In the last few posts we discussed combat art from World War I.
In the comments, a lot seemed to depend on the fact that these artists, whether illustrators or "fine" artists, were first-hand witnesses to the trauma of war. The personal ordeals of these artists seemed to give their work an authenticity. In some cases, it pushed the artist to abandon traditional artistic techniques and flail around for new methods of communication.
How does this art compare with work by artists who did not participate in the war? How were the results different for artists who merely imagined the war from a great distance?
In my view, the best contemporary artist to be inspired by World War I is George Pratt. Here is some of his work, which I find quite striking:
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| Pratt uses a powerful composition to strengthen an already powerful subject. |
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| Some of Pratt's subjects are similar to the subjects chosen by Dix, but Pratt kept his wits about him. |
His first graphic novel about World War I was the highly regarded Enemy Ace: War Idyll.
66 comments:
Nice drawing David, the life force has disappeared from the solider as gravity, the rope and the post supporting his torso are the only things that animate the form of his body now.
Interesting, your topic made me think about the number of artists who have painted convincing painting of Christ's crucification without having been there.
And the resistance of the the ground plane.
Pratt, I think, is one of the best we've got right now. His Enemy Ace graphic novel, replete with suggestion and evocation and heart, reminds me of Pyle's "mental projection" dictum that the artist-illustrator should either have lived the life he is depicting, or so thoroughly imagined it that he might as well have lived it. Not surprisingly Pratt is big Dunn fan and assigns Dunn's An Evening in the Classroom to his students.
That Pratt image you posted of the gnarled old enshadowed gentleman with the red face and knuckles is Kathe Kollwitz-level great.
I think these particular images show how the real issue with any subject (war is of course highly emotive and therefore can destabilise our view) is not whether a thing has been witnessed or not, but whether a scenario is imaginatively experienced by an artist with the compositional and performing skills to realise it. (Kev mentioned this in the previous post somewhere) We know dying in pain sucks, we know tyrants are ruthless, we know it is wrong that a mother loses her child because of another's whim. But whenever something takes possession of a great artist the image they produce is haunted by what they feel. And because they are human, the artist externalises, in the form of a work of art, what we all feel.
If Pratt was unknown to any viewer , and you had invented a story of him being in the hell of a combat theater and producing those images , I bet no one would have any questions . Jeff Jones was a big influence on Pratt as many know .
Jack Kirby was in WW2 , saw combat , and I think a feeling of that showed in some of his work - like that cover of the GI with a bandaged face for a war comic - it was based on a photograph but powerful none the less .
Just got the Fuchs book and am relishing it - fantastic to see some of the closeup textures that escape smaller reproduction . I wonder if his "filter" or gift of seeing a grace and beauty in things could have changed if he had an assignment to do something showing the horror of Viet Nam .
Al McLuckie
A piece of advice often handed out to writers of fiction is "write about what you know about." I think that advice is best given to very young writers -- students in an undergraduate creative writing class such as one I had. (I recall writing something I knew nothing about first-hand, realizing that what I was producing was essentially garbage.) A writer 20 or so years older usually has enough life-experience to get away with dealing with subjects not personally experienced. Otherwise, how could convincing science fiction be written?
What about these artists from various backgrounds David has been showing us? Where does or does not personal experience relate to art dealing with war?
(Disclosure: John F. Kennedy saw to it that I was trained to kill ... I was a pretty good shot using an M1 rifle. But I never saw combat, timing being everything, it seems. Nevertheless, I experienced being a soldier.)
As I mentioned in comments for a previous post in this series, I regard the combat artists of the Great War as being reporters. Their previous illustration work gave them a reportorial point of view, and the army hired them to do visual reporting. So far as I know, they didn't join the first line of advance; most of their scenes are of rear areas or places where combat recently had taken place. I'm not sure about Dunn's paintings of urban conflict. And there was a scene he made of a live grenade in a German trench -- he was never there. In any case, these American artists saw the war at the point where trench warfare was transitioning to a more fluid situation in the summer of '18 and the blood and gore was less intensive that it was on the Somme or at Verdun.
Dix did see war, but apparently not as an infantryman, not at first anyway. His first duty was in artillery, a behind-the-lines posting. Then he was in a machine-gun unit. At or close to the front, but a defensive, not offensive position. He was involved in Ludendorff's 1918 spring offensives in some capacity and did win the Iron Cross (2nd class). So he probably did see some of the gore of that especially gory war. His later war art strikes me as being propaganda, not reportage.
To me, Pratt falls into the category of the fiction writer whose life experience is developed to the point where he can understand how various people might react in situation that he himself has not experienced. Pratt would have been familiar with the World War I scene from many photos that were taken. So using maturity, empathy, imagination and artistic talent he has created powerful art.
You don't have to have experienced war to depict it well.
Anonymous; That's an interesting thought on what Fuchs would have made of the conflict in Vietnam. I can certainly picture those Huey helicopters above the tall grass dropping troops into the field looking as beautiful as those golf course paintings of his; dragonfly colours and emerald greens punctuated with warm darks and grimacing pink faces. I know its unfair to speculate about the merits of work the guy never actually did, but my hunch is that it would have shown up the essential weakness at the heart of his method. The irony is that the 'journalistically rich' tracing technique would have worked against effective expression.
That said, if he pulled it off, well...
Pratt is awesome. He's just as good as the WWI artists we were looking at, and better than Dix.
Tom-- I agree, I really like that picture of the executed soldier-- the weight of his slumping body, the pull of the ropes, the gravity all reflect an artist with keen powers of observation and an understanding of the way the world works, but at the same time (as the detail shows) the picture was done in a very rough, loose fashion. I love artists who can achieve such accuracy with such rough methods.
As for artists who painted the crucifixion in a convincing manner-- wow, that's a huge topic. There are so many paintings of the crucifixion that are intended to be symbolic and other worldly, they tend to look sanitized (perhaps partly because in pre-Renaissance days many Christian artists were not capable of painting intensely realistic images). I'm not sure what it means for these artists to paint a "convincing" scene-- it would depend in part on what they were trying to convince us of. Then on the other side of the spectrum there were painters such as Grunewald who really fixated on every sore and bruise, for perhaps an overly ghastly result. I'm not sure I'd say these are any more accurate. Did you have particular artists in mind who you think did an especially good job of pulling off a "convincing" version?
Kev Ferrara-- I agree with you about Pratt, I think he is a serious artist in a field where that is an all too scarce commodity these days. If you follow the link to his web site (and I hope readers do) you'll see a wide range of quality work on a variety of interesting and serious topics. Some of his work I like more than others, but he really hit his stride on his WW I theme.
Chris Bennett-- I love the line, "We know dying in pain sucks." Surely we can find someone out there willing to argue that dying in pain is a good thing?
But your main point, the issue "is not whether a thing has been witnessed or not, but whether a scenario is imaginatively experienced by an artist with the compositional and performing skills to realise it," is I think the real issue of the week. We just finished talking about artists who put themselves in great personal danger so they could experience the war first hand, and not react to it from the safety of an arm chair at home. We talked about artists who were so traumatized by being in the tenches that they chose an artistic path they would not otherwise have chosen, casting aside centuries of artistic tradition in a frenzy. We talked about viewers giving an artist more deference because he or she suffered first hand through the war. We talked about the authentic smells of the trenches, about picking up details that only an eyewitness would appreciate. And then along comes these excellent, highly convincing pictures by Pratt. How do we reconcile these things?
Crucifixion paintings ?!? BORIS---BODYBUILDER---JESUS .
Al McLuckie
Anonymous / Al McLuckie-- I'm so glad to hear that you got the Fuchs book and that you are enjoying it. Thanks for letting me know. It was truly a labor of love, both for me and for Dan Zimmer at Illustrated Press. I originally thought that a book with 300 pictures would give me plenty of room, but I had to make some heartbreaking sacrifices. I could easily have filled twice that space with top quality examples.
