ART-FOR-ALL - WHAT'S IN A NAME?

We recently changed the name of my gallery to Art-for-all Gallery. And so many people ask the obvious..Why Art-for-All?

Simply because it is our aim not to be like so many other galleries.

You’ve all been to one, or several of those. Where you walk into a hushed church-like atmosphere where the loudest sound is the disdainful sniff of the person in attendance (art speak for sales person). Where your nervous “Good morning” is met with a steely look over severe glasses followed by pointedly harsh keyboard tapping akin to the frantic morse code emanating from the Titanic’s radio room. And then as you inevitably glance at you attire and wonder whether jeans is acceptable in these hallowed halls, you cannot help but steal a look at the Gruppenführer and compare your duds with her SS black, Gucci outfit.

And onwards you soldier…past strange looking objects (pronounced objay…the j being a buzzing sound) and works of art which totally astound and overwhelm you…not neccessarily because of their beauty but because of the eye-watering price tags attached to them. And then, as you stare goggle-eyed at the nine square meter yellow canvas with a black diagonal stripe across it, you become aware of the clicking of approaching heels and the hairs at the back of your neck rising at the anticipated talking to you are about to receive from the storm trooper in attendance. Mercifully this is when you start into sweaty wakefulness realising that it was all a terrible, but accurate dream of a previous experience.

We do not do this.

We, the artists at Art-for-All Gallery (or the “person in attendance”) do not speak to our guests in some strange language designed to confuse them and create the impression that we are some superior form of human beings deigning to speak to you and spend some of our precious and expensive time on you. Language which is often heard in the holy inner sanctum of Jaques’s Fine Art Gallery. In answer to a simple question like “Tell me about this painting (remember it’s always a piece, never a painting or, God forbid a picture).

Well..says the perfumed pariah, this piece is a classic example of the artists post-Colonial, yet somewhat apocalyptical rendition of hyper-activism as pertaining to “abstractionism” in a rather perverse yet contextual realm. All this rattled off with the absolute conviction that this makes complete sense. One can imagine him or her saying to their partner when they get home: Well, we have to address, in this post mid-day period, the question of nutrition in the realm of supply and demand determined by budget constraints and pure availability of produce in our storage spaces. Instead of: What would you like for dinner?

We do not do this.

At Art-for-All Gallery in Storms River Village we want to make everyone equally welcome. Whether you’re an art collector with a degree in fine arts or a fisherman, an attorney, a housewife, a student, a pensioner or a school kid. Whether you wander in wearing a tuxedo or your bathing costume and flip flops. Whether you intend to buy art or will never in a thousand years buy a “piece”. Whether you know what pigments Rembrandt used in his cobalt blue or you have no idea what a palette is.

Art is for everyone. Art is for all. (Even the Guppenführer)

Johan Brink