I’m working my way through a massive library find, Artoday by Edward Lucie-Smith, which attempts to survey modern art from 1960 to the late 1990s. It’s an enormous undertaking (the book, not my reading of it) and both interesting and thought-provoking.
F’rinstance … I perceive a bias on his part against representational work. Maybe he didn’t mean it, but quotes like these are hard to interpret otherwise:
“…an entirely studio-bound painter who depicts only what he sees…his work has no flights of the imagination.” (on Lucian Freud), or
“…seems like a fairly limited theme.” (on Realism), and
“This loss of stylistic direction … has led to a compensatory emphasis on content rather than style.” (on the 1990s New York art scene)
The last quote in particular struck me - is he saying that style really should matter much more than content? This doesn’t help me understand why people like some of the Expressionist stuff from the mid-20th century - I can’t forgive how deliberately raw, childish, and sloppy it is, and can’t look any further.
I spent a few hours at the Yellowstone Art Museum when I was in Billings about a week ago; YAM focuses almost entirely on post-modern Montana artists. Some challenging stuff in there, or just plain odd - although there are also Deborah Butterfield horses, and I really love her work. Why are plexiglas cubes filled with crumpled waste paper worthy of a museum? Or giant canvases with no discernible object, subject, or center of interest, and crudely rendered? For that matter, there’s a Montana artist who is well-known in this area (and in NY, I think) who has made pencil outline drawings of horses that look like a kid did them. I’ve seen these drawings humbly framed and offered for sale at $1200.
So am I just a philistine?
P.S. there will probably be more to say as a result of reading this book…not least of which is that it’s leading me down some interesting experimental paths.
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July 28th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
No, you’re not, of course. The author sounds like a biased idiot, though. Why is it that for as long as I can remember, those who have a preference for non-representational art have to build it up by knocking down representational work? Emperor’s new clothes come to mind.
July 29th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
I agree with Susan entirely. In this day and age I think most people who like
modern art and crack on realism don’t understand art at all. That goes for most
modern day art critics as well. I feel most of them are educated beyond their intelligence. I do appreciate modern art, but it still must have a mood or
a feeling to speak to the viewer. With that said ” Shock Art ” is not part of that
at all. Shock Art and a lot of modern art today tells me alot, that the people who
create this “stuff” really have no talent to speak of. No skills or abilities. This
has really brought down modern art of the past. I would like to think that no modern master of the past would urinate in a bottle and call that art.
July 30th, 2008 at 8:25 am
While I don’t disagree entirely, I do get equally bored with yet another perfectly rendered painting of a horse/buffalo/eagle etc. where the technical skill is dazzling but the painting says nothing new! It’s all been done before — 100s of times. Yes the fur is amazing and the primaries are exactly the right number but enough already!
In the wildlife art world in particular, it is rare to find artists who have real style — or are trying to say something new (besides all of us, of course!)
July 30th, 2008 at 9:19 am
I agree with Rosemary all the way. We need more style in wild life art to set people apart. I’ve walked into galleries and saw a lot of work that is very similar and nothing pops out if you scan your eyes across the room. A “sea of sameness”. Because Bob Kuhn understood DESIGN, his work had a very distinct style and made him different. Gotta leave a little something for the viewer to fill in. At least get a little more dynamic with the imagination and go beyond the photo reference.
But I have also been in classes where students have stapled bloody tampons to the wall and had a two hour critique on it. And to me, than is definitely not art!
July 30th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
I have decided that we somehow equate “creativity” with art. Overall, I dont think most people really get the concept of art vs. creativity and/or crap. I will always defend Jackson Pollack or Kandinsky for their artistic value, but most people who refer to their art, IMO, dont understand where it comes from.
Perhaps I am talking about style. In speech, the first element of style is language. If I’m talking, I should do it in the language that my listener understands. If I want to listen to someone who speaks another language, I need to learn to understand it. At that point, it becomes okay for me to say, “I get what you’re saying, but I dont like the way you said it.”
As for myself, I really have no desire to understand why someone would put crumpled paper into plastic cubes. That, I suppose, is another point- when I speak, I should have something to say. I hope this currently rambling of mine falls into that category.
July 30th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
…”current” rambling of mine…
July 30th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Y’know, I’ve often wondered if I missed out by not going to art school. This suggests maybe I didn’t.