It's hard to predict how Fuchs would react to anything, let alone how he might handle the horrors of war-- he did some pretty dark images of drug addiction for one article, but they were atypical. It may interest to you know that Austin Briggs, who was like a father figure to Fuchs, unintentionally ended up a combat artist in Vietnam. He was over there accompanying some fancy general on a good will tour for Look Magazine but he ended up in a medevac helicopter landing in live firefight to evacuate some wounded marines. They landed in a perimeter of marines to defend them against Viet Cong snipers. I interviewed Briggs' son for a forthcoming monograph about Briggs, and he said that Briggs, who was in his 60s and ill, was shaken up by the experience.
As for Jack Kirby, it's hard to think of any artist who did more brawny, muscular drawings of conflict but I didn't see a lot of the sensitivity or pathos of war in his pictures.
Donald Pittenger-- That may not be the most romantic assessment, but it's hard to deny your point, "using maturity, empathy, imagination and artistic talent ....You don't have to have experienced war to depict it well." Artists such as Pratt provide strong evidence in the visual arts just as Stephen Crane famously provided strong evidence in literature with The Red Badge of Courage. (Crane, age 24, had never been to war and was in fact born after the Civil War). But what does this do to your vision of the role of the combat artist as a reporter? How can you be a reporter by staying home and looking into your own heart?
I think empathy and imagination can help compensate for the absence of a first hand role (and conversely, even a first hand role may not do any good for artists who lack empathy and imagination). I'm reluctant to try to write the recipe for creating convincing war art. For some artists, a first hand role traumatizes them so greatly it harms their artistic performance. For others, it gives the insight they could get no other way.
Jack Kirby's cover , The Guys in the Foxhole . Sanford Kossin's Bay of Pigs illos .
Chris Bennett-- I just recalled that Fuchs illustrated Ernest Hemingway's novel of World War I, A Farewell To Arms. I see that Matt Dicke has posted the full set of the illustrations on his flickr page. ( https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattdicke/11862132366/ ) . What do you think?
MORAN-- Like you, I think Pratt is the superior artist. Dix demonstrates the power of a no-holds-barred, confrontational, gory content. But a picture can only gain so much power from its content; Pratt combines strong content with strong form, and the marriage of those two far exceeds the power of extreme content alone.
Anonymous / Al McLuckie-- Yes, the infamous Boris Bodybuilder Jesus is truly a goofy classic. Also a great demonstration of a disconnect between form and content. The muscle bound Jesus is the opposite of Jesus' content.
Anonymous wrote, "Jack Kirby's cover , The Guys in the Foxhole . Sanford Kossin's Bay of Pigs illos ."
Well, I'm not so sure about the Kirby cover but I agree, Kossin's Bay of Pigs illos are his masterpiece. Truly superb, and probably closer to Pratt's work than any of the other artists we've discussed.
Enemy Ace was huuuuuuuuuge for me when it came out. Just incredibly alive and affecting watercolor work.
Ken Meyer Jr.
David Apatoff,
Thanks so much for that link to the Fuchs 'Farewell to Arms' illustrations. Fascinating to see. Whist I feel they prove me right in principle they do bring something to the table that I had not quite anticipated.
There is in them a distancing from events, as there is with most of his work, which is his trademark beauty; the élan, the smooth-operator thrill, the gliding exuberance, the Olympian smile of his surfaces - he is the Pat Metheny of illustration, and boy do I love Pat Metheny's music. So at risk of stretching the analogy, these pictures are, to me, the 'Last Train Home' of Fuchs' oeuvre.
And although none of these pictures are masterpieces, they do suggest a kind of heroism because the beautiful surface, like the Metheny tune, is a smile held fast regardless of the tears.
For anyone who is interested Metheny's 'Last Train Home': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9vQ_y9JJ1E
Hmm, my feeling on the Fuchs 'Farewell to Arms' illustrations is that he is commenting on the photos, not on the war, nor the soldiers, nor their experience, let alone Hemingway's classic book. And the visual commentary on the photos is basically the "Fuchs Filter™" applied the same as if he were doing golf or cowboys. Art as veneer. Depressing.
I think you have put that very well Kev, this is indeed a case of 'art as veneer'. And I agree with the principle that happy endings which are not organic to the tale are, contrary to their intent, depressing. But for some reason I do not feel this in these particular illustrations. I find myself welcoming the distance, the detachment, even though it is not the functional type essential to the artist when building an artwork that David referred to in his previous post as the need for the barman to stay sober.
So after a little more reflection on this, it's quite possible that the 'heroism' I alluded to is just a subjective thing on my part, and I'm responding, I dunno, perhaps to these illustration's echo of the combat comic covers I used to enjoy as a kid? Or that listening to 'Last Train Home' clouded my judgment. (This is why I loath Post Modernism!) :)
Chris Bennett and Kev Ferrara-- I basically agree with you both; Fuchs was not a war artist; he was definitely not the type to project himself into a foxhole or a trench. (I'd have the same criticism of Rockwell, Leyendecker, Schaeffer, Dorne and many other great illustrators of the mid-20th century.) There really does seem to be a legitimate distinction between excellent artists and excellent war artists.
It's not that he didn't realize that the subject matter called for something different; Fuchs abandoned his usual golden palette for a collection of dirty grays that I've never seen him use anywhere else. And of course, they are well designed-- Fuchs could do no other-- but I think he was relying almost totally on his selection of the underlying photographs for any power from the subject matter. In a way, the illustrations to A Farewell To Arms hardly seem to rate as war paintings; they are more like nostalgic, sepia toned scrapbook photos looking back, from an armchair, on what the war once was.
In a way, the illustrations to A Farewell To Arms hardly seem to rate as war paintings; they are more like nostalgic, sepia toned scrapbook photos looking back, from an armchair, on what the war once was.
Except it's not Fuchs' scrapbook; the images are traced from stock photographs he found in a morgue file. They're nobody's memories.
Interesting the conversation about Fuchs Farewell to Arms illustrations. I think David analogy, "nostalgic, sepia toned scrapbook photos looking back, from an armchair, on what the war once was." Really hit it on the head. They feel like long lost memories, which does fit the feeling of the story, as the book is a memoir about loss.
As for War Artists, I can't agree more that George Pratt is best when he is tackling WW1. I own one of his Solider monotypes which is and brutal in the way only war can be. What is even better is he is a great teacher and person. Always willing to answer any question and inspire!
As for the60's and Vietnam, as mentioned earlier Briggs brought his A+ game to those drawings for Look:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattdicke/35966647894/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattdicke/6986998212/in/album-72157625356237108/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattdicke/7133082235/in/album-72157625356237108/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattdicke/26028494792/in/album-72157625356237108/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattdicke/25848161650/in/album-72157625356237108/
There is a short article from the Famous artist school magazine in there about Briggs location drawing trip for Look magazine if anyone is interested. Enjoy
Kev Ferrara wrote: "Except it's not Fuchs' scrapbook; the images are traced from stock photographs he found in a morgue file. They're nobody's memories."
Well, here we disagree. Let's put aside that the images were obviously not just "traced," that the photographs were not likely from the "stock photo" industry back in those days, and were not simply "found in a morgue file" as Fuchs was highly selective about the photos that appealed to him for his paintings. Let's focus instead on what I think is the issue with more potential-- that these photos are "nobody's memories." Since virtually all photos contain memories of humankind for the receptive eye and mind, I'm not sure what a photograph has to do to become "somebody's memories." George Pratt studied photos of WWI; he didn't live through the experiences himself, so they weren't his personal memories of WWI but they informed his personal memories of human nature.
From a broader perspective, you can go on ebay and find for sale old family photo albums from the 1930s or 40s-- photos that once contained their most precious memories; gap toothed ungainly children, an overweight housewife playing peekaboo with her husband from behind a shower curtain, wedding toasts from couples who started out with great hopes but whose wedding albums ended up in the trash. Whose memories are those? I submit that if you engage with those faded sepia photographs, meditate on them and think about what they portend for you personally and for the species, even the most harmless domestic snapshot can become fertile soil for great art. I don't know what it means to say they are "nobody's memories." Perhaps you should be reading Hemingway's other novel, For Whom The Bell Tolls (or at least John Donne's inspiration for the title).
