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philadelphia sketch papers: “the context of my process”
a member’s view of a club’s history, by random installment
Press Here for a podcast & blog on our Philadelphia art history, stories, events, sketches about of my friends & our process...
the longest continuing, entirely artist-run organization in america or, for that matter, the world, is the one i belong to in philadelphia.
the Philadelphia Sketch Club
it was founded in 1860 and by tradition, charter and sheer ornery-ness has been owned and operated entirely by working artists now for 150 years.
short of the nation itself no other freely volunteered organization of its kind or most any other can claim that longevity.
what does this mean?
to me, it means that, contrary to the characterization most admit, working artists, as a group, or at least this group, in this organization, share long, abiding, life-long professional issues like no other. they are, in fact, demonstrably resolute, especially in the integrity of that 150-year-old autonomy, as artist-run.
through the long- and the short-, the fat- and the lean-, as well as the dreaded up- and the more-frequent, tho no less merry, down-times...they were always, always times for the artists to support each others’ lives and, more importantly, each others’ work.
this site, an extension of my mainsite www.donaldmeyerhome.com , then, i wish to dedicate to that history, those histories, of artists who have left their inexorably strong mark on their times, past and present, at that Club.
these are my friends, living and dead, and i visit them every day.
they were, as i am as part of this group of artists, “the context of the process”.
this is my personal view as a born, bred, home-fed philadelphia artist.
this is part and totality all about the when and how, and hopefully the why, of who i am, and why my work is such and so.
which, withall, is really, to those who truly ‘know’, very philadelphian. -dm