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:
21 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.
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; fingerpainting on a wing and a prayer; tricks.
Obviously Williams draws very well, but again - harkening back to Howard Pyle and his original critique of academicism - one can't get to a unified and powerful image from reference or the model. There's no vision to aim for. No idea. Without a goal to guide…. 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 of visual gibberish, sometimes decorative, spattered and splashed, flicked or flung, noodled or doodled as a frame around the ref. Facile "postmodern" solutions to timeless pictorial problems. ('Postmodern' being an euphemism for 'Sophist Excuses’ )
It's become very au courant during this current era only because all these talented draftspeople are all in the same boat. Tons of drawing and painting workshops. But no imaginative training, no imagistic code of ethics, no judgment man. Williams certainly isn't the only one bailing visual water where the map of the world ends. Brad Kunkle does a more controlled version with gold leaf. Phil Hale, Kanevsky, Jenny Saville and others fracture the facture or smear out the heads. Vanessa Lemon does her own brand of this. Rick Berry may have been the founder of the cheat code.
I do not see the Jack Unruh as doing the same thing. I see his style of design, type, and drawing as entirely integrated. He knows he's being whimsical. And, of course, with comedy, there are no rules; so long as people know you're being silly. I think Mr. Unruh knew exactly what he's doing. I wouldn't call myself a fan of his work, but I think he's great.
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?
"Yes, agreed, but *why* not just take the reference all the way out to the edges?"
Do that and you run smack dab into the gigantic narrative black hole that was being avoided in the first place. Now a thousand different decisions must be made starting from square one. All of which are mental work, requiring imaginative concentration and physical labor to implement.
For example, you've already got the drawn figure. So now, unless you want to start over completely, you must work out from the figure you already have; which has no necessary narrative connection to anything. It's obviously a model sitting there: Bored with her boobs out. Or mugging in a halloween costume.
The easiest solution is to just draw-in the rest of the studio where the photo was taken or the model was sitting. Well, that'll be dull as dirt. You can't do that for every one of these kinds of works you make. As soon as you do it for one, everybody sees it's a study.
What if instead you take the big leap and try to build out some setting and scenario based on some narrative situation you've come up with that will work with the given figure. Then what about the lighting that's already on the figure? Or the perspective? The atmosphere? What if you exhaust yourself developing a room idea, populating it with people, referencing it all, making sure all the lighting and perspective is correct - and this is the great likelihood - it just looks like a model sitting in referenced room. All that work for a bland result. (And Douglas Crockwell shows you up. And so much for mr. edgy postmodernist.)
See, without an exciting narrative idea, a gestalt vision, there's no point creating any setting at all. The generative inspiration isn't there. So that's why they look to the model to provide it.
"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?"
Well, they're just creating "expressionist" decorative frames or graphic design frames around the life drawing or life painting. They're thinking of it like hot school lunches. Here's the entrée in the center of the tray. It tastes alright, somebody might like it. We made it out of what the trucks delivered. Now let's surround it with some forgettable sides and send it out the door.
They don't "sense" there's nothing there. There's nothing there. They're totally avoiding all the difficulties of making coherent paintings by gilding studies. They're concealing a lack of creative-imaginative energy. This whole movement is an attempt to create "Fine Art" out of studies.
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?
Well...
A portrait is supposed to convey a person's character, bearing, and energy and suggest their life. To the extent it does that, it must be an imaginative work, because a sitter cannot hold any characteristic pose, facial aspect, energy, or attitude for more than a few minutes, let alone one that the artist has chosen as most strongly representative of them, and worth perpetuating through time. Other symbols of the sitter's life might be brought into it to assist. As an imaginative work, a portrait must be composed for its meaning.
A figural study is a more or less objective abstract translation of a model's figure into the terms of one's art (line, form, value, edge, etc.), a journalizing of facts and abstractions through deliberate technical means. The gesture that is abstracted from the figure - which is used to undergird that figure - is the main thrust of the "art" of the study; its suggestive aspect. But overall, a study tries to reflect the being as a posed body in a certain mood rather than an individual of a certain character and station.
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.
I understand you, Laurence.
'Formal Innovation' is a perfectly serviceable phrase for what we are discussing. Framing life drawings with decorative blather is actually a formal innovation.
I obviously don't agree that what propels art forward is any formal innovation. As I'm asserting in this thread and the prior one, many formal innovations are just methods of disguising laziness, narrative disjoints, or unimaginativeness, and the verbal explanations for the kluge solutions are just sophist bullshit; excuses given credence by the pathologically compassionate, "open-minded" or credulous.
As I wrote last time out, I believe what propels art forward is formal innovation in the service of particular poetic challenges, which may be so foundation-shattering that we get a sea change. But not necessarily. Generally it is great work alone that energizes a generation, and often the artists doing the great generational work are looking back to earlier aesthetics.
Equally, often it is a new frontier interest that provides the exciting subject matter that causes a demand for poetic visual imagery.
Sometimes this frontier subject matter can come from the interest of one great artist. Homer with seafaring. Monet with the effects of sunlight. Remington with the West. Pyle with Pirates. Waugh with seascapes. Hopper with lonely city buildings. Frazetta with barbarians. And so on.
David,
It is the misguidedness of your generation that allows the idea that greatness can come from indiscipline, “open-mindedness”, a lack of principles, and nonjudgmentalism. The postmodern contention that "there are no timeless principles."
Artists cannot be freed through know-nothing-ism and pathologically compassionate mothering. We've all seen that by now. All the great art heroes of the 1960s were steeped in the ethics and rigor of the prior generations, the afterglow of the Golden Age and its teachings. Since then, since the adoption of hippie-hedonist bomb-anxious standardless-ness has resulted in the unskilling of every aspect that made the Golden Age and its afterglow so great. We have consistently stepped down in every aspect of the visual arts based on your received 60s idealism.
I’m here to call BS on emotional pleas for sprawling, mindless liberty; a quintessential "luxury belief." You feel good saying it, and everything in the blast radius of the idea crumbles to junk.
Different kinds of art can provide different kinds of sensory experiences.
Sherwin Williams thanks you. As do the graphic designers of the "fine art world."
The more one specifies, the more one can suggest. Richard Schmid earned his "arty" brushstrokes because he was using them in an evocative way in the context of highly poetic works. The viewer want for nothing in his masterpieces. They are full of life and beautifully balanced.
I think David, under the influence of 60s sophist postmodernism, thinks "meaning" is a hidebound idea, and possibly a fraud perpetrated on the public. Or at least some kind of dogmatic limiting principles from stiff prior generations artists, and therefore an impediment to progress.
That he can't detect the anaesthetic meaninglessness in photographic substrates indicates that he may be unable to experience (thus grasp) the reality of the concept. Which would explain his disinterest in any principle made in reference to it. (Hi David!)
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.
"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."
"If a man is going to paint pictures he must recognize much of the feminine in himself - gentleness, beauty, grace, etc." - Harvey Dunn, 1930s
(It isn't about injecting the opposite sensibility, but allowing it come out.)
"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."
The only requisites are strong intellect, strong emotion, fertile imagination, some athletic dexterity, and a burning desire to do it. (And of course good teaching, opportunity, and a local "scene.") Whoever has that, deserves a chance.
Pyle said, "If you're meant to be an artist, all Hell can't stop you. If you're not, all Heaven can't help you."
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