Matt Dicke-- I didn't know you were following this thread, but since you have surfaced let me thank you properly for posting those Fuchs illustrations for A Farewell To Arms, and for all of the excellent work by Briggs, Fuchs and other artists of that era who you constantly turn up. I've used your images for reference work on several occasions and I think you perform a real public service.
I agree that Briggs, despite his leukemia, was at a great stage artistically when he did those war pictures. Thanks for sharing. That man could really draw. There was also a series of war drawings in Look by Noel Sickles, another superb draftsman as far as I'm concerned.
Well, that woke you up, David.
I think we will have to agree to disagree about how artistically heroic Fuchs was in his choice of reference material for this particular job. It seems to me that the sources are clearly generic - I instantly felt I had seen at least half of the source photos (having perused many thousands of images and magazines from the WWI era.) Even if Fuchs was judicious about which particular photos he decided to trace off as the foundation of his pieces, he still was choosing from what was available from recordings made in the event; this is still a curatorial or selective act, not creative, let alone transformative. The expressive schema of the images evidently remains the mechanical recordings of a machine, which is why they are so dead internally. Then he renders them like a crystal chandelier glinting in moonlight, because beavers must build dams.
Which brings me to the question of memory and photography. A photograph is a philosophical paradox... Its robotic subjectivity, I would argue, (aside from the camera's many meaningless distortions) is equivalent to objectivity without understanding; without thought... which means it is sans emotional understanding, poetic understanding, temporal understanding, or even simple physical understanding.
A memory, on the other hand, is replete with sensibility; poetic, symbolic, emotional, temporal, physical, even olfactory, all mixed together in effect. So that the result is the opposite of robotic or objective; a memory is itself an experience. Whereas a photo is just a capturing of light rays bouncing off surface descriptors into a pinhole in one split instant of frozen time; hardly life.
Of course photos can be a tremendous suggestive and factual aid to the mind. And if the imagination is sufficient to the task, capable of "Mental Projection", a talent can so vivify a photograph that the captured event can become nearly like a real experience. Such imaginative processing would utterly transform the assisting source material, of course. It must. For the original dead abstractions beneath the average photo, no matter the captured depiction, only really express the originating machine's iron dogma of anti-consciousness.
What do you and David think of Drew Struzan ?
My opinion...
David Grove is like Fuchs with a bit more Bob Peak and Robert Heindel. Drew Struzan is like David Grove, but with a cleaner, more graphic approach. I don't think there's ever been a better montage illustrator than Struzan.
With all three, when things are clicking, poetry and joy abound, and the source photography falls away from notice. When the source photography starts to over-present itself, the spirit of the picture dies.
Kev Ferrara-- It seems that you, like me and others who visit here, have some unresolved emotional issues about photography. You seem to resent how it has undermined your fundamental philosophy of hard work and talent, and the havoc it has wreaked on the playing field where your heroes formerly comported themselves with such grace and grandeur. The new legitimacy of accident on that playing field (including the random result of a chimpanzee snapping a great picture by arbitrarily pushing a shutter release) is most disconcerting. Even worse is the succor photography has given odious poseurs such as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Sherrie Levine. Believe me, I get your resentment.
It's difficult not to be indignant when you discover that robots are carrying the ball across the goal line. With photography and Photoshop on the playing field, the rules of art sometimes resemble the rules of Calvin ball. I sympathize, but not to the extent that I'm willing to move the goal line to deny a score to a photograph (or a digital image) that succeeds in crossing the place where the goal line once stood.
We might all agree it is unfair when athletes enhance their performance with drugs. We might go even further and agree that it is insidious to the values of the sport. But art is unlike the Olympic games; I don't know of any honest way to measure art except by the quality of the outcome. For a long time the digital images at the Society of Illustrator exhibitions used to stand out like a sore thumb. Then gradually they didn't any longer, and my choice was either to say "OK" or to try to redefine art to carve out otherwise indistinguishable work. You seem to be struggling with the latter approach, insisting on a human intent and human implementation that we may not be able to glean from looking at the image itself. That's OK, but for me-- whatever the consequences-- hewing to a goal line based upon the quality of the image is the only polar star that enables me to make sense of the racket we call art. The most I will concede is that photography forces us to look extra carefully to make sure that we aren't hoodwinked into mistaking showy resemblances for quality. But hell, we already knew that with Boris.
You say, "a photo is just a capturing of light rays bouncing off surface descriptors into a pinhole in one split instant of frozen time; hardly life" and its "originating machine's iron dogma of anti-consciousness" lacks "poetic understanding." These are all beautiful, eloquent defenses which are praise-worthy, but as a wise woman (I searched for her name in my journals but can't find it) once wrote, "You are a fool to believe that your city is protected by its beauty." (cont.)
You seem to object that we are forced to bring our own memories and content to a photograph, to invest it with meaning. I'd say the same burden applies to painting. You seem to claim it's cheating if the viewer must "transform the assisting source material" with the viewer's own imagination, but I'd say we have to do the same thing with a drawing. (As the great Austin Briggs said, “Line is the most limited medium…. It's necessary to know the limitation one is dealing with in order to use its positive qualities to its fullest advantage." It is our imaginations that enable the artist to code important truths using such limited means and our imaginations that enable us to unpack or "transform the assisting source material.” You seem to imply that artists bring some kind of emotional veracity or understanding to their images, while a photographer does not. That may be true for the chimpanzee photographer, but I don't see how you can assert it about a good many other photographers. In fact, it's arguable whether there there is generally more emotional sincerity and authenticity in photographs or in paintings. Paintings often depend more on cold blooded artifice than impetuously pushing a shutter release. (I'm fond of quoting Viereck for the proposition that "Art, being bartender, is never drunk" but photography can drink as much as it wants and still, if only by random chance, come up with a powerful image.)
There are a million little intimacies in those old family photo albums on ebay-- all kinds of drunkenly effusive snapshots of parties, clumsy but loving photographs of girlfriends, or grandparents and family events that I submit are far more emotionally genuine and illuminating than a lot of paintings. Some of them, whether intentionally or not, are well composed and beautifully designed. It's no use denying that these photographs fill many of the most important functions of art that helped fuel its status and growth since the days of Raphael.
Just as it does not matter that Raphael's portrait is not of a member of your personal family, it doesn't matter that the photograph from the WW I trenches is not your personal memory. That doesn't make them "nobody's memories," they could be "everybody's memories" instead. Being part of the family of humanity is often enough to give these photographs an intimacy, tenderness and meaning. Early photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue created a fascinating record of Parisian life 100 years ago. They might qualify, as you say, as a "factual aid." But on his honeymoon Lartigue somehow persuaded his young bride Bibi to let him take her photo sitting on the toilet. You can tell that he was head over heels besotted with her, and just wanted to record her everywhere doing everything. You can also tell from her shy, uncertain expression that she's not so sure how she feels about this new photography business. I find it hard to identify many paintings that year that do a better job of evoking the "emotional understanding, poetic understanding" that you say is so crucial to good art.
Kev Ferrara wrote: "Well, that woke you up, David."
Yes, I've been very remiss lately, but I promise not for lack of interest. I've been going through business transitions this summer (unrelated to art). That, combined with my regular column for the Saturday Evening Post on these same subjects and wrapping up the Fuchs book and the Briggs book, have made me a poor correspondent. I read all the comments with great interest but no matter how much they provoke me, sometimes I cannot respond to them all promptly. I'm almost at a point where I'll be able to participate more actively again, but if you want faster answers try raising issues that are easier to address.
David, speaking for myself, I cannot think of a single photograph, not one, that I would want to look at for more than a few second, twenty at the very, very most, because any interest in them is entirely to do with their anecdotal content. Whereas I could list hundreds of paintings that I have enjoyed gazing at, marvelling at and falling under the spell of for hours on end, not because I'm interested in how they are made as a fellow practitioner, but because I find deep fulfilment in reading their plastic narrative of emotional effect written to me as if they were a missive from the gods.
Any frustration I personally have about the matter of photography is a result of witnessing the belief by others that it is an aesthetic language.
