had just published The One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding and told me that every publisher in the US had turned it down, that his agents found a French publisher where it became a best seller and thereby put pressure on an American publisher to issue it. It became a cult classic. The stories of authors being turned down by publishers scores of times are legion—and the success of their books when published are just as legion. But one never hears of the publishers regretting their bad decisions. I had the utopian idea that a publisher acted for all publishers in assessing a manuscript and that it was the fault of the manuscript if it was rejected, thus I did not persist. I  went for years before I wrote something that found a publisher because of its topicality. Eventually with the advent of word processing and digital publishing and the confidence in my writing gained from the few of my books issued by established publishers. I issued my mss from my own press, which was much more fun than having a mss taken over by a publisher. Distribution is a problem for small presses but if you are not commercial to begin with [and rarely is a commercially written book a work of art] distribution is of small significance. Moreover, with ebooks and the decline of bookstores, self-publishing will become even more worthwhile. We may reach our readership some day.