You put your left foot in, you take your left foot out,You put your left foot in, and you shake it all about.
--- The Hokey Pokey
Many contemporary artists seem to have have concluded that accuracy and realism are no longer sufficient, so they start a picture in a careful, realistic style then rough it up with an element of wildness-- a spill, a splatter, a deconstruction, a crude gesture.
Here, for example, the talented Jack Unruh proves that he can master fine detailed pen work but then offsets it with a loosely applied thick, wet black brush:
Note how the fine line, detailed realism of this bird is enhanced by a messy ochre stain:
It contributes freedom and a casual looseness to what otherwise might be a too tight drawing. It improves the composition and design, expands the range and contributes a more organic, natural feel to the work.
Here is another example of an accomplished drawing where Williams gambled with an out-of-control spill and ended up improving it beyond what tight drawing might have accomplished:
After paying the terrible dues necessary to learn how to draw with control, how much of that control are we willing to surrender? That is the question:
27 comments:
I believe these seemingly haphazard flourishes evolved as a device meant to conceal effort, nothing more. They are the art that conceals the art from the layman; in Italian, they are means to sprezzatura. The audience cannot tell the difference between a picture truly drawn or painted effortlessly and one executed painstakingly but merely finished with a layer of scribble, noise, and grit.
Compare Sargent to his contemporaries among the French academics. Both labored over their paintings for ages, carefully modeling form with a tiny brush. But in the end, Sargent covered his tracks with a handful of cleverly placed thick strokes (usually toward the edge of the canvas, and never on the face or hands).
Thus he managed to escape the criticisms laid against the academics of being insufficiently spontaneous, overworked, and so on, even though his working method was largely indistinguishable from theirs apart from this final flourishing pass.
Kent Williams appears to be using it the same way. He is an ARC Atelier painter who hides his stodgy atelier training beneath some meaningless abstract-expressionist marks at the end, after he has already rendered his reference into the canvas.
Truly loose gestural art is a beautiful thing. But lay audiences are much more likely to be impressed by careful work that merely implies gesture.
Richard-- Concealing effort is a goal of the greatest artists; it's why Michelangelo burned his preliminary drawings showing all the heavy lifting and manual labor that went into his masterpieces, and as you note, Sargent tried to create an air of spontaneity too, so I don't see why you demean such efforts as "nothing more." As William Butler Yeats wrote about concealing the hard work of poetry:
'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
If you think that Williams was using a "final flourishing pass" the same way Sargent did (which I'm not sure is correct) I'd have no problem with that, and I don't understand why you would either.
In the interests of accuracy, you are mistaken about Williams' background. He attended Pratt, NOT an ARC Atelier. Upon graduation he immediately jumped into the fast moving deadline-driven world of comics and graphic novels where he was innovative and quite successful-- the opposite of "stodgy atelier training." (https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2007/03/kent-williams.html ) He also taught art at Pratt and a number of other art schools and matured into illustration and fine art.
Most importantly, I don't think any of these artists (Unruh, Ciardiello, Wyeth and especially Williams) are sprinkling spontaneity at the end for purely cosmetic reasons. The risks they took are too great. Wyeth could easily have ruined that painting by throwing a cup of paint on it, just as Williams could easily have ruined all his hard work on that first or second drawing if fate and hydrology had taken a slightly different bounce. He was prepared for the sacrifice.
I think these artists are struggling with genuine conflicts between realism, abstraction, neo-expressionism, conceptual art and other influences in an era of great flux. My hat is off to them for their effort.
Are they 'out of control spills', though, or carefully considered strokes/washes of tone or shadow containing reflected light; or other areas given this kind of treatment in the way that people see in both sharp specifics and broad sweeps?
That's a marvellous crow (?), really lovely.
Bill
Ah, yes, I did not mean to say Kent Williams went to an ARC atelier.
Where he actually studied is neither here nor there for my point; only that his paintings are generally indistinguishable from ARC atelier work with a bit of flourish. How he arrived at that style, whether by influence, study, or something else, I do not know.