It seems that you, like me and others who visit here, have some unresolved emotional issues about photography. You seem to resent how it has undermined your fundamental philosophy of hard work and talent, and the havoc it has wreaked on the playing field where your heroes formerly comported themselves with such grace and grandeur. The new legitimacy of accident on that playing field (including the random result of a chimpanzee snapping a great picture by arbitrarily pushing a shutter release) is most disconcerting. Even worse is the succor photography has given odious poseurs such as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Sherrie Levine. Believe me, I get your resentment.
Dear Armchair Freud,
I am strictly arguing about the aesthetic problems of photographic image-capturing. And how they carry over into pictures that over-utilize them. That's it.
It is in bad faith to transpose my very real and considered arguments into some kind of cheeseball Hitchcock psychoanalysis movie plot. If I return the favor, and amateur-diagnose your defense of photos and tracing with the same flippant disregard for debate ethics, I will quickly reduce the conversation to pejorative rubble. Stop trying to "win" the discussion at all costs, Mr. Lawyer man. There are more enriching postscripts possible.
I don't know of any honest way to measure art except by the quality of the outcome.
The issue I am always getting at is the very nature of aesthetic quality!
I have this terrible feeling that after all this time, you still don't get what I mean by all that aesthetics jazz. Your latest Exhibit A is wrongly presuming that I am speaking in empty, pretty rhetoric, as you eye-rollingly indicate with this passage...
These are all beautiful, eloquent defenses which are praise-worthy, but as a wise woman (I searched for her name in my journals but can't find it) once wrote, "You are a fool to believe that your city is protected by its beauty."
I have no interest in being "praised" for what I am trying to explain (I didn't invent any of this), let alone the words I use to try to explain it. I am simply trying to be clear as best as I know how. I don't believe in beauty outside of the apprehension of truth. No such thing, as far as I can tell. I simply am, and have been, trying to teach anyone interested something deeply essential and fascinating about Art. Something real, too. Something actionable. Something that distinguishes art from other forms of communication, which makes it unique. Something that demonstrates that though Art isn't supernatural, it is a kind of poetic stage magic with a craft that, like other professions that traffic in illusion, is all about what is not shown rather than shown.
But it may just be that you can't understand me on this point and you never will. Well, so be it. But I know I have successfully taught others on this blog (and elsewhere) who already are able to feel what I am describing, to also appreciate intellectually this deeper language of art. I have also spent much effort to explain how the linguistic essence of Art differs from the way photographs function... also, occasionally, with success. So not everybody around here can only play Checkers on this Chess board.
"Dear Armchair Freud" " Mister Lawyer Man " "I Faked All Those Orgasms" Yes you have taught people on this blog ; David's living room , which many feel pretty lucky to be able to be in . It stains the good points you make when you always let loose with the name calling - yes , Davids a big boy who can take it , and take it with a grace and goodwill that you might consider striving for .
Ever thought of just starting your own blog ?
David said,
"As for artists who painted the crucifixion in a convincing manner...I'm not sure what it means for these artists to paint a "convincing" scene--"
I was responding to the nature of your post, that some artist can paint a convincing picture of an event or experience that they have never actually experienced or seen. I wasn't thinking of any specific artist but Pratt's image seems to contain the theme of human suffering which has been conveyed in a convincing manner in the many paintings of Christ's suffering on the cross.
As far a s needing the actual experience of something like war or a crucifixion in order to make a convincing picture, it remains me of what Laurence Olivia told Dustin Hoffman in the making of the Marathon Man. Dustin Hoffman's character in one of the scenes in the movie was suppose to have been awake for two days. So Hoffman stayed up for two days so the scene would be true to life. He came to the set exhausted. Olivia turned to Hoffman and simply asked him, " My dear boy, why don't you just act?"
David wrote'
"In a way, the illustrations to A Farewell To Arms hardly seem to rate as war paintings; they are more like nostalgic, sepia toned scrapbook photos looking back, from an armchair, on what the war once was"
My nostalgia is similar, but it's for 1960's illustration and design. It's a feeling of how things of the past looked to people of the 1960's much more then a feeling of how things felt to people in 1918.
Drawing and photography keeps coming up. I have found in learning human anatomy or the elements of classical architecture that drawings have always imparted clearer and more precise information then any photos have. In fact when trying to learn about the things of the world, drawing always increases understanding, while photos only create questions. It's amazing how imprecise and vague photos can be, especially about space and how things work. But this isn't the same as the emotional responses you where describing.
Ever thought of just starting your own blog ?
Anon,
I've posted for a few years about various Brandywine illustrators on a facebook group page called "Howard Pyle & Co." My last few posts were about little known Pyle student Frank Stick, the op-art (long before there was such a thing) of Maxfield Parrish, and the compositions of Dean Cornwell. The posts are short, but some of the information is not widely known, and the art is usually rare gems I took great pains to unearth. Particularly in the cases of the lesser known Pyle students and grand-students where I try to show only their best stuff. I usually try to tie each post back to Pyle's teaching and teaching legacy.
I'm glad you enjoy my comments on this blog. David and I have a fun time wrasslin'. He's a wily fella. Thank you for your contributions as well.
Drawing and photography keeps coming up. I have found in learning human anatomy or the elements of classical architecture that drawings have always imparted clearer and more precise information then any photos have. In fact when trying to learn about the things of the world, drawing always increases understanding, while photos only create questions. It's amazing how imprecise and vague photos can be, especially about space and how things work. But this isn't the same as the emotional responses you where describing.
Exactly. Perfectly said.
Chris Bennett-- I have a hard time understanding your draconian view of photography. If we made a comprehensive comparison of the ingredients of photographs and paintings, they would seem to be almost identical-- colors, shapes, patterns, line, composition, design, meaning, symbolism, emotion, innovation, irony, imagination, etc. Some done well, some done badly (for both photos and paintings). Both involve human judgment, right? 99% of these ingredients could be compared on a level playing field, across categories. Then there are a few distinguishing ingredients: the level of work required to achieve the end product, the role of random chance in achieving the end product, the physical means by which the visual elements listed above are applied to the surface. There may be some more that I have omitted that you care to list.
I can understand how these few different ingredients might cause you to think that the painter is harder working or more laudable than the photographer, or has a set of skills that you personally value more highly. You might even feel that painting is a more "moral" discipline. But I have trouble understanding why these few distinguishing ingredients would cause you to conclude that no photographic image is worth more than 20 seconds of attention, while painted images merit hours on end. Can you help me understand why such proportionately small differences evoke such a hugely different response in you?
If you tell me it is a practitioners's curiosity-- you study a painting for hours because you're mentally trying to reverse engineer how you'd achieve that same result-- that makes sense to me, but that's not what we're talking about, I think, from the general viewing public.
Anonymous-- I generally concur with Kev Ferrara's assessment of Drew Struzan (and David Grove). I think Struzan is clearly talented and does very bright, intense, eye catching colorful work. He makes very effective posters. (I prefer them to Peak's later posters, for example). I would only add one thing: more than Kev's concern about the intrusion of the photographic roots of the picture (which I also share), I am concerned about the intrusion of the press agent and the studio lawyer into the picture. I understand from artists who have done movie posters that the artist's options are frequently limited by studio contracts which dictate how large the star's face must be, where it must be situated on the poster, what may go above the title and what must go below, whether co-stars are also pictured and how large they may be, etc. This is very different from the editorial freedom in some other kinds of illustration. Movie posters are highly lucrative work, but I don't think Struzan was able to go out on a limb the way the other artists mentioned by Kev ( Fuchs, Peak and Heindel) were able to do.
Kev Ferrara-- I wish I could find the journal where I jotted down that quote, ""You are a fool to believe that your city is protected by its beauty." I keep thinking it may have been from Hannah Arendt or Simone de Beauvoir, but I'm just not sure. In any event, the words were expressed with nothing but love. The writer's dear friend felt certain that nothing too bad could happen to her beloved city (Vienna, perhaps?) because everyone knew it was so beautiful, no one would dare harm it (not even the invading Nazis). The writer wished that was true but feared that beauty's magic powers did not extend in that direction. I think you put up as valiant and poetic a defense of your bright line as possible; I'm just not sure that poetry works against robots.