Rosemary, you have a very good point: wildlife art has suffered through repetition and a substitution of technical skill for actually saying something original. In a sense, it’s ALSO style over content: the paintings are about super-realist rendering, NOT about offering a new point of view or a thoughtful or provocative idea.
Which brings us back full circle: should style matter more than content?
July 30th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
should style matter more than content?
It’s not a zero-sum game. Style is how you, and only you, can communicate your unique content. It should grow out of your on-going growth in what you want to say as an artist.
It’s like creating your own language, really. That’s why it takes the time it takes and can’t be forced.
The problem with so much wildlife art is that it lacks style AND content. And don’t anyone chime in with the phrase “mere illustration”. My technical training is as an illustrator and I can tell you that a lot of those artists couldn’t make it as illustrators because they can’t draw well enough and don’t bring an individual point of view to the table.
Julie, I wouldn’t have gotten anything out of a standard-issue college fine art program either. It turns out that, as anyone can see from Bob Kuhn, Guy Coheleach, Howard Terpening, etc., that a good illustration program is where one goes to learn traditional technical skills. I think that you would have liked the Academy of Art illustration department as much as I did. But, hey, you’ve done ok ;-).
July 31st, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Coming from a realist’s viewpoint, how I paint comes from my love of the unique beauty of each creature. I want to capture the details as they have been created…but I also hope to capture the personality of each animal. Maybe realism becomes translated into “technical skills” but for me, realism is how I love to paint. But I can also marvel at the looseness and feeling of spontaneity in Julie’s paintings. We don’t paint at all alike, but neither of us should be considered “wrong.” Content must also be backed up with good composition and good technical skills no matter what the style.
I agree that representational art takes a big hit, especially in academic circles, because it does take skill and effort and a lot of professors in fine art programs either don’t have those abilities or don’t want to devote the time. It is so much easier to teach students to throw paint at a canvas, or take random objects and blow-torch them, then hang them on the wall. Then teach them to make up some quasi-intellectual, socio-economic angst-filled explanation about what their art “means.”
If the viewer can come away with a sense of wonder at the beauty, or excited by the action, or humbled by the raw power of the animal, no matter what the style, then I think that is what counts. And maybe that animal has been painted a hundred times before, but if those paintings have not been seen by or did not connect with the viewer, should it really matter how many have been painted before?
Style vs. content will be argued over forever as long as there are artists and everyone will have a different opinion.
July 31st, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Because they represent modern cities and societies?
Because some museum curator decided they were?
Who knows?
When it comes down to it, art is all pretty subjective.
Largely a matter of personal taste.
Some may not like that, but that’s the way it is.
August 1st, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Style vs. Content- to me their both equally important. They balance each other.
I can walk into a room and pick out a Bateman, or Kuhn or Rungius by their
styles and content. Their work speaks to me and tells that these artists have pushed their styles and content beyond what other artists have yet to achive.
You can have a great painting style yet have crappy content and when first
look at that painting your mind will tell you something is wrong. Eventually you will figure it. The same goes for have a crappy style and great content. To have
a successful painting you have to a successful style and successful content.
And I agree about the ‘’sameness” today in wildlife art. The problem to me is
no technical skill, lack of foundation of drawing ability and animal anatomy.
August 1st, 2008 at 7:34 pm
I see so many works that lack any knowledge of animal anatomy period.
Any good illustrator can tell that knowledge in animal anatomy can take you as far as you want to go. That speaks to the “sameness” and static images in wildlife art today. Kuhn was the master of understanding animal anatomy.
That’s what made really made him successful. That and his style and content.
Truly, knowing the anatomy allowed him to place his animals in any postition
he wanted. The same can be said about Terpening, Susan touched on Howard’s
work. He understands anatomy as well. And it shows. Sorry to ramble on.
August 2nd, 2008 at 9:57 am
I agree with Doug. Rungius said that you need to learn anatomy so well that you can forget about it. This is when you have freedom to function as an artist by knowing what to put in and what to leave out. Learning anatomy is very monastic (monks job) and thats why many artists put it off. But once you know it your free to create. So this goes back to style because someone like Kuhn will paint anatomy as 2D and 3D shapes giving it a stylized look.
August 4th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Sandra, you are absolutely right - and nowhere do I mean any disrespect to realism of any kind. Any Modern-art type would consider me - or any of us that paint representationally - realists. What makes my eyes cross with some wildlife art is that the artist seems to have focused his/her efforts on numbing detail rather than composition, movement, story, etc. It was my big complaint about much of what I saw advertised in Wildlife Art magazine the last several years - a monotony in the images, nothing that spoke of passion or originality.