Bill-- I take your point; there are different degrees of control here. In the case of the Ciardiello, there are random spatters and the colored droplets fall where they may. If he tried to administer each drop deliberately with a brush, he wouldn't achieve the same result.
In the case of the Williams drawings, note that the erratic scrapes of color completely ignore the delicately drawn figures; the color doesn't respect the shapes at all , but pours right over them, starting and stopping for reasons of abstract design. The broad brush tool, especially with the catwoman drawing, completely thwarts the kind of control that the pencil permits.
where the reference stops, then terror begins. One rolls the bones and hopes for a happy accident to solve what is actually a grave narrative-poetic problem as a far simpler design problem. So we’ve come to the atelier refugee "get out of jail free" card
Yes, agreed, but *why* not just take the reference all the way out to the edges?
Above, I argued that artists are ultimately trying to conceal what they are doing, how they are working.
If I understand correctly, you are suggesting something more than that: you think they are trying to create art in places where they sense it is not already present in the reference?
They're concealing a lack of creative-imaginative energy. This whole movement is an attempt to create "Fine Art" out of studies.
Hmm, help me out here then;
What is the difference between a portrait and a study?
I think this discussion demonstrates the difficulty of rescuing art from complete subjectivity. This blog has antagonized lots of people in the past by insisting that standards are real, even if not fully objective or provable, and that it is important to be able to distinguish quality in art from raw sewage. I still believe that. And as a special bonus, thoughtful and clear eyed standards, if well articulated, can comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted.
However, once we go down the path of objective standards, it becomes difficult-- nearly impossible-- to refute critics who are fixed upon one particular type of art that they personally prefer, and who condemn all other types of art as unworthy. One might argue that anything that strays from the Howard Pyle / Harvey Dunn melded poetic narrative paradigm can't be taken seriously as art, or that "spattered and splashed" images can only be "visual gibberish" or that a "study"can't be a "portrait" or that images of unsavory topics or ugly people can't be good art, or that "abstract-expressionist marks" are necessarily meaningless. But doing that, we tend to end up with the Thought Police doing sentry duty around what can be Art and what can't.
Unless we pull back and give art tolerance and the room it needs to breathe, we eventually cede the field to smug little barbarians who feel entitled to impose their taste by vandalizing art they feel is sexist or racist or insufficiently enlightened; or at the other end of the political spectrum, to a vulgar and tasteless president who, once he's done tarting up the oval office with grotesque gilded trinkets, confidently sets out to dictate art standards for the country's public museums.
Different kinds of art can provide different kinds of sensory experiences. For example, someone might become besotted by a wall sized color field painting by Helen Frankenthaler and think, "I'd love to bathe in that radiant pink." For me the Williams catwoman painting has a touch of Frankenthaler and a touch of Motherwell, with those bold powerful pink shapes contrasted so effectively against the black and white drawing. I recognize it's not the kind of sensory experience that you prefer, but I don't believe you'd lose your immortal soul to the purifying flames of hell if your notion of art was open and tolerant enough to give such work a fair shot.
As an approach from another side, I've heard a museum guide ask a bunch of french kids why the food on the lower left of Manet's picnic looked so different to the rest of the painting. What I got of her explanation is that Manet did it so to show that the could have done the rest this way if he wanted, but he didn't want to.
Kev: “I don't know if it was intentional on your part, but the Kent Williams stuff is the prime example of what I was talking about on the prior thread; today's explicit formal innovations as surface effects”
Again, to clarify, I wasn’t using the term ‘formal innovation’ in the previous thread to mean ’shallow surface effects’ as you’re using it here. Which is why I gave ‘the move from the Renaissance's well-lit, diorama-like staging, to Caravaggio's starkly-lit realism’ as an example of formal innovation as I see it. Another example might be the contrast between Turner and Bouguereau. If you don’t like the term ‘formal innovation’ then tell me what term you prefer.
