Vance Wood

Just because something is commercial does not mean it lacks artistic merit. Remember that most, if not all, of the great masters were commercial artists. Van Gogh agonized over the fact that he had trouble selling his paintings. Da Vinci made his living with his art, the science stuff was his hobby his art payed for. Michael Angelo made his income with painting and sculpture. The Sixteenth-Century artists all had patrons. Just because something is sold for money does not mean it is not art.

There seems to be this concept today, mostly by people who are not artists by profession, that in order for something to be art the creator of such items must be doing what they do because of some sort of compulsion, an almost uncontrollable drive to create beauty that overwhelms them. It is as though they go into a different level of consciousness we mere mortals cannot comprehend. God forbid that they may be driven by, dare I say it,-----money? Somehow the idea that art and money are mutually exclusionary is an absurd fantasy that those who wish to romanticize Art adhere to in order to find some sort of quasi-magic associated with it.

With the trees you have documented who is to say what was in the mind of those who styled them? Are the people that do this kind of work artists first, and have found that by making bonsai not only provides an income but is and outlet for their artistic talents? Do you think that the people who sell these things would say to someone you cannot make bonsai for my company because your trees are too artistic, or you are an artist and have no place in my business. I want clods and dolts to shove trees in pots.

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The only finished bonsai is a dead one; me 1992 MABA Des Moines Iowa