And as Joe and Doug have noted, knowing anatomy is crucial to painting animals; I get tweaked when I see a good landscape painter insert an animal that he/she clearly doesn’t know how to draw into a piece.
August 4th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
“I get tweaked when I see a good landscape painter insert an animal that he/she clearly doesn’t know how to draw into a piece.”
That’s why there are no animals in my work. Yall are the pros and I respect that. For me to force a poor representation into a landscape would, I think, be insulting to those who do it well. That being said, though, come out into the field with me and we’ll have a great time painting and scraping together. The latch string’s always out.
August 4th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
“I get tweaked when I see a good landscape painter insert an animal that he/she clearly doesn’t know how to draw into a piece.”
Yeah, me too. My reaction is along the lines of “don’t give up your day job.” On the other hand, I do occasionally see art by very, very good mainstream fine artists who happen to have animals in some of their paintings that are well done. Which speaks to me of their powers of accurate observation and sheer drawing ability. (In fact, if you get Southwest Art, look for the ad for the Richard Schmid auction. He’s not by any measure an animal artist, but the black and white cat is fabulous. Makes my point perfectly.)
August 4th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
“and nowhere do I mean any disrespect to realism of any kind.”
Julie, no disrespect taken! I know exactly where you are coming from…just wanted to share my viewpoint. It irks me to no end when as Susan Fox said, realists get labeled as illustrators!
The latest comments remond me of a local artist who paints lovely still lifes in watercolor. When she saw I was getting into some big shows, she commented that maybe she should paint wildlife. Well, she scheduled a trip to Yellowstone for reference photos and came back and among other things, painted a “chipmunk.” When a collector pointed out that she had in fact painted a thirteen-lined ground squirrel instead of a chipmunk, she called me and complained, “I’m not a biologist…I don’t have time to research what all these animals are!!!
Sheeeesh! Can you believe folks like that!!!!!!!
August 5th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Sandra, that is A Great Story! I have wildlife biologist friend who also paints wildlife and she’ll be on the floor howling when I tell her that one.
August 5th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
There is a thing that good wildlife artists are able to do, for which I have tremendous respect. When working from photos, you know how to correct the camera’s distortion. It is an amazing thing to me. With less developed artists, the lack of that skill is really telling.
Is this something that just comes with time, or is it taught somewhere at “Wildlife Art University”?
August 5th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Yeah, Julie’s ;-). She does a great job in her workshops showing and explaining how to “unpack” an animal in a photo. I use that info all the time when I have a photo of an animal in a 3/4 facing forward position, like a bull elk coming toward the viewer.
But before her workshop, I learned the basics of what you are talking about when I was working toward a BFA Illustration at the Academy of Art. Illustrators, by the nature of the game, have to work from photos, so there was a lot of emphasis on how to do it correctly. We had whole three hour drawing classes on just foreshortening so we could create the illusion of a person receding back into space with charcoal on paper.
One phrase that has lived on in my memory ( I was there from 1987 to 1989) was “don’t be seduced by your reference”, as in “don’t copy it, use it as a guide”. This applied across the board, not just wildlife.( I was the only one doing animals in my class.) So we learned how photos distort and flatten and used what we learned in life drawing to “see and acknowledge the third dimension” in order to compensate. It takes effort for sure, but gets easier over time.
We had one class, Drawing for Illustrators, in which we had to go out and buy “muscle” magazines and then draw the figures and put in the contour lines to help us learn to see the rounded form. To this day, whether it’s an animal or a landscape, I’ll sketch in contour lines for clarification if needed. It’s a handy tool, along with my faithful mirror.
I’d be very interested in hearing how other artists commenting here correct camera distortion, too.
August 6th, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Following up on Sandra’s question on camera distortion and our own techniques.
I also will sketch in contour lines and use a mirror. I will also try sketching
the subject in reverse instead of using a mirror. I also will do almost on a daily
basis is sketching in my sketch book animal skeletons in different postions
such as reverse images and 5 figure turn arounds. It helps you to see
your mistakes as well helps in visualizing in shapes as well. It sounds
difficult but it’s really alot of fun.