One of the reasons I fall behind in responding to these comments is that I think, "I know a great quote right on point" and I look for the journal or sketchbook where I first wrote it down. As much as I enjoy flipping through old work, I think I'm going to start taking credit for these quotes; it will speed up my response time immeasurably.
Tom: "I have found in learning human anatomy or the elements of classical architecture that drawings have always imparted clearer and more precise information then any photos have. In fact when trying to learn about the things of the world, drawing always increases understanding, while photos only create questions. It's amazing how imprecise and vague photos can be, especially about space and how things work.”
i don’t follow that at all Tom (unless you’re talking about architectural / engineering / anatomical diagrams which may be useful but are in a different category to artistic drawings). if i want to know what a famous person looked like i’d search for photos of them, not drawings. a drawing of the same person only ‘increases understanding’ about a particular artist’s subjective take on that person, and usually tells you more about the artist than the sitter.
David Apatoff said: If we made a comprehensive comparison of the ingredients of photographs and paintings, they would seem to be almost identical-- colors, shapes, patterns, line, composition, design, meaning, symbolism, emotion, innovation, irony, imagination, etc. Some done well, some done badly (for both photos and paintings). Both involve human judgment, right? 99% of these ingredients could be compared on a level playing field, across categories.
This is certainly the case for oolours, shapes, pattern and line, which also goes for nature itself BTW.
But this is not the case for the following things you listed. I'll take them one at a time:
'Composition'; In photography this is only a product where and when the photographer presses the shutter. And this finding and recording of a mise en scene is just the starting point for the plastic artist. The importance of the mountain of composing that goes on after that can be readily seen when we evaluate the results of a journeyman and a master standing side by side painting from the same motif.
'Design'; The same goes for this, which is a subset of composition but without aesthetic meaning. (Even for beautiful as distinct from functional design - an AC Cobra is a cool looking sports car, but its sensuous curves and pleasing lines mean little beyond suggesting a thoroughbred race horse.)
'Meaning' is written into an image by way of its smallest graphic modules building up to its elements, building up to its structures building up to its main structures which ultimately embody the picture as a whole. Photography, which uses a photon recording machine, is not written with sentience and therefore cannot embody the language required to communicate meaning - aesthetic meaning is not the same thing as anecdotal meaning.
'Symbolism': I agree that anecdotal symbolism is common to both forms, but the crucial, qualitative difference is that in the sentient-written image the sensuous beats of the pictorial elements (that I have already described) are delivered by non-verbal symbolic equivalents of sensuous experience at a fundamental, shared level of human physicality.
'Innovation, irony'; too trivial to bother with in this particular argument.
'Imagination etc'; I see no evidence of imagination at work in photographs whatsoever. Photographs, as I said some while back in a reply to this blog, are a species of found object - How is that an embodiment of imagination?
So you see, there is a huge difference. And it has absolutely nothing to do with a sentimental, nostalgic notion that taking time over something has any value in itself. I wish to god I could paint my pictures in the time it takes to wake from a dream! And though I enjoy the sensual business of painting; the laying out of the fresh colours, the zing of a brush mark when it works against another brush mark, the look of what is on the canvas as it slowly grows before me, slowly as a tree... this has absolutely nothing to do with why I value painting. I only value that it is sentience/written and that the aesthetic language we call art, like nothing else in this world, can communicate what is hidden behind appearance.
Chris: "I see no evidence of imagination at work in photographs whatsoever. Photographs (…) are a species of found object"
for many figurative painters the painting process begins with creating the required photographic source material, therefore creating the photographic source material is part of the imaginative / artistic process.
have you seen the Rockwell ‘Behind the Camera’ book ? are you willing to argue that selecting the models, costumes, props, posing them, directing them like a film director; getting them to act as the character etc. isn’t part of the imaginative process of the final painting ?
the sentient-written image (...) anecdotal meaning
These are very clear ways to state these ideas. Excellent, Chris.
Though it is also still clear that David and Laurence aren't getting us. We keep making the same arguments, pointing out the same essential ideas of sensual and structural meaning (versus the robotic capturing of light rays) in different ways, using different phrases and formulations. And in the end it may just be that only by painting and drawing themselves, by actually living, again and again, through the composing and orchestrating and rendering of an original image themselves, will either David or Laurence ever come to put actual meaning to what we are saying. And until such time, we may as well be talking gibberish.
As a side note: This to me is an exact replication of the situation that befell Aesthetics in the late 19th and early 20th century; while the professional painters were using the sensual plastic language of art holed up in their ateliers, taking it to the most advanced level it had ever been, discussing the reaches of truth, beauty, suggestive expression and composition among themselves, the cynical and political literary intellectuals in the coffee shops, classrooms, and media companies took over the Art conversation in the public sphere. And because those hard-nosed folks had no actual experience or exposure to the real stuff, no sensibility for it, maybe even an antipathy for it, they just assumed actual artists were hyping their wares with fancy patter rather than telling the truth about their work. (The egotism is staggering.)
So the intellectuals set about "correcting the record" about the nature of art, by and by turning Aesthetics and critical discourse about sophisticated culture into that which they could understand. Thereby putting themselves in charge of all cultural products, usurping the discussion of Art from actual Artists. Which then warped Aesthetics as a discipline, diverting it from its mission, while making it, not coincidentally, very teachable by mouth. And this ersatz, easily-verbalized version then flooded into the colleges and literary art journals, and became a mass movement that altered the trajectory of Art itself.
Forget robots. The intellectuals, by arrogating control of something they scarcely understood, laid the groundwork for the mindless wasteland to come.
Kev,
we’re all familiar by now with your thesis regarding the hijacking of culture by intellectuals, so there’s no need to copy and paste it again.
i'd like to hear your response to the question i just posed to Chris regarding Rockwell.
for many figurative painters the painting process begins with creating the required photographic source material, therefore creating the photographic source material is part of the imaginative / artistic process.(...) are you willing to argue that selecting the models, costumes, props, posing them, directing them like a film director; getting them to act as the character etc. isn’t part of the imaginative process of the final painting ?
Though, I love Rockwell, because he became so photo-dependent later in his career, some of his work will not be that instructive on this subject. Also, importantly, Rockwell was intent on communing with a popular public by the incidents he portrayed, and so he was quite a stickler for the realism of what he was doing. His art is still filtered through his own unique lens of heart, whimsy, and humor. And the best of it is still composed and orchestrated in a way that no photo could match. But Rockwell clearly wanted the overalls on his farmers to look like their actual overalls, the family den to look like the average middle class American's den, the end table to have the same stuff on it that most people might put there, etc. He wanted a foundation to his pictures of life-as-lived. So Rockwell's work was often much more like a movie director's work, one with a photojournalist's eye, than the Brandywine illustrators who were, at their best, much more romantic, symbolist, and imagistic. The brandywine illustrators, in fact, were often encouraged to invent props and costumes and furniture; so they could work from a much more abstract level in populating their works with effective sensual symbolism.
But, of course, every recognizable thing one puts in the picture has symbolic value and meaning-resonance, whether in a painting or a photo. And such symbols can chord with each other to suggest ideas and associated feelings not actually present in the work. And in this way, certainly, photos and paintings share qualities. But this reference level of the picture, while also powerful and evocative in its own way, is still only the surface symbolism, the equivalent of words.
The poetry beneath, which suffuses, organizes, and orchestrates every mark complex and condition at every level of scale of a painting simply cannot exist to any great extent in a photo. To some extent, sure, the big shapes can be shaped and moved a bit. But reality is simply nowhere near as malleable as paint. In reality, physics is absolutely insistent. In art, the idea is what insists. And a radiating idea can mutate everything in a picture down to the cellular level.
Additionally, Howard Pyle taught that nature works in the exact opposite way to art. By this I understand him to mean that nature "states" itself, while Art, at its most effective, suggests. And nature "states itself" visually with absolute continuity. Nature is undifferentiated, not abstracted.* While Art must break natural continuity, must break apart what it seeks to express into abstract components, in order to imply anything at all, in order to be conscious. So suggestion and existential continuity cannot coexist.