(i’m going to be without internet access for a few days, so follow-up responses might be sporadic)
David,
Have you ever considered asking the artists what they were trying to achieve with those techniques?"
If you think that Williams was using a "final flourishing pass" the same way Sargent did (which I'm not sure is correct) I'd have no problem with that
The anecdote about a flourishing pass in Sargent’s process to hide his rendering came from one of Schmid’s students, who said it was something RS regularly mentioned when asked why he himself added chaotic finishing strokes to his paintings. I do not know where Schmid first heard it.
As for why it would be less meaningful to decorate a “study” with flourishes, rather than building an image from one’s imagination out of purposeful marks from the start, it seems self-evident. If you don’t regard that as a “problem”, it implies you either don’t think meaningful marks should be a goal, or that meaningless marks are an issue. I wonder if you apply the same logic to words in a poem, or clauses in a contract.
You’ve said before that it’s a temperamental limitation when someone can’t see the difference.
I think about it a lot in terms of the sexes. There is something inherently female in the image as poetry, in mood, sentiment, meaned effect, and atmosphere, and many of the skills required to reach it are inherently male: study, rendering, visualization of form, anatomy, and so on.
To really appreciate it, you have to embody these two very different ways of seeing the world at the same time, and it is no wonder that so few manage it.
But I’ve been thinking lately that it may be more fruitful to teach female painters the rigor/male side of painting than to try to train quasi-autistic male minds to feel a picture in any depth.
xopxe-- Of course, some artists do something just to show off that they're capable of doing it, but there are plenty of "respectable" reasons for devoting more attention to one part of a picture than to others. Implying blades of grass, with only a few specific examples fully painted in the foreground, is often the artistically superior way to go.
Movieac-- Yes I have, and I've even invited them to participate in the discussion. Some (who I respect) don't believe in explaining their work. Some will discuss it with me but don't want to be quoted. Within the past year, I've had four artists who've read some of the angry or nasty comments and decline to participate. They do read the comments but don't want to make themselves targets by surfacing.
“… but don't want to make themselves targets by surfacing.”
Can’t say I blame them. As always, I look forward to your upcoming blogs.
Creating art is already an emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually demanding act on its own, without having to worry about what we peanut galleryists have to say. Artists need to protect their energy.
The same is true for politicians of any stripe. It’s very easy for us to critique policies and politics in the abstract, from the comfort of an armchair or an artboard, but few of us would say even a tenth of what we post online to someone actually responsible for governing millions, face-to-face.
Irony is now integral to art. This cannot be undone. But simply adding ironical flourishes to a piece, doesn’t therefore make it more artful - similar to how autofiction isn’t more artful than pulp fiction per se.
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Postmodern Anonymouse
I thought the broad pink shapes in the catwoman were - just my guess - gestures to suggest the environment the figure was in. And, as with the other figure, a means of adding colour to a monochrome drawing in a loose way (that becomes more pertinent to the drawing in suggesting light, then colour on the shoulder, the blue of the tattoo leaking out, etc.)
The hat on - is it Custer? to give a forceful way of giving its mass, the strokes following its form including where they taper off (which prevents it from being too dominant too).
The vulture and grouse are really lovely drawings, giving the essential details as well as any natural science illustration but with a vivaciousness.
I really love work like that, but there's stuff I really like in all three artists here.
Which I mean (I wish I had a tithe of their knowledge), and has nothing to do with the subject of criticising artists, raised below. I think querying the import (or content) of a work is a valid line of question, (and, for me, I see the great ability of digital artists, but don't get the 'why' of the medium or like the simulation involved. Those using it obviously do) . And, in the historical context, there has been deterioration in some aspects of art over the decades/centuries, while in other areas there has been gains; the question of if/where current artists or trends connect is an interesting one.
There's room for every kind of achievement honestly won. Only shysters and conmen deserve a drubbing.
Bill
>>>>>>>>>"This whole movement is an attempt to create "Fine Art" out of studies."
Kev why'd you delete your posts on this subject?
~ FV
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