February 22nd, 2011 at 10:30 am
I have great sympathy for your artistic project and for those who use a so-called “realistic” style and are punished for it. Having said that, I do think the truth goes both ways and your dismissal of some of the greatest work of the 20th century on the usual grounds that it is sloppy or choppy is committing the same error that the progressivist commits when s/he believe the sole criteria in art is newness or relevance. I would never label you a philistine per se but I believe philistinism to be a general condition of culture of which many of us are guilty. Part of it is caused by being locked into one’s own tradition i.e. pride in mastering techniques and craft and feeling others did not “pay their dues”. The problem with this of course is that art has more than one purpose, and rawness of emotion structurally organized may be as important as excellence of drawing skill.
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November 14th, 2011 at 10:42 pm
I have one answer for all of you who might question the validity of the author’s remarks:
Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, by David Goldblatt.
To answer the tail-end rhetorical question of the original post, you are only a philistine if you are unappreciative. To say that you don’t understand, and then assume that you are correct because you don’t understand, is to be narrow-minded. Questions of art are not answered in a single turn! These things take lifetimes, and there is no one answer.
There are however, conventions. Conventions, in this case, hold powerful arguments. Speaking as a fine-arts major, with a dual minor in art history and philosophy (take my credentials for what you will), I can tell you that content is fluff. Content is essentially an excuse to paint, and the more you focus on content, the more you ignore style, and the more professional artists will look at your work as ‘cheap imitations’ or ‘craft’
How do we discern a Matisse from a Picasso? Ingres from Delacroix? Carriere from Rosetti? They all painted figures! To be blunt, nobody gives a sh*t that they all painted figures, what really mattered-what defined each and every one of them, was HOW they painted them. A Picasso would still have just as valid if “demoiselles d’avignon” was a painting of a group of snails. Would it have the same meaning? for the sake of this point I’m making, meaning is irrelevant-at best, secondary.
In short, pure artwork, in the professional realm, should stand on style alone. If your work is totally reliant on content, its not artwork, it representation, and that’s what we have point and shoot cameras for. Go take a photograph and make your life easier. There is a reason why painting didn’t die with the advent of the photograph-there are aspects of painting that can never be captured on film, and this is why we paint. If you are painting a picture to look exactly like your reference, you’re wasting your time. Don’t paint for the stigma of painting, paint for the fact that there is a unique nature, sublime and inherent to the medium, that can be captured with that brush that cannot be recorded through a lens.
If you haven’t already, take a color theory class. Take a lot of them, because its not an easy concept to grasp for most-but it is step one of a proper understanding of contemporary painting.
Hope something I said helped, sorry about the length.
November 14th, 2011 at 11:10 pm
Not to knit-pick, but what this thread seems to be referring to as “realism” is more accurately called “classicism”. Classicism (uncapitalised, as an adjective. Classicism capitalised refers to a specific artistic movement in history) refers to the formulaic representaion of subject in as close to a 1:1 ratio as possible. In short, if your aim is to depict your subject as accurately as possible, you are shooting for a more classic style. Classic style is the foil of romantic style, which is less concerned with accuracy and more concerned with expression. Kathe Kolowitz was a romantic. There are reasons why you might look at a work of art and think that it looks like sh*t, but you have to know the history, and you have to understand the theory before you can criticize. Artwork is not something to be taken at face value-but I digress. Like all things that are opposites, there is a spectrum in between-you can be somewhere between classic and romantic, really it’s not something you want to try to categorize yourself into-it will limit your natural expression of the world.
Realism, like Classicism (capitalised) refers to another specific period of art history that had less to do with depicting figures accurately for the sake of being accurate, and more to do with depicting them in such a way for socio-economic/political reasons.
Like I said, I don’t want to sound like a know-it-all but you have to understand that in order to be taken seriously in this field you have to know what you’re talking about. There’s nothing more destructive to your cred as an proper artmaker than not using the vocabulary correctly.
I’ll leave you all alone now. Sorry if I sounded like a jerk-was not my intention-I was just trying to impart my entire education on you in a nutshell..anyway, pick up that text, its well worth the bones, and you’ll pick up a lot of theory if you’re looking to be a serious artmaker. If anyone would like to know more I’d gladly answer any questions I can to the best of my ability-shoot me an email and I’ll see what I can do for you.
November 14th, 2011 at 11:13 pm
Oops, didn’t realise it wouldn’t publish my email, its dbooth.1@go.ccad.edu. Sorry. Ok, I’m done.
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