Thus, in capturing the light bouncing off nature, the photograph takes into it the anti-aesthetic, non-suggestive way nature presents itself to our eyes. Thus, photos are naturally journalistic, but not naturally artful in the sense of suggestive.
A further issue presents itself, though, which is that through the tiny pinhole of time and perspective by which the camera takes in the visual world, only an utterly myopic representation of the experience it aims to capture is actually captured. Which justifies Tom's point about just how little information photos offer in certain areas as compared to drawings and paintings.
(Again, this is simply another restating of the matter.)
*Our senses naturally abstract experience, but such is a different topic.
Kev: " So Rockwell's work was often much more like a movie director's work, one with a photojournalist's eye, than the Brandywine illustrators who were, at their best, much more romantic, symbolist, and imagistic”
i agree.
"His art is still filtered through his own unique lens of heart, whimsy, and humor.”
... however much you try to suggest that the quality of his paintings is down to other factors such as ‘heart’ you can’t argue that the photographs are not a crucial element in his creative process. anyone can see (by a side by side comparison between painting and existing photos) how much a Rockwell painting owes (or doesn’t) to the photo reference he took specifically for it, where he deviated from the photo ref and where he didn’t.
don’t get me wrong: i’m not trying to claim that to make a painting as good as a Rockwell all you need is some good photo ref. i’m not even ‘for’ paintings with that level of detail. i’m arguing that Chris’s suggestion that all ‘photographs are a species of found object’ doesn’t make sense when applied to the working method of many painters such as Rockwell or Fuchs (too many more to name).
p.s.
RE your suggestion that i’ve never composed a drawing or painting before; i have no desire to discuss my own work on David’s blog which is why i’ve never provided a link to it. nor do i have any desire to discuss your work or Chris’s. it would be very easy to descend into an insult slinging match if we went there. i come here simply to chuck ideas about picture making around.
i told you years ago that i work as a storyboard artist and have also worked as animator, character designer and have a published graphic novel. and yes, i labour under the delusion that i’m a pretty good painter too.
i told you years ago that i work as a storyboard artist and have also worked as animator, character designer and have a published graphic novel. and yes, i labour under the delusion that i’m a pretty good painter too.
Wow. I have absolutely no memory whatsoever of you telling me that. If you could find that exchange I would really like to see it and I will sincerely apologize. I have been thinking of you through my few visits to your blogger account page (and I believe a visit to your blog)... I recalled only that you were in fashion, and I seem to remember a post of yours about re-purposing old clothing. So I assumed you made clothes. Anyway, I had no idea you were an artist, but I am very glad to hear you are, and I would love to see your work.
And I'm sorry if it bothers you, but I think it is absolutely relevant to a discussion of art what a person's experience with art actually is. Art is enormously revealing, and unstoppably so, of a person's talent, creativity, sensibility, poetic soul, ethics, mental energy, physicality, commitment, interests, and state of aesthetic knowledge.
To say "what does it matter if I can't draw or paint in the discussion of art?" is the equivalent, to me, of saying "what does it matter if I can't do math or logic and have never set foot in a lab to a discussion of science?" "Why can't I coach football without ever having played it?" "Why can't I critique Baudelaire's poetry when I can only read it translated into English?" "Why do I need to know how an automobile engine works in order to discuss how to engineer an automobile engine?" (and so on.)
Such dismissals of the relevance of basic credentials are exactly how the academic cultural intellectuals were able to circumvent scrutiny and take control of visual art.
Yes, a good argument still wins the day. But the best argument is always a demonstration, which is not even necessarily in the form of a portfolio. (An aside: Had Kant actually painted, there was no way he could have asserted that color is only decorative and not form. A commitment to making Art would have demonstrated sooner or later the error of that belief.)
The second best argument is one thoroughly grounded in experience.
By the time we get to arguments based on reasoning alone, we are asymptotic with supposition. And supposition is asymptotic with sophistry.
Laurence John said: for many figurative painters the painting process begins with creating the required photographic source material, therefore creating the photographic source material is part of the imaginative / artistic process.
Yes, but what you describe is an artist collating source material, just as a writer does when researching the world of their novel in order to ensure the infrastructure of the work has enough fidelity to be believable at a grass roots level. The way a shirt tugs across a stretched arm, the look of a certain light effect within a given interior, how foam collects on a pebble beach etc etc, this is information gathered to add verisimilitude to a pre-existing or emerging imaginative vision. The material itself, or the process of its selection, is not imaginative. It is (and Kev has just covered this in a different way) only how the material is combined that begins the process of anecdotal resonance vivified by the deeper sensual imaginings written as plastic expression.
So whether you are talking about gathering this information by way of hiring models, going on location and sketching/taking notes, or taking photographs or tearing photographs from magazines or Googling them, these are all forms of gathering raw material. The fire depends on the imaginative touch paper, not whether it is applied to an assembled bon fire or a forest you happen to be strolling in.
have you seen the Rockwell ‘Behind the Camera’ book ? are you willing to argue that selecting the models, costumes, props, posing them, directing them like a film director; getting them to act as the character etc. isn’t part of the imaginative process of the final painting ?
I have not seen the Rockwell book you mention Laurence, but I am familiar with his methods in a general sense. So to answer this let's make a thought experiment:
Rockwell has an idea for a painting and he gathers together all the reference material he will need in a studio, instructs the models to take up the attitudes to one another he requires, orders them to stay just as they are and then leaves the studio. In comes a photographer and takes a photograph of it. Now, we do, as you know, have such photographs, and they do not possess what the Rockwell paintings have for the reason I gave in the earlier post. So far, so good.
Now, I do agree with you that there is an imaginative component to the undertaking. (Andy Goldsworthy is a contemporary design example of this among many others). But I disagree that this has anything whatsoever to do with the photograph of the piece itself. Any imaginative force contained in the photograph of such a thing is to do with the construction of the tableau it has recorded. So the imaginative input is the building of a mise en scene, not the mechanical record of it.
Kev,
i’m not here because i like the work of any of the commenters, including yourself. i’m here to discuss ideas about picture making, and David’s blog happens to be one which ignites a lot of interesting debates.
need i remind you that the author of this blog isn’t a professional illustrator or fine artist ?
i always assumed that the frequent commenters here drew or painted at some level from enthusiastic amateur to professional, or retired professional, but whether i like their work or not (that’s if i can even see it) doesn’t prevent me from engaging with their ideas.
Chris: "But I disagree that this has anything whatsoever to do with the photograph of the piece itself”
ah, i didn’t say the Rockwell photos were good enough to be exhibited as they are. a few are perhaps, but most are incomplete and cobbled together from several photos. my argument is simply that they are an essential
part of his process.
Chris: "So the imaginative input is the building of a mise en scene, not the mechanical record of it.”
we’ve been here before Chris, only last time i used photographer Gregory Crewdson as the mise en scene builder example; you’re hung up on the photographic medium itself i.e. film or digital-info and i’m interested in the mise en scene element; what can be done expressively with set design, lighting, actors etc. whether that is recorded in a still photo, a moving image or translated into an oil painting isn’t important to me. only the quality of the final image is important. if Rockwell requires the laborious mise en scene building and photographing process in order to achieve the final painting then so be it.
Kev said: And in the end it may just be that only by painting and drawing themselves, by actually living, again and again, through the composing and orchestrating and rendering of an original image themselves, will(they) ever come to put actual meaning to what we are saying.
This indeed may be largely true, but there are those who are experienced practitioners who continue to have a blind spot when asked to comprehend what is being argued here. And this, I think, is explained by your thesis on the reasons for the demise of aesthetic understanding that began around the dawn of the last century. The usual response is to distrust the conclusion of the argument because they have the nagging feeling something has been left out. And this, I would suggest, is because it flies in the face of the material being celebrated and feted in the cultural climate of the last 100 years.
i’m here to discuss ideas about picture making, and David’s blog happens to be one which ignites a lot of interesting debates.
need i remind you that the author of this blog isn’t a professional illustrator or fine artist ?
Laurence,
Because David is an excellent writer, a sharp arguer, has a very strong streak of humanism in him, particular artistic tastes, wide erudition, and a keen and inquisitive mind, he approaches art in a very interesting and unique way which I enjoy reading. His thinking is fresh to me because it is not how I tend to think. And the work he spotlights is not work I much look at. But he is still mostly talking about his experience and appreciation of pictures, only once in a while dipping a toe into the deep waters of picture making per se.
