In my recent post admiring a painting of a tree, someone commented that artists have been drawing trees for 30,000 years, and suggested that there could not be much new to say. But as William Irwin said, "the question is permanent; answers are temporary."
Trees may not have changed much in 30,000 years but nevertheless here are some innovative pictures of trees that I think are absolutely marvelous:
The brilliant draftsman Robert Fawcett draws tropical trees outside a hut:
Note how he drags a drybrush along their winding forms, then rounds them with shadows of leaves:
The brilliant Bernie Fuchs, assigned to paint golfers, devoted 98% of the picture to majestic trees painted with his famous "stained glass" oil painting technique:
The following beautifully designed reduction is from Joseph Beuys:
From the brilliant Jean Dubuffet, Four Trees:
Finally, as recently shown on another post, Milton Avery's orchard:
195 comments:
The Bernie Fuchs pines (?) are amazing.
Bill
A great assortment. I remember Kev hates that Milton Avery but I enjoy it.
JSL
David, your collection presents a good variety of art trees ... as ranked from outstanding to dismal. In my view, you might want some additional works between those by Fuchs and Beuys. Currently, the spectrum too abruptly steps down, and would do well to include some of the numerous middling trees, which you've overlooked in the transition from remarkable to soulless and trivial.
The Milton Avery looks like some kind of bizarre centipede on fire with methylated spirits.
Anonymous/Bill-- Yes, and Fuchs did half a dozen other pictures with equally distinctive, creative treatments of trees. He was really quite extraordinary.
Anonymous / JSL-- True, but I thought Kev's taste might have matured in the last couple of weeks. I thought I'd reprise the Avery picture to give him a second chance.
Richard-- I didn't intend this to be a spectrum from good to bad. I think the later pictures are as excellent and innovative in their own artistic categories as the first pictures are in theirs. I originally included a bunch of other trees in the mix-- Rembrandt's marvelous etching of Three Trees, a painting by Mark English, a pen and ink drawing by Frazetta. All of them were beautiful in a traditional way, but they just distracted from my point that as long as artists can continue to view a tree (or a landscape or a human figure) with fresh, creative eyes, there is a reason to continue to draw and paint it. Artists today don't necessarily have to compete with Rembrandt, or with 30,000 years of precedents. If they did, they'd be paralyzed. They will, however, be judged on the quality and ambition of the new standards by which they wish to be measured.
chris bennett-- Wow, feel the love leave the room.
But the Fuchs and Mark English are wonderful...
This is like some Barney The Dinosaur kindergarten Art pow-wow, where the children learn that there’s all different ways to draw and paint trees! Each just as good as the other! (No matter how threadbare and vacuous the result.) Everybody gets a prize medal at baby's first self-esteem summit.
"I thought Kev's taste might have matured in the last couple of weeks. I thought I'd reprise the Avery picture to give him a second chance."
I must admit, as a picture of a bizarre purple centipede aflame with methylated spirits, it's not half bad. It must have been mistitled originally (something to do with 'orchards' or 'springtime', as I recall.)
I've always marveled at that Fuchs. The trees are so accurately silhouetted its almost as if he'd traced them off photoreference.
As well as drybrush, Fawcett is using a split brush technique. That's how he's getting anywhere from double to quintuple repetitions of the same linear strokes. This is typical of the period, when illustrators were trying any shallow tactic to make their surfaces look 'interesting' to a midwit readership.
Imagine if any of the artists you posted up here actually went out and looked at nature, and thoughtfully observed actual trees. Like actual poets. That's how a young artist can learn to see with 'fresh eyes' a subject done a thousand times. But I guess you just can't get enough of canned ham and 3rd generation Xeroxes.
chris bennett-- You're right, there were originally three additional images, including a Mark English. I posted them, and when I saw how they looked I decided the additional images, while truly excellent work, diluted the point I was trying to make (for the reasons I noted to Richard, above.)
What are the “new standards by which they wish to be measured”, David? True works of art, which have been regarded as original and revolutionary, have stood the test of time due to their foundation on the universal, each time revitalizing and consolidating the art tradition, while superficial innovations, which arise out of a desire for a unique, shocking and pretentious, are doomed to become irrelevant and forgotten. That’s why I feel we have to “compete with Rembrandt, or with 30,000 years of precedents”, because we must keep in touch with the sources of true knowledge.
“In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature.”- Henri de Toulouse Lautrec
A sincere, authentic spirit in the pursuit of truth will automatically lead to the expression of something uniquely new, while the pursuit of formal innovation will lead to meaningless, soulless works. Beuys’s reduction doesn’t have depth or sophistication, it does not feel poetic or meaningful, to me it looks like a bunch of insignificant brush strokes which happen to be of such a shape that we can associate it with a tree (you also directed me to this conclusion with the topic of this post, Beuys image appears a bit like an ink blot test where nothing makes complete sense). The purpose of art is to express essence and experience in such a way that it can be contemplated, while the desire for superficial uniqueness/newness is satisfied by volume, size, strangeness, shock, controversy etc. Novelty is not a criterion for quality, as it can appear as an insignificant innovation, consummerist fashion or camouflage for shallowness, so I don’t necessarily care about how these bringers of the new “wish to be measured”. Avery's orchard looks like something awkward is burning for way too long, as Chris said, and Debuffet's sculptures remind me of mushrooms.
“What moves those of genius, what inspires their work, is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.” - Eugene Delacroix
Kev once said that a true innovator possesses complex knowledge that leads to creation that, through its quality, demonstrates the weakness of the conventions of the past, while vandal challenges tradition merely by declaring new standards through ridicule, contempt, signalling values, undermining the opposition in the desire for power, and so on, which leads only to a decline of a discipline. While real art provides us with lasting spiritual grounding through insight and timeless knowledge of our common human nature, in our desire for the superficially interesting, we fall into a vicious circle of obsessive search and escalation of temporary novelties, which sooner or later leads to the monotony of the diverse and our boredom in the saturation of the radical. I think Kev's taste is well developed, what we have to do is to stop glorifying these insignificant simple graphics which trivialize our culture.
Kev Ferrara-- I think the Fuchs and the Fawcett are two good examples of how your cast iron template for what qualifies as "good art" lets you down.
Talented artists have been using photo reference since Degas, yet not one of them (to my knowledge) or any artist painting plein air, has produced anything like Fuchs'painting of the trees. I don't know exactly what advantage you fear Fuchs may have wrongfully obtained from "tracing off photoreference" but it clearly wasn't the majestic compositional choices, the beautiful, innovative palette, the vigor of the brush strokes or the numerous decisions about which elements to soften, blur and aggregate, as opposed to which should be strengthened and prioritized. A powerful emotional statement that I think any of the artists you've admired here would respect.
Regarding the Fawcett drawing, I think you missed his point. Rather than a "typical shallow tactic used by illustrators to make a surface look interesting, Fawcett used that technique to prioritize his drawing so that the jungle outside the door wouldn't compete with what was going on inside the hut (where he took the opposite approach, drawing that wall with broad slashing brush strokes). Fawcett's ability to calibrate value employing a wide variety of techniques is one reason he was so famous amongst his peers. He cut and shaped his own brushes to achieve effects like this, just as he whittled his own bamboo sticks. His laborious traditional training at the Slade school and his continued study (including life drawing every week for the rest of his life) earned him drawing skills that were second to none in his generation of illustrators.
I chose the Fawcett as an example because I admired the way it understands the 3 dimensionality of the winding branches receding into the jungle, the rapidity with which he painted those leaves and the shadows from overlapping branches, and the extreme technical skill with which he pulled off the light "quintuple repetitions"-- a true draftsman's solution to a problem which more cautious artists might've handled with a gray wash, or-- if they were as heavy handed as Franklin Booth-- multiple pen strokes.
"When I offer up extremely simplified pictures, like those of Milton Avery, they trigger outrage from some of the commenters who seem to think the painter hasn't worked hard enough."
Outrage?
Its more like they trigger an outage. Meaning; bald anaesthetic artwork doesn't generate imaginative wattage, it has no power supply. It produces neither heat nor light, and certianly no enlightenment. Thus it requires no passion to criticize or dismiss.
And it isn't that Avery didn't work "hard enough." What does that even mean? He played an uninteresting graphic game. That's all. If you like porrige, you eat it.
I don't know exactly what advantage you fear Fuchs may have wrongfully obtained from "tracing off photoreference" but it clearly wasn't the majestic compositional choices, the beautiful, innovative palette, the vigor of the brush strokes or the numerous decisions about which elements to soften, blur and aggregate, as opposed to which should be strengthened and prioritized. A powerful emotional statement that I think any of the artists you've admired here would respect.
There's about 37 Fuchs paintings that have the same effect. If you like photographs, you'll like Fuchs' colored photographs. Now and again he transcends the photoref because he does have the heart of a poet.
Wasn't it you who told me that Berni Fuchs - when passing through The Kelly Collection - remarked that he and his generation did not hold up against the Golden Agers? How could you fault me for agreeing with your hero?
Fawcett used that technique to prioritize his drawing so that the jungle outside the door wouldn't compete with what was going on inside the hut (where he took the opposite approach, drawing that wall with broad slashing brush strokes).
It was well established in the Golden Age that indoors and outdoors in the same scene had to be treated differently. Yet Fawcett uses a lot of the same strokes out of doors and on the figure in this picture.
Fawcett is an excellent technical draftsman, no doubt. But on this piece the jungle bit - with all those repeated lines, looks messy and anaesthetic. Obviously he is trying to use a very loose technique to jazz up the surface of his picture, but in this case the technique calls attention to itself with its inconsistency.
For the record I don't disagree with Kev's verdict on the Fuchs. It's obvious to me that the thing was mainly traced from a photograph, but the artist has given something poetical to it by way of his exquisitely nuanced colouring sensitively, I'll say even lovingly, rubbed into the surface. That said, Alma Tadema's colouring was just as beautiful but with the added quality of it being a substance realising the forms from within rather than tinting its silhouettes as it does in the Fuchs. This of course, to my mind, makes Tadema's colouring more profound.
Ales: well said!
Aleš-- Perhaps I could reduce the distance between our views if I did a better job of explaining what I meant by the word "new." I agree with most of what you say (except the part about Kev having well developed taste). When I talk about these artists being measured with "new standards," I meant, "don't compare these artists with Bouguereau because they have no interest in doing what Bouguereau did. Bouguereau bores them to tears, and rightfully so. It's not that Bouguereau did bad work, it's that he lived in a dramatically different world, running a different race, using different materials. And the more modern artists-- the really good ones, not the ones peddling mere novelty-- weren't really doing something "new," they were offering a renaissance of the archaic, going back all the way (as Picasso did) to cave art and tribal art. Do you agree that archaic art is "timeless" like other great art you mention? If so, there should still be tread left on those tires.
As for Toulouse Lautrec, he is an excellent example of the kinds of "new" I intend. He was one of the earliest and most aggressive embracers of photo reference and rather than feel guilty, he exulted in it. He was a true blue commercial artist, illustrating magazines and posters like any illustrator today. He was an innovator in the "half finished look," completing paintings on cheap cardboard that might have a completely painted face but with other parts of the painting merely suggested by a few sensitive lines-- a style that became very popular later on amongst illustrators as vignettes. And specifically related to Fuchs, Lautrec was the first artist I know of to energize his paintings by painting flat walls or even air with slashing "hail storm" marks, which made the whole painting shimmer with vitality. All this from an artist who, as you quote, said he was focusing on the "intrinsic nature" of his subject, not some novel treatment.
Bougereau is a strawman. Whatever 'artistic battle' needed to be waged against him was waged nearly contemporaneously by countless visual poets who were paying reverent attention to nature in all her moods and setting down their results in their own way.
Maxfield Parrish
Frank Brangwyn 1
Frank Brangwyn 2
Elizabeth Shippen Green
Gustav Klimt
Edward Seago
Henry George
F.R. Gruger
> going back all the way to cave art
Artists should only go back if they believe we have made a wrong turn, and that returning offers the opportunity to correct some flaw and get back on the right path.
Is Avery going to lead us back to the right road? Have we gone the wrong way? On the face of it, it reeks of schizotypal narcissism.
As with shaved head girls who argue that genders shouldn't exist, marriage is slavery, and every other radical claim suggesting humanity has been mistaken on some point for its entire recent existence, the burden of proof lies solely with the party making the claim.
Instead, Avery has merely smudged some paint on the canvas like a child, giving us no reason to consider going backwards and every reason to think he's just another charlatan seeking attention by making bold claims.
Yeah, Bouguereau might be dry, even boring, but at least his paintings are good. If there's something better than Bouguereau it's almost certainly ahead of him, not behind him and around another corner.
Kev Ferrara-- A very interesting collection of trees, but one which raises more questions for me than it answers.
Some of them, for me, are right on the money. That wonderful Gustav Klimt is a painting I actually considered for my original blog post. It fully deserved to be there, but I just thought the post was getting long. The Walter Everett is also superb, and rings all the right bells: An ancient subject freshly and innovatively painted. The Henry Watson: fantastic. I also thought others, such as the Brangwyn 2 were excellent examples although a little less inventive. These images all made me think we were speaking the same language.
But then I became puzzled by some of your other choices. That Maxfield Parrish strikes me as much huffing and puffing over a very minor artistic statement. I was far more impressed with this Parrish painting of trees: https://fineart.ha.com/itm/paintings/maxfield-parrish-american-1870-1966-winter-1906-oil-on-paper-laid-on-board-16-1-8-x-15-1-2-in/a/8145-67038.s?ic4=GalleryView-Thumbnail-071515. As for the Elizabeth Shippen Green: Huh? Pleae explain to me what this is doing in this company. The Seago is not much better, as far as I'm concerned. As for the rest: Gruger, Flint, Booth always do at least a decent, yeoman's job but I don't see any real vision or creativity in these examples. So that makes me wonder whether you detect some unifying quality in these examples that I am missing.
Liked quite a few of the examples given by Kev - particularly the Henry Watson, thanks v. much for that, wasn't aware of him.
As for the Constable I meantioned earlier, I'll labour the point and give the best online version I cd. find that most closely gets the original's life, colour and movement across - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Constable_-_The_Cornfield.jpg
Overall, though, in the examples given or mentioned by everyone, there is a split between the ones that are showing trees themselves, even if limiting their attention to one aspect of them or the stamp they make on us at the most peripheral edges of our senses and awareness (even to the point of abstraction), and those that are stylised - so that they really becomema symbol for a tree (which, I think, works in the same mode the hypothetical arcaic representations that became the characters in oriental scripts and probably all alphabets).
Nothing wrong with considering both kinds, but I don't think it would happen without a more sharp awareness that two separate modes are being juxtaposed if representations of the human body or portraits were what was being looked at.
Does this explain at least part of the different responses ?
(not meaning that a preference for one or the other determines the assessment, we obviously can gauge on either column)
Bill
Several time it was said artists have been drawing trees for 30,000 years....
... but of tree drawings older than 2-3,000 years, one would be hard-pressed to recall any.
Apatoff said 'I originally included a bunch of other trees in the mix-- Rembrandt's marvelous etching of Three Trees, a painting by Mark English, a pen and ink drawing by Frazetta.' ...
... and none of the alleged 29,500 years of tree-drawing past? What gives?
If artists are wise to go back to cave drawings of trees, how about showing some of them?
Richard wrote: "Artists should only go back if they believe we have made a wrong turn, and that returning offers the opportunity to correct some flaw and get back on the right path."
Even if this was true (which I question), there are ample reasons to circle back and incorporate aspects of older art in our work. Artists could only go so far down the path of academy painting, detailing toenail cuticles in the manner of Bouguereau, before art became too precious and desiccated. (I got a kick out of your comment, "Bouguereau might be dry, even boring, but at least his paintings are good.") When Picasso invoked the raw power of tribal art, it wasn't because he was incapable of painting realistically.
But on a larger scale, there was ample justification to "go back" becaue the 20th century witnessed the sun setting on the great promise of the enlightenment and of the scientific and technological revolutions, and indeed of the whole Newtonian universe. The momentum of previous centuries faded as people realized that science would be used for monstrous ends in world wide clashes, creating poison gas and nuclear weapons and facilitating the extermination of millions of human beings in killing camps. They realized that flaws in our lizard brain would forever thwart our illusion of "progress." That's when cubism and surrealism and abstraction and existentialism and art brut and a hundred other responses arose.
I don't view Avery's orchard as a bitter reaction to this turn of events, I view it as a lyrical alternative to a mechanistic, "accurate" depiction of the world, just as Shelley or Keats or other lyrical poets responded to the industrial revolution's view of the world. Avery started out painting individual green leaves on trees, but matured into his later style.
Dorian JR-- We haven't found nearly as many prehistoric paintings of trees as we have of animals; there are many academic papers speculating about why this is. Nevertheless, you can easily find ancient drawings of trees just by googling "cave art trees." The drawings of trees in caves at the Serra de Capivara National Park are dated back around 25,000 years. I think they're not only beautiful but cool in a mystical sort of way. It's easier to find surviving drawings of trees and plants in later millennia, say 15,000 years ago (Australia's Kimberley rock art site "stands out globally in having an enormous body of direct and indirect depictions of plants, including: grasses, trees, tubers; pigment-soaked plants imprinted on rock shelter walls; anthropomorphism of plants." The foraging lifestyle which gave rise to these depictions of plants lasted over 50,000 years, so a safe assumption would be that there are many other pictures that have been lost to the millennia.
Is it possible that Fawcett’s multi-edged snaking branches represented a delirium caused by the suppressing jungle heat upon the waking man?
The Fuchs is a wonderful example of his art. A warm reflective light affecting and being affected by local colors. Colors bleed into negative spaces creating an impressive sense of depth despite a lack of dimensional buildout or animating forces within forms which we see in the Kolesnikoff posted by Kev; with its immediacy and depth of snow for example.
The multiple galleries in the Fuchs furthers its warmth with the effect of coupling, especially when groups of people assemble with a shared interest, hush tones and intermittent silences engaging a cultivated and restrained landscape, giving the tension of the game its particular elegance.
The gesture of the observing player in white with the bending of the trees by weight or wind, the crowd aware of the slightest creaking or moving bristles in their own silence are the types of nuances which call one to all parts of the painting. In a field of such nuances the photo is playing a far smaller part than first appears.
David, I think Kev’s appreciation of painting is pretty darn remarkable. That said, your defense of some of the other artists you posted is also very interesting. The Dubuffet against those buildings comments on that subtle whatever it is, between chemistry and biology, with its forms appearing to struggle in that particular setting.
