Art is about meaning. The best art, the images that we find most moving, to quote a good friend who has spent his life doing art and promoting it, reminds each of us who we really are. Some discover that experience in hushed museum exhibitions, others in visits to galleries. Relatively few of us seek out and feel we can afford to buy original art to put in our own homes. We are conditioned by high prices and elitist attitudes to believe that we can’t, shouldn’t, or don’t want to own it. All too often, men whose lives could be enriched by art are turned off by academic snobbery or the exclusionary environments in which art is shown and sold. I count myself among that group, except that my house is filled with it.
I am an artist. I’ve avoided that label for many years because I allowed myself to believe that I had nothing of value to say that would legitimize thinking of myself as an artist. I believed that it was presumptuous and that I was unworthy of the title. And I didn’t want to be an effete, pretentious, esoteric bullshitter. But what I’ve slowly come to realize is that what I see and feel, and the way that I express it when I pick up pencils, pastels, or anything that I can make a mark with, is all about my own struggle to recapture the passion, pain, violence, tenderness, and joy of being a man. I don’t really think about it; that’s just simply what it is.
Over and over again, I’m attracted, for lack of a better way to put it, to what I call guy stuff. Not shiny, expensive boy toys in magazine layouts, or to the activities and trappings of highly paid professional athletes. I’m captivated by beat up old cars and work trucks. Weather ravaged farm buildings and soot stained factories. Greasy old engines partly disassembled, or abandoned machinery rusting away in forgotten corners of fields gone fallow. A favorite pipe casually set down half smoked, on a scarred tabletop next to a partly consumed bottle of beer. A pair of dirty gloves or a sweat stained hat at the end of a hard day of work. Things that, to me, represent real life and not some carefully arranged fantasy scene, self consciously manipulated to make a pretty picture. Life the way I find it and feel it, in all of its immediacy, with nothing filtered out, and with nothing glorified.
Art for Guys is our way of sharing these things with men who might not normally buy art, or think that they want anything to do with it. Our first production, a collection of tobacco smoking pipes drawn in everyday settings in a variety of moods and designed into a wall calendar, came out of our desire to add this dimension to the pipe enthusiast and collector community, and to make it available at an affordable price in a high quality piece of functional art. Next weekend, I'll travel to the Conclave of Richmond Pipe Smokers annual exhibition in Virginia to offer it to the show's attendees. It will also be available through this website. We hope that it, and the images it contains, in some way help remind you of who you are and what you value about the experience of being a man, whether you smoke pipes or not.
A Mikhail Revyagin pipe from the collection of Neill Archer Roan, 9B graphite and watercolor pencils