A lot of what I do around here is yank at David's toe when I see it to try to pull him underwater.
In fact, I pretty much do that with everyone, including you. I don't know whether I have made a dent in you. But I have clocked a distinct change in your understanding of this material over the years. Our current impasse regarding the innate anaesthetic quality of photographs is the most stubborn knot of all, however.
By the way, David worked on a comic strip in the early 1970s which he spends a lot of time pretending never happened.
Tom-- To clarify, when I said I'm not sure what it means to paint a "convincing" scene of the crucifixion of Christ, I didn't mean conveying "Christ's suffering on the cross." That part I understand. What I meant was, there are centuries of religious art designed to convince the viewer that Jesus was surrounded by angels at the time and was ascending to heaven. Convincing your viewers that they are witnessing a divine event-- that's a whole different type of convincing.
Tom wrote: "I have found in learning human anatomy or the elements of classical architecture that drawings have always imparted clearer and more precise information then any photos have. In fact when trying to learn about the things of the world, drawing always increases understanding, while photos only create questions."
To which Kev Ferrara added: "Exactly. Perfectly said."
I don't understand how two such bright observers can be comfortable with such "exactitude" and "perfection" in a field like this. You say that "drawings have always imparted clearer and more precise information" when it seems self-evident to me that bad drawings impart less clear and more imprecise information than good photographs," and vice versa. The notion that there is an absolute rule that drawn images are "always" superior to photographic images in the way you describe just makes no sense to me at all. I am baffled that you can say that "when trying to learn about the things of the world, drawing always increases understanding." I could show you wheelbarrows full of dishonest drawings that only obfuscate and dissemble but I'm sure I don't need to because I'm sure you've seen them too.
And I don't understand how photos can only create questions; Michelangelo secretly dissected dead bodies to understand how muscles worked beneath the skin, but you can now get photos that give you the same basic information. Surely there are one or two small answers in there, not just questions?
David said,
"Convincing your viewers that they are witnessing a divine event-- that's a whole different type of convincing."
It's funny how people can be responding to each other and be thinking of totally different things. I didn't even consider "convincing," meaning convincing one's viewers that they where witnessing a divine event. I thought the general thrust of the post was an artists ability to make a "convincing," picture of something he had never actual experienced. Pratt's image capture a sense of the suffering of life and the release and peace of death. The picture had the feel of the descent from the cross. But making a convincing painting of a divine event would be another excellent example of what a skilled artist can do with a subject he has never experience. Like the post you did on Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.
David, I wasn't making an argument for the superiority of drawing to photography. When someone draws a picture of something he shows us how well they understood their subject. Taking a picture of something is not the same as understanding or comprehending what one is looking at.
Everyone knows what reality is, or what it "looks like," until they try too draw a picture of it. Drawing is objective, it shows us immediately what we do and don't understand about the shape and form of reality. One often immediately feels dissatisfaction with one's first attempts because what we produce doesn't meet our expectations and feelings about the world. Our drawing is showing us the incompleteness of our thoughts, what we have failed to consider, how we have not notice what gives nature its vitality. Most people quit drawing , when it doesn't immediately satisfy. Or they find a short cut and avoid the difficulties that drawing has presented them with. Perhaps copying photos.
Take a simple form like a blade of grass, and try to draw it. See if your satisfied with what you draw. See if you can feel and express its strength, and it's flexibility, its energy while maintaining its stablity. See if you can draw the planes of intersection between the grass and the ground and keep it level. See if you now how to position the central axis of the blade of grass at the correct angle to the ground plane. and where should the drawing be placed on the paper? Then see if you start to notice how it is similar to other things like plants and then to a tree. How it moves in the wind like the tree does. And how the canopy of a tree echoes the shapes of the clouds, and clouds feel so much like the shapes of water. Start to notice how certain underlying abstractions can be found in all the objects of the universe. See if you can decide on the value difference between the ground plane and the vertical plane of the blade of grass. And how that value relationship is echoed in the distance by the ground and the trees. See if you have a way of determine the length of the shadow the blade of grass casts. An how many steps darker is the value of the shadow compared to the value of the ground. Or ask yourself, do I ever consider such questions?"
When you have considered some of these question, now go look at a photo of and see if it provides you with answers.
Without an interesting question, or a motivating force you don't really have any questions to ask of the photo. If one thinks looking at some photos of muscles is the same as dissecting the real thing and relentlessly drawing their forms, finding their points of origin and their intersection , it's relationship to it's neighbors, drawing until one can define the form in all it's aspects, one really hasn't dive deeply into their subject or they doesn't want to be brother with what has to be done to crave an arm like Michelangelo.
Emotional responding to everything is fine, but the stories and narratives you attach to the photos is the same as walking down the street and seeing a gull flying free in the sky. The mind can create a narrative about images and anything it sees. "How long as the gull been flying, where did it come fro, has it lost it's partner, did people 2000 years ago see the gull the same way I do now, or is it a symbol of freedom, the flight of the soul? But such thought patterns never really address the question why does the gull look beautiful in flight soaring on the currents of air. In fact narratives seem to break things apart instead of seeing the relations between things. That the shape of the gulls wings and the air current bring each thing into mutual being. The bird's sense of weightlessness and lightness depends on our strong sense of a level, stable horizontal plane.
That's why I included the Vernon Blake quotes in your post about "Lightening." A more formal artist put's the value in how the art is made, in the elements of art..
David,
Of course Tom is speaking of competent or better drawing. And I believe he is also suggesting the act of drawing things for one's self, which makes all the difference in the world. (An engrossing and enriching discipline I would highly recommend for your retirement.)
To the larger point, once more into the breach...
Understanding requires conceptualization. Understandings do not exist out there in the world as physical, evident things. We can't simply grab them like cans from a shelf. We can't capture them by simply switching on a recording device and aiming it at some collection of facts. Facts are not understandings. Facts require processing in order to yield knowledge. Which is why perception alone, the mere reception of facts through a sensor or senses, is a vacuous operation.
The act of drawing well (or painting well for that matter) is a conceptualization process. And one does it not just to capture the planar silhouette concept and its gestural concept as a cartooned presence facing the viewer, but also to somehow capture, conceptually, the unique sculptural realities of the elements and milieu as well. Which means to somehow encode them into the rendering.
If successful, the resulting drawing is replete with the evidence of 3D knowledge on a 2D surface, which is, in my view, a species of holography. Plus, we might add the fourth dimension of movement. Plus, hopefully, a fifth dimension of mood, tone, or emotion. Even further; the air quality in the room, the scent, the must, the mildew... And who knows what else.
Photographs are not conceptualized in this way at all. They are the result of the capturing of light rays by a machine. The machine is not conscious, it is not experiencing, analyzing or understanding anything. It is not suggesting anything. It is not encoding anything through the capturing process. It is simply recording stupidly what "facts" are before it through a pinhole, in a pinhole of time. And again, facts are not understandings.
In order to successfully make use of a photo, it needs to be conceptualized by the viewer. Otherwise it will remain a dead husk of perception. And this imaginative revitalization process is especially crucial for an artist using any given photo for reference. Because without conceptual revivification, the dead husk is all there is to go on. Which is why anybody who traces photos (or slavishly copies them) is at very high risk for making something equally dumb and dead.
Great, great post Tom!
Thanks Kev
"And I believe he is also suggesting the act of drawing things for one's self, which makes all the difference in the world."
Yes exactly.
"Understanding requires conceptualization. Understandings do not exist out there in the world as physical, evident things. We can't simply grab them like cans from a shelf. We can't capture them by simply switching on a recording device and aiming it at some collection of facts. Facts are not understandings. Facts require processing in order to yield knowledge. Which is why perception alone, the mere reception of facts through a sensor or senses, is a vacuous operation.
The act of drawing well (or painting well for that matter) is a conceptualization process."
Much more to the point and better said!
Tom and Kev Ferrara-- Sorry, I thought you were comparing what we learn from looking at a drawing vs. looking at a photograph. Perhaps I read too quickly, but I didn't appreciate that you were comparing what we learn from the act of drawing vs. the act of taking a photo. That clarification significantly reduces the space between us. After all, I've quoted Austin Briggs for that proposition so many times on this blog that I'd be embarrassed to quote him again (but I'm not ashamed to repeat it in the comment section: "It was only as I discovered that I did not really possess an image of the object I desired when I took a snapshot that I relegated the camera to its proper place: that of a gatherer of information which has not yet been digested. Only when I reverted to the laborious task of drawing the object directly did it begin to reveal its hidden forms.")
Having agreed to that, I still think there is meaningful space between our positions; In my view, the field of art (by which I mean good quality art) is too wide and woolly, too undefinable, to permit the kind of absolute rule we are discussing.
Kev, for example, adds an important qualification when he says, "Of course Tom is speaking of competent or better drawing." So can we all agree that Tom's dictum about the act of drawing only holds true for conscientious, sincere drawing, not for the cheaters and the lazy slobs, rampant in the art world today, who try to fake it? I would also submit that the same qualification applies to photography: hastily snapping a reference photo may tell you nothing about the subject's form, but if you are Robert and you select a single flower to photograph and you study it from different angles and with different lighting to illuminate the form artistically (http://photoarchiveswspr13.blogspot.com/2013/04/robert-mapplethorpe.html) then I say you learn more by beiong a conscientious photographer than you learn by being a lazy draftsman. Thus, it seems to me that the value we derive from drawing or photography depends in part on the character of the photographer or the draftsman, rather than just the medium.
Similarly, I think the nature of the artistic objective affects the measure of value offered by drawing or by photography. I notice that in Tom's excellent and thought provoking comment about a blade of grass, he slips back into comparing drawing grass yourself with looking at a photograph that someone else took of grass (rather than taking the photograph yourself, a la Mapplethorpe.) This is kind of an apples-and-oranges comparison, is it not, that takes us back to our initial confusion about whether we are talking about the act of drawing / photographing, or the act of looking at a drawing or a photograph. Tom's description of the process of thinking about drawing a blade of grass is excellent for some kinds of artistic objectives, but not for others. (We've talked here before about artists for whom drawing grass is an act of manual labor ( http://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2008/11/perspiration-and-inspiration.html ) compared with painters who render a field of grass beautifully with one smear of their thumb. We've talked about how John Gannam goes through Tom's process to paint a row of flowers and leaves (http://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2007/07/watercolors-of-john-gannam.html ) but there are other kinds of art for which, I think, that model doesn't apply. (CONT.-- These space limitations are killing me)
(CONT.)
To paraphrase Sol LeWitt, "a drawing of grass is not real grass, but a drawing of a line is a real line." I think your distinction disregards a whole category of art concerned with a drawing of a line, and once you do that, your generalization about the act of drawing becomes more airtight, but I'm not ready to do that yet.
You want to talk about knowing the true nature of a blade of grass using a pencil or a camera, consult my hero Walt Whitman:
"A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full
hands;
How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it
is any more than he."
And after you're done reading the full "What is the grass?" poem, you should definitely follow up with his poem 25 ("Poem of The Child That Went Forth, and Always Goes Forth, Forever and Forever.")
David,
That Mapplethorpe flower image is a fine challenge to the question. I did indeed feel the aesthetic effect of it, an immediate "rush of beauty", and flipping the image horizontally revivified that effect. So that I, at least, am sure that a real compositional expression of some kind was at play, which must have been born of a conscious act. I cannot deny the photo is a work of art.
However, as a point in the larger argument, the success of the effect of the image doesn't actually change anything. I made the point earlier that, indeed, shape (thus line) can be composed to some degree at a macro level in a photo to produce something artful. So can (obviously) value, to some degree, (which I failed to mention). The amount of control required of the photographic set-up to gain such a level of abstract control of line, shape and value is quite extensive. And such control in photography is enormously difficult to attain; the camera is always at the mercy of stark, dumb reality and all its jumble of meaningless complexity. Thus the variables in a photo must be reduced in order to achieve a level of control sufficient for composing. That this has been achieved here, I'll grant demonstrates a kind of artistic conscientiousness worthy of praise.
However, for the same reason, the image is utterly barren save the flower. Everything variable in the world has been shorn away because it cannot be dealt with. What we get at the end of the reduction process is a kind of monogrammatic, haiku level simplicity of form and content, with only the barest wisp of orchestration (such as the isolated subject affords.) The result is a thing as light as air; a sweet little piece of visual music, even with its erotic metaphor. But though it is a lovely little trifle to be sure, it is not even an appetizer, let alone a meal. Though it is abstractly lovely in an almost godlike way, the content is paltry.
So the point about photography still holds; its severely limited plasticity also severely limits the breadth, depth, and complexity of understanding that may be packed into any particular image. Even at its most artfully rare, as here.
David said
"...then I say you learn more by beiong a conscientious photographer than you learn by being a lazy draftsman."
I think you have to tell us what it is we learn.
"Thus, it seems to me that the value we derive from drawing or photography depends in part on the character of the photographer or the draftsman, rather than just the medium."
I agree with that, another way to state it might be, a photographer or a draftsman is only going to include the knowledge they have acquired in what they make. But a draftsman has to construct his space, like your great quote from George Bridgman,,"he has to build the house before he paints it." For the photographer the house already exists, he only has to frame the picture and decide what light he like best on it. In fact he can take a thousand shots and then choice which picture he likes the best.
"I notice that in Tom's excellent and thought provoking comment about a blade of grass, he slips back into comparing drawing grass yourself with looking at a photograph that someone else took of grass (rather than taking the photograph yourself, a la Mapplethorpe.) "
I know it's confusing, I'm confused when I writing about this stuff. The point I was trying to make in describing some of the questions an artist might ask when looking at an actual blade grass is that If the same questions where asked of a photograph they would not be answerable. Sometimes they aren't even answerable when looking at nature and you have to get out of chair an good take a closer look at something so you can answer your question
"Then I say you learn more by beiong a conscientious photographer than you learn by being a lazy draftsman."
The lazy draftsman learns he can't do it. It's to overwhelming and he doesn't want to be brother. That's learning a lot. The photographer is never faces the question, can I create this form from nothing, as his forms are always preexisting.
"Tom's description of the process of thinking about drawing a blade of grass is excellent for some kinds of artistic objectives, but not for others, compared with painters who render a field of grass beautifully with one smear of their thumb."
My examples of some of the things an artist might consider when drawing a blade of grass where just a few samples of what might run through a artists head when drawing a picture, so I could make my point. The questions we ask of nature depend on the individual, what they want to do what they want to express etc... One does all the learning so if they want to describe a field of grass with a smear of their thumb they can. The thumb still has to hold to a plane and a orientation. That was my point about an artist's knowledge. You mention Turner in your next post. Have you seen his drawings for his perspective lectures he gave at the Royal Academy? Their worth googling just to see the amount of knowledge he possessed.
Wonderful posts from Tom and Kev here. Many thanks.
Cont:
To paraphrase Sol LeWitt, "a drawing of grass is not real grass, but a drawing of a line is a real line." I think your distinction disregards a whole category of art concerned with a drawing of a line, and once you do that,"
I think, I am not sure but this get's to Kev's point, or this is how I see it, line is a great example of conceptualization. Ask a geometer. They said the same thing in China, brushstrokes aren't just beautiful because they look like something, they are beautiful in themselves. That is way I don't appreciate the Austin Briggs quote about line being limited. To me it seems just the opposite line sets everything in motion, it's a wonderful and generous thing.
I'll read the Whitman, but I wasn't really talking about knowing the true nature of a blade of grass. I used a simple thing to show what an artist has to consider when drawing a picture of something
I should clarify that while Mapplethorpe's image is art, the photo itself is a reproduction of that image. The original artwork itself that was plastically manipulated was the sculpture of form and light that was composed in front of the lens; composed in a manner reminiscent of the way in which a bas relief sculpture would be composed to be viewed form a single direction.
Just to be philosophically rigorous about it.
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