Your mentioning of a kind of reaction to the utilitarian world questioned by artists and writers of the 20th century brings to mind a book that questioned the same philosophically called “Leisure: The Basis of Civilization” by Josef Pieper, (1948), if anyone is interested. The book returns to antiquity to take a fresh look at philosophy. It consists of an intro and two essays about 50 pages each, with an appendix of reviews current to the time. For me it separated the freshness of receptivity from a presumption and glibness in knowingness.
But on a larger scale, there was ample justification to "go back" becaue the 20th century witnessed the sun setting on the great promise of the enlightenment and of the scientific and technological revolutions
This is such an absurd and grotesque slander against great art - to equate poetic integrity with the worst aspects of mechanistic rationality. Meanwhile you're the guy defending the tracing of photographs as a legitimate form of artistic composition.
The problem is, from your Sensation-Seeking-Sixties perspective, you can't see that every great work of art is novel, but that novelty is rarely great. In fact, its usually tripe; balderdash hocked via bafflegab; something meant for the eyes sold via the mouth.
Furthermore, to think that going back to the holy primitive is somehow an escape from the tragedy of mechanistic horrors is also incredibly dubious; when the actuality of the technocratic war problem (and totalitarian technocratic modes of government as in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) is mechanistic rationality in service of the primitive. People are fooled by pleasant-sounding ideological bullshit disguising the primitive urges for power and dominance beneath.
The problem is always the misdiagnosis of the problem. The hysterical, the ideological, the blinkered, the delusional, the egotistical, the scapegoating... Hidden beneath the façades of civility and sophistication.
The poetic is real sophistication; not a façade. The primitive is a retreat to the garden; that is, Kindergarten; a neurotic anxiety reaction that seeks the simplest possible bumper-sticker answers to the hardest possible problems.
Artists could only go so far down the path of academy painting [...] before art became too precious and desiccated.
No such slippery slope existed. The academic tradition that Bryullov introduced to Russia, giving birth to Kramskoi, whom gave birth to Repin and Shishkin, did not devolve into dessication. Rather the opposite, it continued to grow organically into something incredible.
Wappers, the director of the Antwerp Academy through the middle/late 19th century, explicitly structured the program after Beaux Arts. He hired Verlat (educated at Beaux Arts), as the primary painting instructor, and went on to educate academics like Alma-Tadema and Logsdail.
He also educated F.A. Van der Wielen, who after moving to Pennsylvania, went on to be Cecilia Beaux's first teacher and Howard Pyle's only art teacher.
In neither line -- Repin's or Pyle's was there any such great revolution against academic art. The closest was Kramskoi, but he didn't revolt against the techniques and strategies, only the subject matter.
Rather, in both of these great Russian and American art traditions, what we see is an organic evolution forward from the French Academics.
detailing toenail cuticles in the manner of Bouguereau
Toenails are subjects, details. Are you saying that great art cannot be made of cuticles? Or great painting cannot exist that renders the cuticle?
Or perhaps that art has a required viewing distance at which the whole image must break down into brush strokes? Must painterliness always be visible from 10 paces, rather than 3?
If one was to paint the cuticle, how ought the artist have painted it, so that they shouldn't suffer artlessness the way Bouguereau's cuticles do?
When Picasso invoked the raw power of tribal art, it wasn't because he was incapable of painting realistically.
Such a tired argument. Picasso was, at least, incapable of doing it well. His best realist works are on par with 2nd and 3rd year students at the St.Petersburg Academy of Art today. Impressive by today's catastrophically low standards, but by the standards of the 19th century, completely unremarkable.
Given that we categorically do not see accomplished realist artists drop realism, it feels unlikely to me that he would have. It's certainly possible he could have become good as a realist. But given that he didn't, it's too hypothetical to debate what he would or wouldn't have done after that.
Impressive by today's catastrophically low standards, but by the standards of the 19th century, completely unremarkable.
Picasso grew up in Spain when Sorolla was the dominant figure. One assumes by the age of 20 (after his father stopped helping him with his canvases) Picasso knew he had to go in a different direction . And so he became a designer-cartoonist.
Given that we categorically do not see accomplished realist artists drop realism
Alfred Maurer handled paint very well - certainly better than Picasso - before switching to the pretense of 'primitivism'. Dan Adel has recently experimented with something akin to abstraction (a sad state of affairs, as far as I am concerned... as he once gave his Mission Statement as "participating in the undoing of the undoing" in the visual arts.)
> after his father stopped helping him with his canvases) Picasso knew he had to go in a different direction
> Alfred Maurer
I suspect Maurer may have been in a similar position to Picasso. Maurer's early realist work seems to have some striking incongruities in skill. Paintings, even within the same series or year, sometimes even the same canvas, will vary in comprehension of anatomy and perspective, color handling, brushwork, etc. ranging from confident to weak and folk-arty. Either way, we can say he's the the exception that proves the rule.
> Dan Adel
There's plenty of particle phenomena that when viewed under an electron microscope will read as abstract-adjacent, but if you've dealt with an "abstract" subject matter like a realist would, is it really abstract art exactly?
To me, he's doing more of a trompe-l'œil of fluid dynamics of paint in mid air. This is just one step removed from his hyperrealist paintings of high speed water photography.
Sean Farrell-- Sean, I'm pretty confident that Kev knows what I really think about his appreciation of painting. And on those rare occasions when he's wrong, it doesn't bother me in the least that he gets all agitated and spatters saliva and bile all over the place.
The Pieper book sounds interesting. I'd agree that leisure has been crucially important to the advancement of the arts although in the decades since 1948 I think we've seen evidence that too much leisure can lead to decadence and superficiality in the arts.
Anonymous / Bill-- I agree with you 100%, that Watson gets the prize for the surprise bonus revelation of this post. Very, very nice.
As for the Constable painting, it was Constable's bad luck to be paired with Turner, who started out as disciplined and realistic as Constable but ended up as abstract as Milton Avery. If you look at some of Turner's small watercolor sketchbooks, he has painted trees in ultra simplified, soft focus compositional studies that I really enjoy, and which I think sometimes make Constable's work look stiff and rigid by comparison.
Richard-- your description of the "organic evolution forward from the French Academics" seems to omit 83% of the history of art of the 20th century. Russia was the true birthplace of 20th century abstraction-- most notably Kandinsky and Malevich. It took Stalin with a gun to try to force that toothpaste into the tube, and he was never really successful.
As for the rest of the world-- what you seem to regard as Pyle's evolutionary line-- the path away from the academy led to cubism, Futurism, Fauvism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Orphism, Abstract Expressionism, Op, Pop, Minimalism, Neo-expressionism, Conceptualism, Magic Realism, Patternism, Graffiti, Color field, Performance, Post modernism, Installation, Deconstructionism, etc. Some of these turned out to be withered limbs on the evolutionary tree, and some hardly qualified as a knothole, but many of these were battlefields of genuine intellectual ferment from some of the greatest minds of their generation. They took up more money, more museum space, and had a greater cultural impact, than Pyle's line. The issues with which they struggled were paralleled in literature, theater and poetry so I don't think you can blame the phenomenon on the introspection of a few painters.
Turner's trees are beautiful, but they're very often stylised along the way that ultimately ends in (open) ciphers. They're ideas of trees, not in itself a bad thing by any means ! Ruskin preferred them to Constable's. Can't agree the latter are stiff at all, but are brilliantly and varyingly modulated work coming from deep observation and understanding (the immediate growth in the leaves, the accreted story of their growth in the depositons that formed the bough and bole, and the immediate interaction of the living tree with wind and light) as alive as his skies, perhaps like these they're best seen in his sketches, as with Turner's as you mention. No seething rage intended in the above.
Bill
Long time reader, first time commenter.
David, I'd just like to take a moment to appreciate your measured approach to commenting on these posts. I never fail to find diamonds in these roughs.
Your ongoing dialogue with Kev over the years, in particular, has borne lots of golden fruit. It seems to me you're both just stubborn enough to maintain a warlike vitality in parley without devolving into actual war.
Kev, you said earlier:
> This is such an absurd and grotesque slander against great art - to equate poetic integrity with the worst aspects of mechanistic rationality. Meanwhile you're the guy defending the tracing of photographs as a legitimate form of artistic composition.
You also said you weren't outraged. In the face of the above, I'm not sure I believe you: In this case, I find the thread's collective aesthetic realism has manifested itself in the debate of ideas rather than images.
Your best contribution to this discussion were the pictures you posted. But I still find something stale in their collection: Too much symbol, not enough "concrete experience" (to borrow an Existentialist term). In particular, I find Brangwyn's painting (the second of his images you posted) to be "anaesthetic" in much the same way you abhor Milton. The thick strokes of green, left without a convincing treatment of light to cradle them, are left stranded on the flat canvas. My eyes don't make sense of the source by which they're highlit.
I find a much greater similarity between this painting and those you've derided here than, say, Fuch's picture.
-wormod
"wormod"
Strange influx on this particular post. Suspicious of random intellectuals suddenly showing up. For all I know you, Bill, and Sean are the same person.
If you want me to respond to you, yoke your Blogger identity to something confirmable and stable.
"Either way, we can say (Maurer)'s the exception that proves the rule."
Sorry, pet peeve: Exceptions proof rules. That is, they test them or challenge them... as in proofing spirits for alcohol content. Exceptions don't "prove" rules, in the sense of confirming them. (This is an example where a colloquialism went off the rails.)
"To me, he's doing more of a trompe-l'œil of fluid dynamics of paint in mid air. This is just one step removed from his hyperrealist paintings of high speed water photography."
Except that he’s actually flinging and smooshing paint to create those works. There is a hyper-realist aspect to it, I agree. Mainly because he’s so smart and such a good craftsman that he’s creating form and depth illusions in real time with his new techniques. But overall it looks and quacks quite a lot more like abstract expressionism than naturalism.
"They took up more money, more museum space, and had a greater cultural impact, than Pyle's line. "
Nothing says quality these days like Money and Museum Space.
And even with Money and Museum Space (et al) astroturfing “cultural impact” on behalf of Modernism, I’d still say it was about an even race on that front with the Pyle line.
Sorry, pet peeve: Exceptions proof rules. That is, they test them or challenge them.
Nah man, that's a myth. The exception proves the rule. It's from Cicero -- Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis.
Kev, I've done as you asked, though I assure you I'm no intellectual. Just trying to contribute.
Richard wrote: "Nah man, that's a myth. The exception proves the rule. It's from Cicero -- Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis."
I want you guys to know that you really brighten my day.
"Nah man, that's a myth. The exception proves the rule. It's from Cicero -- Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis."
You're throwing spaghetti. Let's unpack Cicero's sense.
Cicero's point was that if a given exception is shown to be an aberration to an otherwise justified and accepted rule, it does not affect the prior justification of the rule.
Importantly, both the original rule and the status of the anomaly as a mere aberration require proof in order to invoke Cicero's principle. But you and I were still in the justification phase when you used the "proves the rule" quote earlier in the thread to dismiss my counterexamples to your categorical claim.
Further, the problem of anomalies disconfirming claims doesn't go away just because you quote Cicero. He wasn't infallible. Cicero lived long before statistical methods were developed. All swans were white until black swans were found in Western Australia. So all swans aren't white. We can't say that the existence of black swans proves the categorical claim that 'all swans are white'.
The problem of rules and exceptions is why I switched to thinking in terms of Normal Distributions and outliers. Normal Distributions are generalizations that can survive exceptions.
Kev, I've done as you asked.
Fair enough. So...
I find peculiar your criticisms of the suite of trees I posted. Calling them "stale" makes me suspicious of your aesthetic sensitivity. And possibly your motivation for writing.
However, I agree that the Brangwyn lacks something. I had originally slated 40+ images or so to hyperlink, but ran out of time and interest. The point was to show a range of examples of real poesis related to trees. Not to show only masterpieces.
Regarding the spirit of my writing; I write in cold blood and as fast as possible, but I also write for impact. Because that is the fun, as well as power, of rhetoric.
Kev,
Every one of the images you posted are beautiful in their own right. I hope that assuages your doubts about my "sensitivity". That being said, I called their collection stale. Taken together, I see a lot of the same tricks repeated--which makes me suspicious about your own sensitivity: that you might've mistaken one aesthetic perspective to be "best". I disagree.
I take the gap between aesthetic consciousnesses presented in the original post (artists whose work abides by much "different standards", as David says) to be the difference between viewing a city from a plane, its park, its streets. You can't get the whole of the city without them. While some views may be less pretty to you, that doesn't mean they don't contain truth.
I wrote something a while back about James McNeill Whistler's "Harmony in Grey and Gold" and Caspar David Friedrich's "Abbey in the Oak Forest." (I apologize--I'd link them, but I'm not so familiar with posting on Blogger.) Whistler as an advocate for "art for art's sake," and the Romanticists more broadly, both used imagined color, composition and subject to create what Whistler originally dubbed "visual poetry." In seeing how similar the two images are despite the vast difference in philosophy between them, I must ask if both were doing the same thing, but seeing different parts of it.
Cicero's point was that if a given exception is shown to be an aberration to an otherwise justified and accepted rule, it does not affect the prior justification of the rule.
This conversation is getting really autistic, but I'll bite. That wasn't exactly his argument. He's saying that in the absence of a justified or accepted rule, a written exception on the books automatically produces the rule it would otherwise provide exception to.
Specifically, his argument was that because there was a law on the books banning people from Gaul becoming Roman citizens, that implies that people from every other region are able to become Roman citizens even if no such allowance is on the books. Not a great argument, but it won the case, and the guy got to become a Roman.
That said, in this instance I meant it in the normal conversational sense -- "Given that the examples you're listing appear more like exceptions, the fact that they are exceptional is evidence of the general observation that in most cases the rule holds."
This applies even in the case of Black Swans--
Swans are white. That there is an exception to all swans being white in Australia, proves the rule that swans are white. If it were not true that swans are white, one wouldn't need to say "There are black swans in Australia". They'd say, "I just went down to the pond by my house, and saw a red, green, yellow and blue swan."
This is the conventional usage of the phrase, inexact though it may be.
Back to realist painters not becoming modernists, the phrase in its conventional usage translates to "Yeah, but that's one guy. If there were a lot of accomplished realists who became abstract expressionists, you wouldn't refer to one guy. We'd be talking about the many cases where that occurred."
I want you guys to know that you really brighten my day.
We can't help ourselves. It's an illness.
"Taken together, I see a lot of the same tricks repeated--which makes me suspicious about your own sensitivity"
Yes, I’m insensitive.
Now what "tricks" might you be talking about?? Hmmm?
Are you an artist? A studied painter; able to tease apart the 15 different effects of form and sculptural volume I hyperlinked for exhibit?
See, I deliberately chose pictures that had different aesthetic rendering styles to show the variety of results one can get through poesis. To show the range of deep styles (rather than types of surface agitation).
So how can you be seeing "the same tricks repeated"??? What are you even talking about??
Kev,
I can see the same tricks being repeated by... looking at the paintings? This isn't a procedural quirk, I'm just describing what I'm seeing.
Sorry, I thought the rest of my post explained what I was talking about better. But you're displaying a particular illustrative tradition (yes, minus the camera!) which I don't agree is the be-all-end-all of "visual poetry." My example was made to illuminate this.
For the record, I am an artist, though I wouldn't venture that I'm a studied painter. But that doesn't matter. This is one beauty of painting: it may speak to all people, regardless of experience or language.
"This applies even in the case of Black Swans--
Swans are white. That there is an exception to all swans being white in Australia, proves the rule that swans are white. If it were not true that swans are white, one wouldn't need to say "There are black swans in Australia". They'd say, "I just went down to the pond by my house, and saw a red, green, yellow and blue swan."
There are also gray swans.
You can say that most swans are white. But you can't say "categorically, all swans are white."
You used the word "categorically" in your original statement.
I don't know how many excellent draftsmen and painters became modernists/abstractionists. But the number is quite a bit larger than the 2 I named. Yes, I agree they are outliers from the normal distribution.
Lastly, upon further reading (cribbing, frankly) on the subject I retract what I wrote earlier about Cicero's point. I think you have it more correct than I do as a principle. But I don't think you applied it in an appropriate situation. It relates to a rule of law, not a rule of thumb.
This isn't a procedural quirk, I'm just describing what I'm seeing.
You haven't described anything. You are merely making assertions. And adding in loose claims that cannot be understood technically.
Comments on this site are as interesting as the fine drawings posted. Stimulating, learn something new every time.
"For all I know you, Bill, and Sean are the same person.
If you want me to respond to you, yoke your Blogger identity to something confirmable and stable"
No
&
Blogger/google doesn't do that, it would just prevent more than one person using that name here through that platform. And sod these companies collating info.
Bill
(<'the same name'..etc)
(Also, warning for future fake Bills - you'll have to make it look like you're writing from Greenwich Mean; if that committed you have my blessing)
Bill/Willy o' the Winsbury
David, I really like that Fuchs illustration (even if it is a dopey thing to like). You mentioned his "stained glass" technique. Have you written about that here? I'm not finding it via Google, but I'm curious to hear more about it. Can you point me to a resource?
Thanks. I always enjoy your blog.
"You mentioned his "stained glass" technique. Have you written about that here? I'm not finding it via Google, but I'm curious to hear more about it."
I know you didn't direct this question to me, but I can answer about what has been dubbed the "scrub and bubble" technique of Fuchs in a general way.
Trace onto canvas your reference with a fine pencil line (or thin vine charcoal). Fix this drawing thoroughly. This is very important. You don't want the pencil/charcoal lines to come up as you work.
Once fixed, you paint a thin layer of dark, transparent paint (usually a brown) with a big brush over the entire surface. Medium (turpentine or mineral spirits) may be used to ensure transparency and flow if oils. With acrylic, it might be acrylic medium or distilled water. With watercolor, just distilled water. Etc.
The brushing (or "Scrubbing") of this transparent dark layer can be played around with to get various stroke directions or textures in the darks. As well as differences in opacity and darkness. You can see in the Fuchs posted in the OP that some dark brown areas are more opaque and some you can see canvas through.
Now, while still wet, you begin wiping out the lights with anything you can get your hands on that won't leave behind any material/gunk; rag, high quality paper towels, a very dry brush, q-tips, cosmetic wedges, your finger, etc. Usually fuchs created a kind of blown-out halation effect by scrubbing out negative white shapes with ovals ("Bubbles"). You can see this prominently in his trees, but he uses it everywhere. Every now and again he will scratch out a bit of drawing or detail in this layer with, presumably, the back/handle of his brush (but any scraping tool would work).
This is left to dry. And then he finishes the picture with opaque daubs here and there to articulate figures and objects usually outside the "scrubbed" (texturized) darks. The idea is to leave the scrubbed/textured darks alone. He will often daub the scrubbed/bubbled light areas with light paint and colors. Sometimes he glazes color onto the lights, so there is a bit of see-through transparency in the lights as well as the darks.
