by Art Chantry ( art@artchantry.com):
EVERYBODY loves a great bad thrift store painting. these are those paintings you literally find in thrift stores for a couple of bucks. they are paintings made by amateur painters long forgotten and deemed lousy beyond redemption. real crap. often you will see the entire existing output by a single artist sitting in one thrift store – completely unpurchased. almost all of these bad bad crappy things end up in a landfill. nobody – but NOBODY – wants them.
well, except people like me. there are LOTS of people like me out there, too. lately, i’ve noticed that thrift store paintings – no matter how insipid or incompetent – are beginning to command prices in the three figures! i blame ‘antiques roadshow’. everybody thinks they have a genuine lost picasso in their attic and , by golly, they’re going to cash in! so, all of a sudden crappy thift store paintings are in high demand. who knew that would ever happen, eh?
AC: my studio is a 'museum of bad art.'...this looks like a ben shahn painting this small. it looks much much worse full size. trust me on this.
collecting really bad thrift store paintings is not a new phenomena. about 20 years back, artist jim shaw (founding member of ‘destroy all monsters’) put together a wonderful book/collection of thrift store paintings. he collected together such a great set of dastardly boorish and insane paintings that, since that time, he virtually created a new market for cheezy art. so many ‘retro kitsch’ collectors now buy them, that all the good stuff seems to have been taken. these crummy things have become really hard to find – well, the really spectacularly ‘so bad it’s good’ stuff, anyway.
the other day, i was in a st. viinny’s and ran into an old friend. he and his partner were carefully considering a truly awful canvas painting of a tiger cub. the problem for them was that they only collected paintings people made of their “pets”, not wild animals. but, it was a deliciously lousy image that whey were debating making an exception for this one image in their extensive collection. they eventually bought it. but, they paid nearly $100 for it!
over the decades, i’ve managed to find a few really horrible paintings that defy the imagination. i hang them up and admire them endlessly. star trek scenarios, colorful abstracts, ill-considered historical images (like george washington crossing the delaware), imaginary landscapes – some really horrible paintings that make you at first laugh to look at them – then stand in awe in wonder. but, i make it a rule to never pay more than $5 for a painting.
even with that low low price tag limit, i’ve also found some really great anonymous pantings in thrift store. some of them are among the very best pieces of art i own. even though most paintings in thrift stores are trash and have been tossed away, i’ve also found some really wonderful stuff – old maritime paintings, art deco portraits, even some stunning abstracts – all done by some real talents. but, i think it would take my eye to appreciate them. i think you’d still look at them and laugh.
my very favorite subcategory of thrift store artwork that i buy is the work that is so bad that even the original artist considered it unworthy of salvation. i call these things my ‘cancelled’ art work. these paintings (like the one i show you above), are so lousy even the creating artist thought they were such absolute failures that they destroyed them. in this case, the painting of the dour old dude became a test palette for colors used on another newer image, then unceremoniously discarded.
often, these ‘murdered’ paintings have a huge giant “X” slapped over the entire image – like a giant cancellation. these ‘X”‘s are usually the most violent and emotional paint stroke in the entire piece. it can transform the unfinished image from truly terrible all the way into “exquisite” territories. i mean to say, these ‘cancellations’ are things of beau
placed randomly in the composition and administered with such gravity and feeling that they speak whole unintended levels of sophistications and passion. they are absolutely priceless and quite beautiful.
of course, now that i’ve written here about my favorite sort of thrift store painting – the competition for these ‘cancelled paintings’ will skyrocket and i’ll never find another one again. so it goes in the modern world.
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