But overall, the final picture will have a contrast between the opaque spots of color and light as against the transparent and textured dark areas.
Once this "scrub and bubble" technique got around the illustration studios in the 1960s, everybody and his mother was using it. (In fact, my mother learned it at Pratt in 1960.)
Hope this helps. (If somebody wants to correct anything I've written, please do.)
Thanks for that clear explanation, Ken. I don't know much about artists' techniques and materials--this despite the fact that my father was in commercial/industrial art and design for most of his career; he would allow me to hover sometimes when he worked at home (this was back in the 60s) but he wasn't exactly communicative on the subject or eager to pull any of us eight children into the biz. I think he just mostly longed for a little quiet time to get his work done.
Anyway, I appreciate your going to the trouble. Interesting about the halation effect; can we say it's somewhat akin to J.J. Abram's enthusiasm for lens flare in his Star Trek films?
I found this larger print of the Fuchs picture that's helpful in seeing more detail. A great difference in color saturation. Do you think this one or David's posted version is likely closest to the original?
You defend visual poetry like a religious zealot and that’s understandable because mystery, beauty. that which is hidden and amazement are where the poets and mystics meet. Wonder and the amazing is what prompts one to ask the philosophical question as Josef Pieper puts it. From what greatness do such things come? What is this between chemistry and biology that no one seems to be willing to recognize anymore?
You said in recent years that drawing was relatively easy and then explained that the real challenge is in developing the story. I don’t question the second part but I did suspect you may have had a perfunctory relationship with drawing, a thought which was answered when you posted the cover and an opening page of a comic book you pitched from your google profile.
A group of storyboard illustrators who are now 70 years old included Tom Fluharty, Pedro Mauro, Walker Brogan and others whose names people wouldn’t know. In turn we admired a group of illustrators who were 20 to 25 years our seniors which included Neal Adams, Ken Bald and others no less skilled. I’m mentioning this because it was understood that people 45 years old couldn’t match the best people who were then 65 and in striving to do so discovered nobody stopped growing. Such put one in an admiring competition with oneself to improve and peers.
Which brings me to the endless bashing of artists such as Robert Fawcett whose drawings fall short of the qualifications of true visual poets, at least that’s how I understand your criticisms. But then you posted a life drawing attesting to your sensitivity. Granted, I wasn’t there to see the model and don’t know the time constraints nor the size of the drawing, or how much sensitivity was lost in translation to digital, but it does appear to be a serious study on your part. That’s not to say it isn’t a good drawing, but a good drawing somewhere on the long journey of growth, unremarkable by some standards. Sensitivity asks to what, to form, movement, rhythm, space, disposition of the model, what one simply observes? Look closely at the nose, the ear and the eyes. Do they look sensitively drawn to you? What’s going on with the protruding forehead and where is the protective bone wrapping around around the far eye? One can see you are sensitively creating space and rhythm with the light and darker receding accents, but take your thumb and place it over the accent on the chair at her lower ribs, or place a blank part it over it and notice how much more one can see the natural rhythms you’ve captured flowing through the arms and breast to the hand. The whole drawing opens up. But in fairness, all life drawing trying to be accurate has to allow time for mapping where things are and in that process, sensitivity to a host of other things can be compromised in the constraints of time. But do you really think in any shape or form this drawing stands next to the work of Robert Fawcett, or even the work of the names I mentioned above?
PS: No, I only put up one post on this thread prior to this one.
I appreciate what you’ve tried so hard to explain and how much it means to you.
Take care.
mark,
When a friend of mine first saw a Fuchs at the Society of Illustrators he commented, “It’s just an underpainting”. That’s true for the technique, but a good writer doesn’t stifle a character but let’s things happen and develop they couldn’t have anticipated and in so doing the character comes alive.
So describing Fuch’s process would lead one to think that it’s simply a recipe, or formula and sometimes it is. But often in art and in this image the categories of elements, so laboriously described on this site don’t stay in their category but cross pollinate in ways an artist can’t always anticipate.
The shapes of green in the middle ground become part of the people below and to the right. The sheer amount of differences and contrasts differentiating things in this image is singing all over the place and is more responsible for its warmth of feeling than the technique or use of photos.
Yes, many duplicated the style, but none could match him.
One could sense something missing in the others.
"That’s not to say it isn’t a good drawing..."
Sean
We've already been through this. Stop trying to engage me, please. I don't want to have to explain why again.
Mark - what Kev described sounds like one of the normal techniques for underpainting, arrested and retained for part of the picture.
I'll add, though (and this is a tangent to what you asked), that - and I don't know about the Fuchs here but it is certainly true of more than a few painters - that familiarity with how photos interpret/recreate their subject can and has influenced how painters sometimes work - even when they're not using direct photo references. I.e. - photographic 'effects' are utilised (consciously or otherwise).
The same thing happened with camera obscuras - despite the claims of whatshisname who did the swimming pools, not everybody in the 17th c and after were using them, but the technology (and the paintings that were made using them) to an extent changed how paintings conveyed particulars. The two-dimensional picture plane in the camera gave something related to but in important ways different to the model/scene, maybe even changing how they afterwards saw the 'reality' to some extent, certainly how it was often approached by some painters.
Bill
Sean and Bill,
Thanks for the added thoughts, much appreciated. I really enjoy David's posts and a lot of the artwork he features, and eavesdropping on the comments is always a treat--and often educational, as today. I have much to learn, but that's OK.
Mark
Mark wrote: "David, I really like that Fuchs illustration (even if it is a dopey thing to like). You mentioned his "stained glass" technique. Have you written about that here? I'm not finding it via Google, but I'm curious to hear more about it."
Yes, here is the way Bernie described it to me as we sat together in his back yard and I was interviewing him for my book. For years Bernie worked primarily with opaque media-- gouache, casein, acrylic, etc.-- because he claimed he lacked the talent to use transparent watercolors gracefully. But he kept experimenting with ways to achieve a particular radiant effect he was after. He was on assignment in London, drinking in a pub when a beam of sunlight coming through the window infused his amber glass of ale with light. He said, "That's exactly the effect I'm looking for!" and hurried back to his studio to paint that glass of ale, using the white gessoed canvas to illuminate a thin wash of amber colored paint from behind (just as white paper illuminates watercolors from behind.) His painting of that original glass of ale-- about 12" x 12"-- remained on his living room wall until he died.
With that as a foundation, Fuchs began experimenting with different ways to lift selected parts of that foundation to create highlights and patterns. Sometimes he wanted a very definite human imprint, so he'd scratch into the paint with a brush handle or leave visible brush strokes of opaque paint, or marks with charcoal or crayon. In other places he would want a more organic look, such as that batik effect in the sky surrounding the trees in the picture I've shown here. Just as Maxfield Parrish would use a crumpled rag to create an organic look on the rocks and mountains in his backgrounds, Fuchs would sometimes dab with a crumpled rag soaked in paint thinner. With the passage of time, Fuchs experimented with different shades of underpainting, and different kinds of application of the paint for different effects. See, for example, Fuchs' painting "Morning workout at the track" with that reddish halo around the trees in the background (https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2014/12/remembering-our-debts.html ) Or look at the closeups to see what Fuchs did to create sunlight coming from behind the trees (https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2011/05/background-is-only-temporary-condition.html )
Kev is correct that after Bernie invented this approach, dozens of other artists during an era of famine for illustrators tried to clamber aboard and sell less expensive versions of the "Fuchs technique." I've seen videos of other artists from here to Japan purporting to explain how Bernie painted these paintings. Some artists had unflattering or dismissive names for it. But for 30 years while Bernie was using this approach, and was selected every year by a jury at the Society of Illustrators for inclusion in their "best of" show, I never saw any of his imitators come close to handling it as beautifully and effectively as Bernie did. (Of course, I have not seen Kev's mother's work.)
David -
Thanks for the illuminating explanation. As I say, I don't have a technical understanding of the field, but I'm having fun picking up bits and pieces from your blog.
I really love the effects Fuchs gets. Such beautiful work and dedication to craft and innovation. What a privilege to have spent as much time with him as you did. I'd love to see that glass-of-ale painting.
Yesterday I watched a video interview with painter John English--Both he and his father were friends of Fuchs, and in the video he discusses quite a few specific pieces. All very interesting.
If you have time for a follow-up, do you think the color of that golf painting is closer to true in your posted image or in this version?
The latter looks much brighter/saturated. Too much?
Thanks again. And thanks for this blog--it's one of my favorite high-quality spots on the ever-more-crappified internet. I hope you can keep it up for another couple decades.
Agreed with Mark. This blog has taught me a lot, and has given me a lot of joy. Thanks, David.
what Kev described sounds like one of the normal techniques for underpainting,
Fuchs invented key differences. Firstly the thin tracing lines from projected photography. Then the way he created effects in the dark areas, of texture, gesture, opacity vs transparency, etc which remain at the end. Then the bubbly halation effects in the light area as he wipes them out. Then the daubs and dabs method of painting, wherein often a figure is barely suggested by shaped blobs of flat color.
H
Thanks Kev.
It would be like wet cobwebs without the opaques.
Always seems unnecessary when accomplished painters use tracing for something like those tree silhoettes, its far less fluid and seems likely to take as much if not more effort than direct work would at their (the artist's) level. And fidgety.
Bill
marc,
Thanks for the colorful version of the image with far more color variation.
When one sees two marks or accents that are nearly identical in tone, color or shape, those marks are going to want to come to the picture’s surface, subverting a sense of space.
In a photo, there’s so much lost variation in value that it flattens out and wants to come to the picture surface. Fuchs went in and made each shape, color and tone different than the next one to eliminate the prevailing flatness that existed in the photo and create depth. He was so thorough that the few shapes he left at a similar color, tone or shape, pop forth from the middle ground between some trees and unite with some smaller shapes in the foreground, also with a brighter shape and on the upper green we see in the distance.
He was uniting the background, middle and foreground with the more vertical graphic trees. But he did it so carefully and judiciously not to re-flatten the whole image. Copycats had no idea what he was doing and only saw what they wanted, blobs of color. At the very least Bernie Fuchs knew much more about what he was doing than what others thought he was doing.
David said: “don't compare these artists with Bouguereau because they have no interest in doing what Bouguereau did. Bouguereau bores them to tears, and rightfully so.”
I didn’t compare them specifically with Bouguereau, but with fundamental knowledge and principles that made all great artworks an inexhaustible source of aesthetic insights about truth and humanity and thus irreplaceable works of art throughout history. The “great innovators” who rejected that, like Malevich, wrote pamphlets about how Greece was crushed by aesthetic taste which he considered to be garbage of intuitive feeling, so he dissed Hellenistic sculptures and Renaissance masters. When vandals like that announce new rules to give meaning to their shuffling of coloured rectangles on the canvas it does not mean that we have obtained “new standards”. I see it as a temporary anomaly in the larger scheme of development.
Beuys's image is something that can accidentally happen when you drop your tools (like a rag attached to a wooden pole) on the floor while painting a ceiling. You can replace such shape making with other stains on the floor since this kind of work doesn’t communicate anything, it has no embedded meaning, so it expresses no insights or truths about humanity or anything. These works are too trivial for these artists to demand that we judge them by their invented standards. Tom Wolfe wrote that this kind of modern art achieved ultimate social acceptance when interior decorators did knock offs of it. So they can go down in history as developers of interior design standards for residental spaces.
Bouguereau’s work belongs in the line of aesthetic tradition of great art, which is the most optimal form of sharing understanding, truth and beauty. Although his work has obvious shortcomings, his best paintings are not merely simple academism. And as Kev has shown with examples of paintings, aesthetic principles are broad and abstract enough not to interfere with innovation and creativity. Beuys always had the opportunity to establish progress within the aesthetic tradition of great art. But he didn't, instead he offered us simple doodles and expected us to judge them by some standards for simple doodles. It’s all nonsense, man.
Ales, within your own arguments, you have not described an "optimal form of sharing understanding, truth and beauty." You haven't given any standard by which to judge the work beyond that it certainly can't be adapted into interior design, or that it can't be accidental. These seem totally arbitrary to me. You're basically reducing this to--"just look at their art, man! It's all nonsense!" Which seems, to me, a worse kind of balderdash than what art you're pointing to.
People are moved by different kinds of art than yourself, or Kev. How does one load up a brush with Truth, indivisible and universal, and sling Understanding to their viewer? Or Beauty? Would Bouguerau's work look the very same to the French, the Czech, the Amazonian, or the Chinese person? It just seems like such awful arrogance, to point a finger and yelp "This tradition is what's making Truth, and no-one else can have some!"
Postmodern or abstract art isn't an anomaly: It's been popular for the better part of a century. Like I said earlier, aesthetic realism encourages us to debate ideas rather than images. I find it a far more interesting and enlightening question to ask why David (who I hope you'd agree is rather sensitive, aesthetically speaking) likes the Beuys, rather than to ask why he's wrong for liking it.
I find it a far more interesting and enlightening question to ask why David (who I hope you'd agree is rather sensitive, aesthetically speaking) likes the Beuys, rather than to ask why he's wrong for liking it.
People like stuff because they like it. That's a completely useless metric. It has nothing to do with whether a thing has intrinsic quality. People like hyperpalatable factory-made food. Want to declare that all food is equally intrinsically good so long as somebody likes it?
There are structural realities at play in what we consume that differentiates treasure from trash, this phenomenon from that, no matter what (postmodern) sophists claim. Unfortunately it takes infinitely less effort to pronounce pseudosophisticated self-esteem/pomo bromides than to explain and demonstrate why they are wrong to the person who would believe them in the first place.
The Beuys is obviously a shallow bit of graphics, quickly made. It looks like low end logo clip art. You can find the same kind of thing offered a thousand different ways on websites for low end designers where vector or raster imagery can be bought for forty dollars. They used to have these kinds of things on CD collections (10,000 images on 8 CDs!) And before that you could get similar stuff by subscription in clip art books.
If I need to explain to you in great detail why the Beuys looks like low end logo clip art, why it doesn't rise to the poetic because it has no composition that creates an envisioned effect, and is rather poorly articulated even as a silhouette, even as a design, then we're not even at the starting gate of a conversation about high quality poetic art.
So you can keep thumping your chest to the risible non-judgementalist dogma that everything is good if you (or anybody) likes it. But that thought-terminating cliché gets us nowhere. The Beuys is weak tea regardless of the words you put together in defense of it.
And in fact, the more you praise it, the more the people who actually can see quality outside of the special pleading effect of words and cheeseball emotions will discount everything further you offer.
TLDR: You are indicting your own judgement in the praise of clip art.
People are moved by different kinds of art than yourself
If you accept as a given that the purpose of art is to "move" people, then it's true that different things will move different people. Art will all be subjective then.
Personally, I am most moved by pictures of my own children, relatives, and friends who have passed away, as well as moments from my early life. This is followed by places where I have lived or visited, and sentimental objects that I have owned.
Following these, there is a range of subjects that resonate with me for reasons that are also deeply personal, often to the extent that they remind me of the former, or evoke feelings about them. For example, a picture of a deceased child profoundly affects me as a father.
In the movement theory of art, I would argue that the best artist would have to be the one who manages to evoke the most personal memories in the greatest number of people.
However, this theory has a flaw – it's unlikely that someone would be more "moved" by a painting of any subject than by a photograph of their own deceased loved one. Then, why do we create art at all when most people are most deeply moved by photographs of their own children/spouse/siblings/parents?
[Aside: With some programming, I could create an AI that allows you to upload pictures of loved ones, and it generates images of them hurt, injured, or dying. This would undoubtedly be moving. Does this mean I've discovered the key to creating the most impactful art?]
According to the movement theory of art, I must conclude that the greatest artist to ever exist is my wife, for she photographed our children's first steps, their first basketball games, their kisses with their great-grandmother, and so on. The second best is my mom, followed by my grandmother.
It would seem that the impact of an image has everything to do with its subject, and very little to do with the artist's actions at all. What even is an artist in this model, other than the person who cares about the same things you care about? What is the purpose of painting now that we have cameras? Certainly my wife's cellphone camera can make more pictures that matter to me than any of the people on David's blog.
So, what do we really mean when we say an artist is great? Perhaps movement isn't the thing. Maybe if you figured that out, you'll have some idea why Ales, Kev, and so many others, feel safe to confidently say that one artist is better than another.
Kev, I said nothing at all about the quality of the Beuys. You're projecting a bias on me. Indeed, I said nothing of my own opinions, because that wasn't the point I was getting at.
Now, you speak of intrinsic qualities. I asked the question: What makes one piece of art beautiful, truthful, or bringing about understanding, and another piece of art ugly, lying, or ineffectual? You have offered little in the way of explanation here, other than using an appeal to mundanity (because clip art can be mass produced, or accessed easily, it must be bad). You haven't supported your own judgements with evidence. You are throwing stones from a glass tower.
It's common to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Most people hold this view, which lends some credibility towards subjectivist aesthetic perspectives. Moreover, this puts the burden of proof on the realist to provide evidence for mind-independent, intrinsic qualities of beauty.
I'm actually sympathetic to your views, because my own tastes are closely aligned with yours. I prefer illustrative works like those you provided to Beuys. But this preference does not self-evidence your arguments: you'll need to provide evidence that beauty is not in the mind of the beholder, or that there is a separate standard we should hold art to independent of taste, in order to convince anyone that your view of great art is correct.
This is why I recommend debating the images: One intrinsic quality of pictures we can all agree on is their form, their visual content.
Richard -- I don't accept "movement" as equivalent to truth, beauty, understanding. That's a symptom. I'm not running track here. Let's stop talking about "movement" and start with truth, beauty, and understanding.
People are moved by different kinds of art than yourself, or Kev. How does one load up a brush with Truth, indivisible and universal, and sling Understanding to their viewer? Or Beauty?
I don't accept "movement" as equivalent to truth, beauty, understanding. [...] Let's stop talking about "movement"
Make up your mind.
Like I said, Richard, movement is a symptom of a work's truth or beauty (or other externalities). There are problems with characterizing any of these qualities as intrinsic, which I've described to Kev above. This has been my perspective from my first post here, and I've been clear in laying it out.
What makes one piece of art beautiful, truthful, or bringing about understanding, and another piece of art ugly, lying, or ineffectual? You have offered little in the way of explanation here, other than using an appeal to mundanity (because clip art can be mass produced, or accessed easily, it must be bad). You haven't supported your own judgements with evidence. You are throwing stones from a glass tower.
As much as my position is explainable in words - (alas, visual poesis and aesthetics comprise a language separate and distinct from words (as Dean Cornwell explained) so any translation will be lossy and porous) - I have articulated it on this blog many times, over and over, using every rewording I can think of to try to enter my points into the minds of the interested.
Such that - at this point - those who can understand me, already have. And I have resigned to believe that those who have not understood me, can not (or will not) understand me ever.
I had thought that you were a long time lurker, so you would have already encountered many variants of my arguments. My mistake.
The discussion is difficult to begin again, knowing the lengths required to achieve a change in someone's understanding.
I think the argument must begin by differentiating facts from truths; facts being static, concrete, and unique - truths being dynamic, abstract and portable. Facts are the inputs that pin truths to reality. (This is simplest to understand in math, where formulas exist as abstract truths, and numerical facts replace the variables to provide a concrete solution to a real problem.)
Next is to point out that the modernist usage of "abstract" is a distortion of the original meaning as it was used in all the arts. The actual meaning of 'abstract' in the Arts is (something like) to expressively summarize such that a sufficient revivification of the original via suggestive means (thus via "imaginative closure") is afforded the audience.
Abstraction is the basis of both poesis and aesthesis. And the experience of suggestion (which in art, as Stanley Meltzoff pointed out, is more like a command than an ask) is what is called "An Effect". Suggestion is the cause of effect in art. But suggestions don't work poetically when they are bald and obvious, so they must be hidden/sublated. Thus the ancient quote, "Art is the hiding of Art by Art." Naturalism is the performance that hides the craft.
Suggestions that cause effects have a relational structure; there are classes of effects and members of the same class share similar structures. Movement is structured different from metaphor which is structured different than halation, etc.
Suggestions are the magic tricks, the illusions of art. For stage magicians, the resulting effects are there to fool the audience. For artists, illusions are used to express sensually meaningful ideas related to experience; thus demonstrating truths aesthetically (via feeling).
Weaves of distinct illusions are used to express more complex ideas in composition, and the great picture is not only an edge to edge weave of truth telling illusions that all cumulate and culminate in a "total effect" (first discussed publicly by Edgar Allen Poe)... but the great Image is also thematically unified. That is, a great Image is a kind of orchestrated visual song that sings something universally relatable to every life through the specifics of the given fictive scenario.
If you can't sing it, it isn't a song. If you can't relate to it, either you are outside the normal distribution of aesthetic sensitivity (or you're inexperienced in life) or the picture didn't have truth.
That's as insanely brief as I can be. Tons left out. And even clipped as it is, it would take me a year to defend everything I just wrote. So I won't bother. You can take it or leave it all as you wish.
Well, in the effort to close my part in this thread--and partly by way of apology, because I made you repeat yourself--thanks, Kev, for elucidating. And, for context, I am a long(ish) time lurker, but not a (very) long time reader of the comments. About a year, maybe a little more.
Prelude to my response on Joseph Beuys, Milton Avery and Bouguereau. (I have a big legal presentation in the morning so I can't debate this stuff too much right now, but the following should at least help me get started infuriating my detractors).
I've repeatedly argued on this blog, echoing Emerson, that true excellence is new forever. My view does suggest a certain timelessness of artistic values. I agree that if Bouguereau was truly excellent, he didn't cease to be excellent when abstract art became more fashionable.
My idea of "timeless" quality in art requires us NOT to close ourselves off in the arrogant belief that one tiny little corner of art from one brief period in western civilization is the summum bonum of all art because it melds poesis and visual forms. That notion strikes me-- in the words of the great philosophers-- as just plain goofy. Instead, the timeless quality of art requires us to be open minded to the myriad forms of excellence in the long history of art.
I hope it is clear to all that there is no "progress" in art the way there is progress in science and technology. Ancient Egyptian art embodied an astonishing monumentality that the human mind may never again be able to equal in sculpture and painting again. Tribal art exemplifies a raw power that we would do well to revisit, lest our "high culture" art become too dainty and precious. For me, visiting cave paintings and seeing how the powers of design and abstraction were in our blood 30,000 years ago was a more chilling religious experience for me than anything I've experienced from Sorolla or Frazetta or Harvey Dunn.
And that's what art is all about, isn't it? I agree with Venturi, "What ultimately matters in art is not the canvas, the hue of oil or tempera, the anatomical structure and all the other measurable items, but its contribution to our life, its suggestions to our sensations, feeling and imagination." It may be easier for some of us to appreciate that contribution when we are looking at realistic oil paintings of people who look and dress like us standing in rooms that look like ours. But I believe we do ourselves a lot of good by casting our nets more broadly in search of different kinds of excellence, exercising our minds to understand what makes other art from other places and eras great. The great renaissances of art mostly seem to come from the cross fertilization of very different cultures.
It would be unrealistic for us to expect that such an inherently human enterprise as art could remain unaffected by the changing circumstances of modernity. Art was affected by the invention of oil paint in tubes; how could it be unaffected by speed, modernity, computers, the mysteries of outer space. Micgelangelo and Raphael used to be locked in a passionate struggle over whether Adam and Eve should be painted with belly buttons since they weren't "born" in the traditional sense. How could today's artists be unaffected by our miraculous new medical knowledge?
CONT.
(CONT.)
I am sometimes guilty, like other commenters here, of being too quickly and too easily irritated by some of the silliness that stems from the splintering of art in the 20th century. Sure, Koons and Hirst and Prince and Schnabel and a hundred other artists exasperate us because they (and their groupies) rub our noses in the shallow decadence of our culture. But we shouldn't let our revulsion drive us to take premature safe haven in familiar styles. Again from the great Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatize, nor accept another's dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board."
I have a theory about where art stands in our era. I think it has taken on the role that ancient physics (once called natural philosophy) once served.
Back at the dawn of humanity's search for ways to process the universe, our early minds had trouble distinguishing knowledge achieved through rational investigation from "knowledge" achieved through intuition, revelation and superstition. Ancient Chaldean priests in their watchtowers couldn't distinguish the science of astronomy from the fantasy of astrology. In those early, undifferentiated millennia, what the Greeks then called physics (or "natural philosophy" because physikos = the Greek word for "natural") became the incubation chamber for every wacko theory that sought the credibility and legitmacy of science. Ideas that passed the test of genuine science ascended from physics to their own branches of science-- for example, alchemy never became part of metallurgy.
Since that time, science has become a little more rigorous about fending off the unsubstantiated and subjective claims of intuition and emotion. As a result I think much of that activity has migrated under the umbrella of what we've come to call "art." We look at conceptual art and "happenings" and performance art and postmodern art and we get itchy for history or some other force to hurry up and save us by passing judgment on this drek. It takes time.
Wormod wrote: “Ales, within your own arguments, you have not described an "optimal form of sharing understanding, truth and beauty."”
These discussions have been going on here for 15 years, so some of the concepts and ways in which certain commentators use them are familiar to others. Truth is an experience shared by all people about ourselves and life, which gives us a sense of universal authenticity. Already in the Poetics, Aristotle wrote about how art is created when from many notions gained by experience one universal judgement about similar objects is produced, so while history uses historical facts about Alcibiades to express the particular things about him, poetry uses truth to restore these events back to life in a way that coincides with our intuitive understanding of the way the world is made up. As Kev said in the past, during life experiences we feel inexpressible internal correlations, connections and relationships among our perceptions, and we can symbolize and reliably communicate these abstract relationships and the fact that the reporting of these relationships over thousands of years resonates with the life experiences of other people proves the existence and consistency of the phenomenon.
Which answers your question whether the French or the Czechs would understand it. Yes they would, that is why we still find ancient Greek sculptures meaningful. When Rodin received a gift, a small Egyptian cat from W.Rothenstein, Rodin saw it as an archetype, part of his artistic heritage: "What greatness, what truth ", said Rodin, "It is not just a cat, it is the whole race of cats. There is the eternity of a living archetype in the way the limbs are attached, in the artistry of the back, in the cut of the head ”. Truth transcends fashion and politics and communicates valuable insights about humanity through generations, thats why we consider the test of time as the final arbiter of artistic value.
The words I used (“optimal form of sharing understanding”) are from Nietzsche where he writes about aesthetic state, but there are many other authors who deal with this in more depth. Aesthetics is concerned with understanding our instinctive imaginative response to sensory symbolic information. In nature, we intuitively perceive information that appears to us as meaningful symbols (like rolling of stones and flapping of wings will be intuitively perceived as a natural rhythmic symbol for speed, or red as a symbol for energic and passionate, apparently red is associated with aggression and dominance in fish, reptiles and birds, only finches born with a red head are aggressive and others instinctively avoid competitors coloured red), so our artistic symbols reflect the form based universal language of nature (color, tone, shape, gesture, rhythm, pattern, ratio, etc.) and by using them through plastic manipulation we communicate directly through human sensuality.
As Kev insightfully pointed out in the past, abstracting and symbolizing primitive natural analogies and poetic associations is otherwise a simple, automatic part of human nature, while the construction of a complex artistic idea is a great linguistic achievement where the actual symbolization of our thought process requires successful reverse engineering of insight/cognition through all its components and the ways in which it is demonstrated, followed by the objectification of all present abstract thoughts into concrete, communicative forms.
Due to the use of such universal language we can comprehend the information that was written in the plastic formulation of a thousands of years old sculptures. And truth helps us understand the world in which we actually live, so art that aims to permanently preserve these insights ranks highest on the hierarchical scale of artistic quality (Nietzsche admitted to great artists that, unlike the philosophers, they had not lost the great trail along which life flows).
Sometimes beauty is in what has yet to be discovered.
For me, visiting cave paintings and seeing how the powers of design and abstraction were in our blood 30,000 years ago was a more chilling religious experience for me than anything I've experienced from Sorolla or Frazetta or Harvey Dunn.
David, when assessing quality you have to be mindful of separating out your awareness of context in which you find the art object from the experience intrinsic to the art itself. You are in a cave under the ground aware that you are beholding marks upon the rockface made by your earliest ancestors. Your intellect is going to endow anything you find there with significance.
chris bennett-- I understand the reasons to be sensitive to how much context contributes to an art object, but I don't think it's possible to separate an artwork totally from its context. How do you separate the Sistine Chapel ceiling from its religious context (with which you may or may not be familiar)? How do you separate a Van Eyck painting from its symbolic elements? How are the masterpieces of Egyptian art, with hieroglyphs you can't translate, any different from a 20th century painting filled with mysterious inferences? In both cases, it's up to the viewer to meet the artist halfway (or more).
Just as being in a prehistoric cave and viewing a drawing by flickering torch light (https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2008/07/one-lovely-drawing-part-21.html)frames a picture in its original context, as it was created, so does an ancient Egyptian sculpture in the temple of Karnak surrounded by the vast desert frames the artwork as it was intended. Would you say it's somehow more pure or preferable to observe these works in a museum in front of a white wall?
It's true I fill in a lot of the blanks with my imagination when I look at an ancient sculpture, but I fill in a lot of blanks when I look at a Maxfield Parrish painting too.
David, I take your point, but the devil is in the details...
How do you separate the Sistine Chapel ceiling from its religious context?
If you didn't, then you'd be faced with the fact that in terms of the long tradition of religious iconography Michelangelo's depiction of God is a spiritually, theologically and philosophically naive depiction of the 'ineffable highest'. It's been portrayed here as Zeus. Apprehended within this framing it can be deemed as a non-sensical anomaly. But comprehended sensually, that's to say as a frozen music of human bodily struggle nested within the vaulting structure it is painted on, it makes aesthetic sense.
How do you separate a Van Eyck painting from its symbolic elements?
They are only the grains of sand that give birth to the pearls. Rembrandt's relationship with Hendrickje Stoffels was his reason for painting her, but when I beheld his portrait of this young woman in the Louvre I knew nothing of who she was, noting of the grain of sand that caused this wonderous pearl. Yet I distinctly remember standing there feeling this would be how I'd like to paint someone I loved.
How are the masterpieces of Egyptian art, with hieroglyphs you can't translate, any different from a 20th century painting filled with mysterious inferences?
In terms of the hieroglyphs and 'mysterious references' they are no different. Their respective qualities will be dependant on the wholeness, the cohesion, of the sensation-meaning embodied in its material expression.
In both cases, it's up to the viewer to meet the artist halfway (or more).
I agree. But this meeting is a communion of sensibilities attuned to the universal language of plastic means.
Just as being in a prehistoric cave and viewing a drawing by flickering torch light frames a picture in its original context, as it was created...
Yes, the cave paintings cannot be divorced from the rock's surfaces which suggested to those ancient artists the final forms their images took, but that's as far as it goes. A cave, in and of itself, is a damp, cold dark hole with an uneven floor, and sure it's going to influence what its occupants paint on its walls. But these conditions, like with the marbled palace, are not virtues to be added to the works contained within them. The converse of this is how beautiful furniture will take your attention off a shoddy room.
...so does an ancient Egyptian sculpture in the temple of Karnak surrounded by the vast desert frames the artwork as it was intended. Would you say it's somehow more pure or preferable to observe these works in a museum in front of a white wall?
No, I wouldn't. I'm just saying that although context will necessarily play its part in the experience surrounding a thing seen within that context, the quality of that thing will nevertheless be distinct. The temple may be beautiful, impressive and peaceful, but if the sculpture was crap then I'd spot it straight away and not forgive it for partially spoiling an otherwise lovely place (back to the furniture-room dynamic).
But I am in total agreement with you when it comes to architecture. To give an example I'll stick with Egypt. The pyramids would make no sense if plonked down in the middle of New York - they'd be seen as some kind of post-modern minimalist sculpture. But in the desert they 'make sense', attuned as they are with the desert from which they rise as enduring, stable testaments to a faith in something (even though we are unsure what that was exactly) amid the drifting dunes of sand.
So context is vital in architecture because architecture is fundamentally to do with a sense of home, home as a sense of belonging. And a building must belong to its setting and its setting to the landscape. It's the same reason why villages are often beautiful - they have come about organically both as buildings fashioned out of materials from the ground on which they stand, and the shared generational concerns of their inhabitants. So, in the case of architecture the lack of regard for context, as setting and purpose, is inversely proportional to a building's aesthetic quality.
Gosh--I'd just like to say, thanks to Kev, David, Ales, Chris, and Sean. This most recent battery of posts is really wonderfully written. Not that you need my, or anyone else's, approval.
"I hope it is clear to all that there is no "progress" in art the way there is progress in science and technology."
Do you live in a reality distortion field? What are you talking about? Did art history suddenly disappear? Did all the aesthetic literature from Baumgarten to Dewey just evaporate this afternoon? Did all the art teaching from Verrocchio to Fraggonard to Gerome to Howard Pyle to Robert Henri just go poof?
Can you show me one subliminal present in an Ancient Egyptian painting? Can you show me three point perspective in an ancient Greek mosaic? Can you show me a luminosity effect in a Persian miniature? Thematic development in an ancient Japanese woodblock print? Can you show me Imagism from the middle ages? Any naturalistic lighting scenario at all in any painting prior to the Renaissance? Can you show me one Impressionist painting from the 18th century?
You talk of “timelessness” in art. The fact is the full suite of timeless qualities and the extent of the possibilities/new poetic excellences they offered weren’t even known until the era of Kunstwissenschaft (of which I sing.) Visual suggestion wasn't understood at a technical level until late in the 19th century.
Poetics is a technology. And technology progresses. Get used to it.
> Poetics is a technology. And technology progresses.
Quite right, which is why claiming this small Western segment of art as the summum bonum is no more 'arrogant' than saying our small corner of Western rocketry is.
Technology is indifferent to our cosmopolitan politics and whether our art historiography sufficiently aligns with marxist principles. The rocket either flies, or it does not.
If the Australian Aborigines had produced works like Bouguereau instead of the French, then that would be the case, but it isn’t.
Furthermore, denying progress in art not only strips these 19th-century European academics of their contributions to Art but also deprives 20th-century Russians and 21st-century Chinese of theirs.
It also undermines the very significance of Chauvet. What does it mean that they drew lions when, for 200,000 years before it was only handprints, if not some sense of progress? Chauvet is notable precisely because of its place in the history of art. Absent that progress, Chauvet stinks.
It is amazing how types of thought can be so entirely misunderstood within the same field.
Would Degas have thought his Japanese derived understandings of the picture plane which provided animating force to his moving figures later be derided as but design? And though a field of design developed following the Asian invasion into art, was it ever divorced from content in Degas? True, we understand the devises are not in themselves poetry, but their invisible forces become part of, and sensed when incorporated into beautiful forms for example.
Did the great draughtsman and painter John Dewey realize how his little comment questioning Sargent’s lack of love in his work would affect countless readers? Such was taken quite seriously. Did Sargent’s watercolor alligators for example ever suffer from his dexterity?
The fourth paragraph from the post by Arles put a very difficult concept together in clear positive prose. It’s a fantastic paragraph because explanation has a tendency to be laborious and often frustrating, even more so if explained in the negative, such as, Visual Poetics is not this and Visual Poetics is not that. Poetry expresses that which is lumbering or sometimes impossible to explain in prose because the poetry itself cannot easily be separated from its expression, which is its purpose.
In the second part of the 16th century, St. John of the Cross explained his poems in prose; his reasoning for the poetic lines and his theology which was of a negative nature, not this, not that. Adding to the complexity of the work is that one mightn’t be familiar with the delicate internal experiences he addresses. The radical approach of his thoughts cost him many troubles.
Now to the reason for this post. Though art may have progressed, did the underlying reality of its poetic origin progress? The following by St. Augustine offers us a clue.
Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty
so ancient and so new!
Beautiful paragraph by Aleš, excuse me.
"As Kev insightfully pointed out in the past, abstracting and symbolizing primitive natural analogies and poetic associations is otherwise a simple, automatic part of human nature, while the construction of a complex artistic idea is a great linguistic achievement where the actual symbolization of our thought process requires successful reverse engineering of insight/cognition through all its components and the ways in which it is demonstrated, followed by the objectification of all present abstract thoughts into concrete, communicative forms."
I am very glad you were one of the ones listening to me Ales.
I'll send you some additional information related to the content in your above summary via messenger on Facebook. I think you will find it interesting.
Sean, were this conversation a door, you have provided a key.
"What greatness, what truth ", said Rodin, "It is not just a cat, it is the whole race of cats. There is the eternity of a living archetype in the way the limbs are attached, in the artistry of the back, in the cut of the head ”
I think too much is made of truth in art.
To me, the more interesting aspect of the Egyptian cat lies in the fictions. Where my truth and the Egyptian truth diverge. It's in the peculiarities of the Egyptian cat (e.g., its strange fingers, the lack of hind legs, and all of the smaller qualities that diverge from my experience) that I begin to understand the Egyptian's mind, to get to experience the world through his eyes.
Similarly, the poetry in ancient Greek and Rennaisance sculpture occurs not where our realities align (human bodies are shaped like this), but rather, where the Greek mind has idealized away from my base reality. Where the Greek believes in a relationship between human anatomy and spirituality that I do not.
There is little to be gained where we agree on human anatomy -- I can get that same content by looking carefully at living people/photographs/etc. However, we do not share idealizations; his untruths become my poetic content. It's not in the vein's of The David's hands, where we agree, but in his sanctification, where we do not.
Which is not to say the shared truth has no value, but I think it's a much more mundane value. Where the Egyptian truth and my own overlap (the way the limbs are attached, in the arch of the back, in the cut of the head) is useful as it provides common ground for the Egyptian to communicate his fiction. If we had no truths in common, I could not experience his fiction. We must have a shared notion of both Man and God, for the Christian to tell me he believes that a Man is God, and for me to experience that poetry.
(And to make myself most clear, I should contrast this with the untruths in Modern Art, where the artist tells fictions that they themselves do not believe. I'm not arguing on behalf of lies, only notions the artist really holds which I do not.)
Sean, were this conversation a door, you have provided a key.
• So you agree that "Degas had Japanese-derived understandings of the picture plane which provided animating force to his moving figures?"
If so, why do you agree with that statement? (Given that Degas did action/figural studies of Delacroix and Ingres but not of any Japanese prints.)
• So you agree that Dewey's one opinionated line about Sargent as painter in Art As Experience negates the entire rest of the content of the book? Like, for instance, his point about the thematic nature of true experience?
• So you think that anybody here disagrees with St. Augustine that there are beautiful things both ancient and new? Do you feel that that fact somehow informs or even relates to the discussion of technical progress in poetics?
"I think too much is made of truth in art. (...)
To me, the more interesting aspect of the Egyptian cat lies in the fictions. Where my truth and the Egyptian truth diverge.
(...) the poetry in ancient Greek and Rennaisance sculpture occurs not where our realities align (human bodies are shaped like this), but rather, where the Greek mind has idealized away from my base reality."
Yes the poetry is in the gap between similars, which is only felt in their superposition, where one is dominant and the other sublated, (as in the dominant eye and the weaker eye, which allows for the visual effect of depth).
Truths overlap in real life in a wholly confused way most of the time. Thus to present truths as they appear in life would result in confused disunified art.
Thus artists select truths to isolate down on, purify, edit, emphasize and exaggerate - in order to be clear and to provide a clear understanding; a single complex effect, purified unto itself and clear in its orchestrated parts.
To idealize properly, for example, is to find the ideal in what is real and to bring it out via artistry; via purification, editing, emphasis, exaggeration, and so on. David is a fiction that tells the truth about the idealization within man's being. The cat sculpture in its own way does the same thing with its species.
Exaggerate too much, however, and comedy is the result. Or caricature. "Purify" too much and you get geometry.
Kev asked:
> So you think that anybody here disagrees with St. Augustine that there are beautiful things both ancient and new? Do you feel that that fact somehow informs or even relates to the discussion of technical progress in poetics?
I simply admired how Sean was able to synthesize both your own point about technical progress in art, with David's assertion that art hasn't progressed in the same way as science. I don't know what other people think of St. Augustine, but I think his quote was very well-placed in support for Sean's implication that while "art may have progressed," "the underlying reality of its poetic origin" hasn't.
As for your other questions, I reserve comment. Those assertions were not why I said he had a key. I'll let people better read than me dissect them. I do agree with David, though, that many "great renaissances of art [...] seem to come from the cross fertilization of very different cultures."
"I simply admired how Sean was able to synthesize both your own point about technical progress in art, with David's assertion that art hasn't progressed in the same way as science."
But art has progressed as science does, technologically.
That the artistic impulse in humans might stem from an innate interest in beauty is a completely different subject. Beauty is an impression or intuition, not a technology.
If David had meant to write that our appreciation of beauty does not progress as science does, he would have written that. Which would have launched a different discussion, with its own historical, technical, psychological, and biological vagaries.
Well... I really can't speak for any of the other writers here. All I saw was, if David's assertion was the thesis and yours the antithesis, Sean's comment appeared to me to be a synthesis in dialectical terms. A sublation of contradictions.
I don't know if I am capable of explaining it clearly, should you be unable to find it in Sean's original post. I also, frankly, don't know what Sean would have to say about it: but for a moment, it seemed very obvious to me.
The only strong recommendation I have is this: I don't think you're describing advancement in artistic technology, but rather artistic technique. We could argue about definitions all day, but I beg you to consider the subtle, but meaningful differences.
"The only strong recommendation I have is this: I don't think you're describing advancement in artistic technology, but rather artistic technique. We could argue about definitions all day, but I beg you to consider the subtle, but meaningful differences."
Dunning Kruger incarnate. Bye.
Well, Kev, barring you explaining exactly how I've been stupid, which you seem unwilling to do... what could I do to educate myself?
barring you explaining exactly how I've been stupid, which you seem unwilling to do... what could I do to educate myself?
You don't understand. I've given you a decade's worth of information already, but highly highly compressed. Smart, talented people who have been thinking about this stuff for years on and off this board (Ales, Chris, and Richard) have offered more along similar lines to me.*
The problem is I don't think you've realized just how much you've already been given here. Because - as far as I can tell - you're only on day four of a serious attempt to grapple with the topic.
This is insanely difficult material and you simply can't get it right away. No matter how smart you are. I'm embarrassed to say how many times I read Harvey Dunn's An Evening In The Classroom before I started really understanding it. For at least a decade.
If you're actually interested in reading on the topic, and since you say you're an artist; I'd say you should start with...
• The Famous Artists Course (1954 or 1960 version); there's bound to be a pdf available online (otherwise try to order the actual physical books through Interlibrary Loan).
• There should be a pdf online of Harvey Dunn's An Evening In the Classroom.
• Art Spirit by Robert Henri and Practical Hints for Art Students by Charles Lasar are also both excellent and can be found on Google:Books.
These are non-technical books, mostly. Filled with ideas that work, but which aren't really explained from first principles or as poetry. (Though in each there are hints of the deeper side.) The reason I offer these is because I don't think you can understand the technical side until you get your hands dirty for a few years on the practical and 'spiritual' side. Apply the wisdom in these books to your art. See what works.
* (David is also smart and talented, but takes a very different approach. He's much more of a progressive humanist and an experientialist/sensualist about art.)
Thanks for the earnest recommendations, Kev, I really appreciate it. I've located a copy of the Harvey Dunn, and I'll look for the others.
Wormod,
"I don't think you're describing advancement in artistic technology, but rather artistic technique."
Here's my understanding of Kev's claim that poetics is a technology:
Since technology is a tool in that the term refers to complexes of tools, it would follow that we can describe language as a technology, although it is what one might call a psycho-technology rather than a physical one. A tool of communication let's say.
Art is a particular form of language, one that communicates with, and within, ordered implications that are expressions framing particular aspects of the ineffable. (Which is why poetics have no essential use for the explicit.) So it follows that poetics can indeed be referred to as a technology, a tool of communion with the spirit.
I may of course have misunderstood Kev on this point, and if I have then I'll be the first to welcome his quickly putting me right.
The first thing one might notice in St. Augustine’s quote is a tenderness, a lack of belligerence. The depth to which it is without belligerence is part of the discovered Beauty. He laments and exhibits humility in having spent his life so unaware of a beauty right in front of him that was invisible to him. “Late, have I loved”. While the quote is a humble lamentation, it is also filled with gratitude at having discovered a paradox, something both enduring and nimble, of the suffering that provides wisdom but also wonder, youth, promise. In a sense, something that by association with beauty and mystery exists in himself also simultaneously and paradoxically. Thus the exclamation point. “so ancient and so new!”
Degas studied everything, but he wasn’t bound by some verbal precept. He took chances. The punctuation of space is an old idea. We discussed the animating nature of the Japanese and Chinese picture plane and its horizon line years back. He did use such to his advantage and it was an invisible force animating his dancers. I did not say it was the only force animating his dancers.
Trying to describe what isn’t visible by a process of negation is a difficult project and one without its confusion. A teacher tries to describe something using the direct nature of prose. But such can be translated in the minds of listeners as a rule when it often just applies to a situation. A well intentioned comment can cause confusion sending a student off into a kind of oblivion of misapplications, misunderstandings, etc. It happens all the time.
Dewey wasn’t an artist so he never processed the seeing and feeling of drawing or painting for himself. If he did it wasn't to any level where he would be correcting Sargent. That was the reason his remark is powerful in its conclusion. It is in practice that one asks questions and feels the need for answers which are not always found in books. Answers to such questions can take decades to find. It is in the presumption of knowingness that one acquires glibness and belligerence. It is in the reception of truth and beauty that one finds a new depth.
So it follows that poetics can indeed be referred to as a technology, a tool of communion with the spirit.
There are many routes to explaining poetics as a technology. Yours is perfectly fine. I might put the case as follows...
The thing about technology is that it is the discovery of new ways of harnessing natural forces and dynamics; a development of a method of material control that has some known effect. The technical comes into it, but also the structural. All new technology brings new structure; a particular method of building and organization. Also technology is additive, even multiplicative; complex technology is built out of simpler prior technologies. And once technology is developed, it can be passed along.
A simple example in art is luminosity. A basic effect of luminosity can be accidentally happened upon in artmaking. But until you analyze the actual cause of the luminosity effect - which is an abstract structural matter - you cannot repeat it (engineer and build it on demand) at will to cause its particular sensation in the audience. (Just as you can accidentally cause static electricity, but you would need to really understand it and work with particular materials and processes to control it at will to shock your neighbor's stupid cat.)
Now, armed with the specific knowledge of how to structure the elements that go into the luminosity effect, you can make a lamp light seem to glow using the structural know-how you have acquired. Such an application of technology is not the same thing as learning how to swipe with a brush or lay down ink lines, which are 'techniques' or 'conventions'. (They can be learned concretely rather than abstractly.)
Then an additional poetic idea comes along; you are painting a lovely girl, and you want to make her look radiant. And you realize that the luminosity effect that can make a lamp glow need not always involve light sources. The same abstract structural organization can be ported to expressing something about a person; to make, in this case, a girl seem almost supernaturally lovely and radiant. (Or a machine seem full of energy. Or a bag of money glow with value. And so on.)
Now, lets add in that we'd like the radiant girl to also have a feeling of warmth to her. Achieving the effect of warmness is another separate abstract structural matter, one that is different from luminosity. So we add that warmth effect superposed with the luminous effect and we have developed a new, more complex effect via a more complex bit engineering.
Various groups of artists in the 19th century called compositions 'engines'. And engines, or machines generally, need engineering so that they fit their purpose - in the case of art to cause specific kinds of effects (in superposition or in sequence or in some scalar way or orchestrated) to put across some complex expressive intent.
To finish my prior thought on the reception of truth and beauty, one also finds a new openness in beauty which is antithetical to arrogance for example. In that context openness is a form of dying to the former.
Beauty, mystery and awe are captured in the arts, but the arts however created are a subcategory to them.
Beauty, mystery and awe are captured in the arts, but the arts however created are a subcategory to them.
I’m not going to pretend I confidently know what you’re saying, because frankly, you sound like you did too much acid in the '70s.
But if you’re saying what it sounds like you’re saying, that art is a member of a larger category of the sublime, I have to disagree.
Art’s relationship to the sublime is very weak at best. Certainly, there are cases of art being beautiful, mysterious, and awe-inspiring, but that’s true for just about anything.
Most art, as most artists learn in art school, is not beautiful, mysterious, or awesome. And as some unfortunate souls learn later in life, the fact that one makes art does not in any way reliably reward one with the sublime. Almost certainly the opposite. Most people who chase art to the end of their days, as any trip to the local Community Art Center will show, are left holding a pile of cosmically mediocre pictures and sad twinge in their eye.
It would seem that beauty, mystery, awe, truth, etc., are the exception in art. Perhaps only slightly more common than beauty, mystery, awe in furniture. Or clouds. Or house cats. Picked at random, you’d almost certainly be better off choosing the house cat. The rule would seem to be that art is mostly boring, mundane, obvious, disingenuous, and ugly.
(I think one would do well to ask if perhaps the relationship between beauty/mystery/awe and art has more to do with habit than with anything particularly inherent to art. But that’s for another time.)
And I don’t mean to debase the whole of art in any way by saying this. Rather, just to say that great art is great because it’s great, not because it’s art. As a category, art is totally normal.
I don't disagree Richard, but I'd say it more like this: picture making, sound making and narrative making are not the same thing as art.
Chris,
I think that redefining art to require the sublime leads us into all sorts of predicaments, where we're left saying things like:
- Humanity all but stopped producing art 100 years ago.
- Art cannot be taught, because:
----- The students of most people who made art themselves never made art.
----- Most people who made art were taught by people who had never made art.
- Even most great artists have only made art a few times.
- Most of the people currently being paid as artists have never made art before.
- Effectively, no one at art school has ever produced art.
- The entire Global South has made maybe three or four pieces of art, ever.
- Outside of the Greeks and Romans, very few people prior to the late Middle Ages ever made art.
- Every artist and writer who ever mentioned the existence of "bad art" was mistaken.
Etc.
Not only does this lead us to all sorts of wild conclusions, but it's also a nonstarter for how the word is used today, and it is not well-supported that the word was ever seriously used in this way. If we feel it necessary to have a dedicated term to describe great, sublime art, we're better off coining a new word, not trying to hijack an existing one.
You guys need to define 'sublime'.
Ruskin's version is essentially religious or cosmic: something like an awe-filled recognition of a great unifying force lying behind experience.
The way I hear it used most often is as an intuitive but non-specific recognition of a lovingly hidden layer of meaning in the context of something sensed as beautiful. And I find this synonymous with the definition of art that derives from artfulness (subtle, suggestive manipulation of an audience to a fine purpose) and artifice (in its original definition as a kind of clever masking). Which amounts to art being the deft poetic use of subliminality.
I think you reworded what I said. The arts … are a subcategory.
Just as biology is a subcategory of chemistry, both are a subcategory of what is. But neither of these categories use a language which goes beyond itself. Their language is limited by their own defined parameters and purpose. The entire human endeavor has become much the same way, measured, even in its daring.
In the book “Story” by Robert Mckee, the author’s stated purpose is to create stories where the viewer discovers morality which they are no longer taught. He does so by placing the protagonist in dilemmas which force them to make moral choices and moral discoveries. He shakes them up.
If vice is what produces a predictable result, then grace is what surprises.
Human errors belong to an area of interpretive thought, impulses, greed, response, presumptions according to one’s disposition, and usually become normalized or hardened until something comes along to change them. Thinking is a part of the larger unknown which it reflects as best as it can with what its got. But grace travels through very simple things, a smile, a slight nod from a stranger; permissions or cautions in a far more mysterious reality. Art, like thinking, belongs to a greater category of what is.
All the subcategories are part of the greater category of What is, Is-ness.
Yes, Ruskin and the second intuitive definition are correct. They are both part of the greater category, What is.
I think you reworded what I said. The arts … are a subcategory. Just as biology is a subcategory of chemistry, both are a subcategory of what is.
If you refers to me... I'm saying that art is NOT a subcategory of mystery, truth, beauty, awe, etc. I'm saying that art's relationship to those things is negligible. That it is in no way like how biology is a subcategory of chemistry, but rather, more like the way politics is related to the social good.
Occasionally, exceptional politicians produce social good, politicians and political historians make quite a bit of the relationship between the social good and politics, young people get into politics because of an interest in the social good, but all that aside, in the normal course of things the two are only superficially related.
You guys need to define 'sublime'.
I'm using it very loosely as a catch-all to refer to those elevated things experienced by people appreciating great visual poetry -- whether that's beauty, profundity, truth, mystery, awe, and so on.
If art means pictures that are "sublime" in this sense, then certainly all art is great, art and great art are synonyms, and bad art is an oxymoron. The word art becomes mere epithet, and the word artist ends up a near religious term, insignificantly different from the sanskrit "bodhisattva".
And again, we're then left with the predicaments I listed above.
I (when I remember to do so) differentiate Art from art; the former being a result that approaches some kind of sublime effect, the latter being anything called art; good, bad or indifferent. This distinction-by-capitalization is something I garnered from reading stuff from the 1850-1930 era. (I don't know how to make an equivalent distinction in person/conversation.)
I'm fully on board the '99% of everything (including art) is crap' train.
Richard,
Maybe my discussing these things in categories is a bit too simple. I agree it might be in relationship, like politics to the social good. But there is a chasm between two areas.
There is a division between possessable knowns and intuitive understandings; sensed but not provable.
From where I began to this point I’ve been providing hints in the form of some word relationships, vice-grace, lament-love, Beauty-openness-new!, closed-arrogance, warmth-relationship, etc.
The area of possessable knowledge is one of measuring and defining differences. There are so many differences to define that one could go stark crazy with a perfect clarity of mind. On the other hand, the intuitive is both marvelous whether grand or small. It is refined and tender. It regards relationships as union in immeasurable quantities and qualities. One might not even notice them. One might not need to discern them, because union is compatible.
"There are many routes to explaining poetics as a technology."
Great post!
This kind of insight re art is rarely discussed or imparted to the plebes, resulting in the judgment of art being mostly about hi-falutin concepts that only an educated few can wrangle with e.g., meaning, value, good/bad, lazy or primitive, post-modern or classic, those ideas often indulged here too until properly slapped down. But I'm telling ya, the average non-educated art lover would understand Kev's post straight out and be able to apply it (or I should say attempt to apply it) to something they are viewing and want to understand why they like it or don't like it, etc. Much of the hi-falutin talk is lost on novices and those who haven't a clue to the "technology" noted by Kev's post.
Thanks, Kev. Always good to find out how much I don't know about how art is actually done.
I guess there was an age where art was as advanced as rocket science, and now, maybe we've reverted to horse and buggy?
When Frank Spinks, a peer with Neal Adams and Ken Bald went to Marvel Comics looking to do some comics because the advertising world was in contraction, they told him he drew too well. It’s not what’s happening they told him. It’s not what the kids see it, or something like that.
They gave him a small series of Collectors Cards to do. One was of Captain America which he was capable of doing without stretching his skill level at all. He did similar works waiting for work on a given afternoon. Sadly that’s about all that exists of his long career. He said he wasn’t an artist, only a draughtsman, but he could fill almost all storyboard advertising needs; moods, drama, joy, every character and all kinds of scenarios without looking at a photo.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/captain-america-by-frank-spinks--159033430564268515/
That world is gone. There is no more market in that area.
Having an open mind to specifics about image making, poetics, spirit, etc. is not an issue but it’s hard on the ears to hear the Chauvet Cave drawings dismissed, etc.
I guess there was an age where art was as advanced as rocket science, and now, maybe we've reverted to horse and buggy?
Something like that. There was a long rolling collapse after the Great Depression in the quality of art education generally, and it only got worse after the Abstract Expressionist cult began taking over departments in the 1950s.
Though, already by WWII the teaching and belief system that went into the Golden Age of American Illustration was well nigh gone. The guys from 1905 were old, new Illustration students who had lived through the Depression were more businesslike, more materialistic and linear in thought, more yoked to the camera, more design-oriented, and more deferential to the Art Directors and the advertisers of the magazines. Poetry was out. Adventure was out. Harvey Dunn could barely breath from emphysema and his last students were more likely to go into Golden Age comic books than carry on the Pyle legacy as painters.
When Saul Tepper - student of Dunn and one of the last of the golden age greats - would visit illustration classes in the 1960s and 70s, he wasn't given respect. And when he explained how his compositions worked and the subliminal symbolisms in them, the students thought he was talking superstitious nonsense and mocked him. It didn't matter. The world had changed, mainstream illustration was dying, and art students had changed. They had become arrogant and closed off and stoned and dumb from TV, politics, and geopolitical fear. And most of them would never work in the industry anyhow. Frank Schoonover (pyle student) said in an interview in the 1960s that "art was out."
But there was still glimmers. One young illustrator who took Tepper seriously was Jeff Jones, who unrelated to any school, spent time circa 1970 grilling Tepper about composition and getting everything he could out of him. Alex Toth is another, who attended lectures by Harold Von Schmidt in the 1950s. In fact, many in the Frazett-led illustration insurrection understood the value of good old information. Frazetta himself talked of using "all those illustrator tricks" in his work and lamented that art directors would crop his paintings not knowing that they were cutting off important information. I don't know how Frazetta acquired the Golden Age information, but pretty much all the fantasy painters and western painters I've known were information hounds, who sought after old information from the Golden Age. (None of the romance book cover artists did.)
That is one sad story. Thanks for the insights.
Just on your (Kev's) "These are non-technical books, mostly", and acknowledging your proviso, what technical books would you recommend ?
(I have to say, other than the obvious usefullness of some anatomy books, in my admittedly limited reading here I've never found one that's of more than minimal help.)
Bill
If anyone else here has any too, of course, please mention / Bill
Hi Bill,
Molly Bang's book, 'How Pictures Work,' is a decent introduction to thinking of the engineering side of composition. And I really mean 'introduction' - rank novice level stuff. But I did find it helpful as primer for the kind of things that Kev and Chris talk about here. And definitely far more useful than books that treat composition only as graphic design.
I also recommend McKee's 'Story,' even though it isn't about painting.
"Just on your (Kev's) "These are non-technical books, mostly", and acknowledging your proviso, what technical books would you recommend ?
(I have to say, other than the obvious usefullness of some anatomy books, in my admittedly limited reading here I've never found one that's of more than minimal help.)"
Bill,
If you haven't read a lot of art books, then don't mess around with looking for technical-poetic books, because there really aren't any anyhow. There's only bits and pieces here and there, including in all the books I recommended. Assuming you are drawing and painting from life and making art otherwise, if those four books I mentioned don't help you, then the whole matter of improving is going to be a struggle.
I'd add in Andrew Loomis' Creative Illustration as another classic text for learning useful art-making information.
Also, as Sid added, 'Story' by Robert McKee is one of the deeper books about any of the arts ever written. That book is the first time I understood the purpose of intervals in poetry; the imaginative gaps that open up and how they get filled. Which I realized ported over to visual art. (Fwiw, I came to disagree with McKee's understanding of Theme as he presented it in that book.)
You need to understand that there's slightly different views at the core of all the different books I'm naming.
Loomis was part of the Chicago School who were "Zornites" - they loved the creamy broad paint application of Anders Zorn and sought to bring that into illustration. Clear and beautiful was their mode.
Harvey Dunn is Pyle/Brandywine through and through, which is work derived from heavy imaginative contemplation, layered full of meaning and composed for meaning and meant to be visually arresting.
Charles Lasar came out of the European salon painting tradition and his ideas offer practical notes on 19th century academic painting; beauty, harmony, and rhythm.
Robert Henri was more of an Impressionist.
The Famous Artists course was a kind of averaging of a bunch of different traditions with specific bits from different traditions taking prominence depending on what is being discussed and by whom.
My (amateur) take on "technical" art books --
Useful art information is both visual and tactile. This information can be absorbed only through the eyes and hands. At best, the words in a book must teach by riddle, directing our eyes back to the examples and diagrams, and our hands back to the brush.
But the information already exists in the great paintings of the past and the world, if only our eyes were sufficiently sensitive to seek it out, and our hearts brave enough to sit with all the painful feelings present.
To access this information, the artist must ask "visual questions." Visual questions cannot be expressed in words, nor can their answers. They are questions that must be asked with the eyes—questions that can only be asked by the eyes.
Moreover, there are various ways the eyes can ask these questions—delicately, aggressively, longingly, with disinterest, bravely, apprehensively, with dignity, with degradation, broadly, narrowly. If one's eyes only ask one type of question, for instance, only delicate questions but never aggressive ones, they will receive only one type of answer.
"Technical" art books claim to teach such useful skills as how to draw a woman or how to mix more accurate colors. However, drawing a woman or mixing colors is the simplest part. The more challenging aspect is SEEING your own drawing/painting of a woman or SEEING the color you are mixing. If you can write in cursive and scramble an egg, you possess just about all the technical skills you could possibly need.
Thanks Kev, much appreciated.
I once was in a quandary choosing between an expensive edition of either Creative Illustration or his 'Figure Drawing...' book, went for the latter (alas).
I've read Harold Speed, Robert Hale, Solomon, Ruskin, a few of the life-drawing and sculpture reprints on Dover and so on...the usual stuff, probably; but was interested in any others you might hold in high regard.
(Incidentally, I once came across an online image of an unused b+w from the Dead Rider which made me get the book. I'd been reading the comments here for months after I bought it before I made the link !)
Sidarth - thanks also.
Bill
Richard,
I think that redefining art to require the sublime leads us into all sorts of predicaments... Not only does this lead us to all sorts of wild conclusions, but it's also a nonstarter for how the word is used today, and it is not well-supported that the word was ever seriously used in this way. If we feel it necessary to have a dedicated term to describe great, sublime art, we're better off coining a new word, not trying to hijack an existing one.
I'm not sure about this Richard. Because if what we mean by art is that it is "a particular form of language, one that communicates with, and within, ordered implications that are expressions framing particular aspects of the ineffable", then it still makes sense to say 'good art' or 'bad art'. The two film versions of Lem's 'Solaris' would be, in my view, examples of good and bad art, with Tarkovsky's being an example of the good.
Thanks Richard. Dunno.... there are blatant things you can be blind to that hit you in the face when brought to your attention by a good teacher (including a text), or brought on by sudden realisations before the world, or pictures of it. Those 'Questions' preceding gradually forming out of the impasses, and so on.
"To access this information, the artist must ask "visual questions." Visual questions cannot be expressed in words, nor can their answers. They are questions that must be asked with the eyes—questions that can only be asked by the eyes.
Moreover, there are various ways the eyes can ask these questions—delicately, aggressively, longingly, with disinterest, bravely, apprehensively, with dignity, with degradation, broadly, narrowly. If one's eyes only ask one type of question, for instance, only delicate questions but never aggressive ones, they will receive only one type of answer."
That was a very strong post, Richard. Very observant.
My first major epiphany on this point came when studying with Chinese painter Hong Nian Zhang. And he told the class not to compare green with red, but red with red and green with green. Completely shifted me from noticing blatant differences to sensing subtle differences.
Another shift came when I shifted from looking at things in a picture to looking at either how things were constructed internally, or how things were connecting abstractly to other things; looking for relationships between things.
And so on.
The internalization of intuited or observed knowledge is revealed in the drawing, painting and storytelling. A lack of such expresses itself in work where the observed has not yet been internalized. Internalization of ideas takes a long time and requires a reverence for what one is doing. As one internalizes one thing, they can then see more. That is where the sublime is intuited, the reverence is revealed.
It’s rather weird to me that the Chauvet Cave drawings and the Fawcett and Fuchs were rejected because in them one can see their internalized understanding. I posted the Spinks link for the same reason. He didn’t work in heroic proportions but in realistic ones, and made the leap fluently without any awkward carryover from his usual mode. Such requires a mastery few attain. He was in demand 7 days a week for about forty years prior to which he did his own boards as an art director.
One learns to draw by drawing, (from life and from imagination).
One learns to paint by painting.
One learns storytelling by storytelling.
"It’s rather weird to me that the Chauvet Cave drawings and the Fawcett and Fuchs were rejected because in them one can see their internalized understanding. I posted the Spinks link for the same reason."
Really now, you've posted your art before. There is no evidence that you have any internalized understanding of anything. You can't even draw. Have a little humility.
The Spinks is weak; sweaty with reference and showing no imaginative belief in any aspect of it. Your praise of it is yet another self-indicitment of your aesthetic-sensory competence.
"They are both part of the greater category, What is."
"If vice is what produces a predictable result, then grace is what surprises."
"There is a division between possessable knowns and intuitive understandings; sensed but not provable."
And maybe your garbled eight miles high pseudo-philosophizing is part of the problem. Half obvious, half clueless, it obviously didn't help your art and couldn't. And the verbal byproducts of your cloudy brain won't help anybody else's art either. Because there's no integrity or engineering or applicability to any of what you drool out on us, except for the banalities that everybody already knows. You clearly don't have the ability to drill down into what you write to test its coherence.
Which is just why the arrogance of you play-acting as a beatific and spiritually-expansive art teacher-cum-evangelical here continues to be painful. So continue to expect pushback insofar as you keep demanding attention by shoving your drivel in front of our eyes.
Kev Ferrara wrote: "Do you live in a reality distortion field? What are you talking about? Did art history suddenly disappear?... Poetics is a technology. And technology progresses. Get used to it."
I just returned from New York City where I wished that Kev, Richard, Sean, chris bennett, Ales, Wormod and others were there to accompany me on my walk from 17th street to 79th street. I started with the Rubin Museum and its extraordinary collection of ancient Asian masterworks, then to the Poster House Museum with its highly informative exhibition of the rise and fall of art deco posters, and on and on, bypassing only the Museum of Modern Art (for many years, a colossally irritating bore), hitting the Society of Illustrators, stopping at Burt Silverman's studio for his enriching discussion of Basquiat, abstraction and realism, then finally ending at the Natural History Museum to view tribal masks and carvings. It was an astonishing day, like drinking culture from a firehose. I could've used some good conversation along the way. But more than that, I like to think that in the presence of such a diverse and powerful range of images, it would've been much harder for some of you to cling to the notion that the history of art is "progress" toward your personal preferences.
Kev, I suggest you add to your reading list of art books J.B. Bury's excellent (non-art) historical survey, "The Idea of Progress." Bury documents that "progress" is a purely modern idea, that it was never held by the Greeks or Romans or Medieval or even Renaissance Europeans. In fact, medieval thinkers assumed that civilization had been in decline since the golden age of Greece, and would continue to get worse until the second coming.
No, the whole concept of progress originated with the rationalistic philosophy that arose from the enlightenment, inspired by the scientific and later the technological revolutions. Because of the undeniable progress of technology, every philosopher and thinker from here to Timbuktu searched for a way to hitch subjective human values-- ethics, art, religion, even governance-- to the same engine. From Immanuel Kant's "categorical imperative" on, everyone wanted to apply the objectivity and logic of technology to straighten out the "crooked timber of humanity." Unfortunately, over the centuries every single one of them was disproved and flung off, like the girls flung off the Devil's Wheel (Teufelsrad) at the Munich Oktoberfest, with their skirts flying.
Wise people have learned to compromise, deriving all that it is possible to derive from the models of technology, objectivity and progress (but not more). 95% of the world recognizes that there is no "progress" in literature from the Iliad, Sophocles and Aeschylus to 19th or 20th century literature, merely process. And we can take no comfort from "progress" in sculpture in the millennia from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the sculpture of the 19th or 20th century. In terms of sensitivity, emotive power, innovation, anyone could identify ancient examples to knock down every example of "progress" that you might propose.
Drawings are a little more perishable so they don't go back as far, but I'd make the same assertion going back 500 years. For every example of 20th century progress you show me, anyone could counter with a Holbein or a Michelangelo or a Rembrandt.
The rest of the world seems to have accepted this-- however regretfully. But there remain a few mulish ideologues, a disproportionate percentage of which apparently hang out around this blog. Kev's argument, "Can you show me three point perspective in an ancient Greek mosaic?...Any naturalistic lighting scenario at all in any painting prior to the Renaissance?" is to me the equivalent of saying "art has progressed because now we have Photoshop."
(CONT.)
(CONT.)
It is fine with me if anyone wants to say their personal preference in art represents the best art ever (even if that art is just a brief and regional microdot in the broader history of art). I love enthusiasm. Go for it! But it is a tall order to reshape all of global art history to line it up behind your preference.
It especially makes no sense to me to say that primitive or intuitive natural analogies and intuitive poetic associations can't qualify as high art until they've been reframed and prettified with higher linguistics in a more complex artistic form that enables us to track actual symbolization with our cognitive processes. If it rhymed better, that could be a line out of Kipling's "White Man's Burden." And I'm truly baffled by the suggestion that there is nothing "subliminal" in Cro-Magnon or ancient Egyptian art. To me, you're just saying that you don't think their sense of the sublime is quite as sublime as ours, while all evidence seems to point to the contrary.
Finally, one of the main attractions of true technology is that you can build on the science and it doesn't go away (whether you continue to believe in it or not). So when advocates start making excuses for the fact that "progress" in art has slipped backwards in the last century, that might serve as a clue about something to somebody.
"And I'm truly baffled by the suggestion that there is nothing "subliminal" in Cro-Magnon or ancient Egyptian art. To me, you're just saying that you don't think their sense of the sublime is quite as sublime as ours, while all evidence points to the contrary"
The most meagre phrase honestly spoken from genuine feeling and experience says more - and always will - than the most developed thing yet or to be produced by any automated technology, because there can never be anything behind the latter. This both knocks us off our perch with regard to oir achievements - knowing that some achievements we used to esteem might (along certain of their measurements) be equalled or exceeded by a machine at some point if not already. But it also forces us to see the most important thing at the heart of all human making - it has an interior, and/or communicates it*
Much more comes into play with paleolithic art - we're getting some sense of developmental events in the history of world--reflecting consciousness.
I don't think this excuses art that has so little in/of itself that it just a prompt for rather than an apt vehicle for the things attributed to it (like the smudge-tree).
The stronger points and deep-delving in the arguments above I mightn't have fully understood, but is there more needed than recognising that the developments in Western art were enormous, but not the sole criterion of value ? I might be totally missing the point.
*(personally, I think it can be said that the painting, poem, phrase or figurative doorknob has an interior - because the made thing forms a unity with the maker, their sensual and inner experience of the prototype, idea/Idea, or real-world original, and the audience - anyone on the receiving end of the communication. In the same way that an object, the light on it, that travels to an eye and the mind behind the eye form a unity. If our inner experience - the quality or spirit-stuff - is real, then this is all-encompassing)
Spinks drew from his head. If he forgot what a certain set of tail lights looked like he might glance at a photo for a second. Sure he had to know what the uniform was but after that he was on his own. His memory for visuals was incredible. Everyone in the field knew it. When he had a few days for a job it went to levels people could only dream of but for the other peers I mentioned. He did double the work of very busy people. Spinks could do 100 mini frames overnight and they would be really good. I know these things because I worked with the same agent he was working with when I was up in MN and with that agent we went back a long time. That's the source of the story too.
Sorry about commenting on your good drawing. I know you can do better.
Kev's argument, "Can you show me three point perspective in an ancient Greek mosaic?...Any naturalistic lighting scenario at all in any painting prior to the Renaissance?" is to me the equivalent of saying "art has progressed because now we have Photoshop."
Hardly David,
Your argument was that no technological progress has been made in the arts.
Please reread the post I made detailing how I would discuss poetics as technology (2/01/2024 12:51 PM) as that is the simplest possible entryway I could think of into a very large body of knowledge that most laymen or academics have no idea about. If you can't appreciate what I wrote there as technological progress - or even acknowledge it as technological - you'll make the whole discussion impossible.
Incidentally, if the argument is that decorative beauty and craftsmanship has not progressed since Tutankhamun, then we are probably in agreement. There's no gainsaying a truly beautiful object. But if you won't or can't distinguish between the decorative/crafted and narrative-poetic, then we aren't even in the same discussion.
"It especially makes no sense to me to say that primitive or intuitive natural analogies and intuitive poetic associations can't qualify as high art until they've been reframed and prettified with higher linguistics in a more complex artistic form that enables us to track actual symbolization with our cognitive processes.
David, your argument was that there was no technological progress in the arts. Yes, there are primitive and intuitive natural analogies and associations in ancient work. Beautiful stuff. But then came more advanced technological analogies and associations as the finest talents and minds from the Renaissance onward worked on aesthetics and poetics for four hundred years straight. What part of this is hard to understand?
"And I'm truly baffled by the suggestion that there is nothing "subliminal" in Cro-Magnon or ancient Egyptian art.
There are primitive uses of suggestion, a la expressionism or cartooning. You see animals drawn overtop one another in outline in caves, which seems to suggest movement. Giving the benefit of the doubt that they were trying to go for an effect of movement and not just drawing outlines on top of one another because they weren't giving much thought to what they were doing beyond having fun, they are still like the modernists: putting the effect idea on the surface, rather than sublating it.
Hint: If it is easy to notice, it isn't subliminal.
"To me, you're just saying that you don't think their sense of the sublime is quite as sublime as ours, while all evidence seems to point to the contrary."
That is an incorrect translation of my argument. Many ancient artists had a wonderful sense of the sublime.
Sorry about commenting on your good drawing.
20 minute life drawing done with no construction lines. That was the challenge of it. Got a comparable example of your own?
Point of quick-posting it was to show sensitivity. Yes, photo was slightly blurry in facial area and poorly lit.
I know these things because I worked with the same agent he was working with when I was up in MN and with that agent we went back a long time.
Post absolutely any work of art you have ever done that you are proud of. I'm willing to eat crow if you are actually the wizened and penetrating master artist that you front as.
Anonymous wrote: " is there more needed than recognising that the developments in Western art were enormous, but not the sole criterion of value?"
I would modify that statement. I agree that there have been enormous technological developments in art that have put new tools (such as acrylic paint, aroma-free paint thinner and Polaroid cameras for photo-reference) and new skills (such as three point perspective) in the hands of artists. However, I don't see that as progress in the more important ingredients of great art: an observant eye, a sensitive hand, a creative imagination, an awestruck mind, a fearful heart.
Kev Ferrara wrote: "David, your argument was that there was no technological progress in the arts. Yes, there are primitive and intuitive natural analogies and associations in ancient work. Beautiful stuff. But then came more advanced technological analogies and associations...."
Allow me to clarify: I agree there has been technological progress in the tools of art as well as in some of the skills of art. Some of that progress has even had an impact on the qualities of art. For example, the invention of oil paint affected the ability of Titian or Rubens to paint flesh, and this transformed their subject matter. Skills such as the ability to draw with perspective were cumulative, and this could be handed down from generation to generation similar to technological progress. But even the most finely ground pigments that new technologies of transportation brought to Venice in the height of the Renaissance could not guarantee an improvement in the quality of the art. Superior inspiration, talent, insight, reverence trump your "technological" garnishes every time.
Thomas Merton wrote that "the peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it." By the same token, the awestruck minds that created the great tomb paintings of Egypt or the fearful animistic minds that created totem art on cave walls at the red dawn of humanity had some natural advantages in creating genuine heartfelt art that "more advanced technological analogies and associations" may not match. I'm not saying that one extreme is necessarily better than the other. It all depends on the individual.
Take your technological example of "luminosity." There are several different ways to convey luminosity-- some high tech, like the application of modern glazes, and some lower tech like chiaruscuro, shadows and high contrast values to create the appearance of a glow. There is de La Tour's brand of luminosity and the opposite luminosity of the luminist painters. But one thing's for sure, there are a lot more crappy paintings than good ones using your latest technology for luminosity. (Let me know if you'd like 500 examples.) Meanwhile, the only way to view cave paintings for thousands of years was by the light of pine torches which flickered and glowed, and even created (we speculate) the illusion of movement as the shadows caused by the indentations in the stone wall (carefully chosen by the painter) moved. You might call that the original form of luminosity, and still one of the best.
In fact, medieval thinkers assumed that civilization had been in decline since the golden age of Greece
On that point, they were right. The collapse of Rome set Northern Europe back by 1,000 years. The progress that the Romans and late Greeks had hard-earned over their predecessors evaporated with their fall. Progress and technology is like that: it is fragile. One can lose it by merely not taking care of it. It is precisely because art is a form of technology that we can lose it, that it can deteriorate. Were it not a form of technology, there would be nothing to lose, and the collapse of Rome should not have degraded the arts in Europe in any measurable way.
What’s more, if progress in art does not exist as you say, then why do you threaten us with examples of Greek sculpture? Surely, absent progress, we should expect the sculpture of all earlier prehistoric peoples to provide equally strong, if not stronger, examples.
Why not Urfa Man or Ain Ghazal? Why not reference the 40,000-year-old sculptures of Nigeria? The early dynastic sculpture of Mesopotamia? What could the Greeks provide that the ancient Mesopotamians would not?
And how is it that I know, before you have even offered such examples from the Greeks, that any such exemplary Greek sculpture would be from the Hellenistic period and not instead from the Archaic period? Surely, the more remote Archaic period would make your point much more strongly than the much more recent Hellenistic period.
And again, if art is not technology, it is curious that the Renaissance discovery of Ancient Greek sculpture coincides so perfectly with European sculpture improving significantly. It is worth mentioning that Michelangelo was himself at the site of the Laocoön and His Sons' discovery.
And is it not also interesting that all of the ancient civilizations celebrated most for sculpture were places conquered by those same Greeks — from Egypt to India?
There’s something reminiscent of the Greeks in this ancient Gandharan/Pakistani sculpture of the Buddha (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Gandhara_Buddha_%28tnm%29.jpeg). Funny that it was from the period immediately following the Greek rule of Gandhara.
Is it not also interesting that the Greco-Bactrians reached the border of the Qin state in 230 BC, and that it was in 210 BC that the Terracotta Army was made in the Qin state?
Yes. The Greeks were great at sculpture. Everyone agrees on that matter. It was their artistic technology that made them great. Little progress, unfortunately, has been made in the area since, but that doesn’t mean no progress has ever been made. You’re thinking in timescales much too small.
And like our predecessors, we too are experiencing a collapse. But unlike when Rome withdrew from Britannia and Hibernia, this time, it’s a willful collapse. The West has decided to decline. And the rest of the world watches, mouth agape, happy to adopt our cultural technologies to replace their own more rudimentary ones, and bemused that a civilization at the pinnacle of the modern world would willingly implode overnight.
When Dick Fosbury flopped his way over the bar at the 1968 Olympic High Jump, it changed the category forever, pushing the world record higher and higher in the coming years. Everyone competitive adopted the technique. Much more recently, lighter, more aerodynamic golf balls have been rendering old obstacles in professional courses permeable, and pushing scores lower and lower--but the sport's authorities have made moves to ban these newer balls. What accounts for the difference in these responses may possibly be relevant to our discussion of artistic technology.
Also, Richard, just a small nitpick: "The West" can't decide anything. It's not a monolith, much less an agent unto itself.
Hey Kev - meant to post this earlier , I came home from life drawing class and saw your piece - just excellent .
Al McLuckie
Richard - Rome never withdrew from 'Hibernia' as the most they did there was a bit of trading by small parties and a speculative attack or two that, if they happened, weren't successful. Never a part of the empire, not even in any contested sense.
Bill
Also - Are there really west african sculptures from 4th millenium bc ? (Don't want this to sound like a nitpick, just interested/surprised.)
Bill
Ah, missed your point.
Bill. (exits)
Don't want this to sound like a nitpick,
Right. We sure don't want any nitpicking in this thread.
Bill,
All the 40,000-year-old human art is in Europe (like the sculpture in my profile picture), where humans were most likely picking up these skills from the Neanderthals. All the art older than that was produced not by humans at all, but by Neanderthals and Denisovans. The oldest stuff in Africa is from around 2000 years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if even that sculpture was influenced at a distance by the Greeks, given the timing.
On Hibernia, my understanding is that due to contact with the Romans in Britain, my ancestors, the Celts in Ireland, were learning to write, use currency, blow glass, etc., through that contact. With the Romans leaving Britain, that progress ground to a halt (e.g., with the Irish not producing glass again until the 1200s).
"I agree there has been technological progress in the tools of art as well as in some of the skills of art."
That isn't the argument. The argument is about poetics as a technology. That means how to subliminally and sensually express ideas through the veneer of fiction/narrative or representation more generally. And how to compose, layer, and orchestrate those ideas.
"Tools and skills" in the sense you seem to be using it falls into the "technique and convention" end of things. (Pigments, pen nibs, Photoshop, rulers, etc.) Which is not what I'm talking about. Except insofar as such material-technical developments then allow for new meaningful effect structures/compositional expressions to be developed for poetic purposes.
But a glaze layer per se is just a glaze layer, it isn't an idea layer. (And good luck getting even a simple luminosity effect by a willy nilly "application of modern glazes".)
It is worth bearing in mind that technologies are brought into being in order to achieve some task. In the case of technologies involving manipulation of the physical world these tasks are towards utilitarian ends and technologies are developed to be an improvement on those performing the same tasks. 'The best tool for the job' let's say. But there are also new consequences arising out of improved technologies. For example; the car, in terms of speed and comfort, is an improvement on horse travel but indirectly contributes to the social alienation of the suburbs.
The same dynamics apply, to some extent, to the the psycho-technologies of poetics, except that we are now in the non-utilitarian realm. So, although one can talk of poetics being a technology, we're now referring to a tool used for realising poetry, "a particular form of language, one that communicates with, and within, ordered implications that are expressions framing particular aspects of the ineffable".
So, let's take a specific example of the principle of 'luminosity' employed as an aspect of this technology. The colour luminance of Euan Euglow's later paintings was a direct result of using increasingly discreet shapes to build forms and can be seen as a development of the same principles to achieve this used by painters like Piero Della Francesca and Uccello. Uglow refined and developed it further in order to achieve a very specific goal related to the task of realising what he was trying to do at the expense of what he was not trying to do. The point I am making is that poetry has its own price for this; the confinement of style, the limits to comprehensiveness engendered by the methods employed. As an example of what I mean compare Uglow's copy of Poussin's 'Massacre of the Innocents':
https://www.lost-painters.nl/more-euan-uglow-painting-perception/#jp-carousel-46542
with the original:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Massacre_of_the_Innocents_%28Poussin%29#/media/File:Nicolas_Poussin_-_Le_massacre_des_Innocents_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
He did a copy of Rembrandt's Margaretha de Geer which demonstrates my point even clearer but unfortunately I was unable to find a link to it online.
Romanticism came in on the heels of the French Revolution. At the time the purpose of the new poetry was to replace the old poetry as revolution was to spread around the world. The old poetry didn’t die at once but was pushed aside as a new optimism in mankind replaced old notions and slowly the old poetry was fading from the public mind. Some artists revisited the old themes, but in time, hope, joy and optimism were reassigned to a secular vision and finally to commercialism.
There are different ways of seeing the passage about a wolf lying down with the lamb, but on the face of it’s easy enough to mock. One can read it as a man laying down his rage and taking on a docile or teachable peace.
I’ve introduced some of the old poetry as it was evident through comments on some religious pieces that it had gotten lost and because romanticism has had its run. That’s not to disparage the artistic merits of Romanticism.
Human beings can’t will peace but can only cooperate with it, giving themselves to it. Yes, therein is implied a religious concept, that peace is experienced, but not conjoined to itself; rather as something other, it’s shared, a paradox, very subtle. I’ve been trying to appeal to reason. Same with the confounding experience. I spoke of it as interior, coming and going, a touch but not of the five senses as we ordinarily experience them.
EDIT:
By 'methods employed' I should have said 'aesthetic methods employed' in order to distinguish what I'm talking about from techniques.
Kev Ferrara wrote: "That isn't the argument. The argument is about poetics as a technology."
I understand that's not the argument, but unfortunately for your case, it's the reality. Calling poetics a "technology" won't miraculously give poetics the admirable qualities of technology, and it certainly won't give you objective, "scientific" credibility for your personal preferences in art.
My point was that for centuries envious people have been trying to legitimize their subjective views-- ethical, aesthetic, religious, political-- by squeezing them into the category of "technology." History is littered with these failed efforts. Religious people call their faith "intelligent design" and sue to force it to be taught in pubic school science classes. Philosophers have tried and tried to legitimize their ethical views as ethical science, but history just laughs at them (technology gives us ever more powerful weapons, from poison gas to thermonuclear weapons, but the technology of ethics hasn't progressed from the Biblical era to keep us from using them). Hopeful academics created a category called "political science" but now admit there's nothing "scientific" at the heart of it, where you'd really want scientific certainty. There's just technology on fringe issues of politics, such as the math of statistics and polling and budgets. Political "science" never resolves the key disputes about how people should govern.
I granted you "poetics technology" in the same marginal realm: what I call "tools and skills" and you call the "technique and conventions." (Either name is fine with me.) That marginal role for technology won't resolve any of the ultimate questions of poetics, and it certainly won't prove your case that there is "progress" (the issue that started all this) in the core qualities of art.
"I granted you "poetics technology" in the same marginal realm: what I call "tools and skills" and you call the "technique and conventions." (Either name is fine with me.) That marginal role for technology won't resolve any of the ultimate questions of poetics, and it certainly won't prove your case that there is "progress" (the issue that started all this) in the core qualities art."
We are repeating the same pattern over and over. You say you understand me perfectly, then savage nothing but your own weirdly warped and oversimple strawman version of what I am saying.
Since others around here do get it, that means either we're all full of crap, or you aren't actually up to snuff on the subject. And it might take some doing to get you up to snuff on the subject, given your persistent inability to grok my points no matter how I reword them. (Or you might not be able to understand what I am saying. Or maybe you don't want to understand. Who knows?)
"My point was that for centuries envious people have been trying to legitimize their subjective views"
That's your point? Yeesh. Why not stop trying to conveniently win your points by assigning me arguments and motivations that you have discerned via mind-reading. It's a cheap tactic and you don't have ESP. I can do the same thing to you, assign you motivations that defeat your argument by idiotic tribalist political fiat. Oh, you're envious, you're a hater, you're just a chauvinist, you're just trying to elevate yourself and the stuff you like. You're just a bleeding heart liberal whose emotions get in the of his ability to discern things. You're just posing as an egalitarian so people will think you're a nice guy. You hate the west and your country and the current culture so you want to elevate other cultures of the past. And so on. All garbage arguments from the playground.
Another cheap tactic is to say "lots of bad art has luminosity." The equally head-shaking response would be "lots of bad art was made in an attempt to approach the sublime too."
I'm making an argument about developments in the kind of visual-linguistic structures that are used in 2D artmaking. It was a very interesting technological problem, it turned out. Which is why it took so long. You don't see ancient paintings.
3D decorative objects and architecture is a different matter; much less poetic-aesthetic-narrative complexity is possible. You can't layer 10 different effects to achieve a particular idea. Which is why it was able to hit peak 3000 years ago, as soon as the craftmanship level rose - which includes quarrying, mining, smelting, carving, 3d measuring, design principles, paint application, and so on.
Yeah, the same date for African sculpture was in my head, but I think the oldest San rock pqintings go back another thousand before that.
There's some painting from Indonesia (a pig/boar ?) which predates Chauvet. But just niggles, I got what you were saying on a re-read.
(...and from Namibia from 25,000 bc - just seen https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/apol/hd_apol.htm now)
Bill
David,
I take issue with this, I believe, artificial separation between techniques/tools/skills/science and the ethical/aesthetic/religious/political.
They cannot be separated.
The ethical is scientific. The ancient Greeks castigated women to a lowly station based on ideas about their cognition and humanity; slavers did the same with Black people. It was the very fact that ethics is an increasingly scientific field that allowed us to resolve these issues for the better—our ethics became more accurate, as we knew more about the world. To know what is moral, one must know what is real. That ethics can be wrong implies that it can also be right, and to be right, to have the opportunity to improve, means progress, technology.
Intelligent design was progress in the technology of religion. Where ancient religion held, “If there is a god, he is a really handsome man in the sky who rains arrows down upon Agamemnon for dissing a priest’s daughter,” religion has advanced and said, “If there is a god, he is a more distant non-humanoid trans-dimensional entity, who guided the world through the laws of reality.” That is profound progress. An unmoved moving intelligent designer is an objectively superior deity to a sky archer who demands sacrifice. Atheism would itself be an advance in the technology of religion if true; it offers a perhaps even more accurate theory of God, that he does not exist. Someone is right, and we’re working to figure out who that is. That’s progress, bucko.
Political science is technology. Our laws are more just and efficacious, our institutions more enlightened than those of Hammurabi or Queen Elizabeth I. We know better how to rule. We have most certainly advanced on just about any question we can think of, which is why our continuing debates are about smaller and smaller edge cases. And even where there is still debate, it is usually about the facts themselves in these edge cases, not what those facts would mean were they true. Debate on taxation is not a debate on what is just, but what is effective. Debate on police shootings is not a debate on what is just, but on opportunity cost.
The same is true in art, the technology and the aesthetic are inextricable. Absent technique/tool/science, there is no art. The discovery of variously colored pigments was not just a change in the science of art materials but in the science of visual poetry. It changed our ability to communicate, which provided us the foundation for improved poetics. Cave painters were not just Michelangelos missing the tools and techniques to produce the sistine chapel. Without the underlying skills/techniques/science that Michelangelo had, they also lacked his poetry.
There's some painting from Indonesia (a pig/boar ?) which predates Chauvet.
That was most likely painted by Denisovans, since that predates when we believe humans first set up shop in Indonesia. But yeah, that's an ongoing debate.
Richard and Anonymous/Bill-- I find the discussion about the origins of art fascinating, even though we're extrapolating from the tiny percentage of what has survived and come to our attention. 25 years ago anthropologists held elaborate theories about why art began with Cro-magnons; then earlier art was discovered and blew up all those theories.
I'm sure whatever theories we spin today will be blown up by future discoveries, but that shouldn't stop us from speculating about what we have so far. As far as I know, we date the first cross hatching to 73,000 years ago and the first figurative drawing to 40,000 years ago. That means it took us 33,000 years to get to the next step. (I showed pictures of some of these in an earlier blog post: https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2018/12/art-worthy-of-2527000-extra-years.html)
But I think it's even more interesting for purposes of today's discussion of progress that-- so far-- the evidence shows our ancestors invented weapons 2.6 million years ago. That means it took us an additional 2.560 million years to evolve from weapons to art. Shows what mother nature's priorities were for us.
Kev Ferrara-- Oh, simmer down. You're imagining insults that are getting in the way of your responses.
You offered luminosity as a technological development that counted as progress in the poetics of art. I agreed that it was a technological development, but asserted it was of the "technique and conventions" type, not a development in the poetry that makes great art great. As an example, I pointed out that there is a lot of crappy art using the technique of luminosity. Artists such as Rowena and Boris are drawn to luminosity, so it can hardly represent progress in the "poetics" part of art. It is merely a tool that might be used by someone who (hopefully) already has the separate poetics of art down. That rather obvious and commonplace observation hardly qualifies as a "cheap tactic."
And don't get your feelings hurt when I note that people who are "envious" of the attributes of science have tried to shoe horn the subjective side of human nature into a science or technology. I think it's a worthy aspiration, and great thinkers such as Immanuel Kant have worn themselves out straining to do the same thing. So I wasn't accusing you of being guilty of "envy" in the sense of the seven deadly sins, I was merely pointing out that for hundreds of years smart people have been tempted by the same goal. The smartest people (IMO) have taken a look at the track record and developed some humility. The people who don't learn from that track record just seem to get angrier, insisting for example that their religious views are really the science of "intelligent design" and those who don't respect the science will be licked by the purifying flames when they burn in hell. Similarly, people claim their ethics about the treatment of the poor are really "scientific socialism," and they're just following the data of historical progress. They fulminate against the fools who are unable to recognize the "progress" in the science of dialectical materialism.
It's difficult enough around here to walk the tightrope between having high standards on one hand and being open minded and tolerant on the other, without trying to put technological certainty up there on that tightrope as well.
Another bit about Frank Spinks. I was told that he grew up next an Air Force base and learned to draw all the planes in such great detail, and that one could barely believe he drew them from his head.
Kev, I don’t post stuff on any social media and lost your email, but if you still have mine it should still work, even though I have a new provider: @breezelineohio.net
Don’t worry about eating crow. If Fawcett doesn’t cut it I wouldn’t expect otherwise, but if you want to see something, we can give it a go.
"Kev, I don’t post stuff on any social media and lost your email, but if you still have mine it should still work, even though I have a new provider: @breezelineohio.net"
I'm interested in you putting just one link to your work out here in public. Because if the hoary, evangelical way you teach art here does in fact result in brilliant, interesting, and sensitive work, we all would learn something.
I have great respect for Robert Fawcett's skills. But just like Frazetta and everybody else, sometimes he sucks.
The Spinks Captain America image was stiff and unimaginative. It was obviously done from a bodybuilder's pose from a magazine because nobody would dream up a super hero trying to survive a blast taking the exact dumb pose that bodybuilders take to show off their muscles. That you can't see that - which is plain as day - is just one more bit of evidence in the indictment.
David wrote: "You offered luminosity as a technological development that counted as progress in the poetics of art. I agreed that it was a technological development, but asserted it was of the "technique and conventions" type, not a development in the poetry that makes great art great. As an example, I pointed out that there is a lot of crappy art using the technique of luminosity. Artists such as Rowena and Boris are drawn to luminosity, so it can hardly represent progress in the "poetics" part of art. It is merely a tool that might be used by someone who (hopefully) already has the separate poetics of art down. That rather obvious and commonplace observation hardly qualifies as a "cheap tactic."
Please go back and read what I actually wrote on Luminosity. Particularly the portability of the effect and the point about superpositioning effects near the end. Which I meant to be a hint; an entryway into a much larger world of poetics. And a necessary prelude to someone even beginning to get my points overall about the long-term developments in poetics.
(Btw, I was not discussing illumination, the cause of Chiaroscuro, which is most of what we get in De La Tour.)
David wrote: "Oh, simmer down. You're imagining insults that are getting in the way of your responses.
And don't get your feelings hurt when I note that people who are "envious" of the attributes of science have tried to shoe horn the subjective side of human nature into a science or technology."
New tactic? Accusing the opponent of getting emotional while asserting they have secret motivations they don't have? Wow. You seem to be imagining a lot of roiling on my end that isn't happening. All sorts of jealousies and anger and status perfidy. Associating my position with Boris and Rowena (!?) is also wild. And let's not forget how 'goofy' you asserted my position was at the start.
Your main accusation against me (it certainly doesn't rise to the level of an argument) now seems to be that because some people have used the imprimatur of "Science" to bolster ideas that are not scientific, that is what I am doing. Which would be a fair statement if I was actually doing that. But I'm not. This is real information that has progressed with the effort of countless talented and intelligent people over time, provably. If that makes you bristle, or the use of the word 'technology' alone strikes you wrong, that's on you.
I began investigating composition and all the rest of it because I was interested in finding out how good pictures worked and why bad pictures were bad. That's pretty much it.
Yep.... the amazing thing is a universe that has fractalised itself through the art of discrete, conscious beings. (I think that's why paleolithic art has its bass-like resonances.) Not a big leap from here to agree with the 'East' that consciousness (in some form) did, too.
Homo Sapiens' presence in Europe have been pushed back to 50k bc, so I think the Cro Magnons are back on the table, at least for this particular corner of the world.
Bill
Richard-- I have to disagree with your histories of ethics and politics, and therefore I can't agree with your conclusion that they provide collateral support for a theory of technological progress in art.
You say: "The ethical is scientific. The ancient Greeks castigated women to a lowly station based on ideas about their cognition and humanity". I disagree. Different Greek cities (such as Athens and Sparta) governed differently and treated women differently, but as a general matter women didn't have the vote because Greeks believed that a person had to serve in the military and defend the polis in order to have the perspective necessary to vote. Along with women, Men and boys who didn't serve didn't get to vote either. This did not stop some Greeks from asserting that women were smarter (Lysistrata) or more ferocious (Medea) or talented (Sappho), or from valuing women for their role with the family. Women received more rights and took on a greater role in Greece and elsewhere when they no longer had to swing a broad axe to kill in war.
You gave another example, "slavers did the same with Black people. It was the very fact that ethics is an increasingly scientific field that allowed us to resolve these issues for the better—our ethics became more accurate." Actually, black slavers enslaved white people for centuries, Islamic barbary pirates enslaved Christians, etc. all with different ethical codes and mostly for economic reasons, not due to inaccurate ethics, and slavery still flourishes today where it has an economic incentive. It ceased to have an economic incentive in the US when the cotton gin, the reaper and other mechanization reduced the importance of slave labor, allowing our moral scruples to finally surface.
You also say, "Political science is technology. Our laws are more just and efficacious, our institutions more enlightened....We have most certainly advanced on just about any question we can think of...."
That's quite a statement considering that the last century was the only century with a World War (and we had two, each with millions of casualties). But putting world war aside, individual governments have used modern technology to butcher more of your fellow humans than any previous time in history. Add up the casualties from Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and they dwarf the death toll from any previous century (including Hammurabi's). Toss in Hitler's 6 million and you have a solid argument that we are in an era of regression, the opposite of progress. And I'm not only talking about casualties, but about the techniques these governments use for killing. The brutal dictators in countries like Iran have applied all the latest technologies to inflicting pain on prisoners, or blowing up innocent passengers on airplanes or civilians sitting in office buildings. And of course, the jury is still out on the use of nuclear weapons. If they use those, our era will unquestionably be the worst era in the history of the world, not the most "enlightened."
With respect to religion you write, "Someone is right, and we’re working to figure out who that is. That’s progress, bucko." Got it. Well, they're working to figure that out right now in Gaza. Would you mind stopping over there to get the answer? You can tell them that the answer is the one selected by technological progress. While you're at it, stop in Tehran on your way home to spread the news.
It seems that Kev and David's disagreement, which colors this whole thread, is fundamentally one of aesthetic realism vs. subjective aesthetics. Kev seems to think that art's poetics are qualities that can be measured, distilled and taught (therefore being built upon technologically), whereas David argues that whatever poetry is inherent to great art isn't borne on any particular technique or technology throughout history.
Is my summary accurate enough? I ask mostly in the effort to understand what's being said.
Wormod-- I think that's a pretty good summary, although I might not label it as "aesthetic realism" vs. "subjective aesthetics." Yes, I believe there are unavoidably subjective elements to aesthetics and taste, but I'm not sure I'd label Kev's side as "realism."
Kev and I have been entertaining each other for years over this fundamental difference. As far as I can tell, Kev really does believe that the history of art is an objective and desirable advancement in the direction of the art he prefers, and that this progress can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt and with geometric logic ( https://youtu.be/ZlV3oQ3pLA0?si=8RI6bd2Rb17DT2r_ ). I on the other hand think that the job of defending our taste and aesthetic judgments is a harder and subtler responsibility than can be turned over to "technology." I am, however, happy to turn over as many of the lesser judgments as can be responsibly delegated.
First time on this blog, so many thanks to you David for posting the great images.
As for the comments - well, this is my first and last post. Sorry, but all I see are arguing egos shouting out so many 'definitive' statements. Most don't seem interested in opening up and discovering something new, rather the opposite - it's a calcified, 'I know better than you' kind of response and very sad to see. Even on going back through archives I see the same tired posters with the same snooty, combative attitude.
David your site is great and you do an exemplary job of posting images and commentary as well as intelligently and fairly answering the other posters, but I do feel that the whole comments thing leads away from the images and leaves a bad taste (much like most of the shouty internet now).
Anonymous said...
the whole comments thing leads away from the images and leaves a bad taste (much like most of the shouty internet now).
It's not the most welcoming of salons, is it? I don't usually venture in. The amount of sniffiness and dyspeptic, smartest-guy-in-the-room posturing and belittling here is as comically off-putting as it is unhelpful. A very internety space indeed.
Great blog, though.
David said: "As far as I can tell, Kev really does believe that the history of art is an objective and desirable advancement in the direction of the art he prefers, and that this progress can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt and with geometric logic"
I am making a qualitative argument about certain poetic structures in 2D work having been developed over time along with ways of combining different types of such structures to layer sensual-symbolic meaning. I never said that guaranteed great art.
However, if one cares about quality in art, certain qualities expressing certain sensual meanings can not be brought to bear without these new structural insights. Which is just why narrative and poetic visual art came to be understood as a language and why there was a roughly 400 year development and progress along those lines.
These structures did not exist in the arts prior. You don't see ancient pictorial imagery of any aesthetic-linguistic complexity, you don't see thematic development. Just as the music structures that were developed from Hayden to Stravinsky did not have precedent in the ancient world.
If the linguistic-structural progress in the arts leading up to the 20th century doesn't interest you, fine. But don't make the argument that it didn't happen, because it did.
Anonymous and anonymous-- Thanks for writing. I don't disagree with you. I suppose that's why so many people write in from a witness protection program. Unfortunately I've succumbed to the temptation to butt antlers too frequently myself-- but then I go off to my regular job for a few days and return with my perspective restored.
If you're a speed reader, you may find mixed in with the fractious comments a lot of great stuff-- artists you've never heard of; insights and observations about the pictures; interesting and exciting facts about illustrators and art history.
I don't presume to separate wheat from chaff, but if I did I'd probably start with the comments that insult my mother or call me a communist. But nothing gets censored around here.
David - Thanks for the perspective. I'm glad you're not censoring, and you're right that pointers to interesting artists and ideas do frequently make it through the peevish forum-flak.
Carry on!
You don’t get pearls of wisdom without some irritating grit.
Yes, there are egos, but they mostly bruise themselves in their godly battles. Us mortals are watching the battle and catch the sparks of a nearly forgotten realm.
individual governments have used modern technology to butcher more of your fellow humans than any previous time in history
And that's wrong, yes? To deem something wrong, there must be a less wrong. If you've allowed for one ethic to be less wrong, you've already admitted all the constituent requirements for ethics/politics to be technological.
It's precisely because of the atrocities of the 20th century that we have since become more enlightened.
Those atrocities may have been the most horrible examples of their kind, but the underlying thought processes that allowed for them were not new. People had been viciously murdering people by the hundreds and thousands for terrible reasons for millennia.
The degradations of the 20th century caused us to reexamine our foundational ideas and grow. We are, for example, in the history of the world, some of the first generations that could both have the bomb, and not immediately irradicate ourselves with it.
Man in his infancy would murder his brother/cousin/neighbor to abduct and rape his wife. How would nuclear weapons work out in the hands of someone like that?
"The sparks of a nearly forgotten realm", indeed! For the anonymous people:
As a student of the arts, I think this blog and its commenters are really valuable, even if their atmosphere is (usually) toxic and ossifying. Having just commented on a post for the first time, I was promptly regarded with suspicion, asked to prove my identity, and then insulted and swatted away--butt I also managed to get some good book recommendations out of the deal. Nearly every post has something extra buried in the forum beneath.
I think you can take what you will from this rich, beautiful, decaying environment. Just remember to wear gumboots while you wade.
erratum -- please ignore that butt's second t! oh, me.
". . . I also managed to get some good book recommendations out of the deal. Nearly every post has something extra buried in the forum beneath."
That's just about right. There is more wheat than chaff, so its worth it to lurk and see most of time. I appreciate all the smart people here.
David's tolerance is high because he's a lawyer, and is likely immune to the slings and arrows. . .
I wouldn't change a thing about it, and in comparison, most of rest of the world wide web is chaff only, providing no food at all.
>>>Having just commented on a post for the first time, I was promptly regarded with suspicion, asked to prove my identity, and then insulted and swatted away
Oh, you poor little baby. How will you ever overcome your trauma?
Anonymous said: "Oh, you poor little baby. How will you ever overcome your trauma?"
You're proving the point. I wasn't complaining, just agreed with what other anonymous posters pointed out.
But now I have books to read! And I don't mean to feed you.
"If you've allowed for one ethic to be less wrong, you've already admitted all the constituent requirements for ethics/politics to be technological."
I'm confused by the implication that every progress is necessarily technological.
For instance, simply understanding that bad drinking water can poison you... so therefore drink upstream from all the dead bodies in the river, rather than downstream... is a progress in healthy living. But there's no invention of some technical-structural aspect involved.
Moral progress requires paradigm expansions often. So instead of, for example, only thinking of your own pain, you come to realize that everybody has pain. And so we come to the idea of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" ... a kind of social contract. But is that latter aphorism - which is teachable - is that the invention of something technical-structural?
That is what I was driving at, perceived understandings.
Looking at a Harvey Dunn it explains itself. We see a woman’s form, jagged mountains, the vigor of the paint itself, the story. Nature in a Dunn is a formidable force, not what one encounters as a bucket list visit, driving in a comfortable car to take selfies. Not only is nature a force in his pictures, but the people are also a force, enduring, persisting, wrestling with nature, their own nature too.
We see “what is”. We feel its interior characteristics. The process is intuitive, imaginative, observed. Not only the mentioned characteristics, but all kinds of intuited understandings are conveyed. But art is still within a yet larger identification, secondary to the love one has for a person, living or deceased, one’s own. It owes itself to something. Therein is another intuitive understanding lost to a mind weened from reality and that's what is degraded in belligerence.
Kev,
'Do unto others' does not, on its own, rise to the level of technology. It is more like a single heuristic tool.
However, within our larger implicit framework of ethical problem solving, comprising numerous ethical tools that interrelate and function together as a system, with varying tolerances and cascading, interrelated effects, I would argue that they collectively form a technology.
As societies face complex ethical dilemmas, the system evolves, adding sub-routines and escape routes, offering increasingly sophisticated mechanisms to balance competing goals. Do unto others becomes just one stop in this larger ethical algorithm.
"'Do unto others' does not, on its own, rise to the level of technology. It is more like a single heuristic tool."
Technological systems build up; technology upon technology.
Moral systems, ethical systems, law, social contracts... at bottom all these systems must take their axioms on faith. Which means even the axioms are heuristics. The bottom level heuristics then predicate all the other heuristic levels.
So: If a heuristic is not technological, then a build-out of a system of heuristics isn't technological either.
A lump of rock becomes a tool when it is used by a body to extend that body's physical capability. But the lump of rock, as such, is not a tool, however it was seen to be so by the mind that first used it as such. And from this the mind built its first flint knife, and from this fashioned softer materials into other tools. And so technology, the development of tools, over time came to build that in which civilisation can be.
Now, all of this, it can be argued, has therefore been built up from a lump of rock, which in and of itself is not a tool but becomes so by way of a state of mind. Thus it follows that technology is really a process of mind, which while invalidating David's notion that techniques/tools in art are a form of the technology we are discussing here, it does, I think, support Kev's claim that moral systems, ethical systems, law or social contracts in and of themselves are not forms of technology.
Thinking up a funny sound is also a 'process of mind'. Same with plotting revenge. So this processional definition doesn't pinpoint what makes tech different.
Technology is (something like) an extension of our capabilities through some innovation in structural/technical means.
To the extent some tool extends us, it is abstracted and extrapolated from things we already do. To the extent it is a structural/technical innovation, technology must come from without because human physiology - while enormously malleable - has its strict limits, particularly in its ability to generate power externally.
If a heuristic is not technological, then a build-out of a system of heuristics isn't technological either.
Then by extension adaptive neuro fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS) are not technological? What exactly are they then?
Thus it follows that technology is really a process of mind, which while invalidating David's notion that techniques/tools in art are a form of the technology we are discussing here, it does, I think, support Kev's claim that moral systems, ethical systems, law or social contracts in and of themselves are not forms of technology.
Having your cake and eating it I see :D
"Then by extension adaptive neuro fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS) are not technological? What exactly are they then?"
You are confusing the question. If something is built of circuitry and software, yes it is technological.
Another way to put it might be; once the heuristic has been embodied as a machine, it has become technology.
Richard,
Having your cake and eating it I see :D
Ha, I wondered if I'd be pulled up on that! However, I feel that a technique is not really a process of thought but rather a tool of thought.
Kev,
You're right, my 'technology as a process of thought' doesn't pin down what technology is, (I like your definition of it BTW) but it was there to draw attention to how technology itself is predicated in such a process.
Would anyone care to opine on a question I asked earlier but which was not answered? Viz:
Acknowledging that computer monitors will play havoc with color, which of these two versions of the Fuchs golf painting is likely closer to the original: David's posted version or this one?
I prefer the second, but did someone really overdo it on plumping up the saturation?
I certainly think so Mark. My guess is that the original is three quarters closer to David's posted version.
Thanks for the thoughts, Chris. Yeah, I suspected the second was far too bright. Would be curious to see the original in person.
mark-- I apologize, with all the bullets flying around here, I never responded to your question, which actually had to do with the pictures we were discussing! I meant to respond that as far as I know, the version I posted is 95% close to the original. I used a large transparency taken directly from the original by a professional photographer, stored on a shelf (out of the sunlight) in Bernie's studio for 30 years and given to me by Bernie's wife.
In the early 1960s Bernie (and to an even greater extent, Bob Peak) went wild with supersaturated, discordant colors-- pink against orange, purple against turquoise, steel against glass. It was a powerful look, emblemic of the 60s, but it was too hot not to cool down. Ten years later, Bernie was working in a richer, more mature style (like the version I showed). But years later, some fans who continued to prefer the smoking hot look of the early 60s would ratchet up the saturation level on these later paintings for their own enjoyment. I've seen that several times, comparing his original paintings with reproductions on line. But that's not what Bernie intended.
That's wonderful, David. Thanks for the further information. Makes perfect sense. Shame on me for liking the over-bright one; that's probably a lizard-brain holdover. :/
And that raises a subject for another day: I know as little about photography as I do about the technical side of art, but I'm sure there's an entire universe of fascinating practices, techniques and, no doubt, controversies involved in the photographing of fine art.
I've an unrelated question for David (if he doesn't mind me asking it here), but if anyone else can offer anything I'd be of course grateful.
I've been trying to find out about reproduction methods used for, primarily, b/w artwork in the past (with the intention of finding the closest analogous technique available today.)
Your article here turned up in a search, which made me wonder if you could offer any suggestions - https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2019/01/the-art-of-the-post-looking-back-at-those-glorious-black-and-white-illustrations/
In older (raised matrix ?) prints such as wood-engraving the black, printed edge is distinct from the paper and slightly raised (I've a couple of nice examples from illustrations in books from c.1900), as is, to a lesser extent, artist's lithographs.
The results are very attractive.
Was it a form of photolithography used for illustrations by artists such as Edwin Austin Abbey, Joseph Clement Coll, etc., or were different methods used, or used at different times such as for either book or magazine work ?
I presume something similar was used for b/w comic art (there seems to be a deterioration in the lines beyond anything caused by paper quality), but again - the same distinct, abrupt clear edges to lines and black shapes are there, and 'raised' in ink above the paper.
It is this raised quality, alongside the clarity/distinction, which I am hoping to find in a contemprary printing method. Is this still present in the methods of lithography in current use ? Are there different kinds? (I've only seen in it in some cheap collections of reprints of old comics, but not - at least not recently/often - in book illustrations. (Digital printing 'converts' the work into something else).
Something of this quality is even present in a good quality photocopy. (Maybe it can be got through something like Riso printing?) Or are there any more professional kinds of the photocopying technology used for b/w illustration ? (which I presume would be more economical than litho for small runs)
Thanks.
Bill